From a pandemic elegy for three billion lost birds to a villanelle written live on air, Lorrie Wolfe on grief, precision, and the discipline of fourteen lines.
Welcome to Twice 5 Miles Radio. I'm your host James Navé.
This week, poet Lorrie Wolfe joins me to talk about the discipline behind the spark — how a stray line overheard on the radio, or a friend's invented word, becomes a finished poem.
Wolfe, author of "The Language of Crows," explains why she works in sonnets and other tight forms, trusting fourteen lines to force clarity rather than sprawl, and why editing, not inspiration, is where precision actually happens.
We talk through her elegy for a friend lost in a hang-gliding accident, written in dialogue with Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish," and her pandemic-era poem "How Many Birds Are Enough," which asks what we owe the dead, human and otherwise, by simply speaking their names.
Navé traces his own path from performing storytellers' ballads at festivals in the 1980s to writing verse today. Wolfe and Navé both discuss how poetry is a cousin to country music. Wolfe quotes Emily Dickinson, tell the truth, but tell it slant.
This is a conversation about form as freedom, and why brevity, done right, is its own kind of generosity.