Weird New Poetry Podcast: SLEERICKETS
 

Eratosphereans!

I don't generally post here, but I lurk often and always with interest, and I've felt connected to Eratosphere ever since meeting a number of you a decade ago at West Chester. In the intervening years, I’ve edited, reviewed, corresponded with, and admired from a distance many more. If there is any social medium that feels like home to me, it's this one. Actually, it's the only one I still check in on anymore.

So, I write to let you know I'm starting a podcast. It’s called SLEERICKETS, and it’s about poetry. Sort of. Mostly. My goal is to approximate the experience of talking about poetry over drinks with a gossipy friend. Over the course of the first four episodes, Rhina, Aaron, Maryann, and Alicia all come up in the conversation, and I imagine this community will play no small part in the episodes to come.

I'd love for you all to listen, but I also trust this group to let me know when I get something wrong, or just to help fill in my many gaps in knowledge. I'll doubtless continue lurking here from time to time, but the best way to reach me with complaints, corrections, or ideas for future episodes is through sleerickets@gmail.com or through my website, matthewbuckleysmith.com.

SLEERICKETS is now available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify. If you like it, please click "subscribe." If you really like it, leave a rating and a review. The first two episodes are live, and a third is coming soon.

Mostly, I hope the show will entertain you, either in its own right or as an occasion for witty takedowns by Michael, Sam, and Quincy. Either way, I'll feel I've made a contribution.

Thank you all for so robustly populating this house I occasionally haunt.

Yours as ever,
Matthew

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This sounds exciting. There's not much I enjoy more than good conversation around the art of poetry. I'm starving for it, actually. There's not much around, that I'm aware of anyway.

Mark McDonnell posted a podcast by an English guy (his day job is standup comedy) whose name I can't remember (Frank?) who has a genuine love of and aptitude for understanding poetry. He speaks unpretentiously and emphatically about those poems and poets he loves and it is a thoroughly enjoyable listen. (I can't believe I let that one slip away from me — Maybe Mark can remind me?)

I'm in. I'll check it out. Thanks.


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Found it: Frank Skinner.



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So the emphasis is American formalist poetry, and more specifically (even more) American formalist poetry centred around past and present members of Eratosphere? Is your focus just on formalism, out of interest?

The wonderful Frank Skinner podcasts can be found here

Thanks, Matthew, and congrats on the new project. I enjoyed No. 2. (Ew, that sounds terrible out of context.) Will go back for No. 1 (ditto) when I have time.

A few additional thoughts on Gjertrud Schnackenberg's "Halloween," which I hadn't encountered before your podcast:

I like the way that the identity rhyme in S1L1's "by" gives S1L4's "Goodbye" just enough extra emphasis that that word is still not too far from the surface of my mind by the time I get to "the King of the Dead" in S3L4. And on a second reading, after having found a some sort of death reference in the fourth line of the rest of the stanzas, I go back looking for the one I missed in S2, and there it is--"We sit up late, and smoke...."

(Yes, I go back to look, because I'm a visual person. Thanks for providing links on your website to all the texts you reference. Mwah!)

S3's "...real men in real boxes never do / Haunt houses" makes me think of the giant, boxlike television of my own childhood, and the anchormen and reporters (always male) who kept bringing the Vietnam War into our living room.

W T!

Thanks for writing. The emphasis is poetry--at least for now. And my own skewed experience means I'll probably retain something of a formalist perspective. But really, I'm a bit of a dilettante in all my interests, so don't be surprised if the scope drifts a bit. The fourth episode, for example, is something of a miscellany, covering Grimms' Fairy Tales, Albert Camus, ASMR, porn, and The Queen's Gambit, among other things. Though it ends on a Bill Coyle poem, so as I said before, I can't imagine Eratosphere will ever be too far from the center of things...

Ah, I see. I do admire that variety! I'll try to make time for a listen.

Thanks, Jim (and everyone else, too--I'm still working out the mechanics of posting replies)! I'll check out the Frank Skinner podcast.

Hello Matthew

I have listened to all 3 of your podcasts and genuinely enjoyed them. You have an engaging voice and it’s good hearing you think aloud. You are very well read and have well argued opinions. The podcasts are long and sometimes you are long-winded. But it’s fun to hear you getting lost in an eddy and dragging yourself back to the main flow. It would help me if they were shorter and better signposted. I would also like to hear more poems. I will definitely continue to listen.

And at some point are you going to explain why “Sleerickets”?

Joe

Thanks for the feedback, Joe, and thanks for listening!

I suspect the content--and structure--of the podcast will continue to drift a little as I find my rhythm. The next two episodes are very different from each other--the first is a sort of whimsical miscellany and the second (GarageBand permitting) is a focused three-way conversation about poetry anthologies (one of the guests being a fellow Eratospherean). But I will definitely keep your remarks in mind in the weeks to come.

