The river Ocean was said to enclose the world in a perfect circle, yet no one had ever seen it. Herodotus grumbled: “The name Ocean was, I suppose, invented by some ancient poet or other, and inserted into his poetry.”
In Episode 14 of Multi-Verse, Barbara Tran and I discuss how water encircles her poem “Loon Song.” Tran’s river Ocean is not inserted but rising around the poet; feverish, Tran envisions herself adrift on the raft of her bed, her feet dangling as if dropping off the far edge of a flat earth. She envisions a loon stuck in a too-small pond. She isn’t sure, in this state, if she’s fit to map her surroundings.
“My feet,” Tran writes,
are an illusion the way a wet
parking lot can appear as a lake
to a loon
in flight …
Tran asks us: What’s madness? Why shouldn’t a loon be confused? How can we not be mad, once we’ve seen how geography can be bent into a cage?
Barbara Tran’s debut poetry collection is Precedented Parroting (Palimpsest Press, 2024).
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Multi-Verse is a poetry podcast hosted and produced by Evangeline Riddiford Graham. To hear poets share and discuss the poems they don’t usually read aloud, subscribe for free on Substack, Soundcloud, Apple, Spotify, or the Multi-Verse website.
Episode 14: Barbara Tran raises the temperature