In “Smother” Poet Rachel Richardson Balances Parenting Amidst Upheaval
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Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life. You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it. So my first reaction was, ha ha, this is so funny. And my next reaction was, wait a minute, I'm a journalist. Is this real? And I think we will see a Twitch streamer president, maybe within our lifetimes. You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts. From KQED.

From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. How should we raise children in a world that's burning? This is the question that Berkeley poet Rachel Richardson contemplates in her new collection, Supernatural.

Smother. This is a book about living in our real world, the one filled with smoke monitoring websites, plastic gyres, and friendship, desire, and fulfillment centers. How do you make sense and make art in these times? How do you know when you can enjoy a sunny day? We're going to talk motherhood and poetry, environmental depletion, and the I Want song that's coming up next right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. It's so good to be back with you. You know, these days, for a variety of reasons, there's this tremendous and deafening dissonance to life for many of us.

Outside, it's spring. Life proceeds as it did before. Work gets done. Kids get picked up. The sun shines. But like a word you say enough times that it becomes strange. Look too long at the daily comings and goings, and they seem painfully unmatched with the deeper realities of our time in history.

This is the imaginary of Rachel Richardson's new poetry collection, Smother, a smoldering, extremely timely work. And if I can be forgiven for this comparison, it struck me as the most intricate, literate version of that meme of the dog sitting in a burning room saying, this is fine. This book is more than fine. And welcome to Forum, Rachel. Thank you, Alexis. Thanks for having me. So people can get a feel for your work. Why don't you kick us off with the poem Zeitgeist?

Okay, thanks. This is my, this is fine poem. Zeitgeist. And then it wasn't just plastic at Gore Point in the Antarctic, population zero, but at 30,000 feet above the Pyrenees, population birds. And in the lungs of every living lunged creature to walk or fly or swim the planet. And still we bought houses in the floodplain, went to the beach when we could.

Then it wasn't a story anyone could bear hearing again, not with the smoke and Amazon's delay delivering air purifiers ordered with Prime. The people huddled, looking into their private, blue-lit screens, trying to think of what to type that might communicate this leaden grief, the totality of the body's aloneness in which we somehow lived together.

And we believed what we believed about who was at fault. And it's true that many things also thrived at this time. For one must take a balanced view. The tick and the jellyfish flourished. And what burned, burned. And what entered our lungs entered them silently, which does not mean without consequence. And then did what it was going to do. Rachel Richardson reading from her book Smother. That's the poem, Zeitgeist.

And boy, does anything capture the zeitgeist quite like the people huddled looking into their private blue-lit screens trying to think of what to type that might communicate this leaden grief? You know, what do we get from putting words to these times? You know, from trying to put words to... What are these very difficult realities to communicate about? I think the act of...

Writing is an act of trying to find some kind of truth or some kind of...

belief in communication still, um, even in a time in which there's so much noise and there's so much dissonance and so much sort of fracturing of trust and belief, um, and, and sort of shared sense of, of purpose on this planet, um, or in our society. And, um, so for me, writing is, um, is a way to try to reach across and, um, and share with people, communicate, um,

have some kind of a connection. It also feels to me like at least there's a theory among writers. If we can name things, right? Yeah, exactly. We can see things differently or we're reorganizing the world in some way via the words. Yeah, yeah.

You know, I was also thinking about in this book a lot how we don't just have the sort of environment outside our window here. We also are getting all of this news about the environmental destruction that's happening all over the world. Not just climate, but, you know, deforestation and plastics and all these things. Glaciers melting. How do you manage that? Do you go seeking environmental collapse news or do you just choose to have it delivered to you by the algorithm?

Over the course of this book, I was not seeking it out in particular. I mean, I have a book, a poem about listening to KQED while I'm driving my kids back and forth to circus camp. And, you know, the news is, where's the fire now? How far has it advanced? What's happening? That was the Kaldor fire in 2021. And I mean, I think it's everywhere. It's sort of in the ether. It's hard not to think about

about it if you're conscious. And I live in Berkeley and I'm raising kids there.

which is the place that I grew up. And so it's hard not to remember what it was like for me as a child and how even environmentally that's changed. Like what we consider the evacuation zone now is quite a bit lower from down the hill from where it was 25 years ago, you know, and the amount of fog that we had in the summer mornings is quite different, you know, from the time that I was 10 to now my kids being 10. So, yeah,

It's hard not to, if you're aware in the world, if you're looking, it's hard not to feel like that news is coming to you all the time. It's like such a dark spin on the idea of you can't go home again. Because it's like you're home, but your home itself is not there anymore. Yeah.

