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Stephanie Burt on Randall Jarrell ("The Player Piano")
2k Plays2 years ago
Stephanie Burt joins the podcast to talk about Randall Jarrell's breathtaking poem "The Player Piano."
Steph is Professor of English at Harvard University, where she works on poetry (particularly of the 20th and 21st centuries), science fiction, literature and geography, contemporary writing, comics and graphic novels, and literature alongside other arts. She is also a poet—her books of poetry include We Are Mermaids, After Callimachus, Advice from the Lights, Belmont, and Parallel Play. Her critical books include Don't Read Poetry, The Poem Is You, Close Calls with Nonsense, and Randall Jarrell and His Age. Steph regularly reviews new books of poetry and publishes essays in places like The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, and The Yale Review. She is also a cohost of Team-Up Moves, a podcast about superhero role-player games. You can follow Steph on Twitter.
If you like what you hear, please follow, rate, and review the podcast. Subscribe to my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Close Readings podcast. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it's my great pleasure to have Stephanie Burt on the podcast today. Hi. Hi, Steph. I'm your guest, Stephanie Burt.
00:00:17
Speaker
Welcome. You are my guest. You're all of our guests now. So Stephanie is, as I'm sure many of you know, a professor of English at Harvard University where she works on poetry, especially poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries, but that is but the tip of the iceberg.
Overview of Stephanie Burt's Expertise
00:00:38
Speaker
Stephanie also works on science fiction, on literature and geography, on contemporary writing of all kinds, on comics and graphic novels and literature alongside other arts.
00:00:53
Speaker
Stephanie is not the first guest we've had of whom I can say this, but one of the first still. In addition to being a wonderful poetry scholar and critic, Stephanie is a poet in her own right. And I hope that we'll be able to appreciate that dimension of her work in the conversation that we have today.
00:01:16
Speaker
Let me tell you about that. Since you said that you were offering the tip of the iceberg, I feel like I should add that we would rather have the iceberg than the ship. That's an Elizabeth Bishop reference. Yeah, good.
Discussion of Randall Jarrell's 'The Player Piano'
00:01:34
Speaker
So the poem that Stephanie has chosen for us to discuss today is called The Player Piano. And it's a poem that the
00:01:44
Speaker
20th century American poet Randall Jarrell wrote very near the end of his life, I believe. And we'll talk about it. Yeah, good. I'm thrilled to talk about it. I'm thrilled to talk about it with her. As always, for those of you who would like to look at a text of the poem, as you listen along, I will put a link or an image or a link to an image of the poem in the show notes so that you can access it that way while while you listen.
00:02:14
Speaker
Steph is the author of too many books for me to name, probably, and I don't know if it makes sense for me to separate them into these categories, but for the sake of clarity, let me say that her books of poetry include
00:02:30
Speaker
Parallel Play, which came out in 2006. Belmont in 2013. Advice from the Lights in 2017. After Kalimikis in 2020. For all of you. Great time to publish a book.
00:02:45
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, for all mutants 2021 and most recently from Grey Wolf Press, we are mermaids in 2022. I was going to say this year, but it's not 2022 anymore. It's now the future stuff.
00:03:02
Speaker
It is the future. Yeah. Her critical and scholarly books include, well, a book that is quite relevant to our discussion today, Randall Jarrell and His Age from Columbia in 2002. But Steph is also the author of the books, The Forms of Youth, Close Calls with Nonsense, The Poem is You,
00:03:24
Speaker
The poem is you it strikes me as a is a book that people who are enjoying this podcast might also enjoy because in that book Steph offers a kind of anthology of contemporary poetry with brilliant close readings of those poems Thank you that accompany them.
Stephanie Burt's Work and Criticism
00:03:41
Speaker
Yeah, and it's it's a great model for For the kind of attention in writing that I hope that we're performing here in conversation the idea that's the hope most recently Steph
00:03:53
Speaker
in terms of her critical work, is the author of a book called Don't Read Poetry, which was published in 2019 and has, I believe, an accurate but misleading title. Well, there's a subtitle. Yes, I know. Stephanie wants you to read poems, not poetry. Bing. That's right. And you can look up that book to understand the distinction she's drawing there. I think it's a salutary one.
00:04:20
Speaker
Steph also regularly reviews contemporary poetry in places like the New York Times Book Review. Her writing also has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the Yale Review, and other places besides. And I just want to say before we get started here,
00:04:37
Speaker
in earnest that I don't think I know another poetry critic with the energy of Stephanie Burt. And by that I mean the capacious attention and attentiveness to her, well, not just to the varied, the wonderfully varied landscape of contemporary poetry and of 20th century poetry,
00:05:00
Speaker
but an attentiveness to her own tastes and prejudices, a willingness to situate not only a book or a poet in its context and landscape, but to situate her own, I mean, Steph's own aesthetic judgments in the context of poetry reading. One tries. And of kinds of poetry reading. I do need to situate my aesthetic judgments in the context of our recording and get a little bit meta here.
00:05:24
Speaker
Yeah. The line next to my name is not moving at all. Oh, that's OK. Yeah. I don't think you should worry about that. On my screen, it's moving quite a bit when you talk. And I think that's just a feature of this recording technology. And I'm sure it will be fine stuff. If it's the same as when you did Lindsay's Bishop thing, then then we're good. We're good. We're good.
00:05:50
Speaker
Are we? Are we good
Recording Setup Concerns
00:05:52
Speaker
now? We are. Your line is moving. Don't worry, Steph. I can hear you. We all can hear you. And I think that, you know, if I could say one last word of introduction, it would be to say that our guest today has been one of the English speaking world's great caretakers of poetry in the last two decades. And so it's just a thrill to have her here on the podcast.
Randall Jarrell's Influence and Friendships
00:06:18
Speaker
Stephanie, how are you today?
00:06:21
Speaker
a little bit flattened by that description. I mean, I'm trying. I'm not seeing any waveform here at all when I speak.
00:06:32
Speaker
But if this is what always happens. Don't worry about it. I worry a lot. I should take a screenshot for you and text it to you or something so you can see the impressive waveform. It's good. I've really enjoyed catching up on the episodes. I've heard a couple now that you've done. And it's really quite a service that you are providing here to the world of actual and potential readers
00:06:59
Speaker
of poetry in English and not just modern poetry, although we are modern in some ways here and romantic in others. And as Jarell really tried to be a thwart a lot of the distinctions that we use to think about what period sounds like and what's appropriate at different points in the writing of poetry. Is this a bit segue for me to just read the poem?
