The Beat – Details, episodes & analysis

In celebration of National Poetry Month, Jesse Graves joined us at Lawson McGhee Library for a reading of his work. Jesse Graves is the author of five poetry collections, including Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, Basin Ghosts, Specter Mountain, Merciful Days, the forthcoming A Little Light in the Grave, and a book of prose, Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place. His work received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Philip H. Freund Prize for Creative Writing from Cornell University, as well as two Weatherford Awards in Poetry from Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. Graves has served as co-editor for several collections of poetry and scholarship, including four volumes of The Southern Poetry Anthology and The Complete Poetry of James Agee. He teaches at East Tennessee State University, where he is Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English.

Links:

Jesse Grave's website

"Jesse Graves and the Cosmic Appalachian Boogie," in Salvation South

Six Poems by Jesse Graves in Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature

"Two Stones" in New Verse Review

"Above Johnson City" in As the Crow Flies

Three poems in Cutleaf

Donovan McAbee is a poet, songwriter, and essayist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME magazine, The Hudson Review, The Sun, Garden & Gun, Poetry London, and others. McAbee grew up in a small town in South Carolina, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and a PhD in Creative Writing and Contemporary Poetry from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. McAbee lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and two children.

Kathleen Jamie was raised in Currie, Scotland, and she studied philosophy at Edinburgh University. Her awards include the Forward Prize for best poetry collection of the year, a Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, a Paul Hamlyn Award, and a Creative Scotland Award. From 2021 to 2024, Kathleen Jamie served as Scotland’s Makar (a title given to the national poet).

"The Whale-watcher," "The Buddleia," and "The Wishing Tree" were recorded with permission from Kathleen Jamie.

Links:

Donovan McAbee

Read "The Tunnel," "Holy the Body," and "Sightings" in The Sun Magazine

Read "Coming Back Down" in Reflections

Donovan McAbee's website

Hear Major Jackson read McAbee's "Desert Sayings" on The Slowdown

Kathleen Jamie

Read "The Whale-watcher," "The Wishing Tree," and other poems at Scottish Poetry Library

Bio and poems at The Poetry Foundation

Hear 19 poems by Jamie at The Poetry Archive

Jennifer Horne served as the twelfth Poet Laureate of Alabama from 2017 to 2021. The author of four collections of poems, Bottle Tree, Little Wanderer, Borrowed Light, and, most recently, Letters to Little Rock, she also has written a collection of short stories, Tell the World You’re a Wildflower. She is the author of a literary biography, Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author, described as “mesmerizing”  and “a beguiling tale of madness and literature” by Publisher’s Weekly. She has edited or co-edited five volumes of poetry, essays, and stories. 

Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840, in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England. Hardy is best known for his novels, including The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. His first book of poems, Wessex Poems, was published when Hardy was in his late 50s. He published seven more collections, and over 1,000 poems in his lifetime. In January of 1928, he died peacefully at his home in Dorchester, Dorset, England.

Links:

Jennifer Horne

A Map of the World (Jennifer Horne's website)

Bio and work at The Poetry Foundation

A review of Letters to Little Rock at Alabama Writers Forum

“Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity and Aging: Life-, Age-, and Art-Affirming Manifestos" at Southern Review of Books

"Two Poems by Jennifer Horne" at Deep South Magazine

Thomas Hardy

Bio and Poems at The Poetry Foundation

The Thomas Hardy Society

Cornelius Eady is a Professor of English and John C. Hodges Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. From September 2021 to December 2022, he served as interim Director of Poets House in New York City. Eady published his first collection, Kartunes, in 1980. His second collection, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1985), was chosen as winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Poetry Award by Louise Glück, Charles Simic, and Philip Booth. He has published eight other collections, including The Gathering of My Name (1991), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; Brutal Imagination (2001), a National Book Award finalist; and Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (2008), nominated for an NAACP Image Award. In addition to his poetry, Eady has written musical theater productions, collaborating with jazz composer Diedre Murray. The two worked together on Running Man, a roots opera libretto that was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and Brutal Imagination, recipient of Newsday’s Oppenheimer Award. Eady is also a musician, and he performs with the literary band Rough Magic and the Cornelius Eady Trio, which recently released the album Don't Get Dead: Pandemic Folk Songs. (June Appal Recording, 2021). Eady has published five mixed-media chapbooks with accompanying CDs, including Book of Hooks (Kattywompus Press, 2013), Singing While Black (Kattywompus Press, 2015) and All the American Poets Have Titled Their New Books The End (Kattywompus Press, (2018). With poet Toi Derricote, Eady founded Cave Canem, a beloved nonprofit organization that supports emerging Black poets via a summer retreat, regional workshops, prizes, events, and publication opportunities. In 2016, Eady and Derricote were honored with the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community on behalf of Cave Canem, and, in 2023, they won the Pegasus Award for service in the field of Poetry by the Poetry Foundation. Eady’s other honors include the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Links:

Bio and Poems at The Poetry Foundation

Bio and poems at Poets.org

"Poet Cornelius Eady on exploring the everyday lives of Black people in America"--PBS News Hour

Cornelius Eady Group website

"Emmett Till's Glass Top Casket" at the Poetry Society of America

Cave Canem

Cassandra de Alba has published several chapbooks including habitats by Horse Less Press in 2016, Ugly/Sad by Glass Poetry Press in 2020, and Cryptids, which was co-authored with Aly Pierce and published by Ginger Bug Press in 2020.  Her work has appeared in The Shallow Ends, Big Lucks, Wax Nine, The Baffler, Verse Daily, and others. 

