Nicky Beer on torrin a. greathouse's "Abecedarian. . ."

I talk with Nicky Beer (Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes) about torrin a. greathouse's poem "Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination Before a Diagnosis Can Be Made." We talk cripple-punk, bad doctors, abecedarians and formal choices, and a "transgender arm." Afterward, we play a game about beer (not Nicky).

Also mentioned:

• Natalie Diaz's "Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation"
• The literary journal Copper Nickel
• Dolly Parton's "Jolene"
• Dolly Parton's "Jolene" slowed down

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Charlie Green Welcome to the Talking Poem Podcast. I'm your

(00:07):
host Charlie Green. On each episode, I invite a guest to bring in any poem they'd like
to talk about for any reason. We'll talk about what excites us, what engages us, maybe
what frustrates us, and we'll follow the poem and the conversation wherever they turn.
Afterward, we will have a poetry game and a little bit of silliness. I'm so happy today
to have Nikki Beer. Nikki is a bi-queer writer and the author of several collections of poetry,

(00:29):
including most recently, 2022's Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes from Milkweed Editions,
which won the 2023 Lammy Award for Bisexual Poetry. It also has a fantastic cover design
to go with really killer poems. So Nikki is also a Guggenheim Fellow. Her writing has
appeared in Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Southern Review,

(00:49):
Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Nikki, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.
Nikki Beer I am so happy to be here, Charlie. Thank you
for having me. Charlie Green
Before we get to the poem that you brought in, can you talk a little bit about the cover
of the book? Because it's really fantastic.
Nikki Beer Yes. On the cover, there is a double image
of Dolly Parton that is rendered in kind of a pop art Andy Warhol fashion. And Milkweed

(01:14):
is really wonderful. They asked for my input right away in terms of what I wanted the cover
to look like. And I had thought because the first poem in the book is kind of about Dolly
Parton and Dolly when I thought, oh, I thought, oh, it's too much of a long shot. Dolly Parton
on the cover. I don't know legally how we do that. But I gave them a pop art rendering

(01:36):
of Dolly Parton that I had found online. And I said, you know, I know it's probably not
what not feasible to have Dolly Parton on the cover, but this is the style. This is
the spirit. And they came back with, yeah, we can do that. So they found another pop
art image. You know, Mary Austin speaker who is just a legend of a book designer had found

(01:59):
this other pop art image. And I said, could we double Dolly? Because it was a single image.
I think could we put a double image on there? And that's kind of the abbreviated story of
the cover. But, you know, of course, she did wonderful work with the titles as well. But
that's the story of the cover. And I really I do love it so much.

(02:21):
It's really beautiful. And if any listeners go find it, the cover is beautiful. And the
poems are fantastic, too. So you've brought in Torrin A. Greathouse's poem, Abbasidarian
requiring further examination before a diagnosis can be determined, which I can't believe.
I'm not going to make it through this sentence, which is written. It's modeled after Natalie

(02:43):
Diaz's Abbasidarian requiring further examination of an Anglican seraphim subjugation of a wild
Indian reservation. Of all things, before you read the poem, can you quickly explain
what an Abbasidarian is? Yes. So it is a form poem. And it is a 26 line
poem, usually in which every line begins with a different letter of the alphabet. And the

(03:08):
lines are in alphabetical order. I think that I think that covers it. Right?
Yeah, I think so. And occasionally someone will really load up a line with the same letter.
These poems do not. So they just start with each successive letter. So whenever you're
ready, go ahead and read the poem. All right. Abbasidarian requiring further examination

(03:33):
before a diagnosis can be determined by Torrin A. Greathouse. Antonym for me, a medical book.
Place all the punctuation, commas, periods, semicolons with question marks. Diagnosis
is just apotheosis with sharper edges. Near name for a myth already lived in. For the

(03:59):
sake of thoroughness, I have given until my veins cratered. Tests administered for HIV,
cirrhosis, glucose, cancer, creatine, albulin, iron, platelets. I've slept for days wired
to machines. Add my piss filtered for stray proteins just to be safe. Still inside my

(04:27):
body, kingdom with poisoned wells. I want anything but an allergy lining my bones. I
just want to be a question this body can answer. My new doctor writes one referral, then another.

