John and Rosianna discuss Space Struck by Paige Lewis. This episode was originally released to subscribers in September 2020.
“Oh! I'm sorry for stepping on your / shadow! and Please be careful! My shadow is caught in the wheels / of your shopping cart." In this episode, John Green and Rosianna Halse Rojas discuss Paige Lewis’s debut poetry collection in all of its playful, moving, relatable, romantic, and fantastical glory.
This episode was originally released to subscribers in September 2020. The Life’s Library Discord and subscriptions are now closed after a wonderful three years of reading together. Check out past books at www.lifeslibrarybookclub.com, Twitter, and Instagram.
Life’s Library logo by Bethany Mannion.
John Green: Hello, and welcome to the Life's Library podcast. I'm joined by Rosianna Halse Rojas. I'm John Green, and we're here to discuss Paige Lewis's book of poetry, which is called Space Struck. It's our first book of poetry, Rosianna.
Rosianna Halse Rojas: It's such a big moment. It's so exciting. I wondered which book it would be and it absolutely makes sense to me that it was Space Struck, which you have raved about since you first read it and I enjoyed it so, so much. I also enjoyed it in the sense of, like—it spoke to the deep dark recesses of my soul.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: So I don't know if enjoy is always the word there, but you know, it's the best one I've got.
John: Right. To use a phrase of the young people, it made me feel very seen.
Rosianna: Yes.
John: I think that—you know, for me, so much of what's difficult about psychic pain, about interior pain or, you know, feeling overwhelmed by dread or fear is that it—I've talked about this a lot before, and this is something I've thought a lot about when writing Turtles All the Way Down—is that, you know, as Elaine Scarry put it, pain destroys language. Like, pain is so difficult to find language for—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And reading Space Struck, I—I read it for the first time in an airport, which is like the least conducive environment imaginable to reading poetry. And yet it completely drew me in because there's a wonderful mix of, like, obviously, the poet knows a thing or two about turning a phrase. Like they turn a phrase with great facility, but—which makes it kind of joyful to read, for me, like makes it fun to read. Makes you want to keep reading. But the work itself is so much about how difficult it is to live with constant dread and anxiety.
Rosianna: Yeah, and for that reason, it does feel like the perfect thing to be reading right now, particular, but also always. But I think, something I've really noticed, actually, is when I see people who I haven't seen for a long time—since the beginning of lockdown, I asked, you know, "How are you finding it?" And they say, "Oh, well, you know, everyone's having a hard time." And my friend pointed out that, you know, everyone's saying that. Everyone's saying, "Oh, I'm—you know, we're all having a hard time" or like, "I don't have it as bad as anyone else." But actually, when you say, "I know that everyone's having a hard time, but I want to know how you're doing," accounts of this much more personal pain come up or what specifically has been difficult and the kinds of feeling.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And I think right now, in general, it's quite easy to say like, "Well, I don't have it the worst" or—
John: Mhm. Mhm.
Rosianna: —"we're all in this." And that can be kind of a way of avoiding, I think, addressing that actually it has been very difficult and so—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —what's so wonderful about poetry and particularly about Space Struck, I think, is that it gives space—one of the many incarnations of the use of the word "space"—for that, in particular and to have those feelings and to give yourself permission to feel them.
John: Yeah. And also to be—I don't—there's something about having someone else acknowledge things that feel very real to you. That feels like an act of forgiveness, somehow, or feels like this remarkable level of generosity, where someone—reading these poems, I'm trying to figure out what makes me cry when I read this because I still cry and I'm not a—you know, I do cry a lot when I read. I don't cry a lot for no reason when I read, like, usually what I cry it's because like something sad happened to a character and I cared about the character and now that's sad or the book is ending and I, you know, and I'm sad to be saying goodbye to these characters or whatever. I think what makes me cry when I read these poems is feeling like I am loved.
Rosianna: Mm.
John: Not by specific people, but by the world. I don't know if that makes any sense, but it makes me feel like—like "I see this in you. I understand this in you. And I know that it feels ugly to you and I love you anyway."
Rosianna: Yeah. That does make sense to me. Because I think part of what the collection does so brilliantly is connect us each to each other thing in the world. And—that and the horrible things we do, as well as the things that we would call quote unquote beautiful. Like I keep thinking about that line. Oh, let me find it before I completely butcher it.