00:07:23
Speaker
Well, that was gonna be my next question for you. So I appreciate your very kind words about the podcast. But yeah, let's hear Stephanie read the player piano and then we will talk about it. The Player Piano by Randall Jarrell. And before I read it for the first time, I am doing what I should always do and only do half the time, which is to gloss things that will appear in the poem. Okay, please. And you should probably know
00:07:52
Speaker
And this is a poem that was written in the early 1960s. So when you hear the word gay, it certainly does not have the primary meaning of wanting to smooch people with the same gender.
00:08:10
Speaker
Though that meaning would not have been inaudible necessarily to a reader. It doesn't seem to be the primary meaning here. It is certainly not the primary meaning. Yeah, fair enough. The word isn't used to mean wanting to smooch people of the same gender, but it is not the primary meaning here. Pancake house is capitalized. It's like a waffle house. It's a chain of casual restaurants.
00:08:39
Speaker
character speaking the poem is an older American woman. And Fatty Arbuckle is a famous director from Hollywood in the 19-teens and 1920s who was notorious
00:09:04
Speaker
for a scandal, a kind of tabloid scandal, and the details of the scandal you can easily look up. That's probably all you need here. Well, is it also worth it stuff to say, I mean, while we're glossing things, and maybe you want to talk about this after having read the poem, and if that's your choice, that's fine, maybe not everybody knows what a player piano is. Ooh, wow, time marches on. Yeah, good call. A player piano is a piano that has
00:09:33
Speaker
a mechanical spring driven device in it.
00:09:39
Speaker
that allows it to automate itself so that it makes music with no one there. And there are people who have composed music for player pianos, but they were very much associated with salons and saloons and informal music listening in the early part of the 20th century and with ragtime.
00:10:05
Speaker
Right. Right. So before phonographs and record players and so on made the the prospect of bringing recorded music into your home a much easier and more portable and affordable thing to do. Yeah. They were popular before phonographs were very good. Right. OK. Yeah. They over their popularity, I think, overlaps with 78 RPM sort of shellac discs.
00:10:33
Speaker
but they're very much a turn of the 20th century sort of thing. Great. Okay. I think all of that is very helpful, but yeah, now I'm very eager and I'm sure that our audience is very eager to hear you read the poem.
Reading and Analysis of 'The Player Piano'
00:10:44
Speaker
The Player Piano. I ate pancakes one night in a pancake house run by a lady my age. She was gay. When I told her that I came from Pasadena, she laughed.
00:11:00
Speaker
and said, I lived in Pasadena when Fatty Arbuckle drove the El Molino bus. I felt that I had met someone from home. No, not Pasadena. Fatty Arbuckle. Who's that? Oh, something that we had in common, like the false armistice, piano rolls,
00:11:27
Speaker
She told me her house was the first pancake house east of the Mississippi. And I showed her a picture of my grandson going home, home to the hotel. I began to hum, smile a while, I bid you sad a Jew. When the clouds roll back, I'll come to you.
00:11:50
Speaker
Let's brush our hair before we go to bed, I say to the old friend who lives in my mirror. I remember how I'd brushed my mother's hair before she bobbed it. How long has it been since I hit my funny bone? Had a scab on my knee. Hear our mother and father in a photograph. Father's holding me. They both look so young. I'm so much older than they are. Look at them, two babies with their baby.
00:12:21
Speaker
I don't blame you. You weren't old enough to know any better. If I could, I'd go back, sit down by you both and sign our true armistice. You weren't to blame. I shut my eyes and there's our living room. The piano's playing something by Chopin and mother and father and their little girl, listen, look, the keys go down by themselves.
00:12:48
Speaker
I go over, hold my hands out, play, I play. If only somehow I had learned to live. The three of us sit watching as my waltz plays itself out a half inch from my fingers. Stephanie, that was a gorgeous reading of the poem. Thank you so much. I need to recover from that. It's a poem that always absolutely
00:13:18
Speaker
just blows me away. It really, I cry a lot now for very good reasons. Yeah. But I, you know, it blew me away when I first read it when I was probably about 16 or 17. And I, it has lost, honestly, none of its power.
00:13:47
Speaker
I don't know where to start with it. It has so many ways in. I'm looking up something so if it comes up. There we go.
00:13:58
Speaker
So let me, and maybe by way of letting us take a breath and after that marvelous reading, just back all the way up for a moment and let's not assume that our audience knows anything about who Randall Jarrell was. And I wonder if you wouldn't mind, Steph, just situating us. And I mean that maybe in two ways.
00:14:26
Speaker
First, can you tell people a little bit about
00:14:30
Speaker
where Randall Jarrell fits into the literary and poetic history of 20th century letters. So that's one question. I mean, he's a contemporary of people like Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, John Baron, and these might be poets that people have heard of a bit more these days than Jarrell. So that's one question. And then the other question, maybe having
00:14:58
Speaker
address that would be to say a word just about where this poem might fit into Jarell's life and career. Sure. Yeah, sure. So Jarell's born in 1914 and he dies in 1965. He's from Tennessee and California. He's often thought of as a southern writer, but he really thought of himself as a California writer. He spent the
00:15:25
Speaker
I was gonna say the happiest, but it's probably better to say the only happy years of his childhood, living with his grandparents in what we now think of as the greater Los Angeles area. He encountered quite young at Vanderbilt University in the 20s and 30s, and at Kenyon College in the late 1930s,
00:15:55
Speaker
the set of people who would also shape Robert Lowell's career and who would do a lot to shape how colleges and universities teach the reading of poetry after the war. And he became friends with Robert Lowell quite young. They lived in the same house in Ohio in the late 30s. He later after the war and after some time in New York became
00:16:25
Speaker
quite good friends with Elizabeth Bishop. And he wrote about their early books very, very effusively and very admiringly and very insightfully. And he was probably
00:16:37
Speaker
the first person in the world to predict that Elizabeth Bishop was going to be the major poet of that generation and that cohort, that Elizabeth Bishop was the person whose poems were really going to last, not just as one line or one anthology piece, but as a real body of work. Even in a moment, I want to say when to contemporary readers, Lowell would have seemed like a major figure and Bishop
00:17:06
Speaker
This kind of minor, minor female Wordsworth, as Bishop called herself. Right, right. Yeah. Durell also had a lot to do with building up the early career of Lowell. He was Lowell's first reader for a lot of Lowell's early poems, and he wrote very admiringly and thoughtfully about early Lowell. So he was really thought of as part of the poetry establishment by the end of the 50s.