You know, there's several scenes in these poems where you're kind of describing a mind on the Internet doing something while also trying to do other things where there's kind of information dynamics of the screen come in. How do you think about trying to write poems in which, you know, our minds and our bodies might be in totally different places? Yeah, there's the...

sort of beautiful ideal of poetry happening in this sort of sacred, quiet space. And the poet goes to, you know, some quiet space within themselves to write. And that is not the reality that I live in as a parent. And also in our time, I think that, you know, the encroachment of screens and of those kinds of technologies into our lives, they're everywhere. And it's hard not to feel that they're sort of interwoven

interrupting your space, your brain, and even the physical space that we move around in. So I'm trying in this book to... I mean, at first I was trying to excise those things. And then I started thinking, well, that is the subject, right? That is how our minds work now. And that is how we live. And so I...

you know, I opened up to it and, and, and those elements are very much in this book. And it's, it's maybe now even because the book takes place from about 2017 to like 2023, it's sort of a document of that moment in technology too. You know, I mean, I called out Twitter, which doesn't exist as such anymore. It becomes sort of a document about, you know, where we were in this period of, I think pretty big transition. Yeah.

Yeah. Let's get this poem, Tamarack Fire. And one thing that I will be listening for here is also just that, you know, this is also a poem about how the technology does connect us to these other spaces and also anxieties and bits of knowledge. So take it away, Tamarack Fire. Yeah.

Can I say? Yeah, yeah, sure. So this Tamarack fire was not one of the biggest fires. I ended up documenting a bunch of different fires in this book. And they're not always like the big mega fires, but it was a fire that was expected not to be much of anything because of where it

uh, started burning. And so Cal fire had other priorities and they didn't, um, address this one right away. It was in the Southern, um, Sierra or Southern South Lake Tahoe area. And, um, it was in the summer of, I think 2021. Um, and my kids were at echo Lake camp, the camp owned the public camp owned by the city of Berkeley, um, in the wilderness up there in, in South Lake Tahoe. And, um, so, so,

so the experience of this is my thinking about my kids being, you know, trying to give them some, some space in nature and thinking about them out there as the fire comes toward them. And, you know, what can we do from, from 150 miles away, uh,

refresh the app on our phone, you know, and check out the air quality. Um, and everybody, everybody in the, it turns out that may or may not be something you can do. It's not helpful, but it is something you can do. Um, and, uh,

Anyone who lives in California probably is now very familiar with those air quality apps and the way that you look at all the little sensors that make all those dots on the map that are different colors, right, depending on what the air quality is. So you want green. So that's the context of this poem. Tamarack Fire. I upload again and again the little circles on the map representing their air, my children in their tents.

Cursing when red turns to purple, praying to the God I pray to which is no God, which is the vast smoky sky for orange, then yellow. Let me be so bold as to pray for green. Children in their tents are not a metaphor. The fire burning 30 miles away is not a metaphor.

What will reach them and what will not reach them is not the question. I am 150 miles away, 3 hours 18 minutes drive time in current traffic. I sit, then stand, then sit. They're probably in the rec hall now, playing board games so as not to tax their lungs. The fire was not considered a danger when it ignited on a rocky hilltop, and so it was left to burn. Wind, heat, the big empty sky drew a path into the forest.

That was Rachel Richardson reading from her collection of poems, Tamarack Fire. It's interesting because at both this period of time in which there were so many fires in a row, we've had a couple of lucky seasons now. And so it hasn't really happened in Northern California. But, you know, of course, there's huge fires in Los Angeles and my sister-in-law lives down there. And I was completely back in this world, you know, with, of course, adding the Watch Duty app now to the Purple Air app and everything.

Does this feel distant to you, like this period of the fires? Or how do you situate yourself relative to that time? Well, we've been lucky for a few years, and I hope that that was the period of the fires. In some ways, when you have fires that are big enough over large enough amounts of space, it does mean that you're not going to get one for a while of that scale if you burn everything. But...