(04:47):
Still no guesses. A man in a scowl and lab coat offers yoga. More painkillers. Suggests
PTSD could be the cause of my chronic pain, my limp of migraines, quickened the pulse
and blood glittered coughs of seizures, ravaging me inside my skin. Oh, syndrome of my perfect

(05:14):
and unbroken transgender arm. They checked my hormones too. Yes. Unfathomable. The suffering
I did not choose. Must be gender, this vacancy my body makes of its own flesh. How I vanish
from myself. We search for a beginning to the story and find only a history of breakage

(05:41):
X-rays cannot explain. Some girls are not made, but spring from the dirt. Yearling tree
already scarred from its branches, sapids. Zygote, the red clay that rain washes into
a river of blood. Oh, that's fantastic. Thank you so much. Why did you choose this poem?

(06:06):
It's from Great Houses debut book Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, which is a book that
I love so much. It's incredibly innovative and it's smart and it's incredibly complex.
And I thinking of a poem to talk about with you and my, and my, I happen to fall on, on

(06:28):
this particular book. And I said, yeah, let's talk about a poem from this book because I
think I first read it when I think the book came on something like 2020. And I thought,
my God, have I really, it's just one of those books that once you read it, you feel kind
of your ideas about poetry and what it could mean. You feel yourself altered by it. And
so that's, it's a very meaningful book to me. I really admire it. And so I was looking

(06:53):
through the book and seeing, you know, cause I've got about a million notes scribbled in
there and I said, yes, let's, let's, let's talk about that Abbasidarian because Great
House is doing so many amazing things with form in the book. And so this just kind of
exemplifies all of the kind of amazing things they're doing in that book.
The thing that immediately pops out, I always enjoy Abbasidarians and also there's a challenge

(07:14):
to them, like a special challenge. Like, and I'll go ahead and get to this question. The
Q, X and Z are always going to be like, yeah. So does that affect how you read either Abbasidarians
in general or this poem in particular?
I think on some level, and maybe it's more because, you know, I have never successfully

(07:36):
written an Abbasidarian. I think I've written some failed ones. And I think maybe an Abbasidarian
where I'm not thinking about that, where I, where I don't have the Q, X anxiety in particular.
And then I go back and I realize, oh, what did they do there? And like, they've done
it so gracefully that it's almost invisible. So that just kind of adds another layer of

(07:56):
admiration that I have for the poem. Because I think Abbasidarians when they're not done
well that you can just kind of, you can feel the, of how those issues get addressed in
the poem. I think it's a larger statement about poets and form as well, is that a poet
really rocking a form is going to make the form invisible in a sense where you forget

(08:21):
about the form because you're so absorbed in the poem.
I never have that distance with an Abbasidarian. I don't think that's a problem for me. And
I think that she uses the Q and X and Z really well because the context of what she's writing
about X-rays is a choice that makes a lot of sense as I got, or as I don't make perfect
sense in the poem. And so I kind of, I have a little grin at the end in addition to the

(08:45):
sort of emotional rush. It's like, this works. You know, that challenge ends up working.
I wanted to include Great House's bio describes her and get your thoughts out. It begins,
Torrin A. Great House is a transgender, cripple, punk poet and essayist. Immediate thoughts
about that. Cause this is a poem both about ableism and disability. And she chooses to

(09:11):
use the word cripple in her bio and also being transgender as well. And there's a sort of
complex web of sort of how doctors are going to treat her because doctors have a tendency
to treat women, to treat transgender people, to treat disabled people often differently

(09:32):
and with the kind of easygoing cruelty, I guess. Sometimes the cruelty is not so easygoing,
but I'm curious to hear your thoughts about that.
I think, and this is maybe kind of like something larger that I'm seeing as a poetry editor.
When I see submissions, I'm one of the poetry editors for the journal Copper Nickel, which

(09:52):
is published by the University of Colorado, Denver. And one of the things that I think
I'm seeing more is when poets are writing their bios or making their bios available,
that there is more of an assertion of identity in those bios. And I find that very exciting
because I think there's still kind of this idea that your individuality is somehow supposed

(10:17):
to be erased in your bio, that it's very much kind of just the facts and that to have any
kind of augmentation is somehow unprofessional. And of course, there's all kinds of sort of
very white patriarchal ideas that prop up that assumption. And so when I see poets asserting

(10:38):
things about their identities, about their queerness, about say their disability or where
they're from or their past or their history or their origins, I get a little thrill about
this. Say, yeah, say that about yourself. Claim that about yourself. And I'm not saying
that everybody has to do this, but I love it when a poet is taking the bio as an opportunity

