Awakeners

On this episode of Awakeners, Lena chats with poets Rick Barot and Brian Teare, who met at Stanford University as young writers and have collaborated for over twenty years. We discuss Brian’s first fingerprint on Rick’s body of work, the triumphs and failures of mentorship they experienced in institutions of higher ed, their approaches to ekphrasis (i.e. creative work that responds to a work of art, or, to quote poet Tania Clark, that “makes the static sing”), and how they helped one another “re-see” another queer artist’s ethics and aesthetics.  Teare says: “Material culture, print culture, teaching, politics, the actual practice of poetry, the role of visual art in work and in our lives… there are so many overlaps that we never run out of things to talk about.”  Rick Barot's most recent book of poems is Moving the Bones, published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. His previous collection, The Galleons, was longlisted for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The New Republic, The Adroit Journal, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books, including Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize. His most recent publications are a pair of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. An Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia, Brian lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.  LINKS: Introduction to the folio Teare commissioned in response to the PMA Jasper Johns retrospective: https://www.nereview.com/vol-43-no-3-2022/mirroring-practice-poets-respond-to-jasper-johns/ Rick Barot’s poem “Looking at the Romans”: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/looking-at-the-romans/ Jasper Johns’s cross hatch works: https://harvardartmuseums.org/exhibitions/4350/jasper-johns-in-press-the-crosshatch-works-and-the-logic-of-print Jasper Johns’s White Flag (1955): https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/487065 Brian Teare’s “White Flag (1955)” from Poem Bitten By a Man: https://poetrysociety.org/poems/white-flag-1955 Adrienne Rich’s poem “Rauschenberg’s Bed”: https://margaret-cooter.blogspot.com/2016/03/poetry-thursday-rauschenbergs-bed-by.html Martin Mitchell’s review of Rick Barot’s During the Pandemic in Phoebe Journal: https://phoebejournal.com/review-during-the-pandemic/ More Rick Barot: https://www.rickbarot.com/ More Brian Teare: www.brianteare.net and www.albionbooks.net Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com.

On this episode of Awakeners, Lena chats with writers Leslie Jamison and Emmeline Clein. Clein studied with Jamison at Columbia University’s MFA program, and the pair published their most recent books—Jamison’s memoir, Splinters, and Clein’s debut essay collection, Dead Weight—the very same week back in February 2024. We discuss what they’re working on right now, what they talked about on their most recent lunch date, how Jamison’s “Archive Fever” class shaped Clein’s research, how to weave softness from words that cut, how both of their books engage with the (often maligned) desire to “revoke” or undo your decisions as a woman, and what they’ve learned from each other when it comes to writing about eating disorders, self-harm, and pain.  In the second half of the episode, Clein reads from Jamison’s feedback letter in response to an early draft of Clein’s essay “On Our Knees” from Dead Weight, and Jamison reads from “On Shame,” a lecture that has since been integrated into her in-progress book of essays about writing. Leslie Jamison is the New York Times bestselling author of Splinters, The Recovering, The Empathy Exams, Make it Scream, Make it Burn, and a novel, The Gin Closet. She is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and teaches at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn with her family. Emmeline Clein is the author of Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm (Knopf, 2024) and Toxic (Choo Choo Press, 2024). Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, The Nation, the Yale Review, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. Links: Awakeners featured on The Lit Hub Podcast (0:31): https://dcs-spotify.megaphone.fm/LIT3180235730.mp3?key=633b1bbb7860a1e12ffb4fa0ddd234fb&request_event_id=8055516a-55c5-4ac3-a490-1e3b1e46f10e&timetoken=1731795270_B448F57BE00F644C54A56320FDD845D3 Subscribe and connect with us on our website at awakenerspodcast.com. Follow us on Instagram for exclusive content at @awakenerspodcast.

This is Awakeners, a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts. Host Lena Crown interviews pairs of writers, artists, critics, and scholars who matter to one another. We chat about how their relationship has evolved, examine the connections and divergences in their writing and thinking, and dig into the archives for traces of their mutual influence (think feedback letters, margin comments, early essay drafts, and more). To listen is to get a window into literary traditions being formed in real time—and to simply hang out for an hour with brilliant artists and longtime friends.  Awakeners Season 1 airs every two weeks starting November 19, 2024, wherever you get your podcasts.