New old shows

Now up on the Wordplay Archive at ibiblio, shows from the fall of 2007 (all links in the show dates are to the .mp3 audio files):

September 2, 2007 featured Thomas Rain Crowe, and includes recordings of Crowe with his band, The Boatrockers.

September 9, 2007 featured poet Joanna Cooper.

September 16, 2007 featured a reading by Glenis Redmond at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.

September 23, 2007 brought Steve Godwin into the studio, and Steve, Sebastian and I talked over poems we enjoyed, from recent work by Van Jordan (Sebastian) to an HD piece from 1921 (me). Music included tracks from Neil Young and Steve Kimock.

September 30, 2007 highlighted the work of poet Audrey Hope Rinehart.

October 21, 2007 found then-Marshall poet Rose McLarney in the studio for her annual* near-birthday reading of new work.

Enjoy, and thanks for listening.


*which means she'll soon be back.

Wordplay this week: Robert B ... er, make that Glenis Redmond, Laura Hope-Gill, Sebastian Matthews, and Ryan Walsh

Ah, poets ... not the promptest people on the earth's face, are we? If you'd tuned into this week's Wordplay, you might have thought I'd just repeated last week's fine show with Robert Bly, and moved on.

True, this week's show does start off with about15 minutes of the show with Bly; I'd cued it up when none of my guests had appeared by airtime, and a few minutes later headed the half-block to Malaprops for a cup of coffee. Half way there, though, I saw Glenis Redmond heading in my direction, so I met her and we headed back to the station. A few steps on, Laura Hope-Gill shouted from her car that she'd be there as soon as she parked, and that Sebastian Matthews was on the way. By a quarter after we had gathered in the studio (and Sebastian came along a couple minutes later - and brought with him Ryan Walsh, who's now helping him edit Rivendell), and at the first break in the Bly show we went live, reading poems and talking over poetry, poets, the upcoming Wordfest, and the new plan for Rivendell for the rest of the hour. Turns out they'd all been to the same Kwanzaa party the night before, and had had a bit too much fun ...

Give it a listen.

And if you wanted to catch the Bly show, it's still available on the archive too, and it's worth catching.

Two new shows: Laura Hope-Gill and Glenis Redmond

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

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Photo: Laura and Glenis just before a reading at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, May, 2006.

Ikkyu, Meet Glenis

After the WordPlay show last Sunday, the first this season in which co-host Glenis Redmond could participate, I was struck by the eerie coherence of the event that had unfolded. It certainly wasn't planned; insofar as there had been a plan, it involved reading poems over music. I'd chosen some poems by the fourteenth century Japanese poet Ikkyu, an unconventional Zen monk, that I planned to read over flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal's lovely Japanese Melodies. Ikkyu's work, though, includes erotic poems. Did I mention that Ikkyu was unconventional? Here's one, in John Stevens' translation:

A Woman's Sex

It has the original mouth but remains wordless;
It is surrounded by a magnificent mound of hair.
Sentient beings can get completely lost in it
But it is also the birthplace of all the Buddhas of the ten thousand worlds.

A man's erotic poetry celebrates the feminine - the Goddess in woman - so Ikkyu's poems actually resonated, I thought, with the poems Glenis read, some of her own, some by other strong women poets. Listen to it and see what you think.

(The poem is from Ikkyu, Wild Ways, translated by John Stevens, published by White Pine Press, Buffalo, NY, 2003.)

(Cross-posted with minor edits at WordPlay)