PoemTalk
Deep descent (PoemTalk #81)
Fanny Howe, 'The Descent' & 'The Source'
Laynie Browne, Rae Armantrout, and Kerry Sherin Wright joined Al Filreis at the Kelly Writers House to discuss two short poems by Fanny Howe, “The Descent” and “The Source.” These are, respectively, the first and last poems in a series called “The Descent,” published together with other series in a book titled Gone (California, 2003). Our recordings of Howe performing these two poems come from two different occasions: she read “The Descent” in a Segue reading at the Bowery Poetry Club in 2010, years after the book appeared; and she had read “The Source” here at the Kelly Writers House in a reading with Norman Fischer in March of 2000, before its publication in Gone.
Starting with “The Descent” and the moving to “The Source,” the PoemTalkers took the poems literally and figuratively, in turns. “The Descent” might mark the descending arrival of an airplane, perhaps bound for a site of meditation. For “The Source” they even worked to imagine a tall, Babel-like pole with wet film at the top. Nothing about these poems inhibits such efforts to set scenes. Ultimately, though, “The Descent” seems also to be about a means of measuring depths sounded by inner exploration, while “The Source” has its source in the poem itself as a site for searching for the source, a holy atheism, an illumination we might have once thought was bracingly Arctic (as in a source of fresh, redefining air) but turns out to be in the very letter of this writing.
PoemTalk this time was engineered by Steve McLaughlin and was edited by Allison Harris. At the University of Pennsylvania, the PoemTalk series has from the start been a collaboration of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, PennSound, and the Kelly Writers House — and now, too, Jacket2 magazine, where each installment is published along with brief commentary such as you’ve seen here. The series has from the start been cosponsored by the Poetry Foundation. Each episode is published simultaneously in Jacket2 and at the Poetry Foundation website. Listeners can stream and download from these sites, or can go to iTunes and subscribe. (Above at right, from left to right: Kerry Sherin Wright, Rae Armantrout, Laynie Browne.)