PoemTalk #139: Worker's Tanka (original) (raw)

Today, we released the 139th episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, a very special program that addresses six tankas by Christine Yvette Lewis, Lorraine Garnett, and Davidson Garrett of the Worker Writers School. For this show, host Al Filreis gathered a panel that included Mark Nowak (who co-curated this episode), Husnaa Hashim, and Meg Pendoley.

As Filreis explains at the start of his PoemTalk blog post on the episode, Nowak "is one of the few contemporary artists who has organiziationally sought a way to recontextualize working-class consciousness and activism within the American labor movement into the poetics and media art of the twenty-first century." He continues, "Mark's new labor poetics has led him to found Worker Writers, an institute that organizes and facilitates poetry workshops with global trade unions, workers' centers, and other progressive labor organizations," and three members of this worthy project — Christine Yvette Lewis, Lorraine Garnett, and Davidson Garrett — are the authors of the half-dozen tankas under discussion here.

You can find more here, including the full texts of all six poems, more info on Worker Writers, and video footage of the poets reading their work filmed by Zardon Richardson at the group's February meeting. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.