Welcome back to our final episode of the Divinations miniseries, featuring an ongoing conversation in poems with poet Sandra Yannone. I'm sharing my poem-in-progress, "Sortition," inspired by Sandy's poem from Episode 6, and by the Little Oracles poetic fragment "bone," part of the original Little Oracles multimedia digital installation at www.littleoracles.com/exhibit.
We talk about skeletal neomorphs and personal specters, jury duty in 6th-century Athens, lexical campfires, and more, and reflect on the project as a whole. Plus, Sandy shares another special reading from her upcoming collection, The Glass Studio: the truly beautiful "Oracle," a perfect series send-off.
This is our final episode of 2023; thank you all for being here! While we're on break, you can find every Little Oracles episode in the archive. Happy New Year, and 'til next time, as always: take care, keep creating, and stay divine! <3
Resources
IG: @littleoracles
Welcome back to our final episode of the Divinations miniseries, featuring an ongoing conversation in poems with poet Sandra Yannone. I'm sharing my poem-in-progress, "Sortition," inspired by Sandy's poem from Episode 6, and by the Little Oracles poetic fragment "bone," part of the original Little Oracles multimedia digital installation at www.littleoracles.com/exhibit.
We talk about skeletal neomorphs and personal specters, jury duty in 6th-century Athens, lexical campfires, and more, and reflect on the project as a whole. Plus, Sandy shares another special reading from her upcoming collection, The Glass Studio: the truly beautiful "Oracle," a perfect series send-off.
This is our final episode of 2023; thank you all for being here! While we're on break, you can find every Little Oracles episode in the archive. Happy New Year, and 'til next time, as always: take care, keep creating, and stay divine! <3
Resources
IG: @littleoracles
[Intro music]
Allison Arth: Hi everybody, and welcome to the Little Oracles podcast, an oracle for the everyday creative. I’m Allison Arth. It is hard to believe, but we're here at the seventh and final episode of the Divinations miniseries here on the Little Oracles podcast. If you're just joining us for this closing Divination, I want to welcome you, and I invite you to go back and listen to the full miniseries, in which poet Sandra Yannone and I are exchanging poems with one another, and sharing them with you all as works in progress, and digging into the creative process around them, and the collaboration that brought them to life. And all six previous episodes will be linked in the show notes if you want to go back and visit — or revisit — them, and you can get them anywhere you find your podcasts as well. But before we jump into today's poem and today's conversation, Sandy: welcome back; It's always such a pleasure to sit down with you.
Sandra Yannone: Allison, I cannot believe we have made it to this pinnacle of the series today.
AA: [chuckles] Yeah!
SLY: And I'm just– I'm grateful for all the time we've spent together.
AA: Mm, me too.
SLY: And of course the poems that we've created.
AA: Yeah!
SLY: And I'm really looking forward to today's conversation.
AA: Oh, I am too. So today I am reading the final poem in our little series here in response to Sandy's incredible poem, “By Years the Obstacles, at Night the Scars,” which we heard and discussed in the previous episode, and we're going to unpack my poem after I read it. But in terms of setting it up before I get into that reading, the fragment that I chose from the original Little Oracles project was “bone,” and I was also inspired by Sandy's references to keys, concretely, and to oracular ritual and mysticism more abstractly in the “By Years the Obstacles” poem, and also this idea of scars that, uh, that she references as well. So I'm going to go ahead and read it, and then we're going to get into a little discussion about it.
Sortition
A woman opens her hand to reveal the key on her palm: a tattoo.
.
A sparrow holds seeds in her mouth by the bone in her tongue: a revelation.
.
A woman holds bones in the palm of her hand: the skull of a sparrow revealed like a delicate seed, like a lonesome tattoo, like an open mouth, like a tongue intoning, like a secret key to some indelible virtue.
SLY: You know, when I got this poem, before I read it, there was the visual of how unassuming it appears to be on the page.
AA: Yeah, yeah.
SLY: It's very sparse. The stanzas are a long line, with much white space — double what you would normally see as a stanzaic break. So there's a lot of white space on the page around the poem. You know, so I was curious about where the depth of this poem would come from with that– with that little to go on.