John: Yeah. I also—I love quoting lines from this book and I always quote them wrong. I had to go back and fix a vlogbrothers video recently, where I quoted Space Struck and then I was like, I should probably look that up, make sure it's right. And it wasn't.
Rosianna: I used to be so good at memorizing poetry. And now I'm just—I just don't practice it enough and I need to practice it more because it's good for me. And I like having those kind of—having words at my fingertips.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: But this is in, "I've Been Trying to Feel Bad for Everyone." And the first—in the first stanza, it says, "I'm learning that a miracle isn't a miracle / without sacrifice, because when the birds / bought manna, we ate the birds." I just—I love that so much.
John: Yeah. That's just so beautiful.
Rosianna: Yeah. And I think what makes me really emotional, in a way, as I read this, is that sense of trying. Like the narrator in—
John: Mhm. Yes.
Rosianna: —all of these poems, in their own way, is trying.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —whether that's trying to look or trying to do or trying to improve or trying to not do something. You always feel the trying.
John: Right. There's a great contemporary internet insult where people call people who try hard try-hards.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And this book is like, I see you trying hard and I care about you anyway. It acknowledges that human impulse to, like—to try too hard. Which isn't cool. I don't know. I kind of feel like it's an anti-cool book in that way. Like it's—it's like, yeah. Maybe we shouldn't be too cool to the reality of experience. I also—one thing that struck me about this book—to use a verb from the title—is space—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —which I had never thought about before as being both the infinite abyss above us, where the golden record on the Voyager spacecraft is flying off in—to the outer reaches of the solar system and whatnot, but also like, you know, the spaces within us, the spaces between us. That we have one word to describe both the entire universe outside of our atmosphere and, you know, what sits between individuals.
Rosianna: Yeah. And within the bars of a cage, or yeah.
John: Oh, god. I talked about feeling seen. I've never felt more seen than in that moment in the poem about "The Terre Haute Planetarium Rejected My Proposal," where they write about being like a snake that's had its fill of eggs and now can't escape its cage. Like that—that was a little on the nose for my experience of middle age.
Rosianna: Oh, that's—
John: That's the other thing about this book is that it's really funny.
Rosianna: Yeah. I was going to say—
John: It's a—
Rosianna: —there's a line in that poem that makes me laugh out loud about this—the very, very first bit of "for more tactile audience participation / And sure, their decision makes sense / if you consider the fact that no one likes / being pelted by meteorites." It just made me imagine like a 40x version or something of the planetarium.
John: Yeah. Yeah. And also, it made me imagine the grant writing process—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —where you're writing—like very seriously writing a proposal where people will be pelted by meteorites to understand that the universe is arbitrary and can be very cruel. It's just so good. I also love the title of the poem "You Be You, and I'll Be Busy."
Rosianna: Yeah. I want to put that on a dating app profile. There's lots of potential dating app bios in this books.
John: That's great. Yeah. But of course, alongside—and this is—I think this is what I love most about Paige Lewis's poetry, is that it all lives alongside itself, right.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: There are poems that start out funny and playful and then are about—what I learned is a true story—that women were—who worked in these factories, painting radioactive paint onto watches—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —so that the watches would glow at night. That these women were told that it was safe and were told to lick the brushes.
Rosianna: The radium girls.
John: And—yeah. And so a poem will go from being funny and playful to being—you know, to telling the truth, another truth of our species, which is that we can be, you know, absolute monsters to each other and can dehumanize others in ways that are not just harmful, but fatal.
Rosianna: Yeah, there's a really—I mean, what I really loved about that poem, in a way, kind of—it ends in that sense of women glowing beneath our feet is that it highlights how horrendous that is, but then also how sort of ethereal and almost god-like those women are, who are glowing even in death.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Which is like both horror movie stuff and there's something strangely magical about it. I think throughout the collection, there's a looking directly at the slightly grotesque elements of magic, and—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —challenging maybe what we do hold as magic and miracle and all of that in our mythology, which I think tends to be male. It tends to be patriarchal.
John: Yeah, I think that's a really good observation. There's a bunch of places in the poems where the quasi-magical happens and it's much more complicated than merely "This is fun."
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: You know, like—
Rosianna: "This is great."
John: And the idea that the stories that we tell each other about the past—whether it's about Noah's Ark or the radium girls—they're stories that we choose and that we choose to keep paying attention to. And if anything, it just highlights for me, all the stories that we've lost.