(11:00):
to say, here I am. This is me. I'm making this available to you. And I reject this idea
that somehow parts of myself would have to be edited out my bio. And so I very much appreciate
that's something that the great house is doing there. And it's something that I've chosen
to do in my bio as well, to start asserting that I am bi and queer in my bio. It's something

(11:25):
that I started, that I chose to do rather a few years back because especially bisexuality
can be something that can be invisible in various ways in one's life. And so I wanted
to put it more front and center and make sure that if people are looking at that, that if
they see some kind of like queerness in my writing, that it's not something that they're

(11:49):
projecting. It's not some sort of mystery or some sort of, like, yes, if you see queerness
in my writing, that's visible to you. You're not misreading anything. Yes, I'm a bi writer.
I'm a queer writer. And there it is.
That's great. I know some people resist in part because they feel like the identity of
the writer ends up being more important than the poem itself, which I don't think is the

(12:11):
case here. And with a lot of poems, the only resistance I have is that all I can say is,
identity wise, is that I am boring. Also, I mean, disabled in terms of chronic depression.
Also, the thing I wonder about, and this is only because I've noticed it coming up sometimes
in classes with students who don't know a lot of poetry, is that there can be a tendency

(12:34):
for people to just narrow their reading of a poet based on bio. Everybody does this with
Plath and Dickinson and to the point that it's like, oh, Plath is suicidal. And then
you give them any one of the poems that are joyful and playful and they're like, what
is this? And Dickinson too. I don't find that, we've gone on kind of a side route. I don't
find this to be an issue with this poem. I actually appreciate the way, although I read

(12:59):
the poem first, I appreciate the way that the bio actually informs my reading of the
poem here, particularly crippled punk. Have you encountered that phrase before?
I haven't, but yeah, that's all I can say. No, no, I haven't.
Yeah. So I teach a disability class sometimes and I've read this phrase before and had not

(13:20):
really come across a lot of definitions. So a lot of disabled writers will use Crip as
an adjective or sometimes as a verb. And cripple punk here, I pulled a definition from a disability
website. It's basically about rejecting pity and inspiration porn and other forms of ableism

(13:42):
and particularly rejects the whole mythos of the quote unquote good cripple. And what's
interesting to me teaching the disability class is that almost all the personal writing
from essays to poems that I teach going way back to the seventies in a way they all feel
like cripple punk in that they are all sort of either implicitly or really explicitly
challenging that idea of the idea, the sort of condescending idea of, oh, this is the

(14:07):
good cripple. Yeah. Yeah. I think it strikes me as a kind
of a cousin of querying as a verb, the idea that when you queer something, you are trying
to interrogate or undermine the status quo. And so those two ideas seem to be very close
to one another in terms of their ideals, their motivations.

(14:30):
I think of kind of DIY with punk, like the kind of messiness that goes with punk. And
what's interesting is this poem, I don't feel like has that. And that's not a criticism
of the poem. I love the poem, but it's, I'm curious if you see that in here and if I'm
missing something or if there's like, there's something like had my piss filtered words
like piss bring a little bit of that. Well, no, you actually know, I see, I see a

(14:52):
lot of punk energy in the poem and I think a punk attitude in the poem because punk,
punk, the term punk itself, you know, is the kind of reclamation of an insult, so to speak.
And you know, punk itself, the idea of something being punk is about something that is unruly.
And in terms of this particular poem, the speaker is essentially addressing how the

(15:17):
unruliness of their body gets treated by medical professionals, by the healthcare industry.
And I think, I think that the moment is really crystallized where we have on the one hand,
the speaker saying, I just want to be a question that this body can answer. And then a little
bit later, a man in a scowl and a lab coat offers yoga, warm pain killers. And there's

(15:42):
something about the scowl and the lab coat that speaker is not disabled because they're
trying to be difficult. In other words, like, hey, I want answers too. But that this moment
with the person with the scowl and the lab coat, I think embodies these moments where
people can be treated by medical professionals like they're just being difficult. And I think

(16:02):
you're talking about women, queer folks, gender nonconforming folks, trans folks, and people
in black and brown bodies. That the way that they can often be dismissed or trivialized
or treated as noncompliant, I think that's a word that professionals like you, that they
can be treated as noncompliant when they advocate to themselves, when they assert themselves,