AA: Mm-hmm.
SLY: And then, of course, I get into the poem and I see– I see where the depth is coming from, and it's coming from those analogies that get set up in the first two stanzas. And, of course, in the final, the third and final stanza — what I'm calling the recombinations, almost like a DNA sequence, that happens in the poem. And so when you're beginning to write this poem — and of course, this is a very relatively new poem still, as we're talking about it — did you know that this is where you were going to go? Did you know these were the choices that you were going to make?
AA: Absolutely not. [laughs]
SLY: Oh, wow.
AA: No, this was something that I really wrote into, which is, I think- I think usually how I– how I go about things is I start with kind of the seed of one idea — and we talk about seeds in this poem here– [chuckles]
SLY: Mm-hmm.
AA: –but the seed of this idea is the word “bone.” And, almost always, when I hear that word, and when I think about that word, I think specifically of one type of bone, which is the bone in the tongue of the sparrow, which is called a preglossale; I don't know if you are familiar with this, Sandy or listeners, but Old World Sparrows have this skeletal neomorph — so it's something that has developed just for them — and they have this little bone in their tongue that stiffens it so they can hold seeds in their mouth better, so that their species can proliferate. And I learned about this, I don't know, more than a decade ago, and I am so fascinated by it.
SLY: Mm.
AA: And I almost always come back to it. I have been writing about this neomorph in sparrows in my poems, and in other pieces of writing, and creating around it for, like, literal years. [laughs] It's just so fascinating to me.
SLY: Wow. So, you know, so this is– so this image that we have in the second stanza of the sparrow holding seeds in her mouth is almost your signature image that you return to over and over again.
AA: Kinda, yeah.
SLY: I mean, maybe in the way that I– I'm always, somehow, brought back to the Titanic.
AA: Exactly.
SLY: On many, many occasions. And– and I don't go seeking it. It just– the ship, which, the ship was also female, she appears. And then– you know, and there she is.
AA: Yeah.
SLY: And it– and of course, that appearance is its own revelation.
AA: Yeah, no, you're, you're totally right. Because I call the– the bone in the tongue in the– in the line of the poem, “the revelation,” because I think it is– it's revelatory in the sense that it developed just so this one type of sparrow can survive effectively. But this idea of, like, ghosts, or things that keep returning in poetry, or even to extrapolate into creative work: I think is one of the most intriguing things about creative work in and of itself, is that whenever we return to those images or those characters or those, you know, moments of history — like with you in the Titanic or Houdini or something like that — it's this new opportunity to reimagine them in a new context. So we have this ability to be flexible and to be curious and to reinvent. And I think it's that elasticity and that flexibility that keeps me so excited as a creative and keeps me wanting to create is that there's always that chance and that new opportunity for new meaning within something that you've, you know, held in your creative brain for years and years and years.
SLY: Yeah. It's fascinating that whatever it is, you know, whether it's Titanic for me or this sparrow for you, everyone has one of these.
AA: Yes.
SLY: And I'm going to call it a specter — like, your own personal specter. And what I love about what you're saying is, I'm also looking at that word “revelation,” and I'm looking at the “re-” part, which of course means: again, again, again, again. And that return that is, literally, when you're returning, you're turning again. It's almost like the object or the– the thing that you're examining is prismatic. It's very prismatic in and of itself, because you keep returning to it, and you keep turning it to look at it a different way.
AA: Absolutely.
SLY: That's why it has such depth. Which brings me back to the beginning when I was saying: when I'm looking at the poem and I'm thinking, “Where's the depth from this going to come from?” Well, it makes so much sense that the depth is coming from the thing that you keep returning to, because the thing that you return to means it has its own depth to it that you've imbued in that thing.
AA: Right. Well, and to return to your question and to your, uh, really, I think, apt comparison of this idea of a DNA sequence or a helix, almost, is that, built into that third stanza, is this recombining of all these words that I've used before, which you so astutely observed. And it's this experiment in combinatorics; that's kind of how I see this poem. And that's kind of what led me to the title, “Sortition,” which is, you know, the– the creation or selection by the drawing or casting of lots — you know, it's an early form of democratic creation, right? It's, like, from the 6th Century in Athens, and that's how they chose magistrates and juries and things like that, and it's been applied in other governmental situations before — but it's this idea of combinatorics within a– a group or a community or a society, and I wanted to see what would happen if I could play with that within the group or community or society of words in a poem.
