Wednesday, June 26 - Poet Andrew Allport

Tonight at 8 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM:  ANDREW ALLPORT.  My guest this week is a young poet whose debut collection won the 2011 New Issues Poetry Prize, a very big deal from Western Michigan University Press and judge poet David Wojahn.  Andrew Allport’s the body / of space / in the shape of the human is a smart, sharp accounting of absence and loss, but always reckoning on possibility and a sometimes ironic but urgent call to attentiveness and creation:  “What today is killed on the page still survives in the world where no one reads.”  In a poem set at a local Buddhist meditation retreat, Allport makes a Zen funny while also calling out the artist and the reader, and perhaps a society chockfull of the virtual, and its endless absence.  Beginning as an elegy for a lost father and ending in the rich environs of the natural and man-made natural world of the Romantics, Allport introduces history and philosophy and humor to show us fullness and absence together.  Andrew Allport holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California.  His reviews, poems, and essays appear or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of an earlier chapbook, The Ice Ship & Other Vessels and he teaches at USC.  Thanks for listening, for purchasing books by guests of this show, and for supporting your, our community-sponsored alternative radio.