Episode 126: Narrative Possibility

We kick off this episode with some riffing on Hallmark movies and a suspension of Jason’s voting rights. No worries, though! The two poems under discussion are by a former student of Jason’s and it comes clear pretty quickly that we’re all fans. Don’t listen to this episode for the suspense, but for the delicious delve into narrative possibility and how poetry is wonderfully suited to keeping the door open long after a poem ends. Indented lineation and how it can affect a poem’s pacing gets some attention, as does the sensory tease of wonderfully selected symbolism and imagery. We also touch on the implication of the reader in a poem where the speaker is still working things out. In this film-tinged discussion, Kathy reminds us that a sweet ending can hit the spot, Sam confesses to thinking a lot about “Baby Boom”, Dagne owns up to seeing Raiders of the Lost Art eleven times when it was first released, Jason pays homage to Diane Keaton and Liza Minelli, and Isabel poses a question that underscores our theme of narrative possibility.   Some links we think you’ll like: Whisky & Rum in Raiders of the Lost Ark, ThirstMag.com How Baby Boom Set the Template for Future Movies About Working Mothers, Vulture   At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Isabel Petry, Dagne Forrest     Georgia M. Brodsky is a recent graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives south of Boston, near the ocean, with her partner and their daughter.   The Tavern   After I cracked the 6-ball off the table, he offered to teach me to drive stick in the parking lot.   Before: whiskey in no-one’s-joking-sized shot glasses, the kind   the cool girl in Indiana Jones throws back then stacks like a champ while men fall off their stools   around her. Heavy glasses. No windows. Just the door to the lot, to the harbor   eventually, where earlier that day I’d seen a girl my age with a pocketknife, cleaning a fish.   She’d plucked the eyes out, let them sit on the ground staring up   like a figment in Charlie Kaufman’s dreams. Every story is a version of something else.   I followed him to his car. I didn’t. I laughed and touched his arm. I balled my hands into fists. My body   felt something was wrong. I felt nothing. It always turns out alright in the end. It never does.   I’m the girl who climbed into the truck and the one who got home safe. I taught myself   how to drive stick and how to run the table. I’m the girl in the harbor. All eyes.   At the Raw Bar, Housing Three Dozen Oysters for our Eighth Anniversary   We’re not in it for the sex, if that’s what you’re thinking. And besides, I’m not the kind of person who shucks and tells. That was a joke. But it’s exactly what I’m talking about. I’m the kind who makes jokes when something matters too much.   We’re not in it for the sex. It’s more about what happens after the shell unlatches: brine, salt, alive, pulling us in by the shirt, shaking us and putting us down as if tentacles had launched out from under the ice.   That wasn’t a metaphor for our relationship. I’m honest to God talking about oysters: the knock-back, the vinegar zip, extra lemon on the side. A feeling like our bodies could turn back into fish. A speedboat revving from zero to sixty, that’s how it felt to throw down my first Mookie Blue after nine pregnant months. Forget forks or sauce or napkins. If every drop of oyster liquor doesn’t make it to your mouth, you shouldn’t even be here, and by here, I mean sitting across the bar, gaping at us, saying, wow, that’s a lot of oysters, or standing on the shores of an oyster farm, complaining that the wind’s too cold.   Am I getting any closer to explaining myself? When we first met, he traced his finger along the coves of Maine’s coast, a chart of waterways and kayak routes, I swear, the only freshman with a map of water pinned to his dorm room wall, and that was fourteen years ago, but in that moment, I loved him. We toast with a click of our shells— he lifts one to his lips.