(16:24):
and they don't accept a certain kind of condescending, minimizing. So I do think that there is kind
of a punk energy that essentially simply by living in, say, a body with disabilities that
can't be diagnosed or solved, that they're immediately perceived as unruly by medical

(16:46):
professionals. So yeah. And I think the way that the commentary power, I think, is also
very punk as well.
And that comes through in the first sentence to me. What's interesting is when I first
read the poem is I read the first sentence, antonym for me, a medical book, antonym somehow
being used as a verb here. And there was a part of me that's like, okay, I'm getting

(17:06):
ready for a poem with complicated syntax, with really surprising choices. And there's
something confrontational about that. The only thing that carries through from that
is the sort of directive, replace all the punctuation. Otherwise, the sentences are
all very straightforward. And I like that we get this kind of challenge in a way to
the reader and then are kind of welcomed in in a different way. Antonym for me, a medical

(17:32):
book. It's just such a great, surprising sentence. I always love when a writer takes a word and
puts it into a different category like that.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that also speaks to how the adversarian form is working here
in this poem. And I think also in Natalie Diaz's poem as well. We have this poem that's

(17:53):
driven by the alphabet, right? And it's one of the most basic forms of certainty, bigger
quotes around that in language, since an embodiment of our language as those basic rules. We're
indoctrinated into this form as babies sometimes even before we can speak in complete words
ourselves. But of course, the reality of language is that it is slippery, it's constantly changing

(18:13):
or evolving, and it's often untrustworthy. And I think this is a useful way to think
about the practice of medicine. It seems to be something stable and objective, but it
too is constantly changing and it's often driven by the prejudices and privileges of
its practitioners. So language and medicine embody power in ways that can be invisibly

(18:33):
nefarious. So I love that we have the alphabet as form here, something that is supposed to
be very orderly and predictable too. And yet it is about this body which is, their quotes
around this, disordered and unpredictable and not submitting to a kind of orderliness

(18:55):
that I think that medical professionals would prefer.
It's this arbitrary order that we treat as not arbitrary. And there are all kinds of
examples of this in medicine, mentioning black and brown bodies, for example, there are lots
of diagnostic tools and non-diagnostic tools at times the doctors use that actually don't
apply. So like body mass index, for example, which is a terrible non-diagnostic tool to

(19:21):
begin with, does not apply at all to black people. It's just like, it does not work the
same way as it does for white people. Part of this has to do with medical testing. Part
of it has to do with how BMI was created. Same with pulse oximeters, finger pulse oximeters,
register darker skin differently and so give you different numbers. And so I like that

(19:44):
this poem chooses the form that feels certain and is arbitrary at its core to talk about
something that often feels certain and is arbitrary at its core. I think my favorite
line that in a way gets at that. And I hadn't read the poem aloud to myself yet, which I
usually do. And hearing you read it aloud, I heard just how rich the sound is. HIV, cirrhosis,

(20:08):
glucose, cancer, creatine, albumin, iron, platelets. It has that the IAMs and the kind
of the alternating stresses and the sounds are really rich the way they move through
the line. And that's a consequence of how those are put together. And it's great houses
and not arbitrary, but her choice. And that, but in a way at times some of these choices

(20:32):
as she gets at later in the poem seem like arbitrary choices on the doctor's part, especially
when it gets to, oh, they check my hormones too, must be gender. This idea that these
choices that even the idea of being transgendered, that that is for a lot of people, it seems
like an arbitrary choice when it is not. I feel like arbitrariness and order are the

(20:53):
two words that kind of get at a lot of what the poem is really interested in.
Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a line, we search for a beginning to the story and
find only a history of breakage X-rays cannot explain. And these actually, these lines echo
the opening lines of the book. I don't want to speak about the beginning of this story.

(21:15):
And so that's from the poem Medusa with the head of Perseus. And this points to a recurring
idea in the book that we can overly depend on narratives to explain ourselves or other
people. And that this is analogous to how the medical profession can perceive our bodies.
Others are looking for stories to answer what is problematic about us and God help us if

(21:35):
they can't find the story that satisfies them. And so while stories can be valuable, they
can be healing, they can also be toxic when they're treated like just the answer to a
problem. And so this kind of resistance, the speaker's resistance here, this poem and in
the book as a whole, this resistance to some sort of narrative that's going to explain
everything. That's something that I really value in this poem as well.

