Asa Drake: Deep Breath, Long Lines

Asa Drake introduces poems that illustrate the long line’s possibilities for creating meaning and connection. She shares Saretta Morgan demonstrating silence and expansiveness (“Dominant orientation lights a corridor wide as Mexico's northern border”), Jennifer Chang exploring distance between speaker and listener (“Dialogues (Against Literature)”), and Solmaz Sharif delving into precision via unrelenting grammar (“Look”). Drake closes by inviting the listener to sit with her in unease with her poem “I’m not here to speak until you feel clarity.”

Watch the full recordings of Morgan, Chang, and Sharif reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:

Saretta Morgan (March 28, 2024)
Jennifer Chang (September 4, 2025)
Solmaz Sharif (September 1, 2016)

Full transcripts of every episode are available on Buzzsprout. Look for the transcript tab under each episode.

Voca is now fully captioned, with interactive transcripts and captions available for all readings! Read more about the project here, or try out this new feature by visiting Voca.

Transcript

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JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON: 0:02

Welcome back to our new season of Poetry Centered, where we invite a poet to guide us through Voca, an online archive of recorded poetry from the University of Arizona Poetry Center. The Voca archive is home to more than 1,000 recordings of poets, and in each episode of this podcast, you'll get a curated introduction to three recordings chosen by our guest host. I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson, the Poetry Center's archivist. We are delighted to be with you again, and we have a great set of episodes coming up for you over the next few months. Look forward to episodes hosted by Laura Da', Eduardo Martínez-Leyva, Richard Blanco, Soham Patel, and Elizabeth Bradfield. To kick off this new season, we have an excellent episode hosted by Asa Drake. The other half of the Poetry Centered team, Aria Pahari is here to tell you more.

ARIA PAHARI: 1:00

A mere few pages in Maybe the Body by Asa Drake jolted me with the line, "this is the part of me I must show everyone first." The bracing honesty hooked me immediately. In part because such admissions read as inextricable from the daily toll of politics as they unfold in America, where the speaker lives and works, and the Philippines, where the speaker's mother, grandmother, and great aunt are from. Maybe the Body grapples with and interweaves these spheres without collapsing the distances of geography and generation. In her selection of poems from Voca, Asa enacts a similar symphony between the global and the intimate. Sit back, relax, and enjoy these recordings by Saretta Morgan, Jennifer Chang, and Solmaz Sharif, chosen by Asa Drake.[MUSIC PLAYING]

ASA DRAKE: 1:59

Hello, this is Asa Drake, and I'm recording from my home in Ocala, Florida. The line break may be one of the most recognizable aspects of a poem, but lately, I find myself asking, why does anything ever need to break? As Alberto Ríos asks, is there anything to be gained by the break? Today, I want to share poems by three poets, Saretta Morgan, Jennifer Chang, and Solmaz Sharif. These are poets whose work I've returned to again and again, to better understand what intentions I may bring with me to the long line. The first recording I'd like to share is Saretta Morgan's "Dominant orientation lights a corridor, white as Mexico's Northern border." Recorded on March 28, 2024. This poem is from Morgan's debut collection, Alt-Nature. It's a collection that demands more than an epistemological solution to systemic colonial violence. Morgan's work is sincere and multifaceted, written alongside her grassroots migrant justice and humanitarian aid work at the US-Mexico border. When I was writing my own collection, I frequently returned to Morgan's poetic practice to recognize that the structure of our poems exists both on and off the page. I needed the possibility Morgan proposes, that every sentence harbors a unique end. Sometimes I take this to mean that the end of something, a sentence, a line, a portion of my life, but not the whole of it is a real possibility. There's a comfort in that. Sometimes, I consider that each sentence is an opportunity to exit, as well as to return, a physical rest. Often, I forget the relationship between the sentence and the line. But the line break is always discussed in relation to the sentences structure. Really, poets have two choices to break against the sentence we call this enjambment, or to have the line break with the sentence's structure, and we call this an end stop. I love to look for these choices. I'm interested in what happens in that extra beat of silence after an end stop, like a double period, with the end of the thought is also the end of a line. When Morgan compares the sentence of natural life, unlike the sentence of life, I have to consider the many ways we structure the sentence. As a tool for the court, as a tool of incarceration, as a tool for connection. For whose benefit are these variances constructed? For whom am I constructing my own sentences? When Morgan writes, it's without their interest, their reaches toward the wide array of life and Brown Canyon and beyond. Morgan's language is precise, starting with "The human "they", and expanding toward other canyon life. The bearded tarantula, the Mexican jaguar, all given the personable she, and gathered into the collective, there in order defined by the lived range of a species. I love the possibilities that happen in a long breath. And this can come from the unbroken line or from the stanza break, which creates a visual space and sense of posture and relationship between stanzas. There is the possibility that in this moment you can go on for as long as possible. The possibility that the line continues beyond the border of the page. In Morgan's poem, I often consider these end stops moments of reflection, where I, the reader, must choose to return to the left hand margin. As we listen, consider Morgan's sense of scale and the relationships, human and geographic, that each line must navigate. Perhaps the line too represents a kind of distance. Here is Saretta Morgan reading"Dominant orientation lights a corridor, wide as Mexico's Northern border."[MUSIC PLAYING]

