Renown cultural anthropologist and poet Renato Rosaldo joins us on this program to talk about "The Day of Shelly's Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief" (2014), a collection of Anthropoesia - poems that blend the language of ethnography with that of poetry. The book reflects on the events that surrounded an October 1981 trip to the Philippines, where Rosaldo's wife Shelly, herself an anthropologist, was killed when she lost her footing and fell off a cliff. The poems are told in the voices of the people and places surrounding the event...from their two young sons who were left without a mother, to a tricycle taxi driver, to the actual cliff itself.
For our Poem of the Week, Renato Rosaldo reads a selection from "The Day of Shelly's Death." "Tricycle Taxi Driver" is told from the perspective of the taxi driver who gave Renato and his sons a ride after Shelly's body was recovered.
Aired Jan. 31, 2016