Barbara Ras' "Margin of Error"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2023

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Barbara Ras was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and has lived in Costa Rica, Colombia, California, and Texas. She is the author of The Last Skin (2010), winner of the best poetry award from the Texas Institute of Letters; One Hidden Stuff (2006); and Bite Every Sorrow (1998), which was selected by C.K. Williams for the Walt Whitman Award. Of Bite Every Sorrow, C.K. Williams wrote, “the book is a demonstration of what might be called a morality of inclusiveness, a Whitmanesque commitment to the wisdom of the individual case rather than the general type. And along with so much rich soul-work, there is a remarkable poetic skill. Ras structures poems with a zaniness and an unpredictable cunning, and her verbal expertise and lucidity are as bright and surprising as her knowledge of the world is profound.”Ras is the recipient of numerous awards including the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. She has taught at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Currently she directs the Trinity University Press in San Antonio, Texas.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is
0:05.9	Thursday, November 9th, 2003. Today's poem is by Barbara Rass, it's called Margin of Error.
0:15.2	It's a little on the longer side, so I'll offer a few comments on the front end, and then send you out
0:20.0	with a reading of the poem.
0:22.3	Barbara Rass is a living American poet. She's 74 years old, and she has published four collections of her poetry, most recently The Blues of Heaven.
0:35.0	But today's poem comes from her first published collection, Bite Every Sorrow, which
0:40.0	won the Walt Whitman Award in 1997.
0:44.2	And though her skill in this particular area has developed over time, even in this first
0:51.0	collection, one of the things that I really enjoy about Barbara Rass's
0:56.0	poetry is that she has a knack for focusing on the singular and the concrete, but then making it
1:10.2	somehow surprising.
1:11.6	There's always a turn or turns in her poetry that catch you off guard because her tone and her subjects are so unassuming,
1:24.6	and yet she's able to give them a kind of a flick of the wrist that makes
1:30.3	you see or think or pause and notice in an unexpected way.
1:38.4	As you'll see in this poem, which is, I think, a kind of cautionary tale about the need to fix things
1:48.3	and a kind of exhortation to be content with what you are given
1:57.3	and content to steward what you are given rather than try and fix it.
2:05.1	And she offers a few examples of this in which in which the stakes get increasingly higher,
2:16.0	as you'll see in the final lines of the poet.
2:19.5	She makes a reference early on to the horse of Cortez,
2:26.1	and lest you have to go hunt down this little historical tidbit,
2:33.1	when Cortez was in the new world, he left a wounded horse with the islanders of Tiasol and told them
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -508 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Goldberry Studios, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Goldberry Studios and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.