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Texas Extras are special and extended content put together just for our podcast listeners!
Texas Standard recently revealed our Top 10 list from April: the Top 10 Typewriter Rodeo poems from the past decade. Each poem is pretty short, usually just about a minute long, but we still didn’t have time to play them in their entirety in our on-air Top 10 – which just felt like a shame. We remedy that for you here, enjoy!
The full transcript of this episode of Texas Standard is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
Laura Rice [00:00:00] Hello Texas Standard Podcast listeners, it’s Laura Rice here with another Texas Extra special and extended content we’ve put together just for you. Last week we revealed our top 10 list for April, the top 10 typewriter rodeo poems, or as one listener pointed out, poems. It’s just not how I’ve always said that word and I’m chalking it up to regional dialect, so accept me as I am. Anywho, these poems are pretty short. usually just about a minute long, but we still didn’t have time to play them in our entirety in our on-air top 10, which just felt like a shame. We remedy that for you here, so enjoy. You’ve got it tuned to the Texas Standard, I’m Laura Rice. Texas Standard is 10 years old. It’s a huge milestone for a program that started as kind of an experiment, and we’re celebrating big time. Along with birthday parties and birthday messages, we’re looking back on our favorite content from the past 10 years. April is National Poetry Month, so we thought it appropriate to celebrate a few of our favorite poets. the folks with the typewriter rodeo.
Speaker 2 [00:01:21] The typewriter rodeo, we, group of friends.
Speaker 3 [00:01:24] writers who we write custom poems on vintage typewriters.
Speaker 4 [00:01:28] You give us a word, an idea, a phrase, something you’d like a poem about, and we will write you a poem on the spot.
Laura Rice [00:01:32] Out in the world, you can find the Typewriter Rodeo team at special events, but they do something special for Texas Standard, taking poems from our listeners anytime. Sometimes these are news related. Sometimes they’re about the Texas experience. Sometimes they are personal. Sometimes they’s silly. We’ve been airing these newsy, Texas-y, personal, silly poems every Friday since before Texas Standard was even. regular statewide show. What it means is that we have hundreds of poems from the Typewriter Rodeo, so try narrowing that down to a top 10 celebrating 10 years of Texas Standard. Well, we took a stab at it. At number 10, a poem request that I’ll admit I thought was going to go quite the opposite of what Shawna Gerlach so beautifully did.
Speaker 5 [00:02:27] Summer training. Sweat is my metronome. The drip, drip, drip down the back of my neck, inside my knee creases, down the front of my Nike socks. It keeps time with my cadence, that perfect 180 steps per minute, growing more and more sluggish by the second, as my skin refuses to breathe as quickly as my lungs, muscles begging for more, more, more. There is an aliveness here. I’m a solar panel maxed out. The outside temperature finally matching my insides, the blood that pumps with no questions asked, not even why now, because every fiber of my being understands the only thing worse would be waking up early to still feel hot. We just go. Me and my blood, me and my sweat, me and fire in my belly and my heart and my footfalls pounding pavement, we run faster and faster to the edge of the brink, the salty sting of beating what’s possible. Just you wait for my Strava come fall.
Laura Rice [00:03:29] At number nine, another hot weather poem, which feels appropriate for Texas. This one from the typewriter rodeo poet who I’d argue does silly better than almost anyone, Jodie Edgerton.
Speaker 4 [00:03:44] Squirrels cooling off by laying flat on concrete. It is hot, Texas summer hot. And oh, I am a furry, furry beast. I have tried first to cool off by leaping into the cool, clean waters. But the lifeguard screeched, and the hooman squealed. And then I was on the inside of a net, and then it was all hot sun time for me again. I am attempting maneuver number two, or as we call it, the increase of surface area and space between the fur wherein I elongate my torso and attempt to have the entirety of my being touching the cool surface of the concrete. It is here that I stop to question what is concrete and why is it so perfectly cool? This is good. The only thing that could make this better would be if someone left a bird feeder nearby for me to snack upon. Upon for me too snack? Yes. It may be hot, but this squirrel is one.
Laura Rice [00:04:55] Next, we get a little more serious. There was a period when almost all of our poems, as well as everything else in our lives, was delivered through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s David Frukter.
Speaker 2 [00:05:09] A quarantine love poem. I’m alone in a room, but I feel you with me. I don’t know. The memory of touch is like a ghost, and yet your whisper tickles my ear. I miss you so much, part of my chest is carved away, leaving an empty space with your contour. But through some starlit alchemy, I’ve never felt so close to anyone. As we talk, voice to voice, send our words in text. Photographs of flowers, dumb videos of the dog, emotions we never expressed in person. This distance is more social than I expected and I’m scared for it to end.
Laura Rice [00:06:03] Now there are some guarantees with the typewriter rodeo. Almost every year we’ll have a back to school poem, a Halloween poem, a Christmas poem, and a New Year’s poem. This one from Naomi Shihab Nye was necessarily a little different. Farewell.
Speaker 6 [00:06:21] 2020. We’re so glad to see you go. We are sweeping you out the door. Bring a bulldozer. We’ll roll you over two seconds flat. Pummel your crazy zeros. Trick your twos out of business. You scared me from the get-go, promising perfect vision, all that. Those of us who never had perfect vision. felt skeptical from the start. We’ll burn you with our matches. We’ll send you with pain. Be gone. Give us a one for the morrow.