00:17:30
Speaker
but in a weird way because while he wrote very good and I think they've held up well and award-winning a little bit poems about the Second World War and about the people who were serving in the armed forces during the war. Including him, right? Including him. He did serve. He never saw combat and never went overseas. Instead, he trained people who would fly bombers and then get shot down.
00:17:59
Speaker
And he wrote a lot of letters that you can go back and read about what it was like to be in the armed forces during the war. But he was primarily known for his entire adult lifetime as a critic. He wrote very cutting and some people thought mean spirited reviews of poets he didn't like at a time when the poetry world was very different. And he's remembered today and he was admired in his time for writing
00:18:29
Speaker
brilliant, longer pieces that were extraordinarily sympathetic and informal and inviting about the poets he did like, about Lowell, about Bishop, about Walt Whitman, who at the time was extremely uncool and kind of thought of as not one of us and dodgy and
00:18:50
Speaker
about Marianne Moore. He was one of the first people to write very well at Marianne Moore. He really, about Robert Frost. If you think you don't like Robert Frost, if you think Robert Frost is not a great poet or not a profound poet, you can go read what Jarell wrote about Frost and be persuaded. If you don't like Robert Frost, because he scares the heck out of you, join the club.
00:19:19
Speaker
But Frost was important to Jurell and Jurell really was someone who described the non avant-garde landscape of American poetry and to some extent of British poetry of Auden better than anyone else at the time did or could. But he went on writing his own poems. He wrote a campus novel, a very funny one,
00:19:49
Speaker
He wrote essays about the state of culture and the way that post-war culture was changing. He wrote children's books. He wrote wonderful children's books towards the end of his career. He wrote four of them. The Bat Poet is the best known. It's very sad. All his children's books are sad.
00:20:10
Speaker
the animal family is the least sad and the longest and it's my favorite. I love it too. He was an early collaborator of Maurice Sendak and they worked together quite well. And in the last
00:20:30
Speaker
five or six years of his life, he wrote what would be his last two completed books of poetry, his last two published books of poetry. There's a good deal of unpublished late work, which we can talk about. But he wrote what would be his last two and his best two books of poetry, which focus quite intensely on the experience of being
00:20:57
Speaker
older of aging, of entering your 50s, 60s, 70s, as his characters did, and of childhood, of remembering childhood and being someone who's connected to childhood and who really feels like he in some ways missed growing up and feels connected to fairy tales and has very little in common with
00:21:27
Speaker
the adult men around him, that's the vibe that you get from a lot of those late poems. Well, those themes seem really present in the poem you've chosen for us today. Yeah. Did you have more to say, Steph? I didn't mean to cut off your biography. Just a little bit. Yeah, please. Just a little bit. Go on. His late poetry was very unsettling and received some negative reviews when it came out because people didn't know what to do with it. He was not
00:22:00
Speaker
He did not present himself as the authority that he was when he was writing his poems, and he was not making obviously sort of shapely, compact, well-defended objects. And he certainly wasn't making frame-breaking late modernist avant-garde, blow everything up, start again things. He was participating in a romantic, capital R, romantic tradition
00:22:23
Speaker
of just trying to get the personality onto the page and having the technical effects which are subtle and profound rise up on rereading and my experience of rereading
00:22:38
Speaker
his work over most of my life at this point has been that some kind of cool technical effect, some verbal repetition, some set of allusions and quotations that you can trace, some way in which the beginning of the poem is in dialogue with the ending.
00:22:56
Speaker
Something about this is a made verbal object just pops out, but there's a beating heart that's right out there. He exposes himself. He makes himself vulnerable. And we can
00:23:14
Speaker
there's a lot more to talk about. We can talk about his sense of families and parenthood. People generally, when I talk about him these days, want me to talk about gender, which, okay. Well, I suppose I'm guessing I know what you mean by that, which is that, well, among other things, that in some of his most memorable poems, he writes dramatic monologues from the perspective of a woman.
00:23:41
Speaker
This one among them, yeah. Yes, right. Yeah. And it strikes me that he's not alone among the, even among his friends, male poets of his generation in doing that, that Lowell did that, Berryman did that, though the Jarrell's version seems interesting in other ways, maybe. Well, Jarrell made sounding like
00:24:09
Speaker
a disappointed white middle-aged adult woman, one of his central aesthetic goals.
00:24:17
Speaker
Great. He did it over and over. Yeah, great. So we're going to have to talk about this at some point. Yeah, with Lowell, I think you're thinking about some of the dramatic monologues in The Mills of the Cavanaghs. Yeah, Mills of the Cavanaghs. To which Jurell responded, a woman would talk like that if she were Robert, if she talked like Robert Lowell, but whoever heard a woman who talked like Robert Lowell. Right, right, right. All of Lowell's poems sound like Lowell. That's right. Yeah.
00:24:42
Speaker
Yeah, even the ones where he's translating. Yeah. Yeah, OK. So well, enough about Lowell and let's bring it back to Berryman. Sorry, not to Berryman, to Jarell.
Jarrell's Personal Struggles and Impact
00:24:54
Speaker
I guess, sorry, one further last question about biography that I have for you is, is it worth saying anything in your view, Steph, about the circumstances of Jarell's death? Yeah, sure. Fine. I mean, you could have said no. I would have been OK.
00:25:10
Speaker
No, because then you just have people Google some nonsense. I mean, I spent part of the day listening to Nirvana, people who die in dramatic and notable ways. Unfortunately, it becomes part of what happens when you Google them and it becomes attached to the art.
00:25:27
Speaker
Jurell, during the early 1960s, struggled with depression and was prescribed the mood elevators and mood stimulants that you would expect from someone who had good access to psychopharm during that period. He was prescribed to elevil, which turned out to be the wrong drug for him. Anyone among us who's had some experience with trying mental health psychopharm and being on the wrong stuff might be able to relate.
00:26:00
Speaker
Jarell, starting at about late 1962 or 1963, around the time he was finishing his last published book, started to have what we would recognize as a manic cycle, which he'd not had before. His friends had, of course, but he hadn't.
00:26:16
Speaker
followed by a depressive period when he was hospitalized in 1965 after slashing his wrists. And while he was recovering in the hospital, he took a walk on a dark road at night and was struck and killed by an automobile. And no one will ever know whether he meant to be struck and killed by an automobile. But
00:26:47
Speaker
It's certainly possible. And it came, of course, as a great shock to his friends and a great source of sadness to the literary community. Yes. Okay. There are many, many memorial poems for him, including I've recently learned one by Audre Lorde, which... Oh, I didn't know that. Couldn't expect. Yeah. There's a time Robert Haas wrote one, Lowell wrote four. Yeah. Berryman certainly wrote dream songs.
