S03:E04 | Divinations IV with Sandra Yannone: Shells, Learning to Listen, & the Lyric You

Welcome back to our fourth episode of the Divinations miniseries, featuring an ongoing conversation in poems with poet Sandra Yannone.

In this episode, Sandy's shares her "Ecdysis Sonnet," inspired by my poem from Episode 3: Lakes, Cosmic Convergence, & the Scientific Sublime, as well as by the Little Oracles lexical fragment "shell," which you can view as part of the original Little Oracles multimedia digital installation, back on view at www.littleoracles.com/exhibit.

We talk about giving ourselves permission to stretch poetic forms, liminality and belonging, human statues, and more. Plus, I share an excerpt from my response poem to Sandy's featured reading. Enjoy, and as always, take care, keep creating, and stay divine!

Resources

• Divinations I | Welcome to the Miniseries
• Divinations II | Twine, Maps, & the Meta-Meta (feat. Sandy's poem, "The Stars on the Snake River")
• Divinations III | Lakes, Cosmic Convergence, & the Scientific Sublime (feat. Allison's poem, "Hereafter")
• The Little Oracles multimedia digital installation | shell, Sandy's chosen lexical fractal
• Sandy's links | Website: www.sandrayannone.com; Boats for Women on Abe Books
• Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry | Facebook and YouTube
• References | Segues: A Correspondence in Poetry by William Stafford and Marvin Bell on Abe Books, which includes "Wherever You Are" by Marvin Bell and "Testing, Testing, Not Being Lost" by William Stafford (as read by Sandy in this episode)

IG: @littleoracles

Transcript

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[Intro music]

Allison Arth: Hi everybody, and welcome to the Little Oracles podcast, an oracle for the everyday creative. I’m Allison Arth. I wanna welcome everybody back to our fourth episode of the Divinations miniseries here on the Little Oracles podcast. It's a very special poetical, epistolary exchange between poet Sandra Yannone and myself, and if you want a little background on the whole project, I highly recommend listening to Episode One of this miniseries, which I'll link in the show notes: we talk about the ins and outs of the project itself, the creative constraints we're giving ourselves within the context of the project, some of the history behind poetry exchanges that inspired us to do this; it's just a lovely little episode to get you acquainted with us and with what we're doing here in the series. But before we dive into today's episode and today's poem, Sandy: hello. Happy to see you again. [chuckles]

Sandra Yannone: Hello, Allison. There's nothing that brings me greater joy than to say hello to you.

AA: [laughs]

SLY: You know how much I love to say hello to you. [chuckles]

AA: Yeah! [laughs]

SLY: And I want to also just say thank you. I'm so excited for this episode and I'm enjoying the conversations immensely. It has truly amplified the desire to say hello.

AA: Same, yes. I would totally agree with that. It's also amplified my desire to write things. It's been so exciting to just have this reason to write, and it's kind of blossoming in so many different ways, you know, creative ways. So it’s been a– it's been a real– a real boon and a real gift. So thank you. Sandy is going to read us a poem today — I read my poem “Hereafter” in the last episode — and so Sandy is going to share her response, and then we're going to unpack it a little bit. Uh, so Sandy, is there anything you want to share about this poem to set us up before you read?

SLY: Well, when I heard “Hereafter,” I was instantly, I mean, it was almost like a lightning strike, and– and I believe I was struck by lightning in the last episode, and now I'm struck by lightning again in this episode. This is– to be struck twice; oh boy! That's– very few people survive that. [laughs]

AA: [laughs] That's true!

SLY: So, you know, here we go. [laughs] So I was– I was immediately struck by a phrase in the poem, and that drove this poem significantly, and I also used the oracle, the fractal, of “shell.”

Ecdysis Sonnet
To chance a change of coastlines, you smuggle
every memory of both into corrugated boxes
that you suture with packing tape. They huddle
together over every terrain you cross. You are a fox

driving cross-country pretending you belong,
sly, wherever you stop. When you arrive at the coast
you traded up for, the sun is forever longing
to be your every meal, breakfast’s burnt toast,

lunch, and dinner. You are the sun’s constant snack.
You watch a woman on an overturned surfboard stare
for hours over the sand then sea, contemplating the backs
of waves from her grainy perch. She cares

only that the sun stays out late. She never
turns her head to look at you. She will never
dare to chance a change of coastlines. Never ever.

