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The Wordplay archive expands …

onair — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:02:20 +0000

As of now, the following shows are available at ibiblio.org. Before 2008, shows were thirty mintues long; 2008 shows are an hour long.

Enjoy.

2006:

September 3, 2006, featuring Laura Hope-Gill and Sebastian Matthews

2007:

February 11,2007, featuring John Crutchfield

March 18, 2007, featuring Laura Hope-Gill discussing her work with alchemy.

April 29, 2007, Laura Hope-Gill and I read and discussed the work of Robert Bly

May 27, 2007, featuring Samuel Adams

June 10, 2007, featuring Robert Bly reading at UNCA (production notes)

June 17, 2007, featuring Keith Flynn

July 1, 2007, featuring Allan Wolf

October 14, 2007, featuring Gary Hawkins

October 28, 2007, featuring archival recordings of Walt Whitman, Alfred Tennyson, and others

November 4, 2008, featuring Jessica Smith (production notes)

November 11, 2007, featuring William Matthews

November 18, 2007, featuring Robert Morgan (production notes)

December 2, 2007, featuring Laura Hope-Gill

December 9, 2007, featuring Nan Watkins presenting her translations of Yvan Goll (production notes)

December 16, 2007, featuring Mara Simmons

December 23, 2007, featuring Laura Hope-Gill reading “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”

2008:

January 13, 2008 featuring Ed Dorn (production note)

January 20, 2008, featuring Katherine Min

January 27, 2008, featuring Gary Hawkins and Landon Godfrey

February 3, 2008, featuring Sebastian Matthews and Dick Barnes

February 17, 2008, featuring my April, 2006 reading for the publication of Natures

February 24, 2008, featuring the very literate singer-songwriter Angela Faye Martin

March 2, 2008, featuring Thomas Rain Crowe reading from Radiogenesis

March 9, 2008, featuring Chad Prevost (production note)

March 23, 2008, featuring Jonathan Williams reading at Sylva’s City Lights Books in May of 2005 (production note)

April 7, 2008, featuring Galway Kinnell reading at Breadloaf in 2002

April 13, 2008, featuring Laura Hope-Gill pitching on the pledge drive show

May 25, 2008, featuring Ross Gay in an interview with Joanna Cooper, and reading at Asheville’s Malaprops Books (production note)

June 1, 2008, featuring Coleman Barks performing at the Fine Arts Theater in April, 2008 (production note)

June 8, 2008, featuring Wayne Caldwell, author of Cataloochee

June 15, 2008, featuring Robert Creeley

June 29, 2008, featuring Nan Watkins presenting her translations of Yvan Goll – the extended edition (production note)

July 6, 2008, featuring Landon Godfrey (production note)

July 13, 2008, featuring Chall Gray

July 20, 2008, featuring Jeffery Beam (production note)

August 3, 2008, featuring Ken Rumble (production note)

Many more to come …

Enjoy,

Jeff

Now on the Archive … er, the other Archive

onair — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 08:09:28 +0000

Doing Wordplay, which consists, on one level, just of getting together to talk with a poet (or two or three) each Sunday for an hour, has often been a delight, even the high point of the week. And sometimes, when technical problems have whacked the show, it’s also been frustrating. We’ve worked with WPVM’s staff and our fellow volunteers at the station to resolve issues as they’ve come up, though, and things have indeed gotten better; we’ve upgraded some equipment and figured out workarounds for other issues.

One issue that we couldn’t address at the station itself, given the storage capacity and bandwidth it would require, was our need for a permanent archive for past shows. After all, it’s not like a reading by, say (just to pick a few whose files I’ve rounded up in the last few days), Jonathan Williams, Robert Bly, Ken Rumble, or Ross Gay merits attention for just a week.

Thanks to the good folks at Chapel Hill’s ibiblio.org, though, we’ve now got that archive. We don’t yet have an index page at ibiblio, but I’ll post links here and at Natures, and work towards creating a directory there down the road.

For now, January’s show featuring Ed Dorn’s 1974 Buffalo reading of La Gran Apacheria is available from the new Wordplay Archive:

Ed Dorn, January 13, 2008.

More to come …

Jeff

Robert Creeley this week on Wordplay

onair — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:50:11 +0000

It’s no secret that I see Robert Creeley one of the essential poets of the last fifty years. From early to late, his work opened new territories of mind and heart for poetry; I believe his fine ear and remarkable articulation of the rhythms of American speech insure that folks will still be reading his poems centuries from now.

In the 70s and 80s I recorded several Creeley readings on my trusty Uher 4400, but it recorded in a unique four track monaural format that makes the tapes playable only on a like machine, and mine needs repair. For the Father’s Day show now up on the archive, then, I selected readings from among the many recordings at the ever-expanding Creeley archive at PennSound. The show begins with poems recorded at Black Mountain College in 1954 and poems from the same period (a few the very same poems) recorded at readings at Chicago’s The Second City in 1961 and at Harvard in 1966. These were all clearly recorded on analogue tape, and transferred after the tapes had become somewhat degraded. I cleaned them up as best as I could for the show, but there’s still some audible hiss; I also had to edit out the “f*ck” in “Ballad of the Despairing Husband,” since the FCC still considers that a word you can’t say on the radio.

Most of the show, though, focuses on Creeley’s middle and later work, from Pieces on. Perhaps that’s just because I met him in 1968, the year Scribners brought out that collection, and so simply find in this work the voice I knew. From then till the end of his life he often worked in what became his long form, the serial suite. I’ve included “The Finger” and “Follow the Drinking Gourd” from a 1974 reading at Vermont’s Goddard College; the complete “Histoire de Florida,” from a 1995 Buffalo reading; “En Famille” from a 2000 reading at his Maine home, and “Wild Nights” from the same occasion; and two poems from a 2000 reading at the University of Pennsylvania, “Myself” and “Where Late the Sweet Bird Sang”.

Did Bob ever write about music? He sometimes worked with musicians, of course, but I don’t remember ever talking with him about music, and have no idea what he listened to day in and day out; I had to wing the soundscape. The show kicks off with a version of Miles Davis’ “So What?” recorded at the Blackhawk in San Francisco (Miles was a big favorite at Black Mountain), and the other music featured in the program includes bits of “Stating Intention” from Peter Kater and R. Carlos Nakai’s Migration; “So Long Michael” from Pierre Bensusan’s Intuite; and Debussy’s La Mer, performed by the Orcestra of Radio Luxembourg, Rolf Reinhardt conductor.

Click on over to the Archive page , scroll down to Wordplay, and check it out.

Jeff

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The photo was taken by Joel Kuzai at Creeley’s home in Providence, RI, in 2004.

Cross-posted at NatureS.