California is vast and there's, you know, the fires that I'm experiencing in this book too, that we all experienced if we lived in the Bay area, they mostly weren't right at our door anyway. They were, you know, in the mountains or, or north of us. And but the smoke came in and, and stayed with us. And that was our experience of it, this sort of secondary long-term emergency. So in that way, it does not feel at all over and the work that we need to do to,

to change that is going to be ongoing and is really just getting started. So, yeah, it does feel it does feel ongoing. Yes. Yes. We're talking with Berkeley poet Rachel Richardson about her collection Smother. Her poetry asks how we can raise children and live in a time of climate upheaval and

We'd love to hear from you. I mean, what role has art and literature played for you as you grapple with environmental devastation? Give us a call. Number is 866-733-6786. How do you approach parenting in a burning technology drunk world? The number is 866-733-6786. You can email forum at kqed.org or find us on all the social media things. We're KQED Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.

Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life. You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it. So my first reaction was, ha ha, this is so funny. And my next reaction was, wait a minute, I'm a journalist. Is this real? And I think we will see a Twitch streamer president, maybe within our lifetimes. You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.

Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here with Berklee poet Rachel Richardson talking about her latest collection, Smother, about living in this burning world.

Let's talk about the epigraph to this book. I'm just going to read it. I automatically reject any poem with the word mother in it. J.D. McClatchy, editor of the Yale Review and kind of a big deal, right, in the world of arts and letters. Yeah, he was. Tell me about this epigraph. Okay.

Well, I heard it. He spoke it at a panel at the Sewanee Writers Conference in the year before I became a mother. I was in the audience. And...

It was, you know, it was intended to be provocative. Did you throw your shoe at him? No, you know, I wasn't really offended by it. I wasn't appearing. And I thought he meant don't write about your mom, you know, don't send me a poem about your mom. But once I became, and I thought, you know, that's a little bit dismissive and a little bit sexist, but, you know, whatever, I just won't send him those poems. I write about other things. But then I became a mother a year after that. And I thought, wait, this is actually a larger relationship.

refusal to think about a whole category of human experience. And I don't know how to write now a poem that isn't a mother poem, whether or not I say it. That is the perspective that I now live with, right? I now have. And so, you know, I have to

I either can silence myself or I can directly oppose this and just go right in and write my mother poems. Right. Yeah. And her next book was Smother. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah. The title takes that to task. Right. And the title Smoke Plus Mother. Talk a little bit about that title.

Well, once I thought of it, it was sort of inevitable that it had to be my title. I thought it was funny. And, you know, a little bit tongue in cheek, a direct rebuke of that sort of you can't write, you can't use the word mother, right? Or it automatically sort of kick you out of the literary serious, you know, yeah, sort of club. And...

So, yeah, I thought it was a little bit sort of aggressive, funny, and it got at the mood of this book, which is not that sort of like quiet meditative sorrow of so many people.

books of poems, but this like immersive, you know, I am in the middle of it. Um, and I'm kind of mad. And a little mad. Yeah. Um, and also things are funny. You know, I live with children. Things are funny all around me all the time. Um, and, and I, I hope that that's here too. Um, let's do another poem. This one, uh, and the, the, I want song is what we're thinking. You want to set it up or you want to go right in? We talk about it after. Um,

Let's just try reading it. Yeah, let's go for it. The I Want song. I just want them to stop emailing. All of them. You. The bots. I want the kids to stop whining. The floor to sweep itself. The sun to rise blamelessly into the sky. In every movie my kids love, the main character gets to turn, look into the camera, and howl her I Want song straight into our chests. The writers even call it that.

I want love, want to walk on two feet, want to see the world, and yes, I want to be queen. And once it's been laid out for all of us to hear, we know she has to get it.

But there's so much that I want. For the trees not to burn, or at least not these trees, not unless they're far away or beneficial to the understory. I want to stop feeling like I'd better buy the fruit now because maybe next year there will be no more fruit, no more water, maybe the crops will burn or wither or be sprayed with the chemical that kills the bees and which studies now show kill the bees' children and children's children two bee generations after exposure. I want not to think about the expiration of the world."

I want to delete my profile, want pollination of the blossom and the swelling of fruit. I want to stand inside the fog, socked in under a crown of redwoods, and then to become the fog. See, I Want Song by Rachel Richardson, part of her latest collection, Smother. One of the things that there are conflicting wants in this I Want Song, right? Yes. You know, what would it be to become the fog?

To be blameless, right? To be a solution rather than a part of the problem. And also to sort of like dissipate and disappear into the woods. Yeah. Rather than sort of having to be here on the front lines, like making lunch and refreshing the app and, you know, wondering about how the smoke will will affect us this week or COVID, you know, or all the multiple overlapping emergencies. Yeah.