AA: I– I love this poem for so many reasons. Honestly, I think there is so much packed into this really tight little form that you're– that you're choosing, the sonnet. The first thing, though, that strikes me that I want to discuss first, and it– and it humbles me, really, and that is: you borrowed one of my lines, one of my phrases, from “Hereafter,” “to chance a change of coastline.” And you led with that in this poem. So there's this borrowing and this lifting from another poet's work, and I did that with “Hereafter” also  — I borrowed from Ada Limón in a way, or I– I was inspired by Ada Limón's work — and then you, you actually lifted those lines, which is super common for poets to do. But is that a traditional part of your practice? Is that something that you do a lot, like that modeling and that borrowing and lifting? And how does that– how does that work for you? And why– why did you do that?

SLY: I think there's two reasons, which means there might be five, but let's just, let's just focus on two. [chuckles]

AA: [laughs] Let's pretend there are two.

SLY: [chuckles] Let's pretend there are two. I mean, one is for me, the obvious, which is, the conversation in poetry lends itself to that.

AA: Mm; mm-hmm.

SLY: Like, I've been given permission to borrow a line that you've cast. I mean, you don't know which line I will hook on to, but that's what we're going for, is that there's something in what you've written previously; you're casting the whole poem forward and inviting me to find something, and this happened really quickly this time. The second reason also is that, in the larger scheme of things, I think we're always in conversation with all the poets that have come before, and– whether we realize it or not. And the– the older I've gotten, and hopefully there's some element of wiser, I've leaned more into allowing myself to be in conversation rather than thinking I have to be the rogue lone wolf out there.

AA: Yeah.

SLY: And I will tell you just a really quick anecdote. When I was in college, I had to defend my thesis. It was an honors thesis and it was a manuscript of poetry. So I have my committee of my beloved professors. And, you know, I'm anxious; this is going to seal whether I get honors or not and all that academic jazz.

AA: Yeah. 

SLY: And my professor, David Vogler, who was a government professor, not– not an English professor — and– and they wanted you to have someone that was not in your discipline also on the– in the constellation, and I was almost a double major in American Government and Poetry, well, in Creative Writing, at Wheaton. So I invited David Vogler, and he asked me the question that I would have expected to come from the English professor. And he– he asked, “Who has most inspired you as you've been writing this work?” And I am a fool; I'm a fool at 21.

AA: [laughs]

SLY: And it's okay, 21-year-olds, any of you 21-year-olds out there listening; you're fine. You're exactly where you're supposed to be. It's different wisdoms. It's okay.

AA: We talked about containing multitudes last episode. Everyone contains multitudes. [chuckles]

SLY: [chuckles] There it is; there it is. More power to all of us, yes!

AA: [chuckles] Yeah.

SLY: The other critical element here is I was horribly, horribly, horribly under-read. I did not read a lot of poetry. There were not a lot of poets that were these, like, anchors that, like, really grounded me. I just did not know how to listen well. And my 21-year-old, most arrogant answer was that I was inspired by myself.

AA: Oh! Not a good look. [laughs]

SLY: [laughs] Not a good– not a good answer.

AA: Wow!

SLY: But I– I was sincere. Like, an answer that I had no business giving, I thought was brilliant.

AA: [laughs]

SLY: I thought I was, like, subverting everything by saying that answer. So how is this an answer to the question? [laughs] I don't know.

AA: [laughs] Well, so I think this is a– this is a door, or maybe it's a window that we're going to have to, like, boost ourselves through [laughs]; crawl through. [chuckles] But you've said two things that I really like. One of them is this idea of listening, right? You talk about how you didn't really know how to listen back then. And then you also referenced this multidisciplinary crew of people who were, effectively, evaluating you. And that is so important to– to recognize as creators, right? We can be inspired across disciplines and across genres. So something that comes to mind for me is that, you know, a writer can inspire a writer, and that's what we're talking about here: you know, Ada Limón inspires me; you know, a line that I wrote inspired your poem, the “Ecdysis Sonnet.” But that can be, kind of, exploded in a way, and you can go to other genres.

SLY: Yes.

AA: There's this novel by the Danish writer Olga Ravn, and it's called The Employees,  and it's the series of vignettes that are inspired by the sculpture and installation work of Lea Gulditte Hestelund. So you can find so many places to inspire the work that you're doing that don't necessarily have to be super direct. And I like that you're intimating that there are these conversation points that don't always have to be that one way or linear.

SLY: Yeah, we don't have to– and we don't have to keep them secret.

AA: Yeah.