(21:58):
Yeah, because narrative itself is arbitrary where we choose those beginning and ending
points. And medicine, ideally from the point of view of medicine, can point to a beginning,
can point to a cause. It reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Marge is, she has a
phobia of flying and eventually goes to therapy. And the core memory is she, her dad, it turns

(22:21):
out is a flight attendant and she's deeply embarrassed by it. But then she goes on to
have all these other memories about planes and the therapist is like, nope, it's just
the father. It's just the father. It's like this.
Right. It turns out her entire childhood has actually been, it's not just her father being
a flight attendant, her entire childhood has been littered with these plane related problems.

(22:46):
Yeah, exactly.
The important thing is that we've pinpointed the precise moment when you developed your
fear of flying. Wait, some other stuff's coming back to me. You think those things could also
have contributed to my fear of flying? Yes, yes. It's all a rich tapestry.
And narrative can be useful in that it can help us create for ourselves the shape of

(23:09):
something that helps us understand something that is otherwise not completely comprehensible.
But there's also, there are problems with narratives, particularly when those narratives
are being given from outside, which is the case when we're going to see doctors, which by the
way, just to note, I go to doctors, I generally trust doctors. I'm not trying to say all doctors

(23:29):
should, I'm not all doctors seeing this poem, which now I feel like an idiot about.
No, I just, I want to agree with you on that as well. I have depression and anxiety as well,
and I have been helped by doctors in many ways, but I've also had encounters with

(23:50):
doctors that have been very, very disappointing, to put it mildly. I don't know what your experience
has been or conversation that you've had with other people, but there is a way in which,
for example, you get a bunch of women about my age to sit down. And if you just start saying to them,
tell me about a time where a doctor said something to you that really pissed you off or

(24:12):
completely ignored about what you were describing about your own experience and your body. You will
get some very hair-raising anecdotes. And I've had several women friends who have had near fatal
conditions misdiagnosed because their doctors were not listening to them or were dismissing

(24:36):
their symptoms. And so, it really can become a kind of life or death thing when you don't feel
that you're being listened to or you're being discounted because of your race or because of
your gender or because of your fatness or any one of those particular things that makes you seem
less reliable as a patient. So yes, I'm very grateful to the doctors who have helped me,

(25:00):
but I also recognize the ways in which doctors can, because of their own personal prejudices,
can do real harm. Oh yeah, absolutely. And that's something that I'm a tall white male,
I've not had to face. I've seen bad doctors, but their badness had nothing to do with my identity

(25:21):
or presentation. And that's very much the case when I teach the disability class, even the 18-year-old
students, both male, but mostly female, express, yeah, I've experienced this from a doctor. And
what's interesting is to have the students who read essays about doctors treating people like
that, and they're kind of shocked by it because they've never had that experience. But most of

(25:44):
them, again, the female students, the minority or minoritized students are like, oh yeah, yeah,
I've encountered this plenty. We've talked, I feel like way around the poem a lot, but I'm also
enjoying the conversation. Are there things in the poem you want to focus on or mention?
I was just looking through this last night and there was a enjambment that I hadn't noticed

(26:08):
before. Oh, that's really good. And it's very small and it's very understated, but I just love it.
Or rather, it's kind of like a moment in the poem. It's not just the enjambment, it's when
the speaker says, for the sake of thoroughness, I have given until my veins cratered. And so that's
a single sentence in the poem. It covers two lines. And for those listening at home, the word

(26:34):
thoroughness is italicized in a way which in terms of poetic conventions can suggest dialogue. But
there's something about the way the word is italicized that also suggests a kind of euphemism,
where the speaker is bringing up all these times where a doctor or medical profession say, oh,
we just want to be thorough. We just want to be thorough. And it's like that that's kind of a fake

(26:56):
myth on the doctor saying, I don't know. I don't know what's going on. Just want to be thorough.
And that's kind of like a cover for the doctor being afraid to say, I don't know. And so I love
that kind of italicization. It's used as an excuse to administer more and more tests and treatments
when they fail to diagnose. And right after that, we have this moment of enjambment where,

(27:17):
for the sake of thoroughness, I have, and then the line breaks. And I have, which suggests
ownership, possession. And then that's immediately undone by the next line when the sentence continues
and the phrase becomes I have given, which becomes a lack, a giving away. And so it's just such a