Yeah, fog feels like this... I mean, fog is so beautiful and so life-sustaining for the Redwoods and for all of us, for our whole ecosystem. And it's disappearing. It's the thing that... Yeah, I would love to be able to embody it and sort of be empowered to bring it back. Right, right. How do you feel...

Your collection and kind of mothering against environmental collapse. How do you see it as intersecting with some of what's come out in the books about women's and mothers lives over this last year? You know, kind of like hot all for summer and all of that. Like, do you imagine this book in conversation with them or are you like, I've got my own track. I'm on my own thing over here.

Oh, I would love to be in conversation with them. I mean, mom's getting mad and mom's going out and like sort of claiming their own brains and their own sovereignty in their bodies. And that we can do this while parenting feels...

really exciting to me that that's, that's like a trend in books lately. Um, and I want to shout out, um, another book that I loved, um, Night Bitch by Rachel Yoder is another amazing one in this, in this genre, um, or in this, this conversation. Um, yeah, I mean, I, I think it's really exciting.

It is... It's about a woman who may or may not be transmogrifying into a dog and running around the neighborhood. It's hilarious. It's angry. It's wonderful. But all of the change that happens in that book happens within that one person. It's actually not in conversation with the broader world. In fact, her husband does absolutely nothing throughout the entire book, including to make anything work at the end. It's totally...

fascinating that way versus this book, which is sort of wants to figure out, well, what do I do like in, in this space? Right. How do I change that? How do I interact with this world? That's different. Well, yes, I'm really, this book is like a search for friends. It's a search for community. It's a search for like my, the gathering up of my forces, you know, to, to,

you know, have the better party than the people who say like, you can't write about moms, right? Moms are not welcome here. But also, you know, to sort of speak more loudly than that and with a better argument. And also just to figure out how to solve some of these things, which is not to say, you know, we're going to solve climate change, you know, me and my mom crew, but also

But also, how do we tell our children the truth about this? And how do we, you know, equip them to deal with what they're going to live in, which is, you know, the future of this? You know, there's actually a really natural connection to one of the other poems in your book. It's a poem with child crying in the background, which is a little bit about, I'll have you read in just a second, it's a little bit about the sort of

The savagery or the like the way that sometimes as a parent, you're just like this just has to happen. You know, the things it brings out in us, among other things. Yeah. One of the surprises of parenthood was to me was how it sort of brought me to the edge of myself in every way. Right. And in all emotional aspects.

or, you know, elements of the spectrum of emotion. You know, the greatest sort of, you know, joy and happiness and excitement and humor and also like anger and frustration and sadness. It really, it challenges you to find, yeah, what those limits are to yourself. Should I read the poem? Yeah, read the poem, yeah. Poem with child crying in the background.

So there's another way of saying I write poems, not in the quiet space of contemplation. I write poems with children crying in the background because that's how I live in these years. The dog scratches. The neighbor pulls his trash bin up from the curb. I sit in the dark, not wanting to be found.

"'Why is the child crying in this poem?' you ask. You wonder, is the mother a bad mother? Is the child hurt or sick? Or is this just to say, this is a mother poem, choosing its audience because the author, who is the mother, needs a friend to say, you still have a brain. You write poems. Your child is fine. She'll be fine. She'll never remember when she's your age how you yelled at her to shut up after the question that had only two answers, yes or no, kept getting answered, neither.'"

It's the wailing, the grievance, like a knife into the ear that shapes the poem. I'm sorry, I'm trying to hear another kind of music, but thinking only of discordant things, like the gymnastics coach who killed himself. Just monstrous enough to aid in the abuse of the other coach, the one whose name we all know, but not monstrous enough to feel no remorse. Or maybe it was only fear he felt. He'd been caught.

I'm monstrous too, though, writing my poem with this wailing in the background that doesn't stop, hasn't stopped, and wanting someone to pity me because the argument was about whether she'd allow me to remove her band-aid, which she wanted removed, but didn't. And I didn't consider, didn't wait for a turn, or quiet myself to hear under her wailing another rhythm. I am not always here for the life of the poem.

Sometimes what I want is absolute power. Sometimes I want to pick up her little body and set her down in a desert like the ancient gods did to the infidels and watch her eyes widen at the expanse of dunes and dry heat. But she was screaming in the narrow bathroom, and I could only look at my own face three ways in the mirror, white tile gleaming everywhere behind us. So I reached down, took her in my talons, and tore the bandage from her arm. Mm-hmm.

