Walking America Turtle Island* welcomes two poets, Cole Swensen and Lisa Robertson, who embrace walking as fundamental to their creative practices, and often as subject matter too. Cole Swensen’s On Walking On (Nightboat Books, 2017) interweaves short poetic chronicles of particular walks with poetic commentary on other walking writers’ work, from Chaucer to Lisa Robertson. Both Robertson’s essay collection, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, (Clear Cut Press, 2003; reissued by Coach House Books, 2011) and her novel The Baudelaire Fractal (Coach House Books, 2020), like walking itself, resist and drift from the confines of genre. Moving through pastoral and urban landscapes, both writers replicate the irregular pace of stride and thought in their cadenced observations. Join these two writers in conversation with host Ann de Forest as they talk about walking in and writing about place, the symbiosis between poetry and walking, and how walking informs their artistic practices.

*Turtle Island, as poet Gary Snyder beautifully defines in the introduction to his 1974 poetry collection of the same name: “…the old/new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been living here for millenia, and reapplied by some of them to ‘North America’ in recent years. Also, an idea found world-wide, of the earth, or cosmos even, sustained by a great turtle or serpent-of-eternity.”