audio

Anonymous Grocer 21/30: [Born was I]

~ Cameron ~ Leave a comment

Hello friend! 
 
Welcome back to Anonymous Grocer, a 30-day audio adventure in backwards poetry. Each day: a new poem, a new collection of words in unfamiliar and spiraling patterns, a new audio message to ease you into your day. 
 
April is also Arab American Heritage Month, and so today, we celebrate the poetry of Kazim Ali. Kazim’s most recent book is called The Voice of Sheila Chandra, and is inspired by and named after the British singer who was rendered almost completely voiceless in 2010 due to a rare syndrome. I am particularly drawn to writing that is in conversation with another artist, even across mediums; poetry like Kazim’s is a reminder that we are molecules in something more, something beyond vacuums; we converge and diverge and converge again, always creating (living) in the wake of others. 
Discover more about this poet here.
Watch Kazim and Sheila in conversation.
Listen to Sheila Chandra’s drone music for the rest of your day!
Do you have requests for poems or poets you’d like to see featured in future Anonymous Grocer episodes? I’d love to hear from you!
Peace and love,
Cam

Anonymous Grocer 20/30: [Again. Beginning to end from story]

~ Cameron ~ Leave a comment

Hello friend! 
 
Welcome back to Anonymous Grocer, a 30-day audio adventure in backwards poetry. Each day: a new poem, a new collection of words in unfamiliar and spiraling patterns, a new audio message to ease you into your day. 
 
Today, we ring in Day 20 with the Diné poet-painter and painter-poet, Sherwin Bitsui. I once heard Sherwin begin a poetry reading with a rippling invocation of water — each sound, each word that arose from his throat was a bead on the lip of a faucet — oh, I will never forget such a sonic reverence for earthlife.
 
Discover more about this poet here. 
Do you have requests for poems or poets you’d like to see featured in future Anonymous Grocer episodes? I’d love to hear from you!
Peace and love,
Cam

Anonymous Grocer 19/30: [Was I world? The taken.]

~ Cameron ~ Leave a comment

Hello friend! 
 
Welcome back to Anonymous Grocer, a 30-day audio adventure in backwards poetry. Each day: a new poem, a new collection of words in unfamiliar and spiraling patterns, a new audio message to ease you into your day. 
 
On this Day 19, enjoy the enchantment of Anne Carson, a poet, translator, Classicist, and perennial brainstainer whose book, Autobiography of Red, has become a forever bedside holy text for me. 
 
Discover more about this poet here. 
Do you have requests for poems or poets you’d like to see featured in future Anonymous Grocer episodes? I’d love to hear from you!
Peace and love,
Cam

Anonymous Grocer 18/30: [Outgrabe, raths mome]

~ Cameron ~ Leave a comment

Hello friend! 
 
Welcome back to Anonymous Grocer, a 30-day audio adventure in backwards poetry. Each day: a new poem, a new collection of words in unfamiliar and spiraling patterns, a new audio message to ease you into your day. 
 
Today is a backwards reading of the classic ‘nonsense’ poem by Lewis Carroll: “Jabberwocky” (1871), which was first included in Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Always for the love of weirdening things, I figured: why not add an extra dose of nonsensicalism to an already eccentric piece?
 
Discover more about this poet here. 
Do you have requests for poems or poets you’d like to see featured in future Anonymous Grocer episodes? I’d love to hear from you!
Peace and love,
Cam

Anonymous Grocer 17/30: [Apart falling still is body]

~ Cameron ~ Leave a comment

Hello friend! 
 
Welcome back to Anonymous Grocer, a 30-day audio adventure in backwards poetry. Each day: a new poem, a new collection of words in unfamiliar and spiraling patterns, a new audio message to ease you into your day. 
 
This Sunday, we celebrate Day 17 with the ever wise and ethereal Ocean Vuong, whose latest poetry collection, Time is a Mother, was recently released on April 5th. 
Discover more about this poet here.  
Do you have requests for poems or poets you’d like to see featured in future Anonymous Grocer episodes? I’d love to hear from you!
Peace and love,
Cam

Anonymous Grocer 16/30: [Things of family, the in place]

~ Cameron ~ Leave a comment

Hello friend! 
 
