Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:27 — 5.0MB) | Embed
Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio or on iTunes!
Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast. It’s been ages, but we’re ramping up to a lot of cool new stuff in the coming year and beyond, including lots more podcasts, a fundraiser to increase payrates to 10c/word, $50/page for poetry and pay staff better too, t-shirts, pins, who knows what else. Homebrew recipes. Foraging instructions. Bespoke lectures about culling invasive species. We’re flush with ideas, as we should be, but we’re always looking for more. Drop us a line if you’ve got any?
Reckoning Press is a US-based nonprofit; we flourish under your regard. Please support us on Patreon, consider donating directly, buy a book or an ebook, read our contributors’ beautiful work for free online, and submit! We’re always open to submissions, we’re always excited in particular to read work from Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, disabled, trans, or otherwise marginalized poets, writers and artists.
You can find all this and more on our website at: reckoning.press/support-us. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or by visiting reckoning.press/audio.
Thank you very much for listening.
This week’s episode features Nancy Lynée Woo reading her poem “When someone says the world is a fish” from Reckoning 6. You’re going to wish you had Catherine Rockwood here to help ground you in this delightful, funny, nesting puzzle of a poem, but she’s off for a bit, so you’re stuck with me. I’ll make it quick. The way I read it, this is a poem about metonymy, the endlessly regressing act of replacement that we’re always performing when we engage in language. We use language to situate ourselves in the world, in nature, but each time we interpose a word describing a thing—a silk worm, a rat, a wisteria—we distance ourselves from that thing by introducing another layer of interpretation. It doesn’t take many iterations of a poem interpreting a children’s science book interpreting science interpreting nature before we arrive at something that feels and works a lot like decadence. How do we find our way back? Can we? What gets lost on the way?
When someone says the world is a fish by Nancy Lynée Woo
