Episode 8: Craig Morgan Teicher

Rachel Zucker speaks with poet, critic, professor, and overall poetry-immersed figure Craig Morgan Teicher. The two discuss Teicher’s various roles in the poetry community, the poetry economy, and the glimpses into people’s inner lives that poetry affords. By delving into his past as an aspiring comedian and his eventual path to poetry, Teicher offers an insight into what motivates him both professionally and personally in his current life. Through their conversation, Teicher and Zucker attempt to tease out the connections between monstrousness and pain, why certain poets like Robert Lowell are drawn to the sonnet, and how poetry allows readers and poets to connect through a solitary medium.

Rachel Zucker speaks with poet, critic, professor, and overall poetry-immersed figure Craig Morgan Teicher. The two discuss Teicher’s various roles in the poetry community, the poetry economy, and the glimpses into people’s inner lives that poetry affords. By delving into his past as an aspiring comedian and his eventual path to poetry, Teicher offers an insight into what motivates him both professionally and personally in his current life. Through their conversation, Teicher and Zucker attempt to tease out the connections between monstrousness and pain, why certain poets like Robert Lowell are drawn to the sonnet, and how poetry allows readers and poets to connect through a solitary medium.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

EXTRA RESOURCES FOR EPISODE 8Books by Craig:

To Keep Love Blurry (BOA Editions, 2012)

Cradle Book: Stories and Fables (BOA Editions (2010)

Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems (Colorado Prize for Poetry, 2008)

Books and authors mentioned by Craig:

Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon, 2016)

From the New World: Collected Poems by Jorie Graham, 1976-2014 (Ecco, 2016)

Inner Voices: Selected Poems by Richard Howard, 1963-2003 (FSG, 2005)

Collected Poems by Robert Lowell (FSG, 2007)

Useless Landscape or, A Guide for Boys by D.A. Powell (Graywolf, 2014)

Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz (New Directions, 2016)

Rita Dove’s Collected Poems: 1974-2004 (W.W. Norton, 2016)

Tape for the Turn of the Year by A.R. Ammons (W.W. Norton, 1965)

So Much Synth by Brenda Shaughnessy (Copper Canyon, 2016)

If This Is a Man and The Truce by Primo Levi (Abacus reprint, 2003)

Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi (Touchstone reprint, 1996)

Imaginary Vessels by Paisley Rekdal and Andrea Modica (Copper Canyon, 2016)

Banana Palace by Dana Levin (Copper Canyon, 2016)

Other writing/works by Craig:

“Rita Dove’s collected poems should put her back in the center of the American conversation” published by The Los Angeles Times

“SCOTUS On Cellphones And The Privacy Of Poetry” a piece on NPR

Other items of interest:

“A Hard Case” on the life and death of Primo Levi, published in The New Yorker

“To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage” from COLLECTED POEMS by Robert Lowell. Copyright © 2003 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell.  Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. http://us.macmillan.com/fsg