How do you create a project that at the same time reaches toward grief and toward joy? What does it ask of our creative practice? What does it take, practically speaking, to make it feel cohesive? In this special episode of Emerging Form, the co-hosts talk about Rosemerry’s new book, All the Honey, which releases April 18 from Samara Press. They talk about how to select poems for a collection and how to order them. They talk about the somewhat mysterious arrival of the title and how some of the poems were written, including a romp of a poem about a time when our audio engineer Leah asked Rosemerry to make a laugh track after an audio mishap. It’s a tender and funny episode about completing a book that touches on devastation and elation and all points in between. “At first I didn’t think both kinds of poems could inhabit the same pages,” Rosemerry says, “and then I realized, ‘Of course, they can. Because that is what we as humans are asked to do—to inhabit worlds of great joy and great despair at the same time.’”
“All the Honey is an outpouring of love from a poet who understands: the world that breaks our heart is the same world that knits it together.”
—Phyllis Cole-Dai, co-editor, Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems
“I need a chair that will make me not want want to get up and do whatever important thing I think I must do. Why is it so hard to just sit?” —Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Episode 85: Rosemerry Explores the Full Spectrum