Natures: Wordplay: Nan Watkins presents Yvan Goll

Monday, June 30, 2008

Wordplay: Nan Watkins presents Yvan Goll

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. [Update 17 September, 2008: Here's a new link for Nan's show, as broadcast on June 29, 2008; it's now up on the ibibio archive]

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 encountered when they ventured out to the concert halls and clubs of that great city.

Enjoy.

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

Labels: music, Nan Watkins, Wordplay, Yvan Goll

Praise for NatureS

"Way back when, a literary gent by the name of E.L. Pound, from Hailey, Idaho, announced to the world: 'I divide poetry into what I can read and what I cannot read.' I am new to Jeff Davis's work but hit'll read!!! It reminds me that writers named Robert Creeley and Charles Olson once taught at Black Mountain College in Buncombe County NC - and made a difference."

~Jonathan Williams

"These poems are succinct in language and insights - no waste of words here - lovely and moving jewels of the Eleusinian luminous darkness, a magnificent shining in the dark. Poems (all of them) that are gifts, with a sassy bit of awareness to ground them all. At their best, they show an excellent eye and ear for the images and rhythms of nature - fresh, clear, as any sparkling mountain stream - and sing with that limpidity Olson was always trying to drum into my head at Black Mountain. Jeff Davis is a poet who knows what most males thirst to know - and die, not knowing. 'I am written,' Rimbaud said, and he is just that in these poems."

~Michael Rumaker

"Being human and part of nature, what we have in common with the natural world is something we gain then lose, gain then lose, over and over. The continual process of holding and letting go makes up the world we smell, we taste, we see, we feel, we hear, we share. As the custodian of this experience we have none better than Jeff Davis. He has been tireless in his practice of recording these dark and luminous encounters: the flicker of love, or the shadow of leaves in the wind."

~Thomas Meyer