Rosianna: Yeah. That was a conversation in Aloe about the epigraph.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: There were—there's two epigraphs, one from Metamorphoses and one from Earth Light. And S Lynn said, "After some Googling, I believe the section from Metamorphoses that is quoted is referencing the Sybil that was granted longevity of life (a thousand years or something like that) but without eternal youth. Thus her body withers away until she is just a voice. Taken with the second quote I feel there's something in there about creating a narrative about yourself, about placing yourself within eternity, and about what it means to tell your story," which I thought was such a beautiful—
John: Mm.
Rosianna: —way of looking at it—
John: That is—yeah.
Rosianna: —and the idea of everything fading away until it's just a voice, as well, like this—yeah, this lack of body and does that mean lack of power, but then also when you look at everyone in context of the universe, like we're tiny and small and—but still a voice worth listening to, we hope.
John: Right. Yeah, that's one of the things—I love the way that the poems zoom in and zoom out. Like I love the way that the scale is sometimes, you know, talking about the color of the universe.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: A good example of this is the part of that Terre Haute Planetarium poem where they talk about the—where the narrator—I should always say the narrator.
Rosianna: I know.
John: I have a bad habit of reading poems as I understood poems to be when I was in sixth grade, which was confessions. Like that's—
Rosianna: For someone who death of the author—
John: Yeah, I know. I know for somebody—
Rosianna: —it just continues to fall apart.
John: Right. For somebody who believes the death of the author, I sure do like ascribe a lot of the perspectives of fiction and poetry to the author. I know. I know it's bad. I have to try to stop.
Rosianna: No, it's just glorious.
John: But—
Rosianna: I like it.
John: I'm not proud of it, but in—anyway, in that poem, when the narrator talks about how the scientists had a choice about naming the color of the universe? What I love so much about that is that it's a moment where you're both zooming in and zooming out because they're having a very human language-based conversation about the least human, least language-based thing imaginable.
Rosianna: Yeah. And it's like as though they're naming ice cream flavors or something.
John: Right. Yeah. And I love, also, that they do definitely pick the wrong name.
Rosianna: Cosmic Latte.
John: Speaking of names and how the poems can be simultaneously very funny and very sad and moving, I have not been able to stop thinking over the last year about that section of the poem "Last Night I Dreamed I Made Myself" that goes, "I think / about how hard it is for me to believe / in the first Adam because if Adam / had the power to name everything, / everything would be named Adam." I just—I mean, it's so perfect. It's so true.
Rosianna: It's so true.
John: It reflects this deep, embarrassing—to me, embarrassing truth about patriarchy, but it also just reflects a human truth that when we're on a—
Rosianna: And now I picture Adam as Elon Musk and I can't stop.
John: Yeah. I mean, Elon Musk only just has enough self-awareness not to name every Falcon rocket the Elon.
Rosianna: Or Elon-X.
John: Yeah. Yeah. But I also think it reflects this human truth that when we're on a FaceTime call, we always look at our own face—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —you know? And it's—and how impossible it is like or how challenging it is. How hard you have to work to see the world in a context other than your own context. Like how hard you have to work to see, you know, your best friend as something other than your best friend. To see them as themselves, to see them as their own person who exists separate from you.
Rosianna: Yeah, and to see them in their own terms.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And also like consider that they see you not as you see yourself, which I think is very hard.
John: Yeah. I mean, it's not possible for me.
Rosianna: Just stop—just stop trying.
John: Yeah, I guess like down that road for me lies ruin—like, if I start thinking about the way that Chris thinks about me, I'm like—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —oh, I bet he hates me deep down.
Rosianna: My therapist always talks about how the public think of you and that concept of the public, which is quite funny to me.
John: Mm.
Rosianna: I really liked that poem, also, because it has this set—this is still the "Last Night I Dreamed I Made Myself." Because of that illusion of wanting to prove independence and speaking of the public, trying to show that to an audience.
John: Mhm. Mhm.
Rosianna: "I want / the woman shopping to know I'm not / with my friend. I want them to know / how great I'm doing with my adventures in / independence. I'm ready to shout, / "Look at my healthy new life! But my friend / thinks it's a bad idea to frighten people / in a place with so many hard throwables." And then at the end, "Do they still / count, these hours I've spent on my / own? Do they still count if I'm saving / all of my shiniest thoughts for you?" And that made me think about relationships, but then also our public lives and social media, and—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —am I having this experience for myself, if I'm saving the shiny moment for someone else, as well.