00:27:15
Speaker
on that occasion. Okay, well, let's come back to the poem now. So that's a lot of very useful context, but let's come back to the poem. I mean, I have a number of questions for you, Stephanie, and I also want to be guided by your way of getting into this poem, and I know that you've
00:27:34
Speaker
you probably have ways in that feel productive to you. I guess just as a first question though, I was so struck in that, I'm sorry, and if you're not, so if you're not looking at the poem, maybe it's worth it to say that the poem is in stanzas of five lines, which gives it a kind of, perhaps a more neat and orderly appearance on the page than what we hear when you read it aloud. But in that first stanza,
00:28:06
Speaker
This moment of conversation, when I told her that I came from Pasadena, she laughed and said, I lived in Pasadena when Fatty Arbunkel drove the El Molina bus. So now the second sentence begins, I felt that I had met someone from home. No, not Pasadena, Fatty Arbunkel. The question I have for you is,
00:28:29
Speaker
Who is the poem's implied, who is this woman talking to? Who is the implied reader of this poem? And maybe say something about what's going on with all the proper nouns that are circulating in the first two stanzas of the poem. So I think she's imagining that she's speaking to a younger interlocutor.
00:28:58
Speaker
But she's not. And by the end of the poem, it's clear that she's talking to herself. But she's certainly imagining
00:29:15
Speaker
someone else in between if you have the poem in front of you line seven and line eight saying who's that because Younger people people who might be teens or in their 20s or even in their 30s in the mid 1960s Would not necessarily know who this director from the you know late silent film era right was and
00:29:44
Speaker
It's a moment, one of many moments in the poem, where her attempt to construct her life as a story of events and people that cross her path over time, her attempt to see herself
00:30:06
Speaker
as this coherent figure whose life means something, who's changed the people around her, who's done something. She's trying and she's failed. And maybe she's failed in the way that we all fail. Or maybe she's failed in a way that is about her.
00:30:33
Speaker
And her first indication that maybe she has failed is when she realizes that these landmarks for her, these memories that have shaped her life are as they say in Blade Runner, lost like tears in rain, right? They're, they're just gone. They're just, they're not going to be there for the next generation.
00:31:01
Speaker
Where do you see that or hear that realization setting in or what are the earliest signs of its setting in for you in her monologue here? Where she realizes that maybe her life doesn't matter and has this kind of existential sense of living a failed identity, living a failed project. It's where she starts singing.
00:31:31
Speaker
Ah, yeah, I was going to ask you about the song lyrics there. Yeah. So tell us what she's doing when she starts singing. So she is thinking about the false armistice, which was a day in late 1918 when North American newspapers and other sources of current events wrongly reported that the Great War, the First World War, had ended.
00:32:02
Speaker
It did end shortly afterwards, but the false armistice was the false reporting of the end of the war. And people celebrated, but it wasn't over. Yeah. Smile awhile, I bid you, saddad you, when the clouds roll back, I'll come to you is part of the chorus to the song, till we meet again, which was popularized by Bing Crosby. And she may be thinking of the Bing Crosby version, but it's a 1918 song.
00:32:31
Speaker
And it's what sort of we're to imagine a soldier singing to a sweetheart. He's leaving behind or something. That's right. Yeah. That's right. He's, he's imagining himself as a soldier in the war. That is for you. And there is a straw for you on the table. Okay. Enjoy. Nathan already got his. Thank you. Okay. Okay. Bye. Life intrudes on poetry. We love to see it stuff.
00:33:00
Speaker
Yeah, and honestly, there's not a whole lot that you can do that's more Jurellian for reading of a late Jurell poem than being interrupted by a child. Yeah, good, good. Okay, so let's get back to the song. Yeah, so it's really sad, right? It's one of those songs that contains within itself the possibility that they'll never meet again.
00:33:25
Speaker
It's like have yourself a merry little Christmas. There's a whole set of goodbye. I'll see you later. Are you able to remind me to practice buzzing before Hofstra three times a week? Yes, I am. Can you eat dinner at Ollie's house tomorrow?
00:33:44
Speaker
Um, can you ask? I mean, possibly them, but I could possibly eat dinner at fourth house. That's where I'm going to be tomorrow. OK, can you ask them? Yeah, sure. OK, thanks. OK, bye. I'm aware that this podcast is unedited. Yeah, yeah. We're just rolling along. We're just rolling that, by the way, was Cooper. And I think a lot of you, especially if you
00:34:14
Speaker
are interested in anime-style art or in fantasy art will encounter Cooper's work in a few years. But we're going to get back to the player piano. We're going to get back to the player piano, and we're going to get back to that song. Well, when the clouds roll back, I'll come to you.
00:34:35
Speaker
even out of context, seems like a highly ambiguous kind of reassurance to provide.
00:34:45
Speaker
Does that mean what? I'll come back to you as I'll be dead and you'll see me in heaven? No, it just means when the sun's shining, I think. When the sun shines. But it could also mean when the sun shines in my heart or when the sun shines on the world and when the clouds of the war are gone. It's important because it's a melancholy song that promises a return that may never happen.
00:35:11
Speaker
and because it's a song of the 19 teens. And this is someone, this person who's speaking is looking back
Themes of Nostalgia and Identity in the Poem
00:35:22
Speaker
on her life. She's looking back on her life using most of the senses at the body's disposal, right? The taste of pancakes, the sound of the song, the sound of piano rolls.
00:35:35
Speaker
the feel and the tactile and kinesthetic sensations of brushing your hair. She's looking back on the girl that she was and thinking, what did I do with that? Who did she become? What happened to me? And the answer is nothing. It feels like nothing. Whatever it was that I was supposed to do with my life, I missed it.
00:36:04
Speaker
It's, it's an incredibly poignant thought or experience to have. It is incredibly sad. Yeah. And it is in a tradition of romantic sadness about missed opportunity that can be universalized in some sense. Uh, as Jarrell says elsewhere, the ways we miss our lives, our life. Yeah.
00:36:27
Speaker
So you can universalize it. You can say, none of us, and he says in his prose elsewhere, none of us have entirely fulfilled the promise that we all had as children. Every adult is a disappointment.