That was Rachel Richardson reading the poem, Poem with Child Crying in the Background from her collection, Smother. I've just had that Band-Aid moment, so I think that's one reason why. That one really hit for me where you're just like, wait, but you want me to take it off. There's no answer. But you won't let me take it off. But you won't let me take it off, but you, ah, it's so frustrating. Let's go to Alanka, who I think has got some thoughts on some of the environmental themes in this work. Welcome, Alanka. Great.

Hi, Rachel. I think we would have a lot to talk about. Great. I'm one of those environmental scientists that got fed up and became a climate justice organizer. And I'm also just recently became a mother. My child just turned seven months old. Oh, my God. Congratulations. Yeah.

Thank you. And I also am an artist, mostly performing arts. And I just wanted to congratulate you on this work and answer your call for community. But specifically, I just wanted to mention about how

you know, in social movements, which is, you know, what we need in order to address the climate crisis, art is just so important. And yet the climate movement, it has sort of lagged behind. And I think it has to do with the fact that so much of the climate movement is rooted in sort of data, right? Facts, figures, science, which doesn't speak to people. And that's why I think the

the role of the arts is just so important, especially in the climate movement, because it is a big, scary thing. And the only way to get people to actually feel what it feels like if they haven't yet is to move their emotions through arts. So I want to just

just congratulations for your work and, you know, would love to chat more with you. Awesome. Great. Well, send me a message. Yeah. I could not agree with you more. I mean, I think that the arts, I feel really purposeful in making art, especially with language right now, because I think we need ways to talk about what's happening to us and what has happened, what we've been living through. And, you know,

And we need to do it in a way that is, you know, conversations that is on the, you know, on the sidewalk with our neighbors and, you know, in schools and in coffee shops and at the bar. You know, we need to have ways to share these experiences because if we don't process them, you know, we will die.

keep destroying things. Right. I mean, Ron writes, you know, I manage controlled burns in the Sierras and I think it's crucial to deliver messages about fire ecology and our role in it to the world. Rachel's awareness as an observer and work as a poet and communicator is so important.

Thanks. Well, and actually, Ron, since I finished this book, I felt like I wanted to change my relationship to fire because, you know, so much of this was this sort of onslaught, this sense of the waves of these terrible things that were happening to, you know, whole towns, you know, to paradise, to our mountains and to our communities. And but I...

I wanted to understand how we could live, you know, California is a fire ecology, right? We need to live with fire. So how could we have a better relationship to it? So in the year after I finished this book, I took FFT2 firefighter training classes and became certified as a wildland firefighter. So I just did my first prescriptive burn like a

a week and a half ago. And I think that is like absolutely the answer. You know, I mean, we know that that's the answer scientifically, like to burn under prescription, to plan these burns, to burn out excess fuel so that the forest doesn't burn and so that we can protect our neighborhoods and our communities. But

But the other answer is that this is totally non-hierarchical structure of communities getting together because we're all invested in this and doing it and learning like traditional practices. I mean, there was a Maidu elder who was our burn boss and she told us about the practices of burning in this area for hundreds of years that had been passed down to her.

And and, you know, then all these volunteers came together and, you know, burned tule grass and sedge together in this in this really beautiful community effort.

My gosh. I mean, what is the work that you're producing now? Like, how is it changing as a result of, you know, this book mostly, it doesn't actually have up close fire. It has smoke, right? It has smoke. But now you're like up against the fire and it's probably alive and different in your work now.

Well, I don't know what will be next in my work, but I... Come on, you're writing poems, though. I'm writing essays. I'm writing... I'm thinking. I'm in that sort of... I always have sort of a fallow period between books where I don't know what I'm doing next. But yeah, but I'm trying to sort of immerse myself in the field, in real life, and in the science of this because it's fascinating. And as our last call,

was saying, like, it's, Ilanka, I think that it's, the intersection between science and art seems so crucial now. There's so much important stuff that needs to be said in the sciences and so much, it's just a fascinating area to think about what's happening to our planet and how we can, you know, affect it, how we can be involved in it.

But then there's the communicative challenge. Like how do we bring it to people? Well, and also that knowledge that there will be fires and smoke in our future, like regardless, we're actually not going back to this period of time in which we kept fires from burning, which is one of the reasons why we're in the place that we're in, right? Right. And I think that's a hard message to internalize, that that's just the nature of where we live.

