Ren Powell, Poet | Playwright | Teaching Artist

This Choice is Who You Are has been my mantra these past years: a mantra for becoming the person I want to be. I believe that choosing to live with the attention that poetry demands is a good start.

In the podcasts, I look to other artists to learn from their experiences.

I ask poets how their work with poetry influences the choices they make in their daily lives, and how these, in turn, affect their sense of self and their relationships.

How are they using the experience of art to shape The Good Life for themselves?

As the title suggests, Tim Mayo’s carefully structured book deals with the multiple forms of separation: separation from the past, from a sense of family, a sense of belonging and ultimately from the self. His poems capture the sense of alienation many of us feel in this contemporary world where we want (as the poet does in “The Yellow Afternoon”):“the inexplicable to be/explained and the eggshell of answers/to close over the yoke of our questions.” Full of surprising phrases and metaphors (“Trapezing,” “Darning Needle,” “Self-Storage”) the poems ring with important truths such as: “you must accept the perennial fly/its karmic place in your ointment,” and “what do we know about the world/except what we know about ourselves.” These poems are extraordinary and generous gifts.  

—Patricia Fargnoli, former New Hampshire Poet Laureate, author of Winter and Then, Something

Poems read or referred to in the podcast:

“The Body grows without-” by Emily Dickinson
“Upon Julie’s Clothes” by Robert Herrick
“The Remedy”, “Crow”, “Puppet Therapy” and “Shelter” from Tim Mayo’s new book Thesaurus of Separation

Original music and artwork by Karl R. Powell.

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