SLY: I can be unabashedly smarter this time around and say, “Allison Arth inspired that poem,” and now I'm honoring the culture of poetry.

AA: Yeah!

SLY: I'm honoring the voices that I really did hear, because we do not live in vacuums. And I never did, but I always thought I did. You know, I was imprinted by reading Sylvia Plath, reading Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks. I mean, I can name poets, but I didn't– I didn't know how to read poetry. I still don't.

AA: Yeah.

SLY: I'm always learning, and I say that with great humility. I really mean it. There's so much to learn as I learn, and it's exciting.

AA: Yeah. Well, and I love that you're saying that it's this process, right? Because this poem is called “Ecdysis Sonnet” — and we're going to talk a little bit about both sides of that title there — but this word “ecdysis,” the process of shedding and of transition that, you know, a snake goes through, for example, or some kind of bug, you know, it's the shedding of a skin or an exoskeleton, and you're talking about this being this process and this ongoing moment of learning. And we're seeing that at work in this poem, too. We're seeing the transition from one coastline to another, right? We're seeing that transition that this person is going through. And something that I really– I find so fascinating about this poem is this, like, push–pull, this tension that you're creating with these ideas of belonging as this process is being undertaken. So you talk about the “you" of this poem; the subject of this poem is pretending to belong at the beginning of the piece, and then this “you” encounters a person who's just sitting on a surfboard, someone who will never chance that change of coastlines, someone who is rooted, someone who does belong, and that person never looks back at the “you” of the poem. So there's this constant, like, tension of: do I belong? Should I sit here? Where am I going to find my spot? I mean, was that– was that your intention to create that tension within the poem, of that belonging, and of that attempt to move through this process in a way that is more rooted as the word belonging implies?

SLY: Such a great question. And I know we always say this on this podcast– [chuckles]

AA: [laughs]

SLY: –but they really are such insightful questions, and they– they are also demonstrations of how we are practicing reading poems together.

AA: Yeah; you’re right!

SLY: So I love– I love the question. The idea of belonging– I guess I'll give a little more background, because I think that will create the context for my answer.

AA: Sure, yeah.

SLY: Which is: this speaker– I know it's so important to not immediately go to the autobiographical fallacy that the speaker is the poet. But what's important– I think what's important for folks to know, and possibly why the gravitational pull to this poem was so strong when I saw that line, “to chance a change of coastlines,” you know, before we started this project, I literally had decided to chance a change of coastlines. And it was literal coast to coast. These coasts are so important to me; they've been important in my writing. But I– I really like edges. So I'm writing this poem, and I decided from the get-go that I was gonna do it as a sonnet; I decided that was gonna be the first line. When I write a sonnet, the rhymes drive the narrative, initially.

AA: Mm-hmm.

SLY: And I also knew that I was chancing to change from one coast to the other, but we had had this epic drive across country.

AA: Yeah.

SLY: Where we were there for one night and we were trying to fit in with people we were trying to see, could we feel comfortable in this space in that space; in this location; in that location? So we really were trying to belong in very ephemeral spaces.

AA: Yeah, the liminality of the road, right?

SLY: The liminality of the road. And so that's where I landed with that particular idea. That's– that's the genesis of that idea.

AA: Mm-hmm.

SLY: But it wasn't fully formed in my head as I entered writing the draft. I just– I knew that “to chance a change of coastlines,” in addition to being– it's probably some kind of pentameter line; it's– it's– it's a beautiful, beautiful– for me, it's three quarters of the line, and what I add to it, because I didn't write that part, is garbage. [laughs]

AA: [laughs]

SLY: [laughs] I add garbage on to the end of it. If you want to cut that part out you can.

AA: [laughs]

SLY: But whatever; I don't– I don't care. I– I mean, I do believe it; look at the sound on that! Like, I mean, that's such a beautiful line; it's got all those hard Cs. It's– it has everything; sonically, it's there and I mess it up.

AA: Well, okay, so you're saying you mess it up, right? You're saying you add garbage to this. But again, I think that gets at this idea of tension that you have running throughout this entire poem.

SLY: Mm.

AA: You're talking about the tension between belonging and not belonging. You're talking about edges, the tension between coastlines. You're talking about the interpersonal tension that you feel when you are in this ephemeral place.

SLY: Mm.

AA: So you're taking, like you said, this pentameter line, this lilting line — “to chance a change of coastlines” — and you're adding something that's a little bit gritty.

SLY: Yeah!

AA: This word “smuggle.”

SLY: “Smuggle,” right! “Smuggle.”

