I’ve included part of a 2007 reading at George Mason University, as well, one in which Strand gave a more chronological overview of his work.

It’s fascinating work, of course. I’d read most of his poems through the years quietly, to myself, and hearing him in person made me aware that I’d missed much of the music. Note to self: poetry needs to be sounded out. Always, no matter how ratiocinative and logopoetic (in Pound’s sense) it might appear.

Robert and Arlene were on hand for the show, and gave listeners out in radioland a primer on RiverSculpture and its mission, and some background on Strand and the readings.

Give it a listen.

Jeff

Not actually, mind you; he didn’t drive all the way over from Scaly Mountain to sit down in the studio this past Sunday. But he didn’t have to, since I’d recorded several of his readings in recent years, and had sat down with him in another studio back in 2006 to talk about (among other things) his translation of the classic Chinese text daode jing.

Tom’s a terrific poet, of course, so it was great fun to revisit the occasions I’d recorded. Those readings included one from September 30, 2005 at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, in which he gave, I thought, a really good overview of his work, from the poems collected in At Dusk Iridescent, to the long poem Coromandel (on line at the link), to his translation of the dao, which was then unpublished. He came back to the Center in March, 2006, though, after the dao‘s publication by Flood Editions, to present the text in full, so I used that recording for the show, as well as a snip from that interview we’d done the same day, rather than the excerpts from the previous fall.

When Hillsborough poet Jeffery Beam visited Asheville in July, he brought along several tapes featuring readings by, or interviews with, Jonathan Williams. One of those tapes, from a midsummer, 1994, reading at The Literary Institute, Muker, Swansdale, Yorkshire, also included a brief reading by Tom; I opened the show with it, since Tom hadn’t featured its material in the 2005 foray back into his earlier work.

Since we were beginning the show in Yorkshire, I used Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on Greensleeves” for the show’s opening theme, and honored the multivoiced Coromadel from 2005 with “Taboehgan” by the Balinese Gamelan Semar Pegulingan (recorded in 1941, and available on Music for the Gods from the Library of Congress). Tom had said he loved Bollywood soundtracks, but I didn’t have any handy, so I closed with Ali Akbar Khan‘s “Blessings of the Heart, Part 2″, from 1993′s Garden of Dreams. Khan has composed for film scores throughout his long career, after all.

Oh, you might notice that the show that’s now available from the WPVM archive is several minutes longer than Worplay’s hour, so I should confess that it’s not the show that aired. If you happened to be listening live, you had an experience that the station’s rickety archiving system failed to record. When I came back to the station Sunday evening to re-produce the show, I included a little more of the music than I could squeeze into our live slot.

Give it a listen.

(The show will be up through Sunday the 14th, and then migrate over to the new Wordplay Archive, where you’ll find it here.)

Jeff

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Photo of Tom by Reuben Cox.

Cross-posted at Natures.

Now up on the Wordplay archive, August shows with Laura Hope-Gill and Glenis Redmond, both former members of the Wordplay crew. Laura read from her upcoming title, The Soul Tree, and Glenis celebrated her new book, Under the Sun, just out from Main Street Rag:

August 24, 2008, featuring Laura Hope-Gill

August 31, 2008, featuring Glenis Redmond

Enjoy.

Jeff

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Photo: Laura and Glenis just before a reading at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, May, 2006.

Cross-posted at Natures.

That show was a real treat, and well worth hearing once more: Coleman Barks reading live at Asheville’s Fine Arts Theater on April 26th, with bassist Eliot Wadopian and percussionist Byron Hedgepeth. It assuredly wasn’t your standard poetry reading.

Barks is well-known, of course, as the premiere translator of the works of the 13th Century Persian mystic poet Jalal al-Din Rumi, but he’s a master poet in his own right, and in this performance gave us both his own work and his translations from Rumi and Hafez.

On an earlier visit to Asheville, Coleman came by the studio to talk about (among many other things) his long relationship with Rumi’s poetry; part of that interview is featured in the show, too.

As always, the show will be available all next week from the Archive page as a stream and free podcast.

Enjoy, and I’ll be back live in the studio (if the sky don’t fall) next week.

Jeff

Cross-posted at Natures.

More on Wordplay and poetry at large over at NatureS.

This week (2:00 Sunday) we’re hosting the very literate singer/songwriter Angela Faye Martin, who’s said she’s bringing her guitar.

( We do like to mix things up. )

Jeff

This week’s show, still available via stream or podcast from the archive page [but see the second update below] features my debut reading of NatureS from April, 2006. The reading took place at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and I talked a bit about the Black Mountain poets, especially Robert Creeley, and my sense of their relevance to my own work. I also wanted to speak to the poetics that informs the work, and so spent probably too much time talking about parataxis, as practiced particularly by Robin Blaser, and about Novalis, whose Encyclopedia explores the identity of the character each of us calls “I” in a way that remains useful some two hundred years, now, further on.

Listening to the recording for the first time just ten or twelve days ago, I realized that I had seriously mangled my recapitulation of Creeley’s account of the rhinoceros argument between Wittgenstein and Russell. Wittgenstein refused to agree with Russell’s assertion that there was no rhinoceros in the room, and Russell, so the story goes, tried to prove to him empirically that, in fact, no such creature was around; he looked under tables and chairs, and so on. My telling scrambles Wittgenstein’s position, and so obscures the import of the whole argument – and, sadly, likewise obscures the humor of the situation as legend tells us it unfolded. When Creeley told the story, he managed to preserve that humor. My apologies to Bob’s spirit, and to any who might listen to this version, for getting things scrambled in my jangled brain that night.

We don’t offer feature our own work on Wordplay, but we had a week with no guest on board, and I’d been having difficulties cleaning up a noisy recording of Jonathan Williams that I wanted to air, … so there it is. Enjoy. We’ll hopefully be able to include the Williams reading in a future show.

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Update: Coming up Sunday (or Monday via on-demand stream and podcast), Lori Horvitz.

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Update, Sunday after the show: Well, hope you heard the show with Lori live, because the archiving system didn’t record it. Apologies to Lori. We’ll have her on again as soon as we can.

I also discovered that the automated FTP upload of last week’s show to the site from which it streams and podcasts didn’t happen, so that show hasn’t been available after all. It should upload tonight. And Mercury, a little planet which loves to play little tricks with cars, computers, and broadcast equipment, goes direct tomorrow (don’t tell me how superstitious I am until you ponder the posts at the link), so perhaps it’ll actually upload this time. If not, I’ll do it by hand; FTP uploads and downloads aren’t rocket science, and I’ve set many of them up, and even automated them, through the years.

And on we go.

Beginning Sunday, January 13th, Wordplay will be moving two hours up on the station program schedule, to 2:00 PM, and going to a full hour format. Woohoo!

Sebastian and I have already been recording additional material with some of the guests we’ve had on the show this fall, and booking new guests who’ll fit much more comfortably into the hour format. The show should be a bit more spontaneous, and we plan to enrich and vary its sonic collage more than we’ve had the simple time to to this point. We believe you’ll find the shows even more interesting, more engaging, than the ones we’ve produced so far.

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There have been several requests for a replay of the early November show which featured the work of William Matthews, Sebastian’s father and my friend during my last year in Chapel Hill; this week it’s available again from the station’s archive page as a stream or podcast.

This coming Sunday we’ll take a look back at a few of the fine moments from 2007 with a show that features poems by a diverse crew, including Robert Bly, Fred Chappell, Cathy Smith Bowers, Matthews, and Matthew Dickman.

And let me be the thousandth person so far to wish you a Happy New Year. Onward!

Jeff

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Cross-posted in somewhat different form at NatureS