John: Right. Can I have a shiny thought without sharing it?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Yeah, there's something very interesting to me that I hadn't really thought about carefully, about how you have a thought. And then the next thought you have is about the thought. It's like a self-reflexive—it's like a level of meta-narrative where you're thinking about the thought that you just had. Like in that poem, the narrator says after that observation about everything being named Adam, says something like, "And then I thought, 'That's a pretty smart thought.'" And I know that feeling very well, but then there's that third level of meta where you think, "Should I share that thought?"
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: "Like, is it even really good until I share it? Like, is it good before I make it useful? Or should I put it in a poem or should I make it an Instagram post?" And yeah, that just felt very real to me about the creative experience. But now, everybody has—we all have that creative experience because we're all creating our own feeds.
Rosianna: Yeah, and it's that making it into an object, that thought becomes very physical. It does become this shiny thing that a magpie is trying to collect, but then the magpie doesn't put it on Instagram. Don't know why. Maybe they do somewhere.
John: Yeah. Maybe they have their own version where they're like, "Hey, look at my nest."
Rosianna: "Check it out."
John: "I got all these baubles."
Rosianna: "You can't touch them, but you can look."
John: No.
Rosianna: That reminds me of something that was also from the Discord about the very first poem in the collection, "Normal Everyday Creatures." Elise said, "I like the idea that things often aren't really the way we imagine them, and imagining them in particular ways can amount to a kind of confinement of the thing."
John: Mm.
Rosianna: So that goes back to the idea of space.
John: Mm.
Rosianna: And sort of the trapping that we do to try and understand things. Classify them.
John: Yeah. Like the ways that language can become sort of a cage or a box in which things have to fit this way or that way.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: I read this great interview with Paige in The Rumpus in which they said, "I am interested in how repetition can normalize something strange or extraordinary over time."
John: Mm.
Rosianna: Which I thought was interesting, too, because it's a lot of repeated images throughout the collection.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: Religion and space and—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —space in all its forms. And naming, as we said. That was true. That made me think a lot as well.
John: Yeah, that—yeah. Yeah, that's another thing that I experience, but don't notice that I'm experiencing, you know?
Rosianna: Yeah. You know—I think that's also—that's part of what I like about poetry. Like I don't really know that I've read it when I read it through the first time.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: I feel like sometimes I haven't taken it all in and then I revisit it and I'm like, "Oh wait, I did take this thing in" or "I did notice that." But also throughout the collection, as well as the grotesque and these spaces and all of that, there's a theme of love. The narrator refers to their beloved many times—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —which is so romantic and old-timey.
John: Oh, I love that word. I love it. I never use it. I don't have the courage, but I love it. It's a great word.
Rosianna: I just got a flash in my head trying to imagine what Sarah's response would be.
John: Ah, yeah, I mean, that's also just a function of who I married. Like I think if I describe Sarah as my beloved, she would clock her head about thirty degrees to the left—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —and just maybe squint.
Rosianna: And just be like, "What did you say?" But there is, yeah, there's romance throughout it and this kind of—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna:—sense of constancy and safety, I think, that even when all these other things feel unstable, there's a kind of stability in that love that I see throughout the poems.
John: Yeah, I really love the love poems in this collection. I'm a sucker for love poems in general, but I find that contemporary love poems just move me so much more, because they feel closer to my experience of romantic love than, I don't know, you know, like seventeenth century, "To His Coy Mistress" stuff.
Rosianna: Yeah. Well, we'd hope so.
John: Yeah. Well, I mean, that sets an exceptionally low bar, but yeah.
Rosianna: Yeah, that just makes me think of so much—my earliest poetry that I read was Shakespeare sonnets and all of those love poems—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —which was so—I mean, they're beautiful, brilliant, but there's so one-sided.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Like, you don't get any sense of balance or evenness in them—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —or steadiness, either.
John: You don't have a sense of steadiness. You also have a sense that the point of love is to be obsessed and it doesn't really matter what the other person is thinking or feeling. Like, I really—
Rosianna: Is that not true?
