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

Peter’s done several residencies in the Smokies, now, and they’re beginning to find their way into his work.

We sometimes do archival shows on Wordplay, and have featured readings by Whitman, Tennyson, Yeats, and others whose voices recording technologies have happily saved from time during our three years of broadcasting. Today we featured the great Ezra Pound in readings from 1938 to 1967; he was 82 in the latter year, but still had a strong, complex voice. His reading of Canto LXXXI is exquisite, and poetry doesn’t get much better than that. “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross…”

A huge thanks to PennSound for making its Pound archive available through the ‘net.

By the way, you might notice a few pops and distortions during the first minute of Peter’s reading. I’d set up that night to record the stage, but everyone decided to perform on the floor instead. What you hear is me moving the mics to get a more balanced recording. Sorry about that.

Music for today’s show included tunes from the remarkable Anni Rossi, who performed at the Institute as part of the program which included Peter, and California flutist Suzanne Teng.

Do lend it an ear.

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.

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

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

Greensboro’s Ken Rumble, one of the founders of the Lucifer Poetics Group, trekked across rivers and mountains to Asheville this past Sunday and visited Wordplay. He provided some keys to Key Bridge (that’s a .pdf file, so give it a few seconds to download), his well-received book from Carolina Wren Press, discussed some his favorite poets, working on typewriters, and read some new work as well. One new piece was a two-voiced collaboration, so I got to fill in as the other voice. It was a hoot.

Ken’s work is always adventurous in its exploration of the dimensions of poetic form – and like, in that respect, the work of one of his favorite contemporaries, Lisa Jarnot. Both seem to draw on the work of Robert Duncan and George Oppen, who drew in turn on the practice of William Carlos Williams, Gertude Stein, and others among the great twentieth century modernists; both go a far piece, of course, beyond the maps defined by Duncan and Oppen into their own territories. But that’s the company, as it seems to me, and it’s a fine company to be in.

Music this week all came from Geoffrey Keezer’s Falling Up; we opened with the title track (long the virtual theme for Wordplay), and also heard “Palm Reader” and “Gollum’s Song.”

Do check it out over on the Archive page (just scroll down to “Wordplay”).

(For the impatient, here’s the direct link to the .mp3.)

The show will be available as an on-demand stream and podcast through next Sunday, August 10th.
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The photo can be found over at Ken’s blog, in his Blogger profile. The closed eyes perhaps testify to its candid occasion …

Cross-posted at Natures.

Hillsborough poet Jeffery Beam was in town last weekend for Loco Logodaedalist, the celebration of Jonathan Williams’ work hosted Saturday night by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, so I talked him into coming into the micro-studio at WPVM to talk about his work. He read a few poems from his Visions of Dame Kind (Jargon, 1995), a book whose vision I’ve long admired, but we spent much of the program reading and discussing poems from his new (as in brand new) The Beautiful Tendons, Uncollected Queer Poems 1969-2007 (White Crane Books, 2008). It’s a fine, emotionally searching and honest, collection of love poems – when we’re in the kingdom of love, it doesn’t matter whom we see as the other, the same rules pertain, and this book limns them with a forthright grace.

Several of Jeffery’s poems have found musical settings, so we discussed the relation of music and poem, and Jeffery, in honor of his lifetime love of the old songs he grew up in Kannapolis singing, and which he feels still inform his work, closed the show with a remarkable rendition of the old Methodist hymn “In the Garden”.

If you don’t yet know his work, here are three poems from Beautiful Tendons that he read on the show, just to give you a glimpse:

TWO LOVES

This is my lesson in humility.
My lesson in grief.
My lesson in the cruelty of the human heart, my own.
Trudging through deep southern snow:
finding both of your faces frozen in the white.
Sparrows still singing in the shrubbery.

I could not say it then.
I cannot say it now.
My heart split in two.
A tree limb weighted by ice.
A white        quiet and protective.
A white        dangerously warm.
My hands spiritless in the drifts.

Why do birds continue to sing?

LOVE COMES

not silent,
   but noisy and indiscreet,
           rowdy and persistent.
He comes in leaf fall.
   musty earth in his palms.

           Held out to me
I can do nothing but take it,
   and take it gladly,
           earth being the one coolness
other than water
   to be enjoyed.

           The fact of the matter is this:
tomorrow he may come silent.
   Tomorrow may be love quiet as mist,
           but today,
his cheeks rough with new hairs,
   I smell furrows of new fields.
           I turn over fertile soil.
I hear burrowing insects, happy worms.

   I taste the gentle, crude, excavating damp.
           The stain of love upon the earth!
Stain of love!
   His sleep rattling me.
           His sunrise and breath awakening me.

THAT NIGHT

That body        tree on a misty hill
That face        fawn with dark eyes
That full moon       surrounded by evening skies
That hour        pavement ending in dust
That grass        green with summer's black-green
That night        coming over us with its breath
That sound        crickets singing at eye level
That body        me on the ground with their song
That body        another touching me with fire
That fire              round as the moon burning as the sun
That face        fawn with dark eyes
That you        speaking in tongues unknown and green
That sound        crickets singing in my ear
That body        tree on a misty hill

There were many more, so give the show a listen. Given that Asheville will be in the throes of Bele chere this weekend, it’ll be available through Sunday, August 3rd, at WPVM’s Archive page (just scroll down to Wordplay) as on-demand stream and download.

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The show opened with McCoy Tyner playing “Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit” from the 2007 release McCoy Tyner Quartet. We also heard three of Billy Holiday’s classic performances, “Easy to Love,” “Life Begins When You’re in Love,” and “Summertime,” all from Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles. Keith Jarrett’s “Paint My heart Red,” from the 2006 The Carnegie Hall Concert: Selections for Radio, took the show out.

Enjoy,

Jeff

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The photo of Jeffery is by M. J. Sharp.

Cross-posted at Natures.

A little over six months ago, in early December, translator and poet Nan Watkins shared her translations of some of Alsatian poet Yvan Goll’s work with us on Wordplay. At the time, Wordplay was just a half-hour show, but the station had given us the green light to move to our current hour format beginning in January. I really wanted to hear more about her project, and thought the longer show would provide the room to really explore it, so I invited her to come back to the studio to record some further conversation later that month. She accepted, and this week’s show finally airs a more complete presentation of her work with Goll’s poems, especially the last volume, Das Traumkraut (she translates the title as The Dream Weed).

Goll really did help define Surrealism, and wrote some stunning poems in the process. If you don’t know his work (and there’s been little published in English), do click over to hear what the lady has to say.

The show is available 24/7 from the station archive page as both a stream and podcast.

Mercury always seems to be retrograde at WPVM, and during the live broadcast today, one of the CD players just stopped mid-track; by the time I’d cycled power to the machine and persuaded it to resume reading the disk, I realized I’d have to leave out some of the interview with Watkins to avoid going over our time slot. When I got to the production room to edit, though, I added the track back in, and added another song clip to boot.

Music for today’s show included Django Reinhardt, from some 1949 sessions with Stephan Grappelli, playing “Minor Swing” and “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise”; Oscar Allemann, another pre-war master of Paris bandstands, playing “Stardust”; and Maurice Ravel’s “Alborada del Gracioso” – all music Yvan and Claire Goll might have come across during their years in that great city.

Enjoy.

Jeff

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The photo of Goll comes from findagrave.com. Yes, there really is a site for everything.

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.