SARETTA MORGAN: 6:50

"Dominant orientation lights a corridor, wide as Mexico's Northern border.""Upon return, everything left was unopened, consumed by humans, destroyed by humans or animalized, One hopes the bees hiving dying in smelling clumps are not Africanized, The increasing aftermath of invasion, The wounds. Amber overtaken near lovely in the morning, The first recorded dead remained unidentifiable to the officers, Lost to exposure, What to do with a Negro in the desert, or all of them after In dry orchards, out of season among cotton, Saguaro picked by wrens, Exposure precedes the realization of an identity or fact, State of being exposed to contact with something else, even when making very little noise, The soldiers pissing behind creosote or elegant on their horses, lined to enter the corral, Entering each morning before the mountain silhouettes, A cold hand to unlace the erroneous and unfortunately passing stitch, The hand incorporated along emotional fields of decay, The chain Choi a fruit then fall, Soil and Sonora softens according to the rain, Offering every explanation in full without saying shit, without gentleness, or stepping back from the officer's science, or from how white supremacist they really are, At the center of the explanation sits a small box, And to this box, the beetle larvae arrived to feed, Among legal understandings of natural life in the United States is the sentence as in for the length of one's natural life, There, standing, The distance of their body to a door cracked alone in the desert, Irrefutable music, The sentence of natural life, unlike the sentence of life, doesn't allow for the possibility of parole, Which was anyway discontinued in Arizona in 1993 when the possibility of parole was replaced with that of release, A process which remains judicially vague, Among peoples. In the United States, Indigenous peoples are incarcerated at the highest rates per capita, Among Blacks, the carceral industry, regardless, the branching of orchards and centuries of trees, finds its critical mass, Every sentence harbors a unique end, that is its gift, Night opens a jagged scar, Soft purple signals the end of night in Southern Arizona, Tree frogs retreat in the depths of winter, Their bodies appear lifeless, as do certain moths that avoid internal freezing by purging their guts, After the last music, a man, then unidentified, found fully flushed condition code one from which water flows North, Probable electrocution, located in a database of migrant deaths, His coordinates crossed by Desert Jaguars reliant on streams, His coordinates are passed through the beetles gentle bowels, And those of the Bell's vireo, Identified by a two part structure, his definitive response and watered down his slender great breast, Beneath the cottonwoods gold filtered crown, Were the lowland Leopard frog remains moist The large cat's paw print remains fresh in the soil, After the last music, Tubman and Whitney hike Brown Canyon, They spot a rare beardless tyrannulet, Did she appear from nowhere? Hugging parched Northern boundaries of her species range, A Mexican jaguar treads backward to observe her melancholic refrain, It's without their interest that the Department of Interior studies effects of stress and fire on vegetation via high rise, high res satellite phenomics, No two droughts are alike, The earliest Negro recorded dead in Arizona was unidentified, having not survived probable hypothermia exposure, blunt force, Pore accumulates behind the skull to bare centuries of afterlife and pulp, The afterlife of being chattled, of being made a glorified mercenary or buffoon, Hanging naked in the moon's light, where there is no substitute for the adjunct feeling coerced into foul smelling clumps, Let's say the forest requires a hand or an industry at whatever temperature, more land, Let's say some records are not good, or the pulp is blooming and the hands they return, not destroyed, exactly, but smelling lonely and of death.[MUSIC PLAYING]