John: On that front, there's a poem in the collection, "When I Tell My Beloved I Miss the Sun," and it begins, "he knows what I really mean. He paints my name across / the floral bedsheets and ties the bottom corners / to my ankles. Then he paints another / for himself." And I really liked that because it's like, "He paints my name." It's so romantic, but he also paints stuff for himself. You know, like—
Rosianna: And also just trying to understand what's going on there, as well. Of like—
John: Yeah. Yeah.
Rosianna: A lot of people talked about Peter Pan on the Discord.
John: Well, it's a mix of images, right? Like it's simultaneously fantastical and sexual and yeah. I also really like the—in the next little bit of that poem, they play the shadow game and they say, "Oh! I'm sorry for stepping on your / shadow! and Please be careful! My shadow is caught in the wheels / of your shopping cart." And that—again, it feels so—it feels like shared experience instead of one person pouring love down a well.
Rosianna: Yeah, and hoping for the best.
John: Right.
Rosianna: There's a—there's like a play. There's a playfulness throughout it.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And that's seen as important.
John: Right. And that's something that we—or at least I don't often see in love poems.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: But it is a huge part of most romantic relationships. Like the playfulness, the inside jokes, the moments of like, you know, sweet light that exists for no other reason to be sweet and light.
Rosianna: Yeah. I love it. That's great. I feel like we should just talk a little bit about poetry more generally, because my impression is that you kind of always loved poetry and that poetry seems to be very steeped in your life. Whereas for me, I think I came to poetry a bit later.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And you know, I remember my grandpa reading me a lot of poetry and I really enjoyed the experience of him reading it to me, but I didn't always enjoy the poetry itself.
John: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fair. And I—some of the pleasure of poetry is in the sound of it. Especially with poems that I love, except that I don't really agree with, you know, like there are a lot of poems out there that I really, really love, where I disagree with essentially everything within the poem. Like there's this famous A. E. Housman poem here, "Here dead lie we because we did not choose / To live and shame the land from which we sprung. / Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; / But young men think it is, and we were young." And I really loved that poem except that I disagree with every sentiment within it. I do not think that life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose. I do not think that young men think more that life is valuable. Like I actually think that a lot of times young people—it is not yet fully settled in, how sacred and wonderful and valuable life is. And then I also don't think that it shames the land from which you sprung to die or to not die in a war. And so—and yet, I love the poem because I love the rhythm of it—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —and I also love the memory of being sixteen and reading that poem and thinking like, "This is so true," because of course when you're sixteen, you think it's true.
Rosianna: Hashtag seen!
John: Totally. Totally.
Rosianna: That was one of the few poems I do actually know by heart because we had to—we did a World War One and Two—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —paper for A-Level—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —and I recorded myself reading poems, and then I would play them to myself at night. So I'd have them memorized for my exams.
John: Yeah. Oh, I'm a big sucker for war poetry. I'm a—it's not the best part of me, but I do love the World War One poets. I think—so I think the reason I loved poetry when I was in high school—and I've never written poetry. I mean, I've on occasion written poetry, but never with any seriousness or—and I just don't have a talent for it. Like I don't have the ear for writing it, but I think what I love about it is that it makes a lot of room for the reader. I think sometimes that's where people feel like, "Oh, I'm not smart enough for poetry—"
Rosianna: Mm.
John: —or, you know, "Poetry contains a bunch of illusions that I don't get." Well, it also contains a bunch of illusions that I don't get. Like, I'm sure I don't get 99% of the stuff that's there to get in Space Struck, but what I do get is really valuable. And then over time, when I reread those poems, they grow and change because they have made so much space for me, as the reader.
Rosianna: Right.
John: Like they've made so much room for me. And so I think that's what I love about it, but I'm able to love it that way, because I don't—for whatever reason, I don't have that expectation. I don't have that feeling of like, "Oh, this doesn't make any sense because I'm not smart." And that shuts—I think that shuts people down really quickly. Like it's not fun to read something that feels like it's an inside joke that you don't get.
Rosianna: Yeah. I do feel like part of it is that for many people, their introduction to poetry—or at least, what's considered capital P poetry is through school curriculums and—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —the sense of trying to—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —keep up with or understand something and being a bit in the dark and this very—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —reductive view of "There's one way to read this poem." And unless you have—really, teachers at that level or your own experience of poetry or you've kind of broadened the scope of what you consider poetry, it can feel quite—yeah, narrow and stifling and I certainly found that. I remember going through these poetry collections that we'd have for class that were like these—printed in these horrible books—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —that were just like A4 worksheets. And just being like, "I don't care about 'Blackberrying,' Sylvia Plath. I just don't care."