00:36:40
Speaker
viewed from the perspective of the potential in a child. If only because we have to choose one life to live, or a few, but not all of them. It's a soap opera, if you like. Sorry, one life to live. Before we move to the next thread. Yeah, I don't want to move to it.
00:37:03
Speaker
Stay here. The poem zeros in on this potentially very widespread feeling that if you want, you can say is existential, is part of the condition of all human life. But it also gives us a character who might or might not have reasons to feel that other people got to live their lives and she didn't. Yeah.
00:37:28
Speaker
there is a universe in which this podcast becomes about queer theory and queer sadness and the kind of missed opportunities for queerness that constitute historical queerness in queer studies scholars like Heather Love and Chris Nealon. There is another universe in which this podcast goes into romantic autobiography and the way we in a Wordsworthian view just
00:37:57
Speaker
we learn who we are by looking back on our life and saying, well, that happened. And there is a third universe in which we spend half an hour talking neither about missed opportunities for queerness, nor about the existential conditions of living in a body that existed in time and aging, but instead about the cultural and historical circumstances
00:38:26
Speaker
around women of this generation, which is not quite Jurell's generation, but close. Jurell would have been four years old when, till we meet again,
00:38:43
Speaker
came out, although it was... So even in his mind as he's writing this poem, he's imagining himself as a woman who is older than him by half a generation, let's say. Yes, and he did that multiple times. Right. Well, I have a question that I think is linked to what you're talking about, Steph, but also grounded in the lines of the poem that immediately precede the song lyrics.
00:39:11
Speaker
going home, home to the hotel, I began to hum." So there's an interesting kind of sound play at work there, but also the idea of home to the hotel. I wonder what that suggests to you about the relation that the speaker of this poem has to
00:39:37
Speaker
rootedness to her past, to being situated in the way you wanted to help us see in her gendered and social roles at this moment in history. I just want to highlight those sounds. A poem like this that is so, so attentive to voice, it's easy to miss the sound play.
00:39:59
Speaker
Yeah, let's hear it. And it's it's full of sound play and it's full of repeated words and then similar words that play out along a string of connected acoustic effects. Home, hotel, hum,
00:40:17
Speaker
Let's brush our hair before we go to bed. I'd brush my mother's hair before she bobbed it. With a mature Jerrell poem, you can often track what the poem is about by looking at what words are repeated in each stanza. Pasadena, Pasadena, Pasadena. House, pancake house, house, home, home, mother, father, father, mother, father.
00:40:44
Speaker
play, play, play. So what you've done for us, if this isn't obvious for people who aren't looking at it, is sort of track down the right-hand margin of the poem, calling out words that get repeated often in that terminal position.
00:41:01
Speaker
of the line there's a kind of story there yeah stuff yeah yeah although in in this one he's he's got a very better known poem called next day where the terminal positions repeat words more often instead of rhymes uh and it's he's kind of lamp shading what he's doing here a lot of the keywords
00:41:20
Speaker
show up in terminal position only once and then show up midline over and over. Right, right. As though something that wants to get emphasized is then sort of metabolized within the poem, within the lines of the poem is just present there as sort of part of the vocabulary of the poem moving on. We go from a house, a pancake house, to a hotel that isn't home, to a home where she no longer lives because it was decades ago, to mother and father and an attempt to play
00:41:50
Speaker
Yeah. But play, I play. Playing is what children do, right? And playing is both an end in itself. It's supposed to be fun.
00:42:03
Speaker
and a kind of practice as it is with other primates, a rehearsal for whatever the heck you're supposed to do as an adult. And she didn't learn to live because she didn't learn to play. She just learned to watch the world do its thing.
00:42:23
Speaker
around her as the music of her life, which is not till we meet again, but a Chopin waltz, which would have been a very popular sort of middlebrow piece of what we now call classical music at the time, as this waltz plays itself out. And she's pretending to play it, which deprives her of the experience of making her own music,
00:42:51
Speaker
And it deprives her of the experience of choice. And it also deprives her of touch because she's not touching anyone. Now, biographically, if this woman has a grandson, she's touched someone or someone has touched her. But maybe not in a way that matters to her.
00:43:14
Speaker
Yeah, and Jurell really leaves it open. The suggestion at the end, if only somehow I had learned to live, tells us that this woman is reasonably professionally successful. Either her job or someone around her can pay for her to stay in a hotel.
00:43:36
Speaker
But I don't mean that she is professionally successful necessarily. I mean that she's not experiencing material wants. Someone can pay the hotel bill for her. But she's really got an unlived life that goes from soup to nuts here. If only somehow I had learned to live a possibility that might be in
00:43:59
Speaker
our minds as readers, the first time through the poem is that this is a widow who's grieving, whose sadness comes from having lost the love of her life, and whatever she's lost, it's not that. We don't have a lot to go on necessarily if we try to reconstruct the details of her life. Yeah, I'm trying to avoid having a discussion of Henry James here, and I'm also trying to... That sounds like something Henry James would try to avoid as well.
00:44:29
Speaker
Oh, he avoided his whole life very successfully. And yet, paradoxically, it happened around him. I'm also trying to avoid pinning down what are now well-known kinds of unlived lives because there's so many ways to feel that your life went past you. But at some point, you know,
00:44:57
Speaker
I'm very happy with the book that I wrote about Randall Jarrell 20 years ago and I'm glad you like it and I hope people keep liking it. I didn't know I was girl at the time. It's not clear what he knew. People ask me if he was trans a lot. And the answer that I give is,
00:45:22
Speaker
We should give dead people the pronouns they took in life. It is not okay to tell somebody what their identity is. However, there's a good deal of transness about what he taught himself to do as a writer. Yeah.
00:45:46
Speaker
in his late work. And this poem is a very good example of that. And that's probably one of the reasons why it has spoken to me for so long, even more strongly than some of his other equally intricate and feelingful poems. Yeah, well, it's Stephanie, it's a profound insight, I think you've just offered us. And I want to
00:46:16
Speaker
Thank you. Two babies with their baby. We have to talk about Freud a little bit. We should talk about Family Star. Hang on. Yeah, because I wanted to bring us right to the fourth and fifth stanzas of the poem and to situate them in this way. Okay, so we have Randall Jarrell, a kind of
00:46:35
Speaker
middle-aged poet whose pronouns would have been he and his, right? And he's got a beard and a sports car. Sure does. And he's married to a woman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, all of that. And so he's writing a poem in which he's imagining himself, or he's speaking as though, or he's writing as though if you don't like the speaking metaphor. In any case, he's imagining himself from the position of a woman who's a bit older than him. Now, that woman then in the
00:47:03
Speaker
in the fourth stanza of the poem says, let's brush our hair before we go to bed. And the reader before they get to the next line might be a little confused by that line because there are no quotation marks or anything. And then it says, I say to the old friend who lives in my mirror. OK, so now this older woman is talking to herself or to the version of herself whom she sees when she looks into the mirror.