Yeah, that's the nature of where we live. We're talking with Berkeley poet Rachel Richardson about her latest collection, Smother. She's also the founder of Left Margin Lit, which is a creative writing workshop that

We want to hear from you. I mean, what role has art played for you as you grapple with kind of environmental devastation, but also just the rest of life being a parent in this burning technology drunk world? We're going to talk a little bit about friendship, too, after the break, if that's helped you stay sane in these anxious times. You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. You can email your comments and questions to forum.com.

at kqed.org or you can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, the Discord, or KQED forum. Laura writes in to say, I agree with your lovely poet. I am a songwriter and being a mother has informed so much of my work, including the kinds of love that I write about in my songs. Once you become a mother, you are a mother to the world and every experience. We'll be back with more right after the break. I'm Alexis Madrigal. ♪

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Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal. We're talking with Berkeley poet Rachel Richardson about her collection Smother. How to parent, how to be in a time of climate upheaval and drought.

Technology drunkenness. One of the things that I found really beautiful about this book is that woven in between environmental devastation and parenting, there's this series of, I would call them love poems, love poems to friends of yours, you know, who you take all the things that we associate with a love poem and you

You know, that intense attention to detail and this kind of beautiful concentration of attention. And why don't you read one of them? Let's start with one that sort of deals with a bit of the unprocessed nature of the pandemic, I would say. Monday, we got Ed Yong on. We'll talk way more about processing or not processing of that time in American life. But let's go in through girlfriend poem, Renee. Okay.

All right. So this series of poems are all called Girlfriend Poem, which is a little bit of a shout out to the poet C.D. Wright, who is a great community poet and an influence of mine. She wrote a bunch of poems called Girlfriend Poem. And I thought, that's a good exercise, right? Love poems to my friends. And so this one is for my friend Renee Jansen, who is listening and wanted me to shout her out. Shout out, Renee.

But also I need to shout out her husband, Chris, and my husband, David, who are very big parts of this poem, although they do not get recognized. So Renee and Chris were our dear friends during the pandemic. We became kind of a pod together and we taught our kids school because we had no school. That word itself feels like an acid flashback. Oh, absolutely. You hear that word and you're like, whoo. 2020. Yeah. So, I mean, the great thing about that story

The one really beautiful thing that came out of that for us was that we got to have this incredible family friendship and sort of living together experience. So this poem is about that year, that time. And this is also, of course, fall 2020 when we had our orange day and then also the 2020 election. All that to say, get ready, everyone, to be back in time for a minute here. Right. Girlfriend poem, Renée.

When we had no school, we made a school. Maps and Senate contests pasted on my wall and the timeline of American history the way we wanted it told on yours. The kids walked between our houses and you made bean soup and I made yogurt and we delivered them by child courier your day or my day to be teacher and you yelled at the kids and I yelled at the kids and we apologized.

And I forget which one of us thought up a whole new currency to teach them economics and whose day was the day the sky stayed orange and we broke into the school playground because breathing smoke on the monkey bars was worth it.

And we read about Ma Ingalls on the prairie in seven months of winter and little Kamala Harris integrating our kids' own school. And we tried to remember our luck in the world as you made sourdough or I did and I made leaf etchings or you did. And we packed the kids into the van to the beach to get off grid when the election came.

We camped among the shorn native grasses, mowed flat to prevent wildfire by the cold ocean, and we didn't know how the votes were being tallied and who would run the country and sign bills into law and how those laws would treat our children's small bodies and our own.

Then all our flashlights died and the dark came down fast, but the kids stayed in the ocean until last light. Their clothes plastered to their skin in saltwater and sand until they delivered themselves to us, expecting us to peel them free and find them something dry, our own clothes off our bodies, and build a fire and bring them to it and then lie on top of the picnic table in our sleeping bags and identify the stars.

And you did, or I did, or we named enough possible constellations with confidence that the kids believed we knew. And our nylon tents were our den, and our children tumbled and bit, and we wanted school back and these creatures out of the house. And you know all these things as well as I do, but we are forgetting already, and that's why I'm saying this. I'm writing it down, because if you and I know anything, we know it goes.

