News notes ...

I missed this when it first got posted, but on Thursday Ron Silliman reviewed Thomas Rain Crowe's new chapbook, The Blue Rose of Venice. What's more, he liked it, noting of it's short "Song of the Gondolier" -

Short bridges.
Narrow canals.
A single wooden paddle
from a black boat on dark water
the only sound
as
the gondolier begins to sing
eeoo, eeoo
into the evening
and the mouth of
a cellular phone.

that "it’s perfectly executed and I found myself reading it over & over, luxuriating in each moment."

Congratulations to Mr. Crowe!

(Other posts about Thomas and his work: here)

&&

Thomas joined me on Wordplay on January 3rd, and as soon as I get it edited (the station internet stream, which feeds the archiving system - or used to, now - dropped several times during the show, so it's incomplete and fragmentary), but I'll post it to the Wordplay Archive.

He read much of the Blue Rose, and friend and fellow poet Caleb Beissert, who joined us in the studio, read some translations of Neruda, and some of his own work as well .

&&

Speaking of Wordplay, thanks to the hard work of Greg Lyon, we've now gotten that archiving system actually, you know, archiving and uploading to the stream server, so each show will be available online for two weeks after its initial air date. I'll post it to the ibiblio archive after that.

Last week's show with poet Lucy Tobin is even now available from the Programming page, here, though it's in unedited form, which means you'll hear a few minutes of Diet Riot before Wordplay, and sundry other sonic artifacts that will disappear before it goes to ibiblio.

I'll be uploading this fall's and winter's shows to ibiblio anon.

&&

And the complete text of Robert Creeley's Collected Essays is now available online, as well, complete with index. Creeley's one of the indispensable guides to poetry in the late great 20th century, so it's wonderful to have his work available for free.
(a tip of the hat to Silliman's blog for the link)

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Photo: Thomas Rain Crowe and Caleb Beissert in the AshevilleFM studio for WordPlay.