S03:E03 | Divinations III with Sandra Yannone: Lakes, Cosmic Convergence, & the Scientific Sublime

Welcome back to our third (and numerically auspicious, so says Sandy) episode of the Divinations miniseries, featuring an ongoing conversation in poems with poet Sandra Yannone.

In this episode, I share my poem "Hereafter," after Ada Limón's "After the Fire," and inspired by Sandy's poem from Episode 2: Twine, Maps, & the Meta-Meta, as well as by the Little Oracles lexical fragment "lake," which you can view as part of the original Little Oracles multimedia digital installation, back on view at www.littleoracles.com/exhibit.

We get into the intensity of the word “if,” poetry as a chance to change, manifesting cosmic convergence (led by Ada Limón), and more. Plus, Sandy shares a snippet of her response poem to my featured reading. Enjoy, and as always, take care, keep creating, and stay divine!

Resources

• Divinations I | Welcome to the Miniseries
• Divinations II | Twine, Maps, & the Meta-Meta (feat. Sandy's poem, "The Stars on the Snake River")
• The Little Oracles multimedia digital installation | lake, my chosen lexical fractal
• Sandy's links | Website: www.sandrayannone.com; Boats for Women on Abe Books
• Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry | Facebook and YouTube
• References | S01:E01 | ABC, Read with Me (if you want to find out more about the original Little Oracles digital installation); my poetry games and generators on Itch.io; "In a Station of the Metro" by Ezra Pound; Bill Knott, American poet

IG: @littleoracles

Transcript

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[Intro music]

Allison Arth: Hi everybody, and welcome to the Little Oracles podcast, an oracle for the everyday creative. I'm Allison Arth. I want to welcome you all back to the third episode of our Divinations miniseries, a special epistolary collaboration between poet Sandra Yanone and yours truly. We are writing poems in conversation with one another that borrow from the lexical fragments and fractals that were part of my multimedia digital installation, also called Little Oracles — and you can hear more about that in our first episode of this miniseries, and on the very first episode of this podcast as well, way back in Season One; I'll link both of those so you can listen. So Sandy and I are trading poems, and sharing them here as works-in-progress; we're discussing them, talking about the creative process, and the value of collaboration between creators — that kind of great, wonderful, creative stuff. So we are going to read and discuss some poetry today, but first: Sandy, so glad to see you. How are you?

Sandra Yannone: I'm doing well, Allison, and I want to just say that the number three is significant.

AA: Ohhh!

SLY: I'm hoping today that we are able to manifest more magic, as we did in the first two episodes. It's a true joy and beautiful mystery to be back with you today.

AA: Aw, well, yes, I have high hopes that this will be just as magical and mystical. The magical, mystical tour. [laughs]

SLY: It's always good to invoke the Beatles.

AA: It is always good to invoke the Beatles. [laughs] So Sandy shared a poem last episode, and it's my turn to share my response to that poem in this one, so by way of background before I get to that reading, I was inspired by the map and the nature imagery that Sandy invoked in her poem, “The Stars on the Snake River” — and we discussed that poem in the last episode; I will link it if you haven't listened; it's a beautiful poem– beautiful poem, and I highly recommend that episode. And my poem is also inspired by Ada Limón's amazing poem, “After the Fire,” which I'll also include in the show notes, so you can read that poem as well. And then the word I chose to work with was the word “lake,” from the Little Oracles lexical fragments. The working title of this poem is “Hereafter,” and it is after “After the Fire.” By Ada Limón. 

Whether by chance, by red-weather-charm, to chance a change of coastline, from coats lined with flannel to those lined with down, filed in a childhood closet, those soft arms unfilled, like to say: where have you been? 

I once saw a downed forest, first felled by flame, next drowned by lake — can I call it a forest if here lie the trees; here lie calcine; here carbon, less-leaves; here lie they in state, criss-cross this concave, this mere new-made and landlocked in stasis (that liminal space); where wind, and wildlife, and water now laves; where like a salve, these slow states of decay; where lake laps on charcoal, like to slake its own shame, like to make right, like to say: if only I’d been here.

