Back in America

Listen again: Divers from the EPIX/ BBC Docuseries “Enslaved”: Diving on Shipwrecked Slave Ships

This episode was originally published on December 17, 2020 In this episode, I interview three crew members of the EPIX / BBC docuseries Enslaved: The Lost History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. While 2020 has been a year of intense examination of…

SETI – Dr. Seth Shostak – Searching for E.T.

Back in America is a podcast exploring America’s culture, values, and identity. This conversation was recorded live on September 17. You can watch the unedited version on our Youtube channel.  Listen to this episode to learn more about the release o…

Poetism Part 7: Can you describe it all? Scott Stevens on the Cocteau Twins & Brigit Pegeen Kelly

If the particular cannot be repeated, it remains forever lost; and this is why there can be no final closure to mourning. There can only be, alongside of mourning,​ learning to love new particulars ––Louise Fradenburg   In this week’s installment of …

Poetism Part 6: Can you experience? Michael Leon Thomas on Whitehead and Pharoah Sanders

The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was…

Poetism Part 5: Can you speak for others? Lorenzo Bartolucci on Seamus Heaney and Hozier

Across Northern Europe, so-called “bog people” have often been discovered shuffling around in the peat. While no one is quite certain where these quasi-mummified bodies come from––some date as recently as the 1940s––they have posed a strange mystery …

Poetism 4: Can you break a word? Gabriel Ellis on SOPHIE and Jos Charles

Elegy Who would I show it to In this short one-line poem, W.S. Merwin condenses the anguish of loss, of being alive, and of the limitations of languages into a neat little package. Why write in the absence of finality? And what happens when mortalit…

Poetism 3: Can You Feel It? Johnnie Hobbs on D’Angelo and Amiri Baraka

She listen to a little of that D’Angelo music, some love’s melody, sophisticated-type rap, which she say sounds more like real music, like intelligent music, than some of that other music, then she cuts the radio off ––Gayl Jones, The Healing   Like…

Poetism Part 2: Are we numb yet? Lisa Robertson and the Airborne Toxic Event with Mitch Therieau

  Why are we so blind, why do we see so little, when there is much around us to see?   So asks philosopher Alva Noë in Strange Tools, an exploration of how art objects contain, persuade, envelop, and direct our attention. What happens when we love a…

Poetism Part 1: Patrick Rosal and The Doors with Fang Liu

  Happy July! While Stan and the usual Back in America podcast are on a hiatus this summer, Podcast Editor Josh Wagner will be hosting a new series entitled Poetism, tracing the foundations of and influences behind American poetry and music. Each we…

Doug Steinel: Cancel Culture in Classroom

Before we dive into today’s episode, a personal note: This summer, I will be going back to France for the first time in two years, and I will take a break from podcasting until September.    However, my interns Josh and Emma will be keeping the light…