Laynie Browne : Apprentice to a Breathing Hand

What does it mean to write toward or under the aura of another poet one admires, to write in homage, as a celebration of another? What happens to language when it hovers between two writers, between how they each separately inhabit it? What does it say about the self, or is discovered about it—within the poem and in the world at large—when that self works through a devotional practice of homage? Today we look at one of Laynie Browne’s homage books, her most recent collection Apprentice to a Breathing Hand which is in deep engagement with the poetry of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. Fittingly, the conversation becomes a deep exploration of both Laynie and Mei-Mei’s poetry, their animating questions and concerns, and the work that arises when their work is placed alongside, nested within, in dialogue, in this way. For the bonus audio Laynie reads for us from another one of her homage books, this one to Alice Notley, called Everyone and Her Resemblances to demonstrate a very different aesthetic and syntactic, formal and thematic project. To learn about how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive, and the other benefits and rewards to choose from when joining the Between the Covers community, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the BookShop for today.