Wishing Coleman Barks the best ...

would be a good thing to do right now, and for the next few months, as he works back from a stroke that deprived him of his speech. He's a lucky man in some ways; as he notes in his statement, he's fine cognitively, and has no major loss of physical function:

I can read and write just fine, and no motor functions are impaired. Arms and legs active and strong. It is really just a slightly droopy right eyelid and my having only half a smile.
...
So I have been tremendously lucky, actually. In three months, my neurologist doctor (Van Morris!) says (by early June), we will see 80% of what improvement (in my half-smile and my speech) is possible. I plan to work with speech therapists, hypnotists, and whoever else, to get better.
...
I am mostly sleeping as much as I can (grace) and listening to recordings of my old voice in my kitchen and talking along (practice). I am not answering the phone or the door, or emails (only a few). Please forgive me these reclusive measures. Think of me as an old dormant bear, healing.

The Hopi, according to the remarkable linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, had a category of taking part in an activity that he termed "covert participation", and it included thinking good thoughts about more active participants, saying silent prayers for them, and like steps. Now might be a good time to participate covertly in Coleman's return to speech.

And I'll certainly be holding that voice in mind, and hoping that the spring which has begun to waken so many things that have been sleeping through these cold months rouses the healing power in that old dormant bear, as well.

Coleman Barks comes (back) to Wordplay

Sebastian and I are both out of town this Sunday, so I've set up a show from a couple weeks back to play again, via the wonders of computer automation.

That show was a real treat, and well worth hearing once more: Coleman Barks reading live at Asheville's Fine Arts Theater on April 26th (as part of WordFest2008) with bassist Eliot Wadopian and percussionist Byron Hedgepeth. It assuredly wasn't your standard poetry reading.

Barks is well-known, of course, as the premiere translator of the works of the 13th Century Persian mystic poet Jalal al-Din Rumi into English, but he's a master poet in his own right, and in this performance gave us both some of his own insightful, genial work, and a selection of his translations from Rumi and Hafez.

On an earlier visit to Asheville, Coleman came by the studio to talk with me about (among many other things) his long relationship with Rumi's poetry; part of that interview is featured in the show, too.

The reading audio is a little boomy, but listenable. I'd set my mics up too close, as it turned out, to the PA that afternoon; I edited out the resulting signal clipping.

Incidental music for the show included tracks from Ali Akbar Khan's 1993 Garden of Dreams.

It'll air at 2:00 PM on Sunday from the station website. As always, the show will be available all next week from the Archive page as an on-demand stream and free podcast.

Enjoy, and I'll be back live in the studio (if the creek don't rise and the sky don't fall) next week.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Coleman provided the photo, taken by his son Benjamin.