SLY: I'm so glad that you talked about the title before I got to ask you about it.
AA: [laughs]
SLY: Because I– I loved the title and I– … have we talked a lot about titles in the series?
AA: Yeah, yeah, we have. [chuckles]
SLY: You know, thank you for remembering what we've talked about.
AA: [laughs]
SLY: Um, but I'm so struck by your titles in general. Of course, “Ecdysis Sonnet,” right? I was able to create a title as fascinating as your titles because of a word that you– you know, I– I wouldn't have gone seeking a title like that. But really, you inspired me to, like, go find something, like, really strange.
AA: Oh, wow.
SLY: Because normally you just say, you know, “Sonnet about X.” And it's like: no, make it weird; like, make it really interesting.
AA: Yeah; yeah, yeah.
SLY: And I just feel like that's what you do with your titles, so we're already curious.
AA: Mm.
SLY: I had to look up the word, actually. But I– I mean, I love that I had to look it up, because then it's a mystery, and then I have to figure out the mystery of how the title fits in, or to, or combines with, or works against the poem.
AA: Mm.
SLY: Like, I don't know how the title is going to fit.
AA: Yeah!
SLY: And so that's its own puzzle right from the get-go. And, you know, not everybody wants a poem to be a puzzle.
AA: That's very true, yeah; yeah.
SLY: But I enjoy a little puzzle. I enjoy a little puzzle. I don't want to have to work super hard, but I'm willing to do some work. And when it's interesting work, you know, such as, “Oh, here's a word I don't know, and how does this fit into…?” You know, I can do that; I can do that kind of work, because, really, then the– the title is also a key, and it helps us unlock the poem.
AA: I really like that. I like thinking about it that way. And I– when I think about titling my poems — and this title actually came at the last; sometimes they come quickly, but this one was one I had to consider and reconsider a lot, because I kind of knew where I wanted to go with the idea of the poem. And I was thinking about that idea of combinatorics, and, like, recombining, and resorting, and, you know, casting about in the divination sense, and the ritualized and oracular sense. But I really was like: what is this? Almost like my poem “Articles of Incorporation,” I wanted something that felt a little more, I don't know, civic or governmental, or something like that, to, uh, to kind of support what was going on in the poem, and kind of cause a little bit of friction between what was going on in the poem. Because I think I really like building these little campfires between the title of my poems and the content of the poems, these– these things that, like you said, it's a puzzle. It's like an invitation to figure out where the ticks and the ties are between this title and what's going on in the poem itself. Like, what do these things have in common? And so I guess it's like: subverting expectations is kind of important to me with poetry.
SLY: Mm; mmm.
AA: And suggesting, or maybe pushing the reader or the listener into a new pathway, and into a new mode of thinking that goes beyond, just like you were saying, “Sonnet about X,” and creating a little bit of that puzzle moment, and that mystery, and almost that surrealness, like we were talking about in previous episodes. It's just inviting this new perspective through proximity.
SLY: Mm.
AA: So, like, the proximity of one word with a bunch of other words, and what does that proximity suggest, or manifest, or– or invite in the listener or the reader?
SLY: Well, and the whole idea of this recombination, this reconstitution, here, uh, in “Sortition,” again is a really great reminder for folks listening: this is doable for– for everyone.
AA: Yes.
SLY: And we could say, at its simplest level, “Well, this is just about syntax.” But syntax can have its own magic in different combinations.
AA: Absolutely.
SLY: And it's almost like using the poem as its own Rubik's cube.
AA: Mm; mm-hmm.
SLY: And what happens when you start twisting the words, and putting them in a different syntactical order–
AA: Yeah.
SLY: –and/or, as you did, combining these the first two stanzas and using as many of the individual pieces as you could to create almost a new narrative, when we're not even necessarily sure of the original narratives yet.