AA: It's kind of sinister in the context of that line, right?

SLY: It is; yeah; yeah.

AA: But also, the other thing that I think is so interesting, because you referenced this idea of the autobiographical fallacy — that mistrust that so many people have of the lyric poem, where it becomes the “I” in the poem is– is obviously the person who's writing it, which is never– it's sometimes true, but it's not always true — but you chose instead to use a “you,” which I think is so fascinating. So there's this tension I feel as the reader because you're implicating me. And I, in my logical brain, I'm like, “Okay, well, this is a stand in for an ‘I.’” But again, If I know it's a stand in for an “I,” based on the story that you've told to kind of contextualize what's happening in your mind as you're writing this poem, you're creating a tension there, too. So I know that you're not necessarily feeling like you belong because you're writing a “you” instead of an “I,”  and you're creating that tension for me because you're implicating me in that sense of un-belonging and that sense of adriftness. And I just– I'm just so curious, like, where did the “you” come from? Why is it a “you”?

SLY: It's interesting because I think the last few poems that I've been writing, I have resisted the “I” and I've gone to “you.”

AA: Oh!

SLY: Now, I think there's a couple reasons, and one takes us back to William Stafford and Marvin Bell, the Segues book that is, in part, inspiration for our project here. Stafford and Bell did that a lot in their poems as they were casting them to one another, and I have a feeling that that might be doing its work–

AA: Yeah.

SLY: –in a– in a subconscious way. I'm pulling in what I remember, how they were writing their poems to be in conversation with each other.

AA: Yeah.

SLY: And I– I loved that when I read it. And so I feel as if that “you” is an echo chamber of what I witnessed and experienced Bell and Stafford doing in their poems. And it reminded me of your poem last time, “Hereafter,” that Marvin Bell has a poem called “Wherever You Are,” and he pulls that title from the first line of the previous poem of Stafford's, called “Testing, Testing, Not Being Lost.”

AA: Oh, wow.

SLY: So I'll share these two poems with you, so you see just the mini-glimpse of their throughline, and how Stafford used the “you.” So this is “Testing, Testing, Not Being Lost.”
Wherever you are, you hear it. A hum other sounds can't quell, A thread you can follow the way a bloodhound follows a trail, Never lost, because what was there is there.  Sometimes you wander for days, Try to hear louder that silence that waits behind other voices, But always there's something like snow whispering The gypsy message into your ear. And you're off, questing again, hearing too well to be lost. There is a place in the world you own by failing to own where you are that you always know you can find any time. 

And now here is Marvin Bell's response to that poem, “Wherever You Are.”

One
A thin silver whistle, and the dog can hear it. But it's late for Prince and the puppy that got loose. Prince had a bed behind the store and a friend at the butcher. Got himself hit by a car in the stomach and came within a gloved hand of the end, but faced up to the chloroform with a dogged friendliness that signaled health and sapped him for another week. He was my father's and knew things, the way a dog's ears will stand up. That's the way Prince caught on and stood up.

Two
He had this thought and that thought, I'm sure of it. Another dog was a summer many years later, and I could ask him to find my son in the woods. Dogs who saved whole families in fires, who walked home for hundreds of miles, who died within a week or two of their owners. They could hear the place where their absence reshaped the air, that grave sound. I have heard a few things before they were said. It's nothing like the giraffe who says nothing. Or the dolphin who hears it all. It's an open ear, ready for the slightest squeeze of air. A cough of vocal muscles tensing. A rubbing in the throat, the muscular. It's the mutt in me, that's all. To be man's best friend. Might be to listen so well, it needn't be said, to hear up high, to know the thing that isn't yet. Then what must it mean to be death's best friend.

AA: Oh, conversational poetry at its best. [laughs]

SLY: At its best! And what's– it's kind of eerie; I am shocked by how much, when I'm reading that, it's speaking to “Ecdysis Sonnet.”

AA: Yeah, like you said, the “you,” the implication there.

SLY: Yeah. So it's– it's not only an echo chamber back to your poem, it's an echo chamber back to Stafford's poem, and I didn't even know it. And this is what I'm talking about at the beginning of the episode.

AA: Yeah.

SLY: We are always influenced by things we can't remember. It's eerie, and it's beautiful.

