Poetry for Every Body: Molly McCully Brown

In this edition of HoCoPoLitSo's The Writing Life, poet Hayes Davis speaks with poet and essayist Molly McCully Brown about her work, especially In the Field Between Us, epistolary poems written between Brown and her co-author, Susannah Nevison, about their bodies, their disabilities, their faith, and their friendship.
Brown reads one of the Master poems from that book, as well as discusses the role of the landscape in the collection.
"The landscape is doing a variety of things for us," Brown explained. "One is that it’s really interesting, as a person with a disability, to feel as if we have these bodies that are inherently wild and untameable, seem like they belong in a wilder universe than exists around us, but also to have bodies that sometimes make it quite difficult to really go out and move through the natural world. The metaphorical wilderness of this book is both of us imagining a space that feels made for and shaped for our bodies, and also a space that we can go out and traverse together, and call to one another across the natural space of the book.”
Davis and Brown discuss the pleasure of a place of trust, of not having to translate or explain one's position, as Davis found at Cave Canem, and Brown found with Nevison, who also has a disability.
Brown finishes by reading one of her favorite poems of Nevison's, "Dear M, Last night I dredged the river again."
Recorded April 28, 2022.
For more information on HoCoPoLitSo's live or recorded programming, visit www.hocopolitso.org.

[@rievans57]

Interesting.