(27:38):
smart, it's why enjambment is exciting. The moment like that where enjambment can undo
something that the line before it did. And then, I'm sorry, I'm just, I'm picking apart this one
sentence, but I got really obsessed with it. And then you have, I had given, and then until my veins
have cratered. So we're given the image of the smallness of the human vein, which is then

(28:01):
perversely warped by its proximity to the image of the crater, which we associate with a large
depression in a landscape. And so it's kind of like a mismatch of scale here that's
limply uncomfortable and therefore becomes more visceral. And so, you know, to sort of take a step
back and say, look what they're doing in just a single sentence in this poem. That, I think,

(28:25):
that just kind of embodies of, I think, so I'll go for the pun, Greyhouse's greatness as a poet.
That's great. I think, I love that attention that you've given, especially veins cratered.
And there's also the I have, it's that sort of conversational, as if she's about to list,
I have condition, condition, condition. And, but that's, and part of that is, I wish in a way for

(28:50):
a world where sometimes I could look at poems and not see the whole thing before I read it,
because your eye gets drawn to certain things. And I saw HIV and PTSD. And so seeing the line,
HIV cirrhosis, very quickly, my eye sort of sees I have and just doesn't clock that until I read
the poem. And here it seems maybe possibly deliberate that you see the I have and then this

(29:16):
list, but that list is actually not explanatory because it ends up being test administered for.
Yeah. And I always love when a poet is playing with us in terms of like how we're going to read
a poem and how we're going to take in mind when we're going to assume a random and when the poet
wants to disrupt that and violate that as well. Yeah. One last note, the poem asked very early on,

(29:39):
replace all punctuation with question marks. And there's not a question mark in the poem,
which I like because it gives it kind of a declarative mode. Every sentence, I believe,
ends with a period. And so every sentence ends up being declarative. I'm so glad you brought in this
poem. I will also link to the Natalie Diaz poem in the show notes, which is very different in a way,

(30:03):
but I like very much as well. Sorry. There's one more thing I wanted to talk about in terms of the
poem. It's just this moment later in the poem when the speaker says, oh, syndrome of my perfect and
unbroken transgender arm. And so I love this moment where the speaker seems to be associating
their transness, their trans body with perfection. Whereas the other things about her body may be the

(30:29):
subject of constant scrutiny of the medicalized gaze, but her transness to her is without question.
It is whole and it is complete. And so it's just this beautiful moment in the poem. And I
didn't want to let this discussion end without us just taking a moment for that. Oh yeah. I actually
have that in my notes because of the phrase transgender arm. Choosing arm really finishes

(30:53):
that off. The idea that I don't generally, unless we're looking at muscled versus unmuscled arms,
generally we don't, there's not a sexualization or gender identity of arms. And so having it be
transgender arm, there's something about it that I think draws our attention to the ways in which
we are in and feel our bodies dependent on certain categories of self and identity.

(31:16):
Yeah. And people who maybe are either misinformed, ignorant or transphobic,
there are people who see transness as simply like a question of genitals. And it can be a reductive
and even hateful way to perceive transness rather than a question of selfhood that it is. That it is
an embodiment, that it is a question of the self, of the body, of the soul, of the spirit. So yeah,

(31:41):
locating the transness in the arm. That's resistant to all of these narratives of transphobia and
ignorance about what the trans body is. Yeah. That's great. Well, let's move on to the silliness.
Okay. Silliness. Yeah. But before we get to the game, we do have an ad. Poets. Everyone knows you

(32:03):
have the most exhausting job. Not only are poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world,
they have to forge in the Smithies of their souls, the uncreated conscious of their race.
So you need to stay hydrated, but power aid and Gatorade are just too sports centric,
and they don't give you the zing that you need to keep writing. Fear not. The answer is here created

(32:24):
by parent company, Well-Read Bull. Bish. Name for Percy Bish Shelley. Bish will quench thy
thirst and thy fiery tears. It brings fresh showers for you thirsting flowers. Art thou
pale for wariness of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, then throw back at 20 ounce of Bish.
Now Bish doesn't have electrolytes per se, per se, per se, but it'll keep your mind and your pen

(32:50):
moving. Even if you've been traveling through the desert from an antique land, one gulp of Bish will
have you ready to scream, look on my works, ye mighty and despair. I mean, out of the corner of
my eye, I have seen... I do have to give my wife a hat tip for steering me towards Percy Shelley.