AA: Right; well, and there's– I think that is so important to note that, that there is so much that you can mine that isn't just– it doesn't just have to be new. Like you were saying, you wanted to be the rogue who had to be original all the time; like, you don't have to do that as a writer. You don't have to do that as a creator. Being in conversation and in correspondence and in some kind of correlative relationship with other creators is, I think, the most vital mode in which to be a creator, because you just have so much more to build on. It's such a human and humane act to create that conversation.

SLY: That's such a beautiful way of putting that, because, honestly, you know, now I look back and I think I put myself in my own isolation chamber.

AA: Yeah, yeah.

SLY: And there's reasons I would have back then, and I'm having that revelation with all of you right now; there was a reason I put myself in that isolation chamber, and now, there is nothing more delicious than to call in the elders, and to honor them, and to be in conversation with them to keep that lineage going. I don't want to be alone in my poems.

AA: No, I mean, I don't want to be alone as a human, as a creator, as a maker in anything. So why not bring that into our work, right? You know, you referenced something that– that I wanted to definitely discuss about this poem: it's called a sonnet, and this is a 15-line sonnet, and sonnets are traditionally 14 lines. So I would be tempted to call this 15-line sonnet the breaking of the sonnet form, but I don't know if that's necessarily what's going on here; I'm thinking it's possibly an addition to, and an expansion of, the poetic form. So I'm just curious, like, what draws you to change the sonnet in that way, and why did this poem express itself in 15 lines?

SLY: As usual, there's multiple answers to this question or multiple parts. [chuckles]

AA: [laughs] I'd expect nothing less!

SLY: So as I was saying, the rhyme scheme ends up always driving the poem even if I've got a narrative that I'm working on, and by the time I'm getting to the end of the poem, by the end of a sonnet, I usually can close it in 14 — although, like, I have another sonnet in Boats for Women, called “Occupy Sonnet,” that's 13 lines. And American contemporary poets are actually notorious for breaking traditional forms. The truth of this draft is that I could not tell the story of the woman on the surfboard; I ran out of lines. And so I gave myself the gift of the 15th line, but it allowed me to do what I wanted the poem to do. Otherwise, I would literally, in 14 lines, have been selling the poem short.

AA: Mm. You know, you referenced “masterclass” in our last episode, and I feel like this is a masterclass in, kind of, taking the reins, as it were, as the poet, and– and being able to say, “Yes, I can change a form. I can start with a form and I can experiment within that, and if it's not serving the narrative; if it's not serving the sound; if it's not serving what I want this poem to ultimately be, I can change that. I can give myself that permission to do that.”

SLY: And let's go back to the masterclass that was your masterful poem of last episode, “Hereafter.” “Hereafter” was a prose poem.

AA: Mm-hmm.

SLY: We talked at length about the sonic quality of that poem. You can sometimes look at your internal rhymes in a poem and you can find a sonnet.

AA: Oh!

SLY: And I try to bring in the mentors when I can; my mentor Bill Knott directed me toward that in my own work at times, and said, “if you re-break the lines a certain way, you might have a sonnet.”

AA: Yeah, this approach to revision that can create a new experience for you as the writer — something that you can pull out and find that wasn't your original idea, or the original thing that you thought it was going to be. I love thinking about it that way, as finding possibilities within the work that you're writing. You know, this series is, we're sharing work in progress. We're not sharing finished pieces necessarily. We're sharing things with each other and with all of you that could change dramatically before they ever see the light of day, so to speak.

SLY: Yeah, thank you for punctuating that point, that these are works in progress. The lifespan of these poems when we're sharing them with you, and the world: about a week. That's for real, listeners; a week.

AA: Yeah.

SLY: And what I still want to say about that, and want to come back to your idea of permission, was: what is important is being in service to your poem. You don't have to be in service to the form. You can be, and that can create some amazing, amazing leaps.

AA: Mm-hmm.

SLY: This 15-line sonnet owes much of it to the leaps that a sonnet provides. But when I got to the end, I wasn't gonna be served by trying to cram it into 14 lines. At this point, at this stage; I couldn't get it there. And I said, “Okay, but now, here's where I need to be in service to the poem that's emerging; let's let it go 15. And that's where I can take it this time.”

AA: Right, right. Well, and what you're referencing here, I think, is serving the poem in terms of its narrative; serving the story that you're telling within the context of the poem. You know, you want to be able to tell the whole story that you have in your mind within this poem, and to cut it short, to cut it off, just to serve a form: it's not going to tell the story that you want it to tell. And one of the things that I– that I also wanted to touch on here is the way that this poem finishes out. We've talked about that it's 15 lines. We've talked about that you're kind of expanding on this sonnet form. But something that you're doing at the very end that I don't necessarily see throughout the the whole poem is this like driving insistence at the very end with this word “never,” and the internal word inside “never,” which is “ever.” So we end the poem on this line, “never, ever.” And the last three lines each end with a “never,” right? And I'm just so curious how, or why, you decided to turn the poem, at the very end, from this poem that feels a little bit unmoored, and it feels a little bit adrift and searching, into something that is just so sure?

