Crystal Simone Smith is the author of Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound (Duke University Press, 2025) and Dark Testament (Henry Holt, 2023). In 2022, her collection of haiku, Ebbing Shore, won The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. Smith is the recipient a Duke Humanities Unbounded Fellowship. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including POETRY Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Rattle, Poetry Daily, Frogpond, and The Heron’s Nest. She teaches in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University and writes poetry about the human condition and social change.
Find more on Crystal at her website:
https://www.crystalsimonesmith.com/
As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit:
https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt:
Write a poem about the influence music has had on you over the years while making the poem itself as musical as possible.
Next Week’s Prompt:
Invent a form that borrows something you love about an existing form—but spins it in a new direction. (Also encouraged to submit this to our call for our invented forms tribute section, due January 15th, 2026.)
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
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Crystal Simone Smith is the author of Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound (Duke University Press, 2025) and Dark Testament (Henry Holt, 2023). In 2022, her collection of haiku, Ebbing Shore, won The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. Smith is the recipient a Duke Humanities Unbounded Fellowship. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including POETRY Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Rattle, Poetry Daily, Frogpond, and The Heron’s Nest. She teaches in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University and writes poetry about the human condition and social change.
Find more on Crystal at her website:
https://www.crystalsimonesmith.com/
As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit:
https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt:
Write a poem about the influence music has had on you over the years while making the poem itself as musical as possible.
Next Week’s Prompt:
Invent a form that borrows something you love about an existing form—but spins it in a new direction. (Also encouraged to submit this to our call for our invented forms tribute section, due January 15th, 2026.)
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
John Poch is the author of seven collections of poems, including Poems (2004), a finalist for the PEN/Osterweil Prize; Two Men Fighting with a Knife (2008), winner of the Donald Justice Award; and Fix Quiet (2015), winner of the 2014 New Criterion Poetry Prize. He is a founding editor of 32 Poems Magazine and a co-editor of Old Flame: From the First 10 Years of 32 Poems Magazine. He is the series editor of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and he recently published a book of essays, God’s Poems: The Beauty of Poetry and the Christian Imagination, and a book of aphorisms on the practice of poetry, Notes on the Poet. He teaches at Grace College in Indiana.
Find his little book of criticism here:
https://www.measurepress.com/measure/catalog/books/notes-poet/
As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit:
https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt:
Write a poem in which space is very important. Include a scent.
Next Week’s Prompt:
Write a poem in which a wall comes down.
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Rattle Poetry
Crystal Simone Smith is the author of Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound (Duke University Press, 2025) and Dark Testament (Henry Holt, 2023). In 2022, her collection of haiku, Ebbing Shore, won The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. Smith is the recipient a Duke Humanities Unbounded Fellowship. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including POETRY Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Rattle, Poetry Daily, Frogpond, and The Heron’s Nest. She teaches in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University and writes poetry about the human condition and social change.
Find more on Crystal at her website:
https://www.crystalsimonesmith.com/
As always, we'll also include the live Prompt Lines for responses to our weekly prompt. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins.
For links to all the past episodes, visit:
https://www.rattle.com/page/rattlecast/
This Week’s Prompt:
Write a poem about the influence music has had on you over the years while making the poem itself as musical as possible.
Next Week’s Prompt:
Invent a form that borrows something you love about an existing form—but spins it in a new direction. (Also encouraged to submit this to our call for our invented forms tribute section, due January 15th, 2026.)
The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