As for "sleerickets," it's just my younger daughter's corruption of "secrets." She (mis)uses it as a singular noun to refer to any whispered speech, and since I have to record at night when the girls are asleep, the word seemed somehow apt. And I figure the nonsense title makes googling the show a little easier. Thanks for asking!

M.

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Hi Matthew, I cannot fathom why there has not been more response here about your podcast.

Speaking for myself, I have all kinds of reasons why I haven't followed up sooner to say what I think of your SLEERICKETS podcast (The name itself has a poem in it, based on your explanation of how it came to be)... But all those reasons (including births, a shoulder operation, gardening chores, et.al.) are just part of the army of procrastinators that seem to come out of hiding every time I want to say something in just the right way, using just the right words… And I go dumb.

I've listened to all four episodes. Each one is a deep riff/improvisation/rumination on things intrinsic to the art of poetry. Your stream of thought is like “the force that through the green fuse” of which Dylan Thomas speaks; the one "that drives the flower". The flower, in this instance, being the art of poetry. (Perhaps that's a bit hyperbolic, and not exactly the right simile, but still...)

My advice is: don't stop. Keep growing the concept. You're onto something. Manna! Manna! Manna! More! More! More!


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Hi,

I'm sorry I missed this first time around, and thank you Jim for bumping.

I'm not sure if I'm your intended audience, Matthew, as I'm quite new here - but I've enjoyed listening to the first two & am happy to share my thoughts if they are useful.

So, I like the website, which is nicely sparse and professional - and the production qualities are great, too - the sound quality is really, really nice. The graphic is fun and the colour scheme nicely simple and 'now'.

I think the graphic perhaps sets up an expectation that isn't quite delivered, a kind of goth-rock-spliff visual communication - as although I think the content I've listened to is erudite, well-argued, well-presented and interesting, apart from the odd expletive it doesn't really echo the goth-rock-spliff vibe.

The content is interesting and pleasant to listen to - I'm not great with podcasts generally as I tend to be either a very active listener, taking notes etc or asleep under the table, and I don't think I'm meant to do either of those with this podcast - but it works as a kind of interesting and intelligent conversation in the background.

You read extracts from essays and lines from poems beautifully and it's so nice to have the links on the page too. The podcasts I've listened to present only one perspective, but that's because it's your podcast, so it's going to be. But that might be worth considering as you move forwards - there's little scope for critical conversation in here or different opinions. I was listening out for a bit of; 'however, the alternate perspective here might be that...' but I didn't hear any that I recall.

In terms of length, my gut reaction was to hope you'd chop these up into shorter sections - but actually, I like that you don't - it's nice that these ask you to spend time with poetry (although again I'm left wondering a little about the single perspective). What works here is that you do, in effect, chop up the podcast, by offering a loose content map.

What would work for me as a potential development is if you gave timings for each section and a time-stamp within the podcast too - so I could more easily skip over sections and navigate to ideas that I find the most interesting.

Either way, it travelled well to the UK, and I've enjoyed listening this pm.

Sarah-Jane

Q & a
 

Thanks so much, Jane and Jim and all! I'm planning a little Q/C & A episode, so if I were to cite your notes, would you prefer I use a first name, an initial, or no name at all? (If I don't hear from you, I'll use no name at all, of course.) And if anyone else has questions--or comments, or complaints!--post them here or write to sleerickets@gmail.com. If I don't see them in time, I'll doubtless do another such episode before too long. Thanks again!

M.

I'm embarrassingly late in finding this thread, but now I've just listened to the first episode of Sleerickets, and I'm here to say, Matthew, how much sense you make about "poet/poetry voice" and how much I love Countee Cullen's "Nothing Endures," the way you read it, and the way you interpret it. So I will be listening further! Thanks for all the work you've done to produce this, and for letting us know about it.

Thanks, Maryann! I've already name-checked you on at least one episode. And I told Shane McCrae to look out for you, now that he's on Eratosphere.

Fondly,
M.

Bubbling this back up to say the Sleerickets podcast keeps getting incrementally better and definitely worth a listen, especially if you haven’t checked in lately. I've been listening since it began over a year and a half ago and, though they have been engaging from the start, at some point six or so months ago they settled in, found a groove, and have become consistently high quality, imo.
MBS has grown it to be more than just a one-way street and offers memberships that include a variety of different outlets for writers to engage. The podcast episodes have evolved into a forum for deep discussions with impressive guests (Philip Metres being the most recent) and MBS has recruited regular guests (including Cameron from our boards/forum here on Erato) that mesh nicely with his casual, engaging, measured, pleasantly circuitous way of conducting discussion.

The meaning of its name still escapes me but the sparse, crisp theme song has grown on me — beat for beat one of the best theme songs out there.

I’m a fan.

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I enjoyed the conversation, some of which wasn't exactly in praise of me, with WT Clark. I do think that it's time to lay to rest articles from over 30 years ago attacking "new formalism" as though it was some kind of assault on American poetry and culture. The simple fact is that there are poets who prefer to write in form (many of them here) and that they represent a minority in the current scheme of things.