S6:E16 Chopsy Gutowski & Roxi Power in Conversation

Chopsy Gutowski talks with Roxi Power about her powerful poems freshly submitted for her MFA thesis. As friends who have been writing together in Santa Cruz for years, Chopsy and Roxi laugh and dig in, plumbing the lyrical depths of Gutowski's eco-poetry, elegies, and political poetry. Mining the difficult moves in Jorie Graham's book,To 2040, Gutowski invites us to inhabit the present moment, however painful, to find healing and joy. She believes poems have a life of their own with a potential to honor and change the course of our lives as they conjure what is possible for our future. Chopsy Gutowski is a poet, improv artist, and early childhood specialist who is completing her MFA in Creative Writing at Pacific University. She lives in Santa Cruz in the midst of redwoods and seasonal visits from Swainson’s thrushes. In the past month, she has read for the Poetry and Music in the Parks series in Santa Cruz County and the annual Santa Cruz "In Celebration of the Muse" reading. Her muse instructs her: “excavate what’s hidden beneath the everyday, peer into things until they give up their ghosts, then go further.”