In this episode (originally aired as Hey, It’s Me #15: “It’s Okay”) Rachel talks with Mike Sakasagawa about why she’s putting Commonplace on a hiatus and how she feels about it.

Rachel speaks with Sabrina Orah Mark about Happily, her collection of essays on fairytales and motherhood which began as a monthly column in The Paris Review. Rachel and Sabrina speak one-on-one over Zoom and then, a few weeks later, at the live-virtual Reading with Rachel salon. Sabrina talks about the fire in her home, writing in the dark, writing in real time, writing about sacred things, the veil of surrealism, teaching outside the academy, writing about kids and parents as a form of protection and what it felt like to—finally—directly write what she really feels.

Rachel talks to photographer and (her former) photography teacher Lois Conner about Conner’s path to becoming a photographer, working at the UN, her yearly trips to China, teaching, the challenges and delights of a two-decade-long project of photographing pregnant women and the work of organizing the vertical and horizontal large format (nude) portraits into a book—To Be—published by Artiere in 2024. Conner talks about teaching, about being a straight cis woman photographing nude women, the circle as an artistic format, how a technical mistake led to the appearance of the Venus of Willendorf in her darkroom on a very hot night in Pennsylvania, and much more. The two talk about one of Rachel’s favorite topics: the ethics of representing people in art, and how much Lois’s teaching and the medium of photography influenced Rachel’s development as a poet.

Eugenia Leigh joins the Reading with Rachel live-virtual salon to discuss her newest book, Bianca. Leigh tells the story of writing Bianca and talks about the role of therapy in the writing process, why she enjoys revision and prefers it to writing, strategies for avoiding burnout, complex PTSD, Bipolar II Disorder, Christianity, trying to write without re-traumatizing the self or the reader, de-romanticizing the relationship between mental illness and art making, what she likes about couplets, regrets about the final form of the book, time travel and much more.

Welcome to a new podcast by Mike Sakasegawa and Rachel Zucker: Hey, It’s Me. In this feed drop from Keep the Channel Open, Mike asks Rachel: “What are we going to talk about? And are we really doing this?” We hope you enjoy this strange, relatable, meta meta meta conversation on friendship, social media, relationships, and beyond. See Hey, It's Me online to learn more.

Hanif Abdurraqib is interviewed by guest host Stuti Sharma. Hanif and Stuti discuss writing communities, traveling to US cities, and music as a vessel for connection. They also talk about cultivating literary friendships, vulnerability, and memory both in the context of loss and in the context of loving someone throughout many stages of life. The second part of this episode is an excerpt from Hanif’s reading at Smith College in Spring 2023, where he gives a preview of his newest book, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension.

While on a trip to San Francisco, Rachel checks in with her longtime friend, poet D. A. Powell. The two discuss what D. A. is working on and what has changed for him since the two recorded episode 13 of Commonplace back in 2016. This episode contains excerpts from a listening party that Rachel and Doug attended the night before curated by Gabrielle Civil and featuring a recording of poets Judy Grahn and Pat Parker. Doug and Rachel talk about their friendship, optimism and hopelessness, how poetry is a transfer of energy, and prioritizing the writing of individual poems over the making of a book. Doug reminds Rachel to give herself a vacation from words and talks about the pleasures of making art that he gives away.

The third of five episodes featuring the lectures that became Rachel Zucker’s newest book, The Poetics of Wrongness. After an introduction from Rachel this episode contains archival audio of “Why She Could Not Write A Lecture on the Poetics of Motherhood” presented at the UC Berkeley English Department on November 15, 2016 and the introduction to the event given by poet Robert Hass. In this lecture, Rachel Zucker—while teaching and mothering and preparing to record a conversation with poet mother Alicia Ostriker in the months leading up to and in the days following the 2016 presidential election—discusses the difficulty of writing a lecture on the work of poet mothers Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Toi Derricotte and others, and what might or might not constitute a poetics of motherhood.