ASA DRAKE: 11:52

The next recording is Jennifer Chang's "Dialogues (against literature)" recorded on September 4, 2025. Chang is a poet who seems to reinvent her writing with each new collection, so I hesitate to describe her poetics in any absolute terms. When I was in college, I memorized her poem "Pastoral" which poses such lush questions as yellow petal has it wither gift, has it gorgeous rash. Central to my reading of her poems is the way the speaker pairs back her presence. The eye, or as we like to say in poetry, the lyric eye, who sings the song of a subjective self, instead presents wave after wave of perspective. In this poem, one of the dialogues from the authentic life, the line frequently feels like a partition with a person on each end. Always in this poem, I'm listening to understand the distance between its population, what exists between the speaker and Flaubert, the speaker and her father. And what about the professor and Hemingway. And what exists between them and me? Does the tension between people exist in the line itself or the silence that follows? Does the long line offer speed, an uninterrupted run from one end of the page to the other? Or do we circle around it? Maybe a dialogue isn't such a direct interaction. Chang sometimes describes her writing as atmospheric. So maybe the line is like weather. Like a water cycle. Even if we understand the cycle, we can't escape the risks that come from feeling it. I once sat in on a craft talk for fiction, which explained that dialogue and literature isn't exactly true to life. Often, dialogue creates or reveals the tension between characters. It demonstrates the distance between individuals and their points of view. Maybe the physical space of the line, the ink it uses, the philosophy it incorporates. Indeed, language itself, full of jargon and signifiers, is also distance insulating Chang's subjects from one another. I'm reminded of Frank O'Hara's manifesto, Personism, written after a lunch with Amiri Baraka. In which O'Hara writes the poem is finally between two people and not two pages. What I love about Chang's poem is that maybe the poem is between two pages and between two people. The dialogue is more than a conversation. She presents a structure where it's not a person who the speaker confronts, but also their ideas. I'm interested in how borrowing the lexicon of her studies, benzine and the Vanguard shapes the poem. When we reach the last line where the speaker describes her brothers, they become for me the archetypes from some great novel. And so this grief, I must register it as undoubtedly important, and also something I'm struggling to wrap my mind around, like a student seeking a metaphor for every symbol. Let's listen to Jennifer Chang read "Dialogues (against literature)."[MUSIC PLAYING]

JENNIFER CHANG: 16:02

So there's a group of poems in this book that are called dialogues, and they are dialogues of a sort. I was thinking about the Socratic dialogues by Plato. So also thinking about the kinds of dialogues you have in your head with people with books you read, and with history. And so there's a bit of-- I like to say that my poems are atmospheric. So you don't need to know what's happening, you just need to feel the weather. So that gives me a lot of permission, as you can imagine."Dialogues (Against Literature.)""Years later, I will remember this terrible time as not only about myself or not only that, to punish my father, I made myself unhappy, For my window, I could see that much else was wrong, Across the street, new construction had struck open an underground pipe, and for months after, water would shutter down the Boulevard, Not shutter exactly, it was as if the road had been forced open and was now weeping violently, I had known such devastation in my youth, but now it was happening to the world around me, Summer stretched into November, The chemical clouds I mistook for glory, Benzene flowering overhead like a wild lily, pinkly iridescent, I thought of my father's loneliness and felt every cell in my body fall silent, And knew this was love, And knew I had come very far in my distance to let tenderness rule me, Of all the men I despised, he perplexed me most, Wretched as Aristophanes, and as maddening, Or that Professor who shot himself in bed, leaving a mess for his widow, Whose bulbs I planted one fall when she was too sick to put her hands in the loam, He would lean over me until his beard stroked my skin, just to say I had misread thread, Cortazar, How one day in my waning 30s, I could no longer read Hemingway ever again, Ever again, a phrase that pains like an early death, In the past, my father could choose to forget me, and the wounding words we exchanged, And now, I forget why I left him behind, Something to do with poetry or risk, that other professor declaiming at a downtown cafe, the need to uproot oneself in order to be brave on the page, As if he ever left his house, As if neither of us had overheard Flaubert flaunting his dull life, Or my father's father, who thought nothing could be better than being his student, Looking around the table, accounting for his black-eyed, hungry children, all terrible at philosophy, There was only one daughter who, even in her old age everyone described as foolish, chiding her poor decision to fall in love with a dying man, Though, in this she was no Vanguard, She held him as he passed, wept the whole of her breath into him, And then, the next years sat for days alone at her mother's deathbed, And where were her brothers? One was in prison, another in Athens, and the youngest was across the alley eating noodles with a neighbor, Even now, my father sleeps through the night and does not dream."[MUSIC PLAYING]

