I’ve been listening to the PoemTalk podcast religiously for quite a while now, at least since early 2013, probably before that. I’m not sure when I started… possibly as far back as 2010. The podcast began with an episode on William Carlos Williams back in 2007.

I like the way the “talk” avoids being too academic but doesn’t talk down to the audience either. For me, they hit just about the right notes. Each episode begins with a recording of a reading of the poem, almost always by the author. (There are a couple of exceptions – for an episode on Dickinson, and one on Poe, for instance). Hearing the poet read the poem is one of the best parts.

Who even knew there was a recording of Lorine Niedecker? There’s just one, apparently, recorded by Cid Corman at her home on Blackhawk Island in 1970. She has a small yet strong voice, a little creaky, pretty Midwestern. I’ve come to feel that it suits her work. PoemTalk # 77 centers on two of the poems she read that day, “Foreclosure” and one called “Wilderness” (or “Wild Man,” as it’s called elsewhere).

Well there’s this bit where she likens the wild man to a “prickly pear” and the PoemTalkers come to the conclusion that she’s (uncharacteristically) writing about the desert.  This started to bother me since prickly pear cactus do grow in Wisconsin. So I wrote Al Filreis, the host, and he put an addendum onto the web page for the episode. Let the record show… I was not really expecting that, but he must have thought it was important.

Another thing bothers me about this episode, in that they seem to think that Blackhawk is a native American who was living on Blackhawk Island at around the same time that Niedecker was and that she somehow absorbed his philosophy. But it’s not precisely clear what they mean to say about Blackhawk. Though I am pretty sure they’re wrong, I don’t have any proof of that, so I didn’t mention it.

Proof of the cactus, though, yes: they’re outside of Spring Green and I have also seen them near Mazomanie.