SLY: Well, Allison, it is an exquisite poem. It's an exquisite poem right out of its gates,  is what I first want to say.

AA: Thank you.

SLY: And I'm struck so much by– and our audience listening cannot see the poem at this point.

AA: We are an audio format after all. [chuckles]

SLY: We are an audio format. And the advantage that I have — you know, the privilege that I have — is that I can see it on the page. And I want to– I want to address what I'm seeing, because I think it is such a salient quality to this poem. The pace, and the sound, and some other things we'll talk about, so lend themselves to line breaks and– and maybe set stanzas, or maybe even couplets or tercets, to kind of create a certain pace. And yet; and yet; and yet: it is a two-stanza prose poem. Yet, where those lines end in the poem, in each stanza, for me, are why the poem is a prose poem, because it creates a completely different emphasis  on the question, “where have you been?” and the ending, “if only I'd been here.” So I'd like to have you, if you wouldn't mind, talk a little bit about making that choice, when you had so many things in this draft — or at least if it was my draft — that would be driving me to break the lines, to break the stanzas. How did you land at this particular place with “Hereafter?”

AA: I love this question, because those formal elements, I think, are really fascinating to talk about within the making of a poem, and as a poem is created. I think, just first of all, I always tend to write toward prose, just generally; that's usually my first instinct. And as I was thinking about, “Well, should this be broken? Should this be– should it be a sonnet? Should I start– you know, cause there's a lot of internal rhyme in this poem–

SLY: Absolutely.

AA: –like could I make this a villanelle? Could I take a formal style, or a form, an actual poetic form, and fit this into that structure? But I– I kept coming back to making it a prose poem primarily because I wanted to create this sense of unbrokenness and of closeness within each paragraph; this, like, almost tripping sense; this spinning around this– this gyre of– of shame or guilt or transition or change or whatever it is.

SLY: Mm, yes.

AA: And I felt like prose really lent itself to that in this particular case, because it– there aren't those natural breaks, and you just want to keep reading, and you want to keep falling down this hill, as it were, of the sounds that are in this poem.

SLY: The sounds are extraordinary. It is a cascading, shifting mini-litany of sounds.

AA: [chuckles] Yeah, yeah.

SLY: I mean, you have– you have the shifting mini litanies, but then you also have the sounds. And they are not competing with each other, but, in particular, I would draw everyone's attention to all the hard Cs and the soft Ls, and how– how they throw us down the mountain and lull us to sleep both at the same time.

AA: Mm-hmm.

SLY: Again, as a writer myself, I would be hard-pressed to be able to create an early draft that is this intentional about sound that way. How did you hear the poem when you were beginning it, to get there so early? And what prompted you to go to those sounds? 

AA: Yeah; yeah. So the word “charcoal” is, I think, a really good example of those sounds coming together, because the “ch” sound is both hard and soft.

SLY: Mm-hmm.

AA: The hard C in the middle of “charcoal” is a hard C sound, and then at the end, we have that “ul” sound, you know. And I think that word for me is kind of where– where this started, because I first started thinking about this image that I've had in my head for years of driving past this, uh, it used to be a forest, but it burned, and then because it was located in this, kind of, bowl, this kind of small valley, and that concavity just started filling with water during the rainy season out here in Washington State, and so it became this lake, and it was just this incredible image of devastation, and then new growth, in a very different way than what you're used to with those images of new growth in a forest, right? It's usually sprouts and things like that. This is water, which, [chuckles] you know, it can– it's– it's a double-edged sword, right? Like, it can drown, and it can also promote growth. So I think I really started with this idea of charcoal and I wanted to build a whole bunch of sounds around that. And so one of the things that I do a lot of the times when I'm working in sound, which is something that I always gravitate to; I'm– I just love the music of language, and I love music just in general: I am a musician, so that's kind of how I hear things. And so I always go to that, and I always start from there. And I wanted to evoke this idea of charcoal within the whole entirety of this poem through that music and that language that I'm choosing here. And something that I do so frequently as– when I am writing something, is I go to a thesaurus when I have a word; I just look at all the synonyms around it, and I'm like, “Oh, that's an interesting word.” — sometimes I learn new words from that! — and I start to build these, like, webs, almost, and these reticulated nets, effectively, of all of these different words that are in the same vein, or in the same space. And then I start to, like, pull and sift and filter. And that's kind of how I work my process a lot is, I start with the dictionary. I don't know if that's rare. [laughs]

