From Our Soundbooth | March 05, 2008

This episode of our podcast features three runners-up in the Voice-Only Poetry category of our 2007 Audio Competition. In”the Golden Lesson,” second runner-up Susan Somers-Willet gives an engaging performance of a poem rich in painterly image and metaphor, a poem both complex in its ideas, and visceral in its textures.

The third runner-up of the Voice-Only Poetry category is Eric Torgersen with “Taking Tickets.” The poem defies easy classification-but we’re sure you’ll find this voice-driven poem, with its quirky character, entertaining.

And we conclude with the fourth runner-up, Josh McDonald’s “Women in Strange Trousers,” a prose poem about females attired in an assortment of odd apparel.

Contributors:

Susan B.A. Somers-Willett is the author of two books of poetry, Quiver and Roam, and a book of criticism, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America.Her honors include the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize and the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award. Raised in New Orleans, she teaches English and Creative Writing at Montclair State University in New Jersey. [2010]

Eric Torgersen, Professor of English, Central Michigan University, has published two chapbooks and three full-length books of poetry, one book of fiction (a novella), and the biographical/critical study Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker, Northwestern UP. [2008]

Josh McDonald is a writer, musician, and storyteller. He is currently writing his third novel. [2008]