AA: Yeah; yeah. And you know– you know, what it actually reminds me of? Is: we talked about “In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound in a previous episode. And I think that I'm kind of bringing that energy [laughs] to this poem as well, because listeners, if you recall, “In a Station of the Metro” — that's the title of the poem; it's just a two-line poem; or arguably a three-line poem, if you want to include the title as one of the lines of the poem. [chuckles] So:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
petals on a wet black bough.
That's the whole poem, and there's so many mysteries and so many puzzles embedded in those lines, that I think I was maybe, uh– there was a specter of Ezra Pound sitting around in my head when I was writing this poem, too. [laughs]
SLY: Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up, because I was feeling that, too. In a very different way, but it did have a little bit of– a little– it made me think a little bit of In the Station at the Metro.
AA: Yeah, yeah. Well, and what's so interesting about that poem, is that the two lines are separated by a semicolon, which, you know, in the world of punctuation, the semicolon is, you know, separating two clauses; it suggests a relationship between the first part of the sentence and the second part of the sentence in some– in some cases. And– and in this poem, like you said, there's all this white space, and I don't really rely on punctuation between the stanzas to, kind of, connect them. I do use colons to suggest relationships between lines, or– or parts of lines. But that's something, too, that I think is really fascinating about poetry specifically, because there can be so many opportunities within lines. And that idea of the break and the linearity of poetry that is just part of what poetry is, there's a lot of opportunity to play around with punctuation and to create a whole bunch of new ways of thinking about punctuation, and new ways of interpreting punctuation, which is similar to what you're saying about syntax. So punctuation and syntax can, you know, they can have similar magics, I think.
SLY: Mm.
AA: Are you familiar with Whereas by Layli Long Soldier? Do you know this book?
SLY: I have this book; it's right here!
AA: Is it really?
SLY: Yes.
AA: One of my favorite books of poetry; an incredible collection that really pushes this idea of syntax, and of language, and of representation by language and by punctuation, and the imposition of language on a culture as a form of cultural erasure. And I think that, you know, while I'm not doing that in this poem, I think that there's so much possibility, like you're saying, that– that you can do this; you can rearrange words; you can reuse words; you can reimagine how they function within a sentence; you can do that same thing with punctuation. You can do that same thing with– with syntax. And I think that's so valuable and so enriching and exciting about what it means to write poetry.
AA: It makes me almost feel like It's our civic responsibility–
AA: Yeah! [laughs]
SLY: –to do, you know, to kind of get back to the title. But let me get back for a moment to Layli Long Soldier. And I'm– I don't know if you know this, and I certainly hope some of the folks in our audience know this, that– that poem is the foundational thread in a film, Lakota Nation vs. United States.
AA: I didn't know that.
SLY: And I will tell you the most amazing happening, and how I know about this. So it's a documentary about this court case brought by the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Peoples in the Great Plains, against the United States government, to get their land back. And it's been going on for years; this litigation has been going on for years. And the outcome is that the plaintiffs win. They win the case against the United States government. Very, very difficult to do. But the remedy — the legal remedy — is that the courts grant the Nations millions upon millions of dollars in reparations. And they say, “That's not what we're here for. We're here for the land. We're here for our ancestors. You know, we're here for our people. We want the land back.” And so the money has been sitting in escrow for years. The nations meet frequently to talk about, “What should we do? What should we do?” And they always say, “We're not taking the money. We're not taking the money. We're not taking the money.” And Layli’s poem: she narrates it all throughout the movie. And it is exquisite. And, how I learn about this film is: I'm on my drive across the country; I stop for one night only in Vermilion, South Dakota, and for one night only in Vermilion, the film is being shown with their Native American Student Alliance at the University of South Dakota. And the filmmaker and the crew are there.
AA: Wow.
SLY: We get into the film for free; we get free popcorn; we get free pop.
AA: [laughs]
SLY: All of it, you know? And so we get to engage with them, and to hear from the filmmaker — her name is Laura Tomaselli — and it is an absolutely phenomenal film. It's one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking, devastating films I've ever seen. But this thread of using the poem throughout from Whereas — which, of course, is a legal reference — and it is amazing to think of a poem as an anchor to such a significant, significant part of history. And yet there it is: that history and poetry once again, meet and once again, you know, do their good work together, in combination.