ASA DRAKE: 20:24

The last poem I'd like to share from the archive is Solmaz Sharif's "Look," recorded on September 1, 2016. This is the title poem of Sharif's debut collection, Look. If this is your first time encountering this collection, it's helpful to know that the poems engage with words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense dictionary of military and associated terms. It's a collection that tries to describe the world not through metaphor, but as the world one we have learned to view through language. There's a theory about language and memory. And it explains how we forget our early childhood, because these memories come before language acquisition. That's how much language influences our ability to process the world around us. When I first read "Look", I just started working at my local library, and I was starting to return to writing after four years of feeling like there wasn't enough time to read, to write, to do anything beyond the effort to live. I really struggled returning to the page to write anything at all. My notebooks from that year are filled with grocery lists and weekly work objectives. I was obsessed with my own productivity, and it was as even in my personal journals, this space that belonged only to myself and that I shared with no one else. I felt the urge to be efficient, to take up as little space as possible. If I wrote a feeling, I felt I had to write that feeling as concisely as possible. Sharif's "Look" convinced me that it's worthwhile to be interested in what happens when we unpack language we use in the name of efficiency. And to give myself permission for the longer poem, to see where I might find myself if I write down not just what is said to me, but how I might give myself the last word. Often, I find that the line that sounds like a mic drop, it isn't the one I need most. I'm interested in what comes after the clean ending. Now, I try my best to encourage students to go ahead and write beyond what feels like an admission or a revelation. I think longer lines help us push toward that. If we're pressed into the next stanza, that next addendum, what discomfort or what excitement do we find for ourselves? As we listen to Sharif's poem, I think it's helpful to consider the structure of her sentences. Each line, it's a hierarchy, a system of subordinating clauses, each an act of precision and a rebuttal to imprecise language. As you listen, pay attention to the second sentence, which begins with warehouse. Technically, this one sentence extends across two pages, and the line breaks again and again, creating opportunity to breathe within this unrelenting grammar. But by using the technicalities of English grammar to describe the space the speaker inhabits, Sharif creates a sentence both structured and surveilled by technicalities. The long line seeking takes the place of metaphor. In its precision, "Look" demands care that we share the speaker's effort not to flatten the image, because perhaps any sufficiently detailed description of the world is the world itself. Here is Solmaz Sharif reading "Look".[MUSIC PLAYING]

SOLMAZ SHARIF: 24:41

I'll read one more. I'll read the title poem. It's called "Look". And the title is a term from the Department of Defense's dictionary that the DOD has defined to mean in mine warfare, a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence."Look"."It matters what you call a thing, Exquisite, a lover called me exquisite, Whereas, well, if I were from your culture living in this country, said the man outside the 2004 Republican National Convention, I would put up with that for this country, Whereas I felt the need to clarify, you would put up with torture, you mean. And he proclaimed, yes, Whereas what is your life? Whereas years after they looked down from their jets and declare my mother's Abadan block probably destroyed, We walked by the villas, the faces of buildings torn off into dioramas and recorded it on a hand-held camcorder, Whereas it could take as long as 16 seconds between the trigger pulled in Las Vegas and the Hellfire missile landing in Mazar I Sharif, after which they will ask, did we hit a child? No, a dog, they will answer themselves, Whereas the federal judge at the sentencing hearing said, I want to make sure I pronounce the defendant's name correctly, Whereas this lover would pronounce my name and call me exquisite and lay the floor lamp across the floor, softening even the light, Whereas the lover made my heat rise, rise so that if heat sensors were trained on me, they could read my thermal shadow through the roof and through the wardrobe, Whereas, it's not like walking to the grocery store and seeing a dead body here, It's not like that, it's a rock, you know, it's a rock, It's kind of like acceptable to see that there and not-- It was kind of like seeing a dead dog or a dead cat lying, Whereas, I thought if he would look at my exquisite face or my father's, he would reconsider, Whereas, you mean, I should be disappeared because of my family name, And he answered, yes, that's exactly what I mean, adding that his wife helped draft the Patriot Act, Whereas the federal judge wanted to be sure he was pronouncing the defendant's name correctly, and said he had read all the exhibits, which included the letter I wrote to cast the defendant in a loving light, Whereas today we celebrate things like his transfer to a detention center closer to home, or as his son has moved across the country, Whereas I made nothing happen, Whereas Ye know not what shall be on the morrow, For what is your life? It is even a thermal shadow, It appears so little and then vanishes from the screen, Whereas I cannot control my own heat, And it can take as long as 16 seconds between the trigger, the Hellfire missile, and a dog, they will answer themselves, whereas a dog they will say, Now, therefore, let it matter what we call a thing, Let it be the exquisite face for at least 16 seconds, Let me look at you, Let me look at you in a light that takes years to get here." Thank you very much.[APPLAUSE, MUSIC PLAYING]

