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Lindsay Turner on Elizabeth Bishop ("The Shampoo")

Lindsay Turner on Elizabeth Bishop ("The Shampoo")

FromClose Readings


Lindsay Turner on Elizabeth Bishop ("The Shampoo")

FromClose Readings

ratings:
Length:
60 minutes
Released:
Jan 9, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode

Description

Lindsay Turner joins the podcast to talk about what is perhaps my favorite love poem ever, Elizabeth Bishop's "The Shampoo." [FYI: For some reason there's a minor technical issue w/my audio quality for the first 3-4 minutes of the episode—sorry!—but, happily, it resolved quickly and doesn't affect the rest of this lovely conversation.]The ShampooThe still explosions on the rocks,the lichens, growby spreading, gray, concentric shocks.They have arrangedto meet the rings around the moon, althoughwithin our memories they have not changed.And since the heavens will attendas long on us,you've been, dear friend,precipitate and pragmatical;and look what happens. For Time isnothing if not amenable.The shooting stars in your black hairin bright formationare flocking where,so straight, so soon?—Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,battered and shiny like the moon.Lindsay Turner is the author of Songs and Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018) and the chapbook A Fortnight (forthcoming, Doublecross Press). She's an assistant professor in the Department of English at Case Western University. Her second collection of poetry, The Upstate, is forthcoming in the University of Chicago Press's Phoenix Poets series in fall 2023. Her translations from the French include the poetry collections adagio ma non troppo, by Ryoko Sekiguchi (Les Figues Press, 2018), The Next Loves, by Stéphane Bouquet (Nightboat Books, 2019) and Common Life, by Stéphane Bouquet (Nightboat Books, 2023), as well as books of philosophy by Frederic Neyrat (Atopias, co-translated with Walt Hunter, Fordham UP, 2017),  Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Postcolonial Bergson, Fordham UP, 2019),  Anne Dufourmantelle (In Defense of Secrets, Fordham UP, 2020), Richard Rechtman (Living in Death, Fordham UP, 2021) and Éric Baratay (Animal Biographies, UGA Press, 2022). She is the recipient of a WPR Creative Grant from Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room for 2016-17 as well as 2017 and 2019 French Voices Grants.During the episode, we listen to a recording of James Merrill reading Bishop's poem. The full recording can be found on the website of the Key West Literary Seminar. My thanks to Arlo Haskell from the Key West Literary Seminar and Stephen Yenser from the Literary Estate of James Merrill for permission to use the clip. (Copyright @ the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University.) Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and make sure you're signed up for my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.
Released:
Jan 9, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode

Titles in the series (49)

One poem. One guest. Each episode, Kamran Javadizadeh, a poetry critic and professor of English, talks to a different leading scholar of poetry about a single short poem that the guest has loved. You'll have a chance to see the poem from the expert's perspective—and also to think about some big questions: How do poems work? What can they make happen? How might they change our lives?