Laura Rice [00:07:03] At number six on the list, we dig back into the archives for one of the poems about what makes Texas unique. I love the way Sean Petrie delivers this one. For those with long memories, it used to be part of a regular ad that aired in the Texas Standard podcast feed.
Speaker 7 [00:07:20] best town names in Texas. So many towns in Texas, their names simply rock. The silent A of Manchac. The timeless value of Dimebox. Oh, Flower Mound, it conjures floral fields and hills so tall. There’s very few of either, but no one wants to live in strip mall. The Panhandle features Pampa, where you’re pampered to the limit. And if you need to curse, all you have to yell is, dim it! Then there’s Italy and Paris. with the lure of foreign fields. But ours aren’t fancy andfalutin. Like all our towns, they’re real.
Laura Rice [00:07:56] We’re halfway through the list of our favorite typewriter rodeo poems from the past decade. Of the general types of poems we’ve typically highlighted, we’ve checked off Texas-y and silly. This one from Bianca Alyssa Perez gets personal.
Speaker 8 [00:08:12] Betis women have always been beautiful in their act of taking apart something to make a new thing, a shedding my skin feasts on. I see my face in the tearing of a soft tortilla. It’s all about amor here. Roll the tortilla up con amor. Drown the tortilla in oil con amor, flip it over con amor Today my flautas do not burn. Today I’m reminded that I am my grandmother’s flesh. Hot oil pops onto my thumb and I don’t wince. This is the way to loving my body, to breathing the burns on my fingers, my wrists, my palms. Each burn a time I cooked a meal for myself, sat down at the dinner table with myself, passed the salt to myself, blessed my food the same way my grandmother did.
Laura Rice [00:09:09] The most challenging category of poem is probably the newsy variety. How to react to something in the world that people undoubtedly have a range of opinions on. We consider these poems tiny commentaries and are not heavy-handed in their editorial oversight. It’s art. This poem by Rebecca Bentheim was recorded not long after a deadly attack on a Colorado Springs nightclub. Last time at the gay bar.
Speaker 9 [00:09:37] Look both ways. Watch the entrance. Your first time at a gay bar, you want everyone to see you, just not anyone you know. Drag queens flip to electric bass synth, but your unscuffed docks have forgotten how to dance. Till smoke billows from the ceiling, and old school magic show you’re free now, dancing on your own. Your 86th time at gay bar. Drag queens, flip. Your girlfriend spins you across sticky floors, but this time, when smoke billows from the ceiling, you wonder. With the base thundering, would you hear a bang? In the convoluted air, would know which way to run? Look both ways. Watch the entrance. Where’s the entrance?
Laura Rice [00:10:31] At number three, this poem came in as a listener request, but our poets weren’t quite sure what the listener had in mind. Le Cole Foote’s balances.
Speaker 10 [00:10:42] couple of interpretations. Turning 18 as a boy in this culture, requested by listener Scott Boss. My dear son, as you grow into manhood, I have a few hopes for you. That you feel strong enough to cry when you need to. That you wear what you’re supposed to in order to feel confident and secure. That your hands have grown calloused by uprooting weeds and planting flowers. I hope you have a strong sense of identity because you feel empowered to define it. I pray you’ve learned to follow and surrender to the higher purpose and presence you’re aligned with. In this culture, in this day and age, I hope we grow without fear or rage. Mind your mind, find your peace. Go to be who you’d want to know.
Laura Rice [00:11:37] We’re nearing the top of our list and we go way back to 2015 for this one. I wasn’t even a mother yet when David Frukter wrote this poem, but I was so moved that I’ve never forgotten it.
Speaker 2 [00:11:49] Off she goes, so full of feelings, my skin feels stretched tight, got to keep them inside. She’s got enough to think about. No need to tell her how swollen with pride I feel, as if I earned this when it was all her. No need choke her with the fears that are suffocating me. Will she fail? Will they hurt her? Will she grow so much that she leaves us behind? Will her debt cripple her for life? We’re doing as much as we can to help, and I fear it’s not enough. But her face is shining, the car is packed, and the vast edifices of human knowledge await her. It’s not my time. It’s hers. So I’ll wait until she’s safely installed on campus. to sit alone in that emptied car and scream.
Laura Rice [00:12:53] Making this list of our top ten typewriter rodeo poems has been impossibly hard. For number one, I picked another that balances news and art, tackling the highly divisive issue of the Supreme Court’s ruling guaranteeing the right to gay marriage. Here’s Kari Ann Holt.
Speaker 3 [00:13:11] The four horsemen lay down their cards and look up through the jagged maw, through the steaming hellmouth. Hey, says War, you see that? What? asks Pestilence. The Supreme Court thing? I saw it, says Famine. Who cares? Seriously, says Death, go fish. And so they pick up their cards, resuming their game, not caring one bit. Who gets married to whom?
Laura Rice [00:13:36] That’s our top 10 list. 10 of approximately 529. Yeah, there were more than a few favorites left out here. Technical Director Casey Cheek’s favorite was, of course, about the birth of his beautiful daughter. And there were a more than few votes, including from managing editor Gabriel Munoz about the poem that was purportedly about baseball, but actually about butts. You can find our full list and honorable mentions along with other birthday content at texastandard.org slash birthday. While you’re there, you can also request a typewriter rodeo poem of your own. And since it’s National Poetry Month, we’re bringing back our tradition of asking you to share your original poetry with us. You can a link as part of this story or go directly to texasstandard.or slash poetry.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