John: Right.
Rosianna: And of course much later, I grew to love that and I love poems now. And I—and there are poems that I read then that I sort of—read for fun and still—I still think of, but I do think that poetry is seen as kind of obscure sometimes. And it's my hope that now, as there's this huge wave of fantastic poetry at the moment, and of people feeling like they can write it and writing it and sharing it—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —I feel a little bit more hopeful. But yeah, at school, I just—I think it was—it felt quite stifling somehow.
John: Right. Well, a lot of the way that it's taught in school, I think—or at least the way that it was when I was a student—was, "This is a poem that is a riddle for you to solve and there is one right answer—"
Rosianna: Mm.
John: "—and if you don't get the right answer, then you aren't a very good reader."
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And nothing crushes the spirit, you know, quite like being presented with what is essentially like a standardized test word problem in the form with line breaks, right?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: That's not—it's just not pleasurable. And I was really lucky on two fronts. First, that when I was in high school, I had a really good English teacher who made a lot of space for student interpretation. And also we read—we didn't just—like we read Tony Kushner and we read all kinds of contemporary poetry. We read Nikki Giovanni and Rita Dove and it was just really thrilling. Poetry felt alive. It felt like present—very present tense—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —to me when I was in that class. And then when I was in college—was really the first time I like read the, you know, classic American poets. Like read Emily Dickinson and all that stuff. And I remember being in a lecture about Emily Dickinson's poetry and it was a lecture, you know, like you're sitting there taking notes. There's no student—no student feedback is welcome. There are seventy people—
Rosianna: You're seen and not heard.
John: Exactly. The seventy people in the room. You're—it's eight o'clock in the morning. You're tired. And the professor was like, "Are these poems that we read in the last week about how Emily Dickinson definitely believes in God or about how Emily Dickinson definitely doesn't believe in God?" And everybody was like raising their hand for one or the other. And he was like, "Because I think they're about waxing and waning and how that's—you know, how that stuff changes depending on how you're doing and changes depending on where you're looking at the world and which part of the world you're looking at. And I think that this is a poet trying across the body of their work to explore that question with openness and being open to the fact that it waxes and wanes."
Rosianna: Right.
John: And I was like, "Oh. It's not a word problem."
Rosianna: Yeah. It's not a fixed thing. It's not like a—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —game of Cluedo.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Someone's not always the murderer.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Yeah. That's really interesting. I'm jealous of that, to be honest.
John: Yeah. Well, I really—
Rosianna: That sounds great.
John: —I think it gave me an extra ten years of enjoying poetry because I think otherwise, I probably wouldn't have found it as early as I did. And it's been such—it is still—it is such a comfort to me. It's such a balm.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: You know, this book is so consistently present in my life. I don't know how else to say it, but all the time, somebody will say something and I will think something from Space Struck, or I'll think something from Object Permanence by Nicole Sealey, or I'll think something from Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar. I just find that poetry informs my everyday experience of the world so deeply. It really is a gift.
Rosianna: It's so exciting, at least now for me, to be discovering new poets, through friends and through Ours Poetica and through—just life—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —and seeing them in epigraphs and being like, "I wonder what that's from," or "I wonder what other poem that's referencing." Just—it's really opened up a new world of it. Like I read a lot of Ada Limón over the last couple of years and just absolutely got so sucked into it.
John: That's great.
Rosianna: And having that kind of new excitement of it. And I actually—coming to think of it, that's also another part of it. The poets I read at school—with the exception of poor Sylvia Plath and her "Blackberrying," and Carol Ann Duffy and "The World's Wife," which was one we studied—were all white and male and mostly from the 1800s.
John: Right. Yeah.
Rosianna: And like, they're fantastic poets. And I still love so many of those poets, but we were an all-girls school—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —and we were reading men and—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —I couldn't find a lot of my voice in that. And so when you look at things like love poems, it would be the generally quite objectifying thing that didn't seem to do it in a particularly interesting way, either.
John: Right.
Rosianna: So a lot of the questions that the poems were asking didn't feel like questions that were relevant to me or that said anything about my experience.
John: Yeah, I think that's a huge part of what turns people off from literature in general?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Is being told that there is this static canon that has to be explored before you're allowed to read any contemporary work.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like it just—it's soul-crushing to be told like, "Well, you can't really be in the club until you're finished reading Wordsworth."