Man, I love that ending. Berkeley poet Rachel Richardson reading the poem, girlfriend poem, dedicated to Renee. I love so many things about this poem. The text on the page, it's almost in two separate columns and it's kind of pinging back and forth. Then you did or I did. And it really has that... I remember this in the pandemic too. Shout out my Colbyverse pod. There was this sense of...

got a different level of community, a different level of need, kind of exploding of the kind of individualism and kind of family units that everybody had maintained for so long. And I think one of the hardest things about this, about remembering that time adequately, is it feels terrible to acknowledge the good things, but it also feels terrible to acknowledge the bad things. And one of the things that I feel like I've heard from people through time, kind of like

Sado Voce is like, I kind of miss it a little bit. You know, there are even though there are all these terrible things happening. Yeah. It felt it felt like the end of the poem where you're sitting there in the sleeping bags and something good is sort of happening to it in amidst all the tragedy of the pandemic and all that that came out of it. Mm hmm. Yeah, I feel that. I mean, there was there

We lost so much of the structure of our lives and the sort of institutional support, you know, school, things like that. And yet, like, it allowed us this really intense closeness with the few other people who we, you know, decided we could, you know, be together with. We were just all in on being together because otherwise there was going to be nothing. And, yeah.

Yeah, this poem, I mean, you said it's in two columns. It is. And the pinging back and forth is also because I really don't remember some of that stuff. Like, who did what? In part, maybe because we were living in a sort of heightened anxiety for so long and my memory just sort of did something weird in that time. You know, it occupies kind of a different space in memory than other things do that are more easily sort of catalogable. But...

It also was just such an immersive experience. And and it gave us something that I think a structured society and a capitalist society and a very busy society doesn't allow us to have, which is that kind of like intensity and closeness of of collaboration with other people. Yeah. I mean, it was.

Yeah, it still feels remarkably unprocessed, like almost like the timeline of the world is moving along. And then there's this kind of like little balloon, you know, little like speech balloon that comes out of that timeline. And everyone just goes like, all right, 2023, let's go. Let's just move ahead. The other sort of...

And the other part of the friendships that are that kind of sustains you through this book and are helping you kind of move through this landscape. There's there's also a lot of grief because you had a friend, Nina Riggs, a fellow writer, died in 2017 of breast cancer.

And this book in amongst the thing, the other things that are being grieved, it's also a book about the grief of your friendship and your friend dying. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Sure. So Nina Riggs was, shout out to her too, she was a dear friend of mine in North Carolina where I lived for a while until 2015. And she had been a poet and towards the end of her life, once she found out she was dying, she started writing a memoir. She wrote this beautiful book called The Bright Hour. And I...

I had moved away just before she died. And so she and I mostly texted in the last year of her life. And once she died, there was just this void for me. And I thought, who am I... What do I want poetry to do if it can't reach my friend and I can't communicate with the person I want to communicate with? And so...

Also, you know, this is right after the Trump election, the first one. And I just felt this great distance from so many people and so much of what I thought I had understood about our communities and who we were. And so...

Yeah, I kind of went silent for a while in thinking, I don't know what the point of being a writer is. And actually thinking about writing to her directly kind of brought me back to poetry. Why don't you read the poem, Questions, which is dedicated to her?

And let me say one other thing. You mentioned that I am a co-founder of Left Margin Lit, which is a writer's workspace and community center in Berkeley. This is where these poems mostly were written actually in a communal space. So they're written in a workspace with other writers. And that was part of what brought me back to it, too, was sitting in a room with other people and thinking,

maybe the world doesn't want poetry, but these people are doing it. You know, I could do it with them at least. And so this is and they can give me an assignment, you know, and then I can like just try something. I can at least get something on the page again. So this is the very first poem that I wrote after her death and for this book, what became this book. Questions. If there's one true thing, it's that Google will make money off us no matter what.

If we want to know what percentage of America is white, as it seems we do, what percentage of the population is gay, as it seems we do, what percentage of the earth is water, the engine is ready for our desire. The urgent snow is everywhere, is a line by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and many have asked, apparently, where am I right now? Also, when will I die?

Do you love me may be up there, generating high cost per click, but not as high as how to make pancakes. What time is it in California? So many things I wanted to ask you now that you're gone, and your texts bounce back to me undeliverable. Praise to the goddess of the internet search who returns with her basket of grain. 67,000 helpful suggestions to everything we request.