SLY: Folks, if you are just hopping into this podcast at this particular moment, or you've been listening thus far, you have just in that answer been gifted a masterclass in poetry.

AA: [laughs]

SLY: A masterclass, condensed, completely compressed. Oh, that's– that's genius. I want to call it what it is. It's genius.

AA: [laughs] Wow. Thank you.

SLY: Let's take the genius a little further.

AA: Okay. [chuckles]

SLY: I want to point to a little more genius in this poem. I want to take the word charcoal further.

AA: Sure; yeah. Let's do it.

SLY: Okay. Because what I love about you bringing our attention to the word charcoal, and of course the second I look at charcoal, I see exactly what you say about the hard– soft C and then the hard C, but the L is there too. So you actually, in one word, you have an overture to the whole poem, the whole sound of the poem. In that one word, it's an overture. And I'm also struck by how the poem itself is about the larger elements: two of them in particular, fire and water.

AA: Yeah.

SLY: And the convergence of how fire becomes water, and all the things that water does to fire. It's all about transformation.

AA: Yeah.

SLY: And so there is the 30,000-foot view of the elements. And then we actually talk about elements on the Periodic Table of Elements.

AA: [chuckles] We do, yeah. [laughs]

SLY: And I– I love that attention. Now I– I was horrible at chemistry, but boy, did I and do I continue to love the names of the elements and their properties.

AA: Oh, I know; the same.

SLY: So, there is so much going on in this poem, and it's not a long poem by my standards, or perhaps by even your standards. And yet, you get so much in here. You get all those elements. You get the 30,000-feet elements, and you get the specific elements in. How did you master that?

AA: So, I– so many of these questions are so– I think they're so incisive, because a lot of them get at just my natural tendency when I'm writing. I love science. I love scientific things that I can incorporate into poetry, that have a poetic nature about them, or that I can apply a poetic nature to. And by that, I mean, they not only sound beautiful — they're not only beautiful words like “carbon,” right? “Carbon” is a really– it's a really pretty word, when you think about it. And “calcium,” you know? [laughs]

SLY: “Calcine.”

AA: It just sounds good.

SLY: Yeah; yeah, yeah.

AA: You know, there's noble gasses.

SLY: Yeah. Noble. Love ‘em.

AA: Like I just– I love all of the ways that science can have this divine quality, and this sublime quality–

SLY: Mm; yeah.

AA: –and how you can take those things that so many people think of as, like, hard, and rigid, and linear — and they are, to some extent — but they explain the nature of nature, and the nature of life, and the nature of biology. And isn't that just the most incredible and awe-inspiring thing? That we can create poetry from something like mitosis, or something like phenotypical plasticity, or that there is– there's just this– such an opportunity to mine these scientific processes and scientific elements for what they can mean to us as humans–

SLY: Yes.

AA: –and how they can reflect our emotions, or the way that we look at the world, or experiences that we've had. And I just love that juxtaposition and putting those things together: the science and the sublime of life.

SLY: Yeah, that's– that's the title of another show: The Science and the Sublime. I’m just saying.

AA: [laughs] That's what Little Oracles is all about; like, that's my whole thing, right?

SLY: It really is. It really, really is.

AA: That's the whole concept.

SLY: It truly, truly is. I just happened to be driving around in my car with Simon and Garfunkel, “The Sound of Silence.” But this poem is the sound of science. Science!  You know that?

AA: [laughs]

SLY: Um, the sound of science! And yet the sound of science, here, is helping us break some great silences within the psyche of this speaker.

AA: Mm; mm-hmm.

