Dear Ears,
Thank you for your patience—and even more for your clamorings. Multi-Verse is back!
From its title, India Lena González’s poem “ACT ! pose with fingers as though cigarette (puff puff)” swept me up in its irresistible sense of theatrical mischief. India begins:
once more unto the breach once more
mama has a bad habit of snickering every
time I say the word theatre. (thee-ate-her).
In rethinking those three syllables, India teases the humor, desire, and violence of performance—of both poetic and dramatic varieties. The game’s afoot!
In our conversation in Episode 8 of Multi-Verse, India and I chatted about writing as choreography, the politics of casting, and the exhilaration and exhaustion of Samuel Beckett. As India puts it, sometimes our endurance is tested to the limit, and we want to escape the repetitive, constrictive theatre of our daily actions, whether they take place on or off the stage. “But then the question for the performer, and for anyone living, is: Leave and go where?”
I hope you enjoy this poem and and conversation as much as I did.
Yours in comedy & tragedy,
Evangeline
You can find the episode and subscribe to the episode by clicking on one of the buttons below, or by searching “Multi-Verse” in your podcast app.
“ACT ! pose with fingers as though cigarette (puff puff)” is part of India Lena González’s debut poetry collection, fox woman get out!, publishing in September 2023 with BOA Editions. If you’d like to read along with Multi-Verse before then, you can find an earlier version of the poem online at the Brooklyn Review.
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Multi-Verse is a poetry podcast hosted and produced by Evangeline Riddiford Graham. To hear more poets share and discuss the poems they don’t usually read aloud, subscribe to Multi-Verse at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, SoundCloud, your favorite podcast app, or visit multiversepoetry.org.
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Episode 8: India Lena González and the Frenzy of Performance