David Naimon
speaker
4,074 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 24 Aug
David Naimon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
The ways you both write into and in and also in a sense work against absence, but also at the same time enact and reproduce absence.
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Because I feel like this is true in your work.
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For instance, you have in in some poems.
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The bracketing of white space, which reminds me of Anne Carson's translations of Sappho, where she brackets what we don't have of those poems.
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Brack.
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So it's not like she just presents the fragments of Sappho.
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She makes us very like visibly aware of what can't be retrieved, or the black redactions in the poem, the one color, the outer.
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Afghan flag has that the Kurdish flag doesn't is black.
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So sometimes we're invited into the silence, into the silence that you're experiencing.
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But other times I think you're employing silence in a different way, where you are within and we are without.
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And it makes me think about how Paul Solon was disturbed by the way the German public metabolized and celebrated his Holocaust poem, Death Fugue.
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a poem that was massively successful.
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It entered the the German pedagogy.
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It was in textbooks and schools and it was taught in this super widespread way.
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And he ultimately felt so disturbed by this, what he saw as an aestheticization of trauma, where the poem had become a sort of lyrical commodity of the unspeakable.
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And where it became in his mind a way to ease national guilt rather than to confront national guilt, that he not only refused to recite it or have it in future collections, he re-evaluates his entire poetics, a poetics that becomes more spare and fragmented, and maybe we could say pebble-like.
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And he ultimately argues that poetry.
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must maintain an essential hostility to art, that it should be artless, art free, producing a grayer language, a grayer language coming from a wounded mouth,
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And I think of this when I think of a recent reading you did of a poem for the Poem a Day podcast, where after the poem, you're supposed to speak about the poem, but instead you say, after you read the poem, you say this quote.
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about this poem.
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Showing 201–220 of 4,074 · page 11 of 204
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