(33:13):
My original idea for the ad was for Frankenstein's Monster Energy Drink. All right, onto the game.
Why do I have a feeling that you came up with the idea of the silly ads first,
and then you just built the podcast around those?
06 You know, kind of, in a way. Well, no, the thing is so... Yeah, I've listened to some poetry
podcasts and I enjoy them. I want more whimsy in them, in part because I'm a child, and in part

(33:39):
because there's at times, I think, a solemnity around poetry. And I mentioned this, I was talking
about this with John Lennon, not the Beatle, a few episodes ago, we listened to a recording of
Russell Edson reading a poem, and there are all these funny lines, but like a lot of poetry
readings, when someone will say something funny, there's this kind of hesitation to laugh,

(34:00):
because there's this solemnity of a poetry reading. So I get to make the puns here so my wife doesn't
have to hear as many of them. 07
Yeah, and I don't know if you're familiar with Breaking Form Podcast, but Gene Zelenhall and
Aaron Smith. But that's another podcast that brings in games and whimsy that I really admire. I think

(34:22):
what you say about it, that reading, sometimes the audience doesn't know whether or not they're
allowed to laugh. And because I have a lot of jokes and humor in my poetry, I'm often trying to
like send an audience signal right away to say, yes, it's okay. You can laugh. I find it during
the venue where alcohol is being served. 08
On to the game. Today, in honor of you, Nikki Beer, we're playing a game that I'm calling

(34:47):
In Memory of W.B. Yeast. It's a simple game. I'm going to give you a title, and you have to tell
me whether it's a poem by W.B. Yeats or the name of an Irish beer. 09
Even when I lose, I'm still going to win somehow. 08
Oh, absolutely. Any questions before we play? 09
Uh, no, sir. Let's do it. 08 All right, Nikki Beer, let's play In Memory of W.B. Yeast.

(35:12):
Number one, The Madness of King Gaul. Is that a beer or is that Yeats? 09
I'm going to say a beer. 08
That's Yeats. 09
Dang it. 08
By the way, you have to imagine me like going between tabs with like the table of contents of

(35:33):
The Collected Yeats because my copy is at school and it's break and like a tab with like beer names
from Ireland. 09
All right, next. 09
Number two, Black Rock. Is that a beer or is that Yeats? 09
The audio didn't come through there. Did you say Yeats? 09
I did say Yeats. 09
Okay. It is a beer. It's an Irish stout from Dungar Van Brewing Company. My apologies to them

(35:57):
for probably mispronouncing it twice. 09
Number three, Sheepstealer. Is that a beer or is that Yeats? 09
Trick question. Both. 09
That would be great, actually. I couldn't find a Yeats poem called Sheepstealer. It's a traditional
Irish farmhouse ale from Black Donkey. We got three more. 09
Number four, The Rose of Battle. Is that a beer or is that Yeats? 09

(36:21):
Yeats. 09
That is Yeats. All right. We're on the board. 09
Number five, Woodcock. Is that a beer or is that Yeats? 09
I don't know. Again, the audio didn't come through. 09
Well, okay. The last time the audio didn't come through, I was wrong. So is it the audio that's
trying to save me? 09

(36:42):
Maybe. 09
Maybe. All right. Yeats. 09
That is a beer. It's a fruity ale from White Pipsy. 09
And finally, number six. I've got a good feeling about this one. 09
Number six, McGargle's Francis Bangen IPA. Is that a beer or is that Yeats? 09
It better be Yeats. But if it better be a beer. But if it's Yeats, then he's a lot cooler than

(37:06):
I thought he was. 09
He does have the poem Drinking Song, which starts wine comes in at the mouth. And my original title
for the game was Beer Comes In at the Mouth. But then that just sounds wrong to me. So I changed it
to In Memory of WBEs. So Nikki, thank you so, so much for being here. Is there anything you want to

(37:27):
say or plug before we go? 09
Gosh, just yeah, real phonies and genuine fakes out on Milkweed. Buy yourself a copy or get a copy
from the library or just listen to a Dolly Parton song in honor of the cover. 09
Yes, listen to Jolene and then find the version of Jolene that slowed down to 33 RPMs,

(37:49):
which is fantastic. It's great on its own and also helps you appreciate just how good her
vocal is. As always, thank you for listening. Go have a great day. Read some poems, pet some dogs,
and support striking workers wherever you find them. Bye.