How to solve a Rubik's Cube. What to do when you're bored. How old is the Earth? How to clear cash. What animal am I? Why do we dream? Where are you now? Come back. Google can tell you everything except for the things you really want to know, yeah? But in our, like...

internet-based secular society, that's where people ask all their biggest questions. It's really interesting to me to look at that. That's what this poem came out of was my doing a Google search on, you know, what are the most commonly asked questions on Google? And these are the questions, you know, what percentage of the population is gay? When will I die? You know, we want Google to be our Oracle. Yeah.

In another poem, Lai Rai, it ends with these lines, right? I never know anymore what anyone is thinking. Tell me again about the hundred-year-old apple trees on the land you bought outside town. Tell me how it smells in fall. Tell me about the rain. And one of the things that I was thinking about this is our AI systems have sucked in absolutely everything

Like literally every text ever made is now inside of them. Yeah, that's right. But not these things, right? Not these things that pass between you and a friend and that have this

other layer of meaning that is inaccessible still to Google. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And somehow that feels very precious to me at this time. It can't be spit back to you by a machine. Yeah. Google can't smell things. Yeah. Not yet. Mm-hmm. AI is working on it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean...

So Lyrae is another very old friend of mine who I've known for pretty much my whole adult life and a poet, and she lives in upstate New York. And that was another, like, call across great distance, you know, and thinking, what's it like there? You know, and are the trees going to survive there? And can we, you know, is there... This is the call across, you know, across the vast distances to try to say, like, are you still out there too? You know, that was...

That was what I needed. I love that. The endings to some of these poems are so good. All right, let's bring in Judith and Almeda, who wants to share a little something as well. Welcome, Judith. Hi. Thank you so much for your book. It sounds wonderful. I can't wait to order it. Thanks. I wanted to tell you briefly about a day-long retreat that's going to happen April 26th.

This is a Climate Justice Task Force of the United Methodist Church day-long retreat to help people appreciate the beauty and art of nature. And it's incorporating indigenous wisdom and ways, indigenous ways, and poetry and music. Oh, wonderful. So people can just, you know, contact the Windsor United Methodist Church for it. And it's basically a free workshop. Yeah.

Love it. Thank you so much, Judith. Could be excellent for people who are listening. Another listener on Blue Sky writes, I'm sitting here working at home, listening to you read your poems and talking. My kids are grown, but I want to cry. I need to cry. Yeah. Thank you. Maybe we all do. Thanks for listening. Yeah, I think there's that need, right? I mean...

It was surprising to me how much force I started feeling in these poems and how strong that need was in me to say some of these things. Sometimes to cry, sometimes to yell, you know, or something else. But yeah.

I hadn't really thought about it. I mean, I think that's what you're saying to Alexis, like there's a lot that we haven't processed and we haven't been given room to do it. We just, you know, COVID restrictions lifted and everybody went back to work or back to something and then we're busy again and we haven't given ourselves the space to process.

And don't want to a lot of the time.

So you have to, you know, just claim them. Yeah.

What do you see as your job as a teacher of poetry? So maybe, you know, kind of what have you learned from your students and what have you learned from, you know, your peers in this writing space? Oh, what a good question and probably too long to answer. Well, but I mean, this book is full of other people. I call them by name. You know, I kind of listen to my poetry forebears. I quote them in here. This is a book about sort of trying to, you know,

thank my community and also be in a conversation with them. And that community includes those poets who taught me, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, Sylvia Plath, Louise Glick, Lucille Clifton, tons of them. I feel so grateful to have had these poets in my head from my earliest childhood.

training, earliest adulthood, to be this counter voice to that prevailing high intensity, fast moving kind of society that we're living in that's not contemplative. And then, so as a mentor and as a community member now actively, I mean, I...

I'm trying to help provide that space and that conversation to others and also to invite others to join it. And, you know, I ask people to write with me. I ask people to respond to, you know, to things that I'm writing. I, you know, I'm trying to help them find ways into a literary conversation that can sustain them too. Yeah. Yeah.

Thank you so much. This is a really beautiful, moving collection of work. The collection is called Smother. Of course, we have been talking with Berkeley poet Rachel Richardson. She's the founder of Left Margin Lit Creative Writing Workshop. And she's also, as our commenter pointed out, a distinguished visiting writer at St. Mary's College. Thank you so much for joining us, Rachel. Thanks so much for having me, Alexis. This is fun.

I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim.

Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life. You don't know what's true or not because you don't know if AI was involved in it. So my first reaction was, ha ha, this is so funny. And my next reaction was, wait a minute, I'm a journalist. Is this real? And I think we will see a Twitch streamer president, maybe within our lifetimes. You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.