This week: Ken Rumble on Wordplay

Greensboro’s Ken Rumble, one of the founders of the Lucifer Poetics Group, trekked across rivers and mountains to Asheville last 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 and 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 exploring 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 Sunday, August 10th.
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Update, 11 August 2008: Ken's show has now been deleted from the WPVM server, replaced by this week's show, which features novelist Janna McMahan. Ken's show will soon be available, however, at another place or two. More as we work out the details.

The photo can be found over at Ken’s blog, in his Blogger profile. The closed eyes perhaps testify to its candid occasion …