SLY: I love your word “insistence,” and the word “searching.” I'm a little fascinated how the other woman shows up.

AA: I know!

SLY: How she shows up is that I am literally writing the draft of this poem on the beach. And I look over and this woman is– is doing exactly what I'm saying she's doing: she is staring out like and she never breaks her stare with the ocean like something intense is going on there, and then she started to do her work on me and then she ends up in the poem. And it was that sense of that searching that drove that “never, never, never”; like, she was not going to flinch at anything. She was like a statue, and then she was gone.

AA: I feel like a statue is kind of the ultimate manifestation of belonging, right? [laughs]

SLY: [laughs] Yeah!

AA: You're not going anywhere. [laughs]

SLY: [laughs] You're not going anywhere. You're– yeah, you're concrete at that point. [chuckles]

AA: I like the finality that you're bringing to this poem, even within that uncertainty. It's kind of like we were talking about last time: the certainty of uncertainty.

SLY: Absolutely, yes.

AA: And that there are ways that you can create within the narrative of a poem that turn at the end, and it doesn't have to be on a word like “if,” which we discussed last time; it can be on this image of something, and this thing that you're witnessing in the real world, as a foil to everything that's come before in the narrative of the poem. And I just– I– I truly love how she shows up, and how she kind of takes over everything that's happening in this poem, which feels very expansive at its beginning — you're talking about travel cross-country; you're talking about all of these different places that you've been — and even though there is a liminality there, and an implied ephemerality, like you said earlier, this is a very concrete moment, and she's not moving, and she is in the midst of belonging, even if she is searching and uncertain about what's coming next.

SLY: Yeah, she belongs there. She is telling me she belongs there, in that moment.

AA: Mm-hmm.

SLY: And that was what was driving– I– again, I can't say enough how much I love that word, that “insistence,” on the “never, never; never, ever.” Some spirit gifted me that for this poem.

AA: It, uh, manifested. [chuckles]

SLY: [chuckles] It manifested. It's all, as Richard Hugo would say, “a happy accident.”

AA: It is a happy accident. I find those a lot in the work that I do. [laughs] So as we like to do here on our Divinations miniseries, we would like to tease next week's poem, which is my response to the “Ecdysis Sonnet.” We talked a little bit about possibility and those kinds of things today, and this poem is, uh, in part inspired by that. So I'm just going to share a little bit of an excerpt; it is currently titled “Articles of Incorporation,” and here are just a couple of lines.

… Turns out
it’s okay to sell yourself for profit, so long as it's mystic:
an economics of transubstantiation.

SLY: Mm.

AA: There we go. [laughs] Sandy, I'm having such a great time here in this series with you; thank you so much for collaborating with me. Before we go, is there anything you want to tell us that's coming up for you and, you know, where can we find you online?

SLY: I've become so fond of this question, Allison.

AA: [laughs]

SLY: I'm continuing to belong, uh, in Cultivating Voices Live Poetry on Sundays. Um, if you can join us live on Zoom, or also watch our recordings, and there's information on our Facebook page and also on my own website, www.sandrayannone.com.

AA: Wonderful. I love Cultivating Voices; if y'all haven't checked it out, it is a tremendous program that builds such a beautiful community of poetry. I hope you can all show up for that. You can follow Little Oracles on Instagram (at0 littleoracles. Check us out on the blog at little oracles dot com; you can find all the poems that Sandy and I are sharing there, and you can also find all of the lexical fractals, the original Little Oracles digital installation in its entirety at little oracles dot com slash exhibit, so you can go ahead and check that out and maybe use it for your own poetry project. We'll see you in our next Divinations episode, and until then: as always, take care, keep creating, and stay divine.

[Outro music]
[Secret outtake]

SLY: … to chance a change of coastlines–

AA: Which, let me be perfectly plain: I wrote that about you. [laughs]

SLY: [laughs] And when I read it, I was like, “That's me.” [chuckles]

AA: Well, you got it; you got it in one. 

SLY: [laughs] Okay. I got it; I got it. 

AA: [laughs]