AA: Yeah, I mean, it speaks to the vitality of poetry in such a huge way. It's such a fundamental and profoundly human art.
SLY: Well, the other thing that I'm so struck by, is I keep coming back to my initial visual reaction to the poem. What was I going to find here? And in our conversation today: look at all the layers. Look at all the depths that this poem has evoked. I mean, we've talked about Ezra Pound; we've talked about, you know, Native American history; like, there's so many things influencing this poem, that the poem is really the tip of the iceberg.
AA: Speaking of the Titanic. [laughs]
SLY: [chuckles] Speaking of the Titanic! And what we are gifted to, as I always like to say, is: the beauty of this poem is, it looks like we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg, but the real payoff is it takes us to the depths below.
AA: Mm.
SLY: And that's the mark of a tremendously grand poem.
AA: Yeah, thank you very much, and I am so excited to, kind of, see where this poem and the other poems that both you and I've written are going to go. This has been an absolutely incredible growth experience for me, honestly, you know, as a poet and as a creative and as a podcast host [chuckles], and– and, you know, writing in conversation with you, and finding new ways to look at my own work. And– and it's just been this dreamy and, like, eye-opening and very magical experience for me, and so much of that is built into the collaborative element that this is. So as we wrap this series, what are your takeaways from doing this project and, you know, where do you see yourself going next with this type of project? Is this, you know– how– how has this affected you?
SLY: Well, first of all, it's been just a profound joy to be in this type of conversation with you.
AA: Yeah.
SLY: I mean we've known each other for a very long time, and I think we've danced around these kinds of conversations, but we've actually never put ourselves at the center of this conversation.
AA: Yeah.
SLY: And– and here we did it. And the word that is coming to mind is, completely, “revelatory.” It was completely revelatory for me.
AA: Oh, yeah.
SLY: And I would say my, sort of, grandest takeaway is that I felt like the prompting of being in conversation did two things: It forced me out of myself, and it reinforced my voice at the same time.
AA: Oh, wow; tell me more about that. Yeah, I love that.
SLY: Well, I was really thinking about how I knew that using your poem as the launching pad — because your poetry is so different, at its core, than my poetry, or how I perceive my poetry. You were really, really encouraging me to take– to take grand leaps every time we were doing this, and I would do it. I would do it. I was– I was scared sometimes–
AA: [chuckles]
SLY: –which is– which is really great. Lucie Brock-Broido always said, “Go scare yourself; go scare yourself.” Like, as a way to get into your next poem: go scare yourself. That's where the good writing is going to come from. And you know, you'll find something of value there.
AA: Wow, yeah.
SLY: But in taking that leap from a poem that is so unlike my own, I was able to find my own center and work from that still. We talked a lot in the opening episode about Marvin Bell and William Stafford's, their correspondence and poetry. And the one thing we talked about was — it was really interesting — you couldn't really tell whose voice was whose, often, and I feel like we each stayed in our lane, but they were really different lanes than we had started with.
AA: Yeah.
SLY: Yeah, it's almost like we were on a highway, but then we were on the surreal version of that highway.
AA: Yeah.
SLY: So we were still in our lanes, but it was a really elevated place for me to go, and I couldn't have gone there without your poem.
AA: Mm; mm-hmm; mm-hmm.
SLY: I could not have gone there without your poem. And so it reinforced, like, my own strengths, but it allowed me just this beautiful latitude to, like, go places that I didn't know I could go.
AA: Mm. I feel so similarly. And I think this is one of my main takeaways as well, is that this project, or a project like this — this conversation in art — whatever medium you want to choose, like, you don't have to do it with somebody who makes art like you. Like, you could even do a cross-genre collaboration in this way, or a cross-genre conversation or correspondence in this way, because I think there is just so much to gain from collaborating with someone who maybe isn't just like you, or isn't approaching the same medium in the same way. And something that I learned so much from– from you, and from reading your poems, is a lot of these concepts of, like, inside and outside; and we talked about clicking the box shut in a previous episode, and, like, wondering how that functions within a poem. And you've given me so much more vocabulary and, like, ways to talk about and think about my poems, too, and think about ways to enter into a poem, or to close a poem, and giving me those new entry points and exit points also is really so valuable and so fascinating and such an exciting gift to take into my practice going forward. And I just think there's something so magical about engaging in this kind of project with somebody, and you get to learn about yourself as well as learning about the other creator. It's– it's incredible.