Rachel speaks with poet, memoirist and literary agent Hafizah Geter about her recently published memoir The Black Period: On Personhood, Race and Origin. They speak one-on-one over zoom and then, a few weeks later, at the live-virtual Reading with Rachel salon. They speak about being poets writing prose, about writing to think and talking to think, MFA programs, writing classes, beauty, erasure, revision, being a craft junkie, TV, resisting “the privilege to obscure,” finding the question your book is trying to answer, writing yourself out of the shame you were given, rethinking reading and writing as solitary experiences, getting over the embarrassment of not knowing, and writing all over the walls.

Rachel speaks with poet and erasure artist Mary Ruefle about menopause, thresholds, death, reading, museums, schools, podcasting, trees, wind, created violence, real violence, haiku, love, the erotics of reading, Yom Kippur, erasure, how to walk around the world two babysteps at a time, and more.

Rachel speaks with poet and Commonplace producer Christine Larusso and then, a few weeks later, with Nicole Sealey at the live-virtual “Reading with Rachel” salon about Sealey’s recently published book-length erasure, The Ferguson Report: poems. Sealey describes why, how and when she erased this document and how the erasure and lifted poems became a book.

In this two-part episode, Rachel Zucker speaks with Ronaldo V. Wilson and Fred Moten about poetry as performance, influences and teachers, open field poetics, finding space for listeners and audience to feel welcome, how to define the limits—or lack thereof— of a book and, specifically, the performance they gave the night before at the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church on May 24, 2023. Part one (ep 120) is a conversation about the performance. Part two (ep 121) is a recording of that performance.

In this two-part episode, Rachel Zucker speaks with Ronaldo V. Wilson and Fred Moten about poetry as performance, influences and teachers, open field poetics, finding space for listeners and audience to feel welcome, how to define the limits—or lack thereof— of a book and, specifically, the performance they gave the night before at the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church on May 24, 2023. Part one (ep 120) is a conversation about the performance. Part two (ep 121) is a recording of that performance.

In this second Keep the Channel Open feed drop, Rachel and Mike Sakasegawa discuss Bianca by Eugenia Leigh.

Rachel talks with long time friend and writer for children, Laurel Snyder. They talk about the Iowa Writers Workshop, Laurel’s path from poet to children’s book author, money, the novice brain, labor, being “messy and extra but not totally batshit,” the relationship between poetry and picture books, the experimental nature of picture books, world building, getting things out rather than getting things down.

Poets Safia Elhillo and Charif Shanahan talk to Isaac Ginsberg Miller, a poet and PhD candidate in African American Studies at Northwestern, about their friendship, kinship, seeing and being seen by others, their intended audiences and ideal readers, inherited/received forms, experimentalism, the instability of racialized experience for many Black Southwest Asians and North Africans.

Poets Jason Schneiderman, Cate Marvin, R. A. Villanueva, Lynn Xu and Rachel Zucker consider the pleasures, challenges, eccentricities and value of live, in-person poetry readings. These musings are followed by excerpts of the June 6, 2023 reading in Bryant Park (hosted by Jason and featuring Cate, Ron, Lynn and Rachel) and comments from the audience.

Poet and interdisciplinary artist Moheb Soliman sits down with V Conaty at AWP in Seattle to talk about his debut collection HOMES, regionalism as a creative and critical practice, the poetics of the watershed, the “third coasts” of the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, having a non-extractive relationship to place, immigrant, indigenous, and settler narratives of the Great Lakes region, timelessness vs. timeliness, and memory.

Host Rachel Zucker talks with choreographer Hope Mohr about her dance Horizon Stanzas (inspired by Alice Notley's feminist epic The Descent of Alette), the live arts, performance and distributed leadership, and with writer Alyssa Harad about Mohr, Notley, performance, power, feminism and much more.

After a brief Commonplace update, Rachel shares episode 143 of Keep the Channel Open with host Mike Sakasagawa and guest Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a writer based in the Bronx, NY. In his debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana presents us with a dystopian future America where convicted prisoners fight each other to the death in a televised bloodsport. The book is both a blistering critique of the US carceral system and an insistence on the inalienable humanity of every person. In our conversation, Nana and I talked about what satire and dystopia open up for him as a writer, why it’s important to him to implicate both the reader and himself in his work, and how he thinks about prison abolition. Then in the second segment, we talked about the seductive nature of success as an artist in a capitalist society.