ASA DRAKE: 28:03

I'm going to read to you one of my own poems from my debut collection, "Maybe The Body" which Tin House released this spring."I'm not here to speak until you feel clarity" is a poem written during the 2024 hurricane season. I was paying attention to the ways we process different degrees of uncertainty, and proximity to disaster. For me, the long line and the blank spaces between stanzas is an invitation for the reader to share my unease. The rest, after a long line, can be unnerving for someone like me, who is not really comfortable with uncomfortable silences. That sounds a little cruel, doesn't it? To want to make someone else uncomfortable. But I think a lot of intimacy is like that. No mind should overlay exactly onto another mind. I draft so many poems in Mona stitches. I find the juxtaposition that comes out of these accumulated lines so fruitful. And the best scenarios, I feel like I'm reaching something strange and surprising at the end of such a line, and later I'll engage in more intentional lineation. This is partially because I'm so easily influenced by the visual of the page. Right now I have a B5 notebook which is around 7 inches wide. I find this easier to use than an A6 journal that's only 4 inches wide, or a phone screen which makes its own signature line length. It's hard for me to break away from the line lengths that the margins impose, so I rely on the monastic in a first draft to reserve that choice until later. If you want to see if you too are easily influenced by the shape of your notebook paper or digital working document, try rotating the page to landscape mode. See how you choose to interact with the extra space. Thank you all for considering deeper breaths and the long line with me today. Here's "I'm not here to speak until you feel clarity.""I'm not here to speak until you feel clarity, Questions I muted when I lost power, How long does a hurricane last? Why haven't you evacuated? Why is it called a rain band? Is rain going on tour? Frequently, I wanted to accuse those who asked the wrong questions, After the second hurricane in as many weeks, My insurer sent me an email inscribed, This can be easy, The Washington Post informed me I needed foreign born workers to rebuild the American Southeast at a good price, I learned this from the radio years ago, If you rest your hand above your heart, it's harder to hate your body, Ways I processed questions in a crisis, I wedged my nail under the calyx, ants, earwigs, jumping spiders, Bright beetle shells which reflected stove light, I drank warm San Pellegrino and failed to photograph the fluorescent blue flashes illuminating the kitchen, I was obsessed over language of loss, The houses were not gone, but flooded."[MUSIC PLAYING]

JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON: 32:12

You've been listening to Asa Drake, and this is Poetry Centered. Asa, thank you so much for opening up the world of the long line in such a fresh way. I'm excited to head back to my notebook with these new thoughts in mind. Listeners, I hope you're also inspired to think about the long line, whether as readers or writers. And most of all, thank you so much for sharing your time with us today. In two weeks, we'll be back with a new episode hosted by Laura Da', and you can look forward to more episodes forthcoming over the next few months. Don't forget to check out our back catalog of episodes and explore Voca. There's more than thousand hours of recordings there to find poems you love. If you're enjoying this show, please also consider leaving us a review, or a rating, or just tell someone who might enjoy the show too. We continued to be so grateful for your time and interest. Take care and we'll see you again in two weeks.

ARIA PAHARI: 33:11

Poetry Centered is a project of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, home to a world class library collection of more than 80,000 items related to contemporary poetry in English and English translation. Located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the Poetry Center library and buildings are housed on the Indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui. Poetry Centered is the work of Aria Pahari, that's me, and Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, the Poetry Center's audio visual archive, online at voca.arizona.edu.