Welcome back to Anonymous Grocer, a 30-day audio adventure in backwards poetry. Each day: a new poem, a new collection of words in unfamiliar and spiraling patterns, a new audio message to ease you into your day. 
 
Today’s episode gives space to the soul and spirit of Mary Oliver‘s “Wild Geese,” a poem that is sage, balm, bandage, courage, hug, friend — all at once. If there’s a poem out there that could save lives, this one is probably it. 
 
Discover more about this poet here.
Do you have requests for poems or poets you’d like to see featured in future Anonymous Grocer episodes? I’d love to hear from you!
Peace and love,
Cam

Anonymous Grocer 15/30: [Looked I. Stopped I.]

~ Cameron ~ Leave a comment

Hello friend! 
 
Welcome back to Anonymous Grocer, a 30-day audio adventure in backwards poetry. Each day: a new poem, a new collection of words in unfamiliar and spiraling patterns, a new audio message to ease you into your day. 
 
Can you believe it? We’re already halfway through Poetry Month! I hope you’re enjoying our time together! Today, I present you with the research scientist-poet, Angelo Mao, whose poetry dissects the ethics of mouse labs, mythologizes the human/mouse divide, and interrogates these funded relationships of hierarchy, violence, guilt, and embodied metaphors.
 
Discover more about this poet here.  
Do you have requests for poems or poets you’d like to see featured in future Anonymous Grocer episodes? I’d love to hear from you!
Peace and love,
Cam

Anonymous Grocer 14/30: [treees / manie so gathred]

~ Cameron ~ Leave a comment

Hello friend! 
 
Welcome back to Anonymous Grocer, a 30-day audio adventure in backwards poetry. Each day: a new poem, a new collection of words in unfamiliar and spiraling patterns, a new audio message to ease you into your day. 
 
Today’s poem is an excerpt from Jos Charles’ book of poetic reckoning, feeld. feeld is modern poetry unlike anything I’ve read recently, as much about the sound of words as it is about spelling and the mechanics of written language, all those fraught and confounding glyphs that make up our lives and our perceptions. feeld is queer and linguistic and investigative and difficult in ways that invoke self-inquiries of readers themselves. What does it mean to hold a word in a palm or the mouth? To slash a line? How does it feel to manipulate a strand of words and create a language that is yours, yours for a time?
 
Discover more about this poet here. 
Do you have requests for poems or poets you’d like to see featured in future Anonymous Grocer episodes? I’d love to hear from you!
Peace and love,
Cam

Anonymous Grocer 13/30: [Them & They as to referred be]

~ Cameron ~ Leave a comment

Hello friend! 
 
Welcome back to Anonymous Grocer, a 30-day audio adventure in backwards poetry. Each day: a new poem, a new collection of words in unfamiliar and spiraling patterns, a new audio message to ease you into your day. 
 
Today, lucky number 13, we celebrate with a poem from the inimitable Terrance Hayes‘ series of “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.”
 
Discover more about this poet here.
Need a quick cheat sheet on the ingredients of a sonnet? I’ve got you! 
Do you have requests for poems or poets you’d like to see featured in future Anonymous Grocer episodes? I’d love to hear from you!
Peace and love,
Cam

Anonymous Grocer 12/30: [It hear—you can closer come!]

~ Cameron ~ Leave a comment

Hello friend! 
 
Welcome back to Anonymous Grocer, a 30-day audio adventure in backwards poetry. Each day: a new poem, a new collection of words in unfamiliar and spiraling patterns, a new audio message to ease you into your day. 
 
This week (this life?), I’ve been having a love affair with trees. I am so grateful for authors like Sumana Roy and Richard Powers and Robin Wall Kimmerer, who alchemize trees into unforgettable, breathful characters with personalities and narratives and lineages all their own. These trees they profile are not anthropomorphized cartoons, but beings wholly greening unto themselves. These are almighty beings with majestic and complex communication systems, with that highly enviable process of photosynthesis. Beings that seem to embody — epitomize — what it means to live a good, long life. 
 
So, in honor of trees and the trees we shall one day become, I bring you Octavio Paz‘s “A Tree Within.”  
 
Discover more about this poet here. 
Do you have requests for poems or poets you’d like to see featured in future Anonymous Grocer episodes? I’d love to hear from you!
Peace and love,
Cam