SLY: And I'll draw our attention to one moment in the poem that to me is very Schrodinger's cat–like.

AA: Ooh. [chuckles]

SLY: Which is: “can I call it a forest if here lie the trees?” And I misread the line initially, and I read, “can I call it a forest if here I lie in the trees.”

AA: Ohhh!

SLY: And so then I saw: you are the cat, the forest is the box. So then when I get to the end, it's like, “if only I'd been here,” and I'm like: “and you are there.” You know, that whole idea of Schrodinger's cat: is the cat really in the box? But is it only there until we open the box? 

AA: Yeah! If a tree falls in the forest with no one around, does anyone hear it fall? [laughs]

SLY: That's right. So it really was this echo chamber of that concept. And what– what I find, of course, so interesting about poetry, is that you're writing, and you've got your narrative and story going on, and a simple thing like a misread — you can't control how my wacky brain is gonna interpret this. But yet sometimes, the thing that I read — and when we have the opportunity to talk about poetry with each other — sometimes the reader has a key that can unlock something that the poet maybe didn't know they wanted to or needed to unlock. And that's what I felt a little bit like when then I discovered that was the misread: that the “I” was there, but the “I” was never there.

AA: Yeah, you're bringing up such an interesting point here about this idea of the misread, and what a reader brings to anything that they're reading — particularly, we're talking about poetry here — what you bring to the poem as the reader, versus the intentionality of the poet; the words that they intentionally put on a page, right? And I don't want to necessarily create that dichotomy, that versus dichotomy, even. It's: I'm a reader, and I'm experiencing the words that you've put on the page; but if I misread it — if I read it from bottom to top, let's say — I can have a completely different experience of the things that you are putting down, and that is just as valid, and– and can be just as enriching, as– as reading in the way that the poet has intended you to read it. And I feel like that is kind of playing with this concept of intentionality and authorial voice.

SLY: What I want to take this part to is I want to go back into the poem to a very microscopic place. And I want to specifically focus and bring our attention to that word “if.”

AA: [chuckles] I love that word.

SLY: Now, the word “if,” I believe, shows up twice: the first time is in that part of the poem that we were just talking about the Schrodinger's cat forest in the trees, that mystical situation, and then the very last clause of the poem, “if only I'd been here.” To me, the word “if,” truly, like, amplified through the poem. It was only there twice, but it's such a critical word that speaks to the liminality; that speaks to the certainty of uncertainty, is the use of that word “if” not only once, but twice, and in the last phrasing of the poem. How do you manifest the word “if” in this poem?

AA: Well, you know, I just said, I love– I love the word “if.” There is this intrinsic hypothetical nature, which, again, kind of goes back to that science-y element. And you know, there's the word “iff,” I-F-F, is if and only if, and you use it in math a lot.

SLY: Mm.

AA: And I've tried to use this word before in poetry, [chuckles] but I'm like: not everyone knows that if with two Fs is actually a shorthand for a mathematical process, and so it just looks like a typo. [laughs] But– but I love– I love using those– those words of, like, an empirical process within the context of this very nature-based poem, and this very– you know, it's a very liminal poem. There aren't a lot of answers, whereas, you know, in science and in math, especially, for the most part, there are answers, whether or not they're concrete or final, but I love to use that word if as kind of a turn in– in a poem, something that creates a sense of perhaps before and after something that creates a sense of yes and no, something that creates a fulcrum on which the reader can chance a change of coastline, you know? To– to rethink something, and to have a slightly modified experience just by virtue of that little tiny word “if.”

SLY: Mm, right.

AA: To, like, open their mind to something that may or may not have been the answer the whole time.

SLY: So it does direct me as a reader to stay open to the certainty of uncertainty, is what I'm hearing you say.

