4 January 2025
Find Unwoven and its supplements: https://waywordsstudio.com/project/unwoven/
Interviewer Jessica Manuel founded a global reading community in 2014. She is the facilitator and guide for passionate readers and thinkers, leading the vibrant community of Book Oblivion. She has taught collegiate reading and writing for over a decade and now teaches at the elementary level, fusing nature study and literature. Her work focuses on helping readers fall in love with the written word by strengthening their connection to it.
Unwoven:
What difference in a little poetic structure? Across 17 traditional forms of poetry–from ballad and sonnet to ghazal and ZaniLa Rhyme–writer, podcaster, and educator Steve Chisnell juxtaposes similar poems in both traditional styles and free verse, “Poetry of Form and Release,” to explore the effects of poetic construction on meaning itself. Along the way, his speakers find their lives torn, unraveled, or dangling as they wrestle with aging, memory, love, myth, and the promise of language. From Waywords Studio, Chisnell’s first book is a layered and provocative collection rich in ironies and meanings found not merely in its words but in the patterns beneath them, not merely in the verse but in the spaces between. The book includes an extensive section of author notes on the inspiration for the poems and as a primer on the meaning in forms. More extensive materials for classroom students and teachers are also available.
Writers recommended in this episode: Tess Taylor (Work & Days), Aleksandar Hemon (The Lazarus Project), Laura Lamarca, Cathy Park Hong (Engine Empire), Susan Howe (Concordance), Ocean Vuong
Chapters
00:00 Intro – Unwoven Interview #1
01:40 Why Unwoven
04:22 Speakers in Poetry
08:16 Uncertainty & Intention
11:33 Politics & Contemporary Language
15:12 Favorite Poem & Form
17:25 Haiku & Tanka
18:33 Book Formatting
19:33 Approaches to Teaching
21:26 Crafting Poetry & Prose
24:17 Layers in Poetry
27:09 Intra-textuality in Unwoven
28:42 Etymology in Poetry
29:31 Classroom Applications
40:46 Support, Notes, and Supplements
42:34 ZaniLa Rhyme
47:35 Favorite Contemporary Poets
53:07 How to Find Unwoven
53:28 Literary Nomads Trailer
Transcript: https://waywordsstudio.com/podcasts/transcript-unwoven-interview-1-dr-jessica-manuel/
Literary Nomads is the primary program of Waywords Studio (https://waywordsstudio.com). The podcast posts new material each week, with thought-provoking examinations of literature around selected questions or themes and several smaller supplemental episodes in between the larger programs: history, writing, and contemporary applications of ideas.
Visit us for expanded resources for guests and the Waywords community, for other programs and writing, and for opportunities to support our goal to expand reading. Resources available can include full bibliographies of material referenced, full and partial texts, annotated editions, supplemental and expanded episodes, fictional explorations, teaching and learning resources, additional essays, and online courses.
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CREDITS:
Original music by Randon Myles (https://randonmyles.com/)
USING THIS WORK:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. It is open to be used and adapted for all not-for-profit uses with proper attribution.
MLA CITATION:
Chisnell, Steve. “Unwoven Interview #1: Dr. Jessica Manuel.” Waywords Studio, 4 Jan. 2025, https://waywordsstudio.com/podcasts/waywords_podcast/unwoven-interview-1-jessica-manuel/.