SLY: Yeah, it's– it's almost like– I mean, I've been saying this for years to– to writers: you know, trust the process.
AA: Mm; mm-hmm.
SLY: Trust the process.
AA: Yeah. [chuckles]
SLY: And, you know, again, we had to lean far in to be able to harness the energy of the other person's prompt. I shouldn't say we; I should say I did; I did; I don't want to speak for you. But the one thing that I witnessed both of us leaning in with every single time — and I think this is why this kind of a correspondence or a conversation in poetry can be successful, folks out there listening — all you need to lean in with is your curiosity. That's all you have to bring.
AA: Yeah.
SLY: It's risky, but it's risky when you're doing it alone. So if you are leaning in with curiosity by yourself, you're just doubling the opportunity when you lean in with someone else.
AA: Yeah, absolutely.
SLY: And if you find that person that you have a baseline of trust with — it– again, it doesn't mean that you write the same way — just lean in; just listen to their curiosity, and respond to their curiosity, and honestly, you're golden. You're golden! You can't help but produce something.
AA: Yeah, I totally agree with you. And I think that can be applied, not just to people who consider themselves poets or artists or makers or creators. I think that one of the most critical things — and I talk about this on Little Oracles all the time — is that you don't have to label yourself this thing to engage in the practice of this thing. Everybody's a creator; like you said in episode one, “everybody's a poet.”
SLY: Everybody's a poet. I really believe it. I really believe it.
AA: Yeah, it's so– it's so true. And I love what you said about trust, also, and finding somebody that you can trust to engage in this kind of project with, is that it doesn't have to be as public as what you and I are doing right now. [chuckles] You can just sit down on a Sunday with your friends and write poetry together, or paint together, or cook a meal together; you know, that's creative, too.
SLY: And again, we leaned into it with a playfulness and an openness–
AA: Yeah.
SLY: –and very few, if any, expectations.
AA: Mm-hmm.
SLY: And anybody can do that. Anybody can do that.
AA: Yeah.
SLY: You just have to get out of your way.
AA: Yes! So well said. And I think if there is, you know, one push that you can definitely use is, like: adding that modicum of rigor or constraint — you know, taking a set of words like we did here with the original Little Oracles digital installation, those lexical fractals, we use those as our jumping-off points, but we found throughout this process that having that constraint — you know, “we have to use this one word,” or “we have to use a phrase from the– the lexical fragment, or the poetic fragment” — we found that there was so much more that we could mine between each other's work once we really got started. So I think entering into a project like this, or any creative project, with, you know, just that one– that one constraint, or that one bit of rigor around how you want to start — that one seed–
SLY: Mm.
AA: –if you will; the bone in the sparrow's tongue– [laughs]
SLY: Mm! [laughs]
AA: [laughs] –or the captain of the Titanic, or the key in Bess Houdini's mouth: find that one thing and let that be your springboard. And then once you get into a collaborative conversation with somebody, trading your work and your art and your creations, then it's just exponential, the possibilities.
SLY: Yeah. It takes on a life of its own.
AA: Yeah.
SLY: It really, truly– it really, truly does. It's energy creating its own energy.
AA: Yeah! Yeah.
SLY: I mean, that's what– that's what I really witnessed and experienced was: you know, the initial time I had to write my first poem, you know, I was a little more closed off; I was a little more tentative; I was a little anxious.
AA: Mm.
SLY: But as we kept going, I gained confidence, and I gained strength, and I was, like, eager; completely eager. And, I mean– [chuckles] and that's why I'm– I'm very sad–
AA: Me too! [laughs]
SLY: –that it's– I'm very sad that this part of the collaboration is over. But that's the other thing that I would also say to folks: you can create a constraint, and then you can decide that you're not going to stay with that contract.
AA: [laughs]
SLY: And so, you know, who knows where we'll decide to go next with this work.