AA: Yeah, exactly. Because I think that's really important when– when we're reading anything, right? Like, there isn't a directive, necessarily, on a page when we're reading something. We get to bring our experience, our hopes and our dreams and our, you know, loves and our traumas: we get to bring all of that to anything that we're reading. And we meet the poet or the author right there on the page with everything that we're bringing and everything that they're bringing. And we get that chance, especially when we're faced with these turn words like “if,” right? We get a chance to, you know, rethink or refashion or meld or merge in some way with whatever we're being presented with as the writing on the page. Or the writing in your ear, like the aural sounds that you get to hear on this audio-format podcast. [laughs]

SLY: I love that: the chance. It makes me think of harmonic convergence.

AA: Oh my god, yes!

SLY: Think of it as the most exquisite synergy that you could experience through sound and language.

AA: Mm-hmm.

SLY: That the poet is really trying their hardest to deliver an offer to you, but you need to participate for the contract to be fulfilled.

AA: Right; right.

SLY: And I believe that that moment of convergence– we begin a poem in mystery. I mean, I look for questions more than I look for answers. I look for wonder and awe to strike me like lightning.

AA: I love that! [chuckles]

SLY: [chuckles] And that's the harmonic convergence, right? It provides us that chance to change through that process.

AA: I hope that our discussions here of poetry and the process of creating poetry,  democratize it.

SLY: Absolutely.

AA: One of my goals in the work that I do here on this podcast, and the work that I do, like, with my poetry roleplaying games and stuff, is creating inroads for people who maybe think that they aren't poets, right? And you know, you said in our very first episode, “We're all poets,” and that is just so true. And by the same token, “We're all poets”: we can extrapolate that to “everything can be poetry.”

SLY: Absolutely. We can find poetry anywhere.

AA: Anywhere!

SLY: Anywhere we look. It’s about the seeing.

AA: Totally. It's about having that moment when you're driving down a rural highway, and you look and you see these half-burned trees jutting up out of a basin that obviously is not a lake, but it looks like one now. And just opening yourself to that chance, and to that opportunity, and to those things is what you as a creator and a writer and a poet.

SLY: You know, I have just two more observations about this poem, if I may share them.

AA: Yeah!

SLY: Because I want to share this with the people who are listening and thinking about what can happen in poetry.

AA: Mm; mm-hmm.

SLY: One of the things that a number of my poetry mentors  have mentioned to me over the course of the years, is that in many of my poems — and in many people's poems; it's here in this poem as well; it's here in “Hereafter” — there is an inside and an outside. We're inside, and where we're inside — and we did not talk about this place; we did not talk about the childhood closet — but the childhood closet is the inside. This closet has, I think, some wonder in it.

AA: It's a Narnia closet. [laughs]

SLY: Yeah; yes! You know, it's– it's– it's “lined with down.” I mean, it's– it’s– it's a delicious, mysterious place. But it felt to me, reading the poem, I felt safe in the closet. That's a hell of a thing for me to say as a person who took forever to come out of the closet, right? [chuckles]

AA: [laughs]

SLY: Okay, but the “soft arms unfilled,” and then, in the second stanza of this prose poem, we are outside again. I mean, we start out outside; we go immediately into that closet, and it's like: we open the door, and now the world is out there. The natural world is there, and it's right down to the elements. And we're watching natural processes take place. And for me, when I get to the end of the poem, I feel like I have arrived somewhere. I've taken the chance to change. And the poem has been the vehicle that has helped me change to arrive to somewhere new.

AA: Mm.

SLY: And that arrival is so amazing, because the literal last word of the poem is “here.” And it says, “if only I'd been here,” and we are. We have been, and we will be. This is a poem about millenniums. It's like the layers of the earth.

AA: Stratification. Something I love to write about, too! [laughs]

SLY: All that stratification. All that– oh my gosh! Oh my gosh. So I want to thank you profoundly for manifesting all that is in this poem. And I'm remembering back when I was in a class. in graduate school; my professor then was Bill Knott. I like to name the people so that the legacies get named and that people can also have access to poets they haven't heard of if they're interested.

AA: Absolutely.

SLY: So one of the things that Bill Knott did one day, we are reading Ezra Pound's poem, “In a Station of the Metro.”

AA: Oh, “petals on a wet, black bow,” et cetera.