Amy Lowell was born in 1874 in Brookline, Massachusetts. She was educated in private schools in Boston and at her home. Lowell’s first significant poetry publication came in 1910 when her poem “Fixed Idea” was published in the Atlantic Monthly. Two years later, her book A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass was published by Houghton Mifflin. She went on to write several other books of poetry, and she was a key figure in the Imagist movement led by Ezra Pound. She wrote a major biography of the poet John Keats, which was published in 1925, the same year in which she died. Lowell’s book What’s O’Clock won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1926.  

Links:

Cassandra de Alba

Cassandra de Alba's website

Three poems in Dear Poetry Journal

"Self-Portrait with Rabbit Ears and Seventeen" at Verse Daily

"Miniatures" in Ghost City

"End Times Fatigue" at Sweet

Amy Lowell

Bio and poems at Poetry Foundation

Bio and poems at Poetry.org

Mathias Svalina is the author of seven books. His most recent, America at Play (published by Trident Press), is a collection of absurdist instructions for children's games. His poetry collection Thank You Terror was published earlier this year, and his first short story collection, Comedy, is forthcoming soon. Svalina was a founding editor of Octopus Books. He’s led writing workshops in universities, libraries, community spaces, and in prison. Since 2014, he has run a dream delivery service, traveling around the country to write and deliver dreams to subscribers. Through the Dream Delivery Service, Svalina has worked with the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, the Poetry Foundation, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson.   

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in the London suburb of Stratford Essex in 1844. He studied classics at Balliol College in Oxford and theology at St. Beuno’s College in North Wales. He was ordained in 1877 as a Jesuit priest, and he served in London, Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Stonyhurst. He also taught classics at Stonyhurst College and Greek literature at University College, Dublin. During his lifetime, most of Hopkins’ poems were read by only a few friends. In 1889, Hopkins died of typhoid fever, and he was buried in Dublin, Ireland. Hopkin’s first collection, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, was published in 1918.  

Links:

Read "Terrible Baby" by Mathias Svalina at The Tiny

Read "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection" by Gerard Manley Hopkins at Poets.org

Mathias Svalina

Mathias Svalina's website

Bio and poem at Poets.org

"Mathias Svalina-Dream Delivery Service" video at by JustBuffaloLit

Mathias Svalina reads from "Thank You Terror" at the Silo City Reading Series

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Bio and poems at Poets.org

International Hopkins Society's website (poems, bio, study guides, video, etc).

Photo Credit: Dean Davis

Jos Charles is author of the poetry collections a Year & other poems (Milkweed Editions, 2022), feeld, a Pulitzer-finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series selected by Fady Joudah (Milkweed Editions, 2018), and Safe Space (Ahsahta Press, 2016). She teaches as a part of Randolph College's low-residency MFA program and resides in Long Beach, CA.

Links:

Jos Charles' website

Bio and Poems at Poets.org

a Year & other poems and feeld at Milkweed Editions

Two poems at The Adroit Journal

Five poems at Frontier Poetry

Amish Trivedi is the author of three books. His most recent is FuturePanic (Co•Im•Press, 2021). His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. Trivedi earned an MFA from Brown University and a PhD in English and Critical Theory from Illinois State University. He's an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Delaware.

Links:

Read this episode's poems (along with several others):

"Green Boots" at The Brooklyn Rail

"Watch the Corners" at Black Sun Lit

"Number Nine" and "Dying" at The Kenyon Review

Amish Trivedi's website

Amish Trivedi above/ground press AWP offsite reading 2023

Anna Laura Reeve is the author of Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility (Belle Point Press, 2023). Winner of the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Salamander, Terrain.org, and others. She lives and gardens near the Tennessee Overhill region, traditional land of the Eastern Cherokee.

Links:

Anna Laura Reeve's website

Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility at Belle Point Press

"Sara Moore Wagner on Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility," a book review at Still

"Look at Everything" and "Children of Asylum Seekers" at The Racket

"Playing the Washboard" and "Sprouting Wand" at Canary

"Desire" in Josephine Quarterly

Zachary Schomburg is a poet, painter, and a publisher for Octopus Books, a small independent poetry press. He earned a BA from the College of the Ozarks and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska. He is the author of six books of poems including, most recently, Fjords vol. 2, published by Black Ocean in 2021 and a novel, Mammother, published by Featherproof Books in 2017.  

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania in 1874. She attended Radcliffe College and Johns Hopkins Medical School. In 1903, she moved to Paris where she eventually began writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She became an influential figure in the worlds of art and literature, and her home became a gathering place for artists and writers like Henri Matisse, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Max Jacob. She died near Paris in July of 1946.

Links:

Read "The Cliff Floats Low" at Sixth Finch

Read "Tender Buttons [Apple]" at Poets.org

Zachary Schomburg

Zachary Schomburg's website

Bio and bio at Poetryfoundation.org

"Moving a Plane Around a Living Room: In Conversation with Zachary Schomburg" in Timber

Two poems at Jellyfish

Gertrude Stein

Bio and poems at Poetryfoundation.org

"Gertrude Stein - Author & Poet: Mini Bio" from Biography

Bio and poems at Poets.org

Mentioned in this episode:

KnoxCountyLibrary.org

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