00:47:32
Speaker
And that prompts a kind of, via memory, regression back to some childhood existence or life. So I want for you, Stephanie, to talk to us about what's happening in those stances and in that moment of the poem. She is looking at herself, something else that people do in drill a lot. She's seeing her face in the mirror.
00:48:03
Speaker
And she's being kind to herself. She's befriending her own face. She's regarding herself and not being sad or disappointed by how she looks. She's regarding herself as an other worthy of care. Let's brush her hair before we go to bed. I love the consonant play on those lines too. And she's remembering
00:48:32
Speaker
when she learned to use a hairbrush on medium length or long women's hair. And that takes her back to a time when she didn't just look at her face, she inhabited her body. How long has it been since I hit my funny bone? Had a scab on my knee. She is seeing simultaneously
00:48:57
Speaker
her connection to the series of selves over time that have become her. And her distance from the embodied potential of those younger selves. The lives that as Ammon says, did not become. And this is, there's a sort of straight up 20th century feminism reading of this poem that's about how
00:49:26
Speaker
girls are allowed to run around and use their bodies, but adult women are not. Right. There's a wonderful Dar Williams song, the folk singer Dar Williams called When I Was a Boy, that is about the different kinds of permissions given to girls and to boys and to men and women. And she's not, this woman is remembering that when she was a girl, she could run around and she could inhabit her body. Mm hmm.
00:49:54
Speaker
but that was something that she chose to give up or had to give up as she became a young woman and now an old woman. And she's having that thought sort of as she I mean you said cares for herself brushing her hair and being kind to herself but also I mean a perhaps a more cynical reading of what's
00:50:16
Speaker
implied in that gesture of brushing her hair as a kind of self-disciplining or self-fashioning or something, a kind of regulation of what's unruly about her body so as to make it presentable. You don't hear that here, though. I don't hear that. I hear brushing your mother's hair before she bobbed it as a privilege for this young girl.
00:50:42
Speaker
I want to acknowledge that many poets and many of our listeners experience things like having to brush your hair and having to do the right hairstyle as a confinement. Nobody should have to practice high maintenance hair care if they don't want to. But I don't think this is like the second hair palm of the road that you've done, right?
00:51:01
Speaker
Well, not quite in a row, but yeah. It's not quite the gesture of mutuality and care that Elizabeth Bishop gives us in the shampoo, but I think this is a gesture of love and of connection and of privilege. It's great to have your mother say,
00:51:18
Speaker
hey, you're old enough to know how to do this. Let's have this moment of intimacy and trust that is shared hair care. And it's like the other moments of intimacy and trust that she remembers with her mother and her father. Drell was a giant fan of Sigmund Freud. He had probably read all of Freud, at least in English.
00:51:47
Speaker
He did read some German. And one of the things about Jurell's Freud is that it is, it's a Freud who's very much about family dynamics. It's a Freud who's about how your parents inevitably screw up. Everybody's parents screw up. All parents screw up.
00:52:15
Speaker
And this isn't, I don't know if this is in Freud, it might be, but it's in a host Freudian, psychoanalytic sort of clinical thought, like how to help people live more fulfilling lives. At some point you have to think about whether you can forgive your parents. It doesn't mean you have to forgive your parents.
00:52:41
Speaker
Dear listeners, lots of parents have done things that are kind of unforgivable. And their kids have dealt in other ways, and that's okay. But this is someone who wants to forgive her parents, especially since she looks like her mother now. Older than her mother was. She says...
00:53:06
Speaker
She looks at her old friend in her mirror and then she picks up a photograph and she says, look at them. Now her mother had her father and she doesn't seem to be with anyone. But she's not comparing herself to her mother who was coupled. She's comparing herself to her mother who was alive then when she was a child and hadn't been hurt by growing up. And it's not her parents' fault. I don't blame you.
00:53:36
Speaker
You weren't old enough to know any better. Better, by the way, which is line terminal develops out of the word bad. Yeah. That's bad, better, best. But it doesn't turn into best. It turns into both. And then both turns into blame. You weren't to blame. And there's the armistice. The false armistice was false. The true armistice came later. But you don't get an armistice with your parents. You don't get everything being over.
00:54:06
Speaker
It's not formalized in that way. The relationship is never over. Yeah, and it's not their fault. Whatever your parents did to screw you up, this woman thinks. And it's both reassuring and terribly saddening to read this poem as a mom, which I didn't have kids when I first read it, but now I have a teen and a middle schooler whom you just heard.
Freudian Elements and Family Dynamics
00:54:34
Speaker
Everybody screws up. Everybody screws up and everybody has the experience. Maybe, I don't know, I can't read your mind. Maybe it's special. Many people have some form of the experience that you didn't get to choose what happened to you. You don't get to choose how your kid turns out. You don't get to choose your parents. The involuntarily of life moving on and aging.
00:55:01
Speaker
just opens up like a river coming to a place where there's a waterfall in those last eight stanzas where she shuts her eyes and we're completely in her imagination. I shut my eyes and there's our living room. She shuts her eyes and she listens and she knows that she's not making that music. She's never been in charge of how her life turned out. She didn't even learn to play properly.
00:55:29
Speaker
And the poem almost faints from me at the idea that it wants to be universalized, that we've all experienced the sense of what happened, I grew old, life went on without me. And then it zeros in at this child doing something that not every child does, which is pretend to play the piano instead of playing it. And her unlived life and her body that
00:55:56
Speaker
didn't belong to her then, that she didn't take action with then, that she's not taking action with now. She's just standing in front of her mirror maybe with her eyes closed at the end of the day. The sense of helplessness there belongs to this character and just opens up the heart of this character and I'm at least blown away. And it's also doing this kind of
00:56:25
Speaker
all-out pathos at the end of a poem is, as we now say, a risk. The poem invites us, and it even more strongly invites 1960s readers, to dismiss it as sentimental. To say, you know, what a tearjerker, what a piece of Oscar bait, you know, what an old lady.
00:56:49
Speaker
And that was, in fact, the response that a lot of Jarell's poems got at the time. Speaking as an old lady, I'm glad I didn't see myself in this poem. No, I'm 52. Speaking as a middle-aged woman, I see myself in this poem less than I used to because I feel that my life is my own more than I used to. You're playing the piano. What? You're playing the piano.