SLY: Et cetera. [chuckles]

AA: Actually, that's just the second line [laughs]; we should say it: “the apparition of these faces in the crowd / Petals on a wet, black bough.”

SLY: Beautiful rendering of that poem. So, we talked about this poem in our seminar for the whole class. For two hours!

AA: Yeah! I mean, it contains multitudes, this poem.

SLY: It– absolutely; it contains multitudes. Now you're talking about the pound poem. I'm talking about “Hereafter.”

AA: Oh! [laughs]

SLY: I could talk about this poem forever with you. I could find more entry points every time I go into the poem. It is its own prismatic mirror ball. It's– it’s– oh my gosh, there's so much. All this to say, I don't know that every poem strives for this much complexity.

AA: No, exactly; and I think you make such a wonderful point here, that, you know, if you're trying to pack millennia, as you said, [chuckles] into every single poem, you can't do that.

SLY: You can’t do it!

AA: Like, not every poem is built to hold that.

SLY: No.

AA: Not every concept is that flexible and expandable, and it shouldn't be, because life is not 100 percent sublime, and life is not 100 percent mountaintop moments.

SLY: Right.

AA: Life is tiny things, too.

SLY: And we need those things to understand these things.

AA: Yeah.

SLY: We need those moments — those crystal clear moments — to be able to understand the murky, the foggy, the shadowy, the mystical.

AA: Right.

SLY: And again, as with the pound poem in that seminar, any one of us who continues to read poetry. We can choose which depth we're going to go to.

AA: Mm-hmm; mm-hmm.

SLY: We can always go deeper. We can always go deeper. We can always push our own edges as a reader. And, again, sometimes groping for things that, of course, the poet had no idea was lurking in the poem.

AA: Absolutely.

SLY: You know, and it almost makes me wish this was a call-in show. 

AA: [laughs] Yeah, wouldn't that be cool?

SLY: Right? Because then we could hear what folks who are listening to us in this moment, in this century, on this day, where the poem takes them. And what different coasts they reside in.

AA: Right.

SLY: Well, Allison, we've traveled so many places with this poem. As I said, you have provided a poem that has provided all of us with a masterclass on poetry. But there's one– there's one stone — there's so many stones to still turn over — but there's one I don't want to leave unturned today, and that is the fact that you shared with us that this poem “Hereafter” is inspired by Ada Limón, our current extraordinary U.S. Poet Laureate's poem, “After the Fire.” And could you speak a little bit about how Ada's voice aided and informed you in the creation of this poem?

AA: Well, anyone who's been listening to this podcast for any length of time knows that I am an Ada Limón stan. I love her work so much; I talk about her all the time. So she just is kind of one of the– the “mothers of my heart,” to borrow a phrase from Maggie Nelson. And so I always kind of go to her work when I am just looking for inspiration, or I just want to read a great poem, honestly. So this poem, “After the Fire,” it's a poem about grief, kind of, a cosmic-level. That's– that's the thing that I always notice in Ada Limón's poems, that she has so many of these tiny, tiny natural elements — things that she's observing out the window of her house; things that she's seeing when she's walking by a plant; she sees a bee or something — there's these tiny, little natural things, that she then extrapolates to these huge, cosmic moments and this– this huge cosmic impact. And I think that's what really resonates with me with her poetry, and something that I aspire to as well, is taking those tiny, little observable things and finding that divinity within them, and finding that cosmic import within those things. And so, you know, she talks about trees in a storm, so there's those images of trees. There's all of these images about losing and– and being in transition with regard to something like grief. And I feel like grief is kind of a big driver of “Hereafter,” honestly; like, there is this moment of leaving one thing for another; there is an implication with that “if only I'd been here” line — which, I love how you read that as, “and I am here,” and, you know, “this is where I am now” — but there is that– that “if,” that turn word that we talked about: “if only I'd been here,” so “I wasn't before” is what the suggestion there is. And so I really wanted to kind of echo what she's got going– what Ada Limón has going on in after the fire with that “before” and “after.” That “here I am reckoning with something that I've lost; here I am in this new place after something really catastrophic has happened.” She talks about fire; I talk about fire, you know what I mean? Like, there's– there's these natural catastrophes that then predicate a change in some way. And that can be externally, like you observed, where we've got a forest; and that can be internally, too — that struggling with grief. And so I wanted to kind of echo that. The other thing that I– that I really wanted to play with is that her poetry, almost all of it is just very plainspoken. It's very conversational. It feels like you're just picking up the phone and talking to somebody, which I love about her poetry. It just feels so real, I guess. And I wanted to play with that, and create this, like, juxtaposition of experience with these, uh, higher register, you could call it, I guess. You know, it's not a super conversational poem; it has all those internal rhymes; there is that sense of remove because of the words that I'm using — all of those, like, repetitious sounds that feels a little more, almost, archaic in a way. And it feels like it's not just a conversational poem, and I wanted to create, like, a little bit of tension there between what this poem was inspired by, and what it ends up being, to evoke that tension within the transition that is happening within the poem.

