S5 E40: Roxi Power talks about her new book with Dion O'Reilly

The Hive Poetry Collective

Dion O’Reilly chats with Roxi Power about her new book, The Songs that Objects Would Sing, diving deep into a work that that “is aflame, both with the literal wildfires ravaging the American West and with the slower smolder of personal grief. Power’s response to loss and disaster is a quirky plangent song…shot through with humor and underpinned by a rippling ostinato of lyric power” (Mark Scroggins).

With ease and humor, Dion and Roxi draw on postmodern and Buddhist theories, debating whether the presences that sing within the objects of Power's lines are “essences.” “I feel you in the glint of objects sometimes. That’s all I know.” The white "ghost piano" on the book's cover, painted by her sister Sky Power, summons her mother’s musical influence within the titular elegiacal poem. Power conjures and “unpaints” the psycho-geography of Texas and Wyoming, filled with the "ghost-scratchings" of memory that, like de Kooning's paintings, peak through to the surface of the “cinematic fictions she sews from scratch." She bends time in poems such as "The Aftermath of Future" where “Now is just one fold in the snake skin of time.”

Dion and Roxi discuss Power’s trans-genre work and why she has been drawn to recombinant forms since her MFA work at Cornell University that include music, visual art, and film. Power has taught for 25 years at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she founded and edits the trans-genre anthology, Viz. Inter-Arts. Her next book is forthcoming from Carbonation Press in 2024.

Power organizes national “Trans-Genre Cabarets,” and her own trans-genre work includes Live Film Narration (Neo-Benshi) performances of original scripts across the country, including the Tennessee Williams Festival, the New Orleans Poetry Festival, REDCAT, and St. Mark’s Poetry Project. Her next Neo-Benshi performance is Feb. 22 at Satori in Santa Cruz.

Power organizes events and makes podcasts for The Hive Poetry Collective. Her most recent podcast is with Brenda Hillman.

Farnaz Fatemi writes: “With both musical and emotional intelligence, not to mention a linguistic virtuosity, Power conjures hope amid her sonic discoveries—while still bearing lucid witness to personal and community grief.”

C.S. Giscombe writes, “The first line of Roxi Power’s incredible burst of poems lays down the law with one hand and sets things in motion with another—that is, she writes as if to remark on the coming noise made by fire, death, love…The many motions of this music, of these songs that objects would sing, will brush the reader with a difficult and worthy and joy.

You can order her book here.