00:57:18
Speaker
I'm not a very good piano player. I mean, metaphorically. Yeah, actually, yeah. This is a woman who, like all of the women in Jarell's poems, by the time she's an adult, has not been able to live her life, well, that's not true, the end of the rainbows, an exception, who, like most of the women, the adult women in Jarell's poems,
00:57:42
Speaker
the end of the rainbow is probably the best exception. It's a very strange long poem. This is a woman who has not been able to live her life outside of what, as we now say, patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality has made her do and prevented her from doing, and it is a kind of helplessness
00:58:03
Speaker
that is emotional and that is political if you want it to be, and that is personal if you're the kind of reader who responds to this poem as an emotional trajectory.
00:58:16
Speaker
Stephanie, you've given us just a heart-stoppingly beautiful reading of this poem and I wanna thank you for it. I also am cognizant of the time and know we don't have very much time left. I wonder if I can ask you,
00:58:35
Speaker
Um, a final question that might bring in some of what you've already, uh, raised for us and might introduce a new topic as well. Yes. Can you throw in one more sentence though? Of course you can. As long as you don't, as long as you, as long as you stay to the end of our sentence, as long as you have time, Steph, I have time. Oh, it's a short sentence for me. Uh, I've been,
00:59:05
Speaker
thinking about the emotional trajectory in this poem and about what it says about the culture of this imaginary older woman lives in. And I just want to remind anyone who's been rereading and following along how structurally complex and elegant this poem is, the way that the word plays recurs, the way that the unrolling, the regularity of a piano roll
00:59:36
Speaker
copies the regular unrolling of these roughly pentameter lines and their five line units and the way that this poem is a masterpiece. Five lines, like five fingers to a hand at a piano maybe, right?
00:59:52
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The five, these stanzas, some of which come to a complete stop and some of which are enjammed over the stanza break. This is a poem that is a masterpiece of speech rhythm and of polyrhythmic aural composition within the limits of the rough pentameter line that you're all preferred. And I want to just
01:00:19
Speaker
yell really loud about his technical gifts because they aren't recognized enough. No, they aren't. And I think you've you've done us. I mean, not just today, but in your career, have done a service in in trying to bring Jarrell back to readers who would love him if they read him.
The Poet-Critic Identity
01:00:40
Speaker
My question for you has to do with, in a way, with your relation to Jarell. Sure. I mean, you implied earlier that people are curious about your perspective as a trans woman about the possibility that Jarell was trans at a time before perhaps he had the vocabulary to describe it or the social conditions that would allow for an expression of it or what have you.
01:01:10
Speaker
Yeah. When I first, you wrote your book on Jarell 20 years ago and I purchased it and read it then. Thank you. Well, yeah, sure. And I thought,
01:01:26
Speaker
Oh, it makes sense to me that this author is writing on this poet for reasons having nothing to do with transness in my mind at the time. But because I thought, oh, here's someone who's identifying with
01:01:41
Speaker
As you described Jarrell in the little potted biography you gave to us at the beginning of this conversation, as somebody who had a career as a critic and who was perhaps most well known as a critic, but who never stopped writing poetry,
01:01:58
Speaker
And I thought there must be some curiosity or identification that you're feeling with the object of your study in that sense as someone who is a prolific critic yourself and has never stopped writing poetry yourself. And before you jump in with an answer, because I see you brimming with thought here. Oh, no. No, no, no, it's good. Let me say the last bit of this.
01:02:25
Speaker
which is it strikes me that someone who sits down to a player piano and whose fingers hover over the keys that start moving themselves you know who's not actually playing the piano yeah might feel a kind of um
01:02:42
Speaker
I don't know how to put it, but a kind of anxiety or a kind of feeling of regret or something that might not be unlike the way someone who has made a living and made a career writing about poems feels when she sits down to write her own poems.
01:03:09
Speaker
I wonder if there's some sense in which the object at the heart of this poem that we only get to really at the end of the poem, the player piano, namely, the object that gives the poem its title, is in some way an image of the poet critic as Jarell experienced that role, or even as you experienced that role, Stephanie. Is that an idea worth considering? Yeah, I think you're right, and I hadn't seen that dimension to it.
01:03:36
Speaker
I think you're right. Jarell was interested in music listening and in how to write about music listening. One of his role models in Friends was the composed music critic B.H. Hagen. They wrote For the Nation together. And he would refer to Hagen as a model for music listening.
01:03:58
Speaker
not just if you're not just listening, but pretending to play the piano, but not really playing the piano, which is what's happening here. In the poem, it's a child doing it. It's not an adult. But of course, we depict children doing things all the time, if we want to imagine doing them, but want plausible deniability, and it's not something an adult would do.
01:04:22
Speaker
And yeah, you're putting yourself in the place of the person playing the piano but not playing the piano and that has a whole lot of similarities with what we do as literary critics of a certain kind, the kind that I think you are sometimes and I like to think I am. People who try to inhabit the persona inside the poem or the implied author or to say among other things, what could this poem have been thinking?
01:04:52
Speaker
What is it like to live inside this poem? And we don't get to choose the words in the poem if we didn't write them, but we get to imagine saying them and living with them. And we play in some sense that we are putting them together to figure out how it's done. So yeah, this could absolutely be a poem about aging and realizing that you're a critic.
01:05:16
Speaker
And when his collected poems came out in 1969, Helen Vendler, who I agree with more often than not, as you probably know, wrote that Jarell put his genius into his criticism and his talent into his poetry, which is an Oscar Wilde reference, as you may also know, which starts a whole bunch of hairs. But Jarell, I think, had doubts about
01:05:43
Speaker
whether his poems were for real, whether they would last. He knew that they weren't as profound and subtle as bishops. I mean, but whose are. And it is a poem that begins in self-doubt and self-affirmation and ends in so much
01:06:13
Speaker
so much resignation and so much regret and it solicits the reader which
01:06:24
Speaker
Honestly, a lot of Jarell poems do, especially late Jarell. It solicits the reader to go over and say, no, you have done something. Your life does matter. Look, you have a hand. Here is your hand. It is in dialogue with a much earlier poem that I think any, it seems like no one has noticed except me and possibly the critic Richard Flynn, called A Ghost, A Real Ghost.
01:06:46
Speaker
in which a woman dies and comes back to life and takes a while to realize that she's a ghost because she can see everything that she saw during life. It's like the Our Town Cemetery scene.