Rosianna: Right.
John: And you want to be like, "Yeah, like—why can't I read Wordsworth alongside contemporary poetry?"
Rosianna: It's like, "No, you have to listen to this guy's opinion on daffodils first. And then we can carry on."
John: Right. But I think that's starting to change—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: like just anecdotally, from what I see in American high school English classrooms, it seems like there is more mixing of you know, classic older poetry or fiction with contemporary stuff, which I think is so good. Like that is why I have a life now that involves so much reading and writing, is because when I was in high school, we weren't just reading Jane Eyre.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Although I liked Jane Eyre a lot. We were also reading, you know, all kinds of contemporary fiction and we were reading stuff that was funny. Like, it didn't seem impossible to me that great literature could be funny or that great poetry could be funny because we were reading that stuff. And so I didn't have to unlearn that, in the way that so many people do. I've had to unlearn a lot of other things about literature and the point of literature and poetry. But not that.
Rosianna: Yeah. Although that did—that just made me think about the research I was doing about Eyam and how one of the accounts from like the 1800s quotes this really pretty standard poetry, from my perspective. From this woman who lived in the town, who was writing about the experience of Eyam and the quarantined from the plague, and it just kind of kept me thinking, like, "Why wasn't that part of the education around—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: "—plague?" And like death, like all these voices that aren't just contemporary that have been there.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And it's something that we revisit again and again, I think, in our discussions on the Discord, but also just in our discussions about literature in life. It's so exciting to be in this time right now, where not only are there so many contemporary poets being published, but also voices being given to people who were doing that work at the time.
John: Yeah. And I think the counter-argument from the canon is always like, "Well, this stuff isn't that good." And I want to be like, "Yeah. I mean, neither is a fair amount of the stuff that we read, though." Like—
Rosianna: Like Byron wasn't always totally on it.
John: Exactly. It's not—yeah, exactly, it's not like Byron hit a grand slam every time he went up to the plate. I mean—you don't get that reference, but it's a—we have a game called baseball. It's like—
Rosianna: It sounds a lot like our game rounders.
John: Yeah, it's sort of like rounders. It's like a—
Rosianna: Like—
John: —shorter cricket.
Rosianna: Yes. It's like rounders but you guys made it really fancy. I don't get it.
John: Yeah. But yeah, I just—I always want to respond with that. Like, I mean, so what? It's still—it's a different perspective. And there—like in that poem that you sent to me—this is about a village in England that during the London plague outbreak of sixteen—in the seventeenth century, they quarantined as a city, as a town, and a quarter of the people or a third of people in the town died, but they never left. None of them left the town for over a year. And as a result, they were able to slow the spread of the plague. I thought that poem was lovely. And it contains a bunch of observations about shared sacrifice that you don't see in other Romantic poetry—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Or that like, I guess—I don't know. I'm not an expert. Maybe you do, but I haven't seen it.
Rosianna: Well, that's not brought to the forefront.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: What's brought to the forefront is like, a hermit. Or the awe and wonder of the storm—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —which is very valid.
John: Right, right.
Rosianna: It's part of a big—I think a big untangling that we're doing right now.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And a lot of writing back to that.
John: Right. The big untangling. That's a nice—that's a nice phrase for what we're trying to do culturally.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Because it acknowledges the complexity and fraught-ness of it, and that sometimes you're going to end up with different new knots. Like when I try to untangle my headphones, I'm always like, "Oh. Well. I've succeeded in some ways. But I've caused new problems that now I need to solve."
Rosianna: I mean, I'm looking down at mine right now and they've got three knots in them, so.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Yeah. Well, Rosianna, I am so grateful to everyone at Life's Library for reading this book with an open mind and an open heart. It is—like, it's just a book I really, really love in a very personal way. And I know that a lot of people who maybe are new to poetry, you know, it's a completely new experience for them. I am just—I love being part of a community that reads so openly and so broadly, and I really, really appreciate it. So thank you to everyone for reading it with me and I'm really excited to—for our next book, as well.
Rosianna: Yeah. It's an exciting time and it's wonderful to still be able to go to the Life's Library Discord or look on Instagram at people tagging what they're reading and just feel like we're part of something a little bit bigger than—in all of it, in our own individual homes.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Hunching over our books. So, yeah. Thank you very much for that.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And we will see you next time.
John: Thanks again.