Poetry Podcast: Rae Armantrout Reads Susan Wheeler

On the latest Poetry Podcast, Rae Armantrout reads from Susan Wheeler’s poem “The Split,” in which the speaker bids farewell to a group of deceased acquaintances:

’Bye, motorcycle David.
’Bye, you bright spirits, born of my friends. Jimmy. Nathalie.
’Bye, beautiful one, your father said your pink skin would be tender, I was afraid for you.
’Bye, one’s devoted mother, another’s devoted son.

In listing off her dead, Armantrout circles the fact of her own mortality. The incantation simultaneously keeps this fact at bay and betrays apprehension, prompting Armantrout to comment that the poem reads like “a really colloquial timor mortis”–a line from Catholic prayer that means “fear of death disturbs me.”

Armantrout also reads her own poem, “Before,” in which she imagines how her everyday surroundings might look if her husband were to die:

If I can describe
the feeling
of your absence
precisely, which means
using the names
of things

Both poems imagine the emotional rearrangements that the death of a loved one might precipitate. As Paul Muldoon, the magazine’s poetry editor, suggests, the theme of absence is also reflected in the process by which a poem takes shape: revealing itself partially by virtue of what’s left out.

Susan Wheeler’s most recent collection, “Meme,” was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2012. You can hear Armantrout’s reading and her conversation with Muldoon by listening above or by downloading the podcast for free from iTunes.