01:07:02
Speaker
And she realizes that a ghost, and it's the end of this earlier poem, what is a ghost except a being with no access to the universe, a being, what is a ghost except a being without access to the universe that she has not yet managed to forget? Mm-hmm. Jarell is,
01:07:29
Speaker
In this poem, the implied figure in this poem is living a life that's no longer his and maybe never was. And it's so close. The life that this woman could once have lived if things had been different is so close to her at the end. A half inch. A half inch.
01:07:56
Speaker
I'm tempted to connect it to Robert Lowell's underrated poem, July in Washington, one of the great Washington DC poems. And Joel is one of the great Washington DC poets, where Lowell, if I'm remembering his poem correctly, imagines that the humidity of Washington DC will lead us entirely out of our bodies. And only our fingertips could drag us back.
01:08:24
Speaker
That is July in Washington, right? I think you've got it right, Steph. But I'm now testing my memory as well. I could swivel my chair around and pull the volume of Lowell off the shelf, which maybe you see behind me. We're finding out. Oh. We can't leave our listeners with misinformation. No, we can't. But I can always... This gives me an opportunity to tell our listeners that when the episode comes out,
01:08:52
Speaker
there will also be a newsletter that gets sent out with the episode. And that newsletter will contain links to Stephanie's books. And it will also contain thoughts about today's conversation. And I'll also tell us which level poem Steffian and I have been a half inch away from naming at the end of this conversation. Oh no. I think it's okay. I'm going to try it one more time. I'm going to try it one more time. Yeah.
01:09:23
Speaker
And then I'm going to give up. Yeah. That's it. It's July in Washington. It seems the least little shove will. OK. We wish the river had another shore. Yeah. It seemed the least little shove would land us there that only the slightest repugnant of our bodies we can no longer control could drag us back. It's a poem about being stuck in your body. Yeah. Stuck in the adult body that you didn't choose. It's getting older like it or not. Uh-huh.
01:09:55
Speaker
Have I answered your final question? I'm not sure that I have. I think you have. I mean, what's so interesting to me about your answer, and I know we're sort of straining both your time for us and perhaps our listeners' attention at this point, but I guess what I would say since you asked is you've so, I think, poignantly described the position of the critic who sits down to write about a poem
01:10:22
Speaker
And what you've said is that the critic tries to imagine themselves having written the poem. It's a kind of
01:10:42
Speaker
positioning that's in the subjunctive mood or something and tries to see the poem as a live thing that one can inhabit as though from the inside. I think the piece of it that has been left implied, but not explored yet in this conversation, but I think that's okay, is what happens when that critic like you, but not like me,
01:11:07
Speaker
the rest of the time sits down to write poems herself and what happens to the role of the critic when you're at the poet's desk. But maybe that's a harder question to answer or maybe it's not even as interesting a question to answer at this moment. No, that's a great question and we can end there and I can answer it if you want, but we'll have to talk about werewolves.
01:11:34
Speaker
Okay, let's hear something about werewolves. And then we're gonna release our readers back into the world. Go ahead. Okay, yeah. So this is a poem about all kinds of frustration and sadness, and it just reaches out to me.
01:11:50
Speaker
Um, and and I, uh, Comrade, you've just given me another reason it's always spoken to me because I was someone from, you know, when I was a sad, ridiculous teenager, wanted to write about works of art and yell about my favorite things in songs and poems and, you know, shoes and also what I want people to love my own poems and I like writing them. Um, about
01:12:19
Speaker
Seven or eight years ago, I spent like four hours in a snowstorm in Buffalo in order to get to an event where I was supposed to talk about being a poet critic. And what does it mean to be a poet hyphen critic? And the answer that I figured out on the tarmac in Buffalo
01:12:44
Speaker
was that I want to be like a werewolf. I do not want to be like a vampire. I think I get it, but go on. A vampire poet critic. And there are a lot of them.
01:12:58
Speaker
is deceptive and claims to be doing one thing while invisibly doing another thing because they say that they're being a critic and helping you read somebody else's poetry, but they're actually consciously and intentionally making a path for their own poems and trying to create more readers for their own poems. And they have problems dealing with
01:13:27
Speaker
poets and poems that are nothing like them and, and view them as competition to be eliminated in sneaky vampire ways. Well, that does not sound like you. So describe the werewolf for me. Okay. So the thing about a werewolf is that if you're a werewolf, you're two things. Right. Um, but you're not the two things at the same time or, you know, not outwardly and you don't
01:13:54
Speaker
Do you just couple days a month or when the moon is full or when other conditions obtain? You are very obviously a furry, fangy, clawy creature with one set of abilities and disabilities. And the rest of the time you are a largely hairless biped with
01:14:21
Speaker
fingernails instead of claws. Maybe the werewolf wakes up in the morning with a bit bedraggled from the night spend being the wolf. Oh, all the time, but you still have to be a person when you person and just feel a werewolf when you're a werewolf and you can't help it.
01:14:40
Speaker
I like to think that I go out and hunt in packs of poets when I'm wolfing out and that I am a human who does the same things that other humans could do when I'm being a critic and trying to help people learn to
01:15:03
Speaker
love the poetry of, among others, Randall Jarrell. Well, no one could have listened to you now or have read your work and disagreed with that statement that you've just articulated as
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
01:15:18
Speaker
a hope for yourself. I think it's a hope realized, Stephanie. So listen, I want to thank you for taking the time to talk to us today about Jarrell and the player piano, and I want to
01:15:28
Speaker
thank our listeners for attending to this poem with us. And I want to invite you, dear listeners, to subscribe to the podcast, to leave us a rating or a review if you like what you hear, and to stay tuned for the episodes I have coming.
01:15:48
Speaker
because I think they'll be exciting ones. Stephanie, you have a last word for us. Let's say they want to subscribe. Let's say I want to subscribe to your newsletter. Where would it go online to do that? Yeah, it's a sub-stack newsletter, but you'll see a link to it in the episode notes for any episode of this podcast. You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Google Podcasts.
01:16:17
Speaker
The Substack, if you just look for my name on Substack, you'll see it there. You can find it in other places too. Follow me on Twitter and you'll see more information there as well. I've just subscribed. Amazing. Thank you so much, Stephanie, not just for subscribing, but for appearing on this podcast with us and for the conversation today. It truly meant a lot to me. It's a real honor and I love doing it. And thank you for spending time with me and with Randall Jarrell. Bye, everyone.
01:16:48
Speaker
Bye bye.