AA: Mm-hmm.
SLY: And/or, if we decide to continue with it in some way, or if we decide to go our separate ways, but we're still carrying this conversation with us wherever we go next.
AA: Yeah; what a gift. What a magical gift. So, typically here on Divinations, we close the episode with a teaser for the next episode's poem, but for this final episode, I would like to ask Sandy to grace us with a poetic Divination that might inspire or spark an idea, or just offer a moment of rest and reflection as we all head off into our own corners of creativity here in the world. So, Sandy, would you– would you read us something?
SLY: Sure, I'd be very happy to. So I I went back to a very old poem that I'd written, called “Oracle,” because we'd been working with the oracles as part of this Divinations series, and I was reminded that I had this poem. And I'll just say one thing about this poem before I read it: we were just talking about, you know, how can we work together in conversation; this poem was written when I was with a friend who was a poet — and this is many, many years ago — and we witnessed something happen in a laundromat, and we both knew we had seen something that we were going to write about. Like, we both saw it in each other's eyes and on our faces, and when we left the laundromat, we confirmed that, but it was a very, very interesting moment. So I'm very happy to share this poem, “Oracle,” with you.
Oracle
Because in the deep translucence you loved the circle
of the bracelet around my wrist as if it were
my body, it broke. But I forgive you for the miracle
of everything you shatter. Now you stir
here in the sheets next to me like a drink
that desperately needs a mouth or a finger curling
around the edge of its glass until it hurts. Only in a blink
can I see inside the rim of who you are, darling,
and I want to return your affection for a moment
to the small girl who peers into the spin
cycle of her mother's washing, who loves the movement
of clothes against the quick circumference within
the barrel, an unfractured yo-yo, glowing
over itself and back, who hopes her hands keep going.
AA: I love that poem. [laughs] Should we do– let's just do another episode; let's just talk all about that poem. [laughs]
SLY: [laughs] Well, you're– you're the director.
AA: [laughs] That's true. I am.
SLY: You're the creative director. [laughs]
AA: I am the creative director. [chuckles]
SLY: Yes, you are. [chuckles]
AA: [chuckles, sighs] Sandy, thank you once again for collaborating with me on this series. It has been so elevating, and illuminating, and oracular, so thank you so much. Before we go, tell us where can we find you and what's coming up for you.
SLY: Well, I am very excited that my new book will be coming out in February of 2024, The Glass Studio.
AA: Yeah.
SLY: And we often talk about where you can find me online, but I want to also say that if you are in the Pacific Northwest, I'll be doing a series of readings in person. And if you happen to be listening from Ireland, by any chance, I'm going to be in Ireland in April, doing some in-person appearances. And you can always, however, go to my website, www.sandrayannone.com to see where I might be landing, and doing other readings in-person; I love in-person readings. But of course, as we've talked about, um, you always can find me, uh, most Sundays, on Cultivating Voices Live Poetry, where we gather, uh, international, intersectional, intergenerational poets from around the world to hear what they have to say about various things and, uh, their own Divinations, so to speak. And so that's where I'll continue to be; here and there.
AA: Fabulous. Thank you, Sandy. You can follow Little Oracles on Instagram (at) little oracles. Check us out on the blog at little oracles dot com. You can find the poems that Sandy and I are sharing there, and the original Little Oracles digital installation in its entirety at little oracles dot com slash exhibit. This is our last episode of 2023; thank you all so much for being here; it's been a truly miraculous experience to create episodes for you every week. We're taking a break until 2024, but if you need your Little Oracles fix, you can find every single episode of the podcast at little oracles dot
com slash archive. I wish you all a Happy New Year; I look forward to seeing you again; and until then, as always, take care, keep creating, and stay divine.
[Outro music]
[Secret outtake]
AA: [sighs] Okay, starting recording at 38 minutes in; perfect. [laughs]
SLY: That's the shortest we've ever gotten in! No, it's not. [chuckles] We got worse! [laughs]
AA: [laughs] We did get worse!
SLY: We got worse, not better!
AA: I'm not surprised; it's fine. [laughs] Okay, are we ready?
SLY: [chuckles] Never!
AA: [laughs]
SLY: And yes.