SLY: A masterclass comment, there it is.

AA: [chuckles]

SLY: About how distance can draw us in.

AA: Yeah. I love that. I love that.

SLY: And the poem certainly does that. And I, too, cannot recommend Ada Limón's work enough. And what's so ironic: today, I listened to her talk about her poetry on another podcast, and she read a poem from her collection called The Hurting Kind, called “Heart by Fire.” And now I come back, and we're talking about Ada Limón, and we're talking about fire. I love the harmonic conversation.

AA: Yeah. It's a cosmic convergence. [chuckles]

SLY: Cosmic convergence. So thank you for this poem, and for this cosmic conversation.

AA: Thank you! I love all these questions. It's just– it is such a– it's such a  gift, I think, to be able to talk with someone as incisive as you are about this work, and I'm so grateful that you're– that you're here and joining me for this project.

SLY: We are here!

AA: We are here! [laughs]

SLY: “If only I'd been here,” I'm here! I'm here!

AA: Thank the stars. [laughs]

SLY: Thank the stars; that's right. Thank you, stars. [chuckles]

AA: [laughs] So as we look ahead to our next episode, Sandy, how about you share a teaser of your response to “Hereafter,” so we can look forward to what's going to happen next time?

SLY: “Ecdysis Sonnet.” To chance a change of coastlines, you smuggle / every memory of both into corrugated boxes / that you suture with packing tape.

AA: Oh, [singsong] I cannot wait to talk about this poem in the next episode! Sandy, thank you again so much for embarking on this project with me, for joining me here on Little Oracles. Before we go, is there anything you want to shout out? And where can we find you online?

SLY: Well, as usual, everyone, I invite you to join me on Cultivating Voices Live Poetry the first three Sundays of any month. You know, the winter months can be challenging depending on where you are in the timezone's puzzle. This podcast will be arriving, for me, in winter, and I want to just say that we are a very warm sanctuary for the winter to kind of huddle up, sit by the fire–

AA: Yeah!

SLY: –and listen to poetry, and bring your own poems to the program, and you can find out about that on my website, www.sandrayannone.com. Reach out, happy to converse. 

AA: Great. You can follow Little Oracles on Instagram (at) little oracles. Check us out on the blog at little oracles dot com. You can find all the poems that Sandy and I are sharing there, and you can also find all of the lexical fractals, the original Little Oracles digital installation in its entirety, at little oracles dot com slash exhibit, so you can go ahead and check that out, and maybe use it for your own poetry project going forward.  We'll see you in our next Divinations episode, and until then, as always, take care, keep creating, and stay divine.

[Outro music]
[Secret outtake]

SLY: I also don't throw the word "genius" around that often. 

AA: [chuckles] 

SLY: And I don't mean it– and it's like– I don't know; there's a boring way to be a genius, and then there's a genius way to be a genius. 

AA: [chuckles] 

SLY: This is the genius way to be a genius. 

AA: Okay! [laughs] 

SLY: Okay, you can cut that part out. 

AA: Okay. [laughs]

SLY: [laughs] Okay.