New shows on the archive ...

A passel of new Wordplay shows now up on the ibiblio archive, including another Laureate's Radio Hour. Just click on the date to go to the show:

September 27, 2009 brought the very literate (she cringes a bit when so described, but only a very literate chanteuse could title a song "Mary Shelly's Hair") singer-songwriter Angela Faye Martin to the studio to debut her new CD, Pictures From Home, produced by Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous, who died this past March. We listened to some of the CD, and Angela also sang live in the studio.

This was one of the very first shows at Wordplay's new home, AshevilleFM.


October 18, 2009 A few weeks later poet/microfictionalsit/playwright John Crutchfield visited the studio, and brought his banjo to boot. His Songs of Robert had just been selected as "Outstanding Solo Show" at the New York Fringe Festival, and he was in high spirits.

He's got a new production, Solstice, scheduled to open at the new Magnetic Field performance space in Asheville's River Arts District next month.

(Here's his previous Wordplay appearance from February, 2007. )


January 17, 2010 brought Graham Hackett, director of Catalyst Poetix, into the studios for an interview and extraordinary performance. Really, if he was reading from anything, it must have been glued to the back of his eyelids. Graham has since gone on to become the Program Director of the Asheville Area Arts Council.


July 25, 2010 This past summer brought poet Landon Godfrey to the microphone to share some of her work, including some of the poems which will be gathered in her first book, Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown, due early next year. It was selected by David St. John for the Cider Press book award.

Listeners may remember that Landon's been on Wordplay several times before, back on July 6, 2008, and, with Gary Hawkins, her husband and fellow poet, on January 27, 2008, and April 5, 2009. Here's the original program note for the July '08 appearance (remember the link to the program in that note has long since expired). And she can come back any time!


September 19, 2010 brought a couple of Wordplay veterans, Thomas Rain Crowe and Nan Watkins, back to AshevilleFM as guests of Poet Laureate Cathy Smith Bowers, for another of her Laureate's Radio Hours. Cathy particularly wanted to celebrate their translation of Yvan and Claire Goll's 10,000 Dawns on this outing, and Crowe and Watkins were happy to oblige. Music included tracks by Paris' Swing-Era guitar masters Oscar Aleman and Django Rinehardt, and composers Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy

Crowe, an old friend, has been a frequent character here at Natures. Program Notes for two of his appearances on Wordplay can be found here (noting his show this January) and here (celebrating his Rare Birds).

Notes on Watkins' previous appearances, both featuring her work translating the poetry of Yvan Goll, can be found here and here.


September 26, 2010 This summer brought novelist Sujatha Hampton to the mountains for readings at Marshall's French Broad Institute and Asheville's Malaprops Bookstore (right now the site generates a Google malware warning, so I'd wait to visit it) from her As It Was Written. The day after her Malaprops reading, Sujatha visited AshevilleFM for an interview that featured not only discussion of the book, but how she came to write it, and much more.

That's all for today, but there are many more to come.

Wordplay: Accidentally for Easter

Charleston poets Richard Garcia and Katherine Williams were in Asheville visiting the guests I'd scheduled this week, Gary Hawkins and Landon Godfrey. What the heck, I said, bring them in too. You'll have to share the two guest mics, but ...

And we all did an impromptu Easter show. Gary provided a couple of poems featuring dogwoods, and Richard had a poem in which Jesus played a significant part, so ...

Landon, sadly, was overcome by the vapors (or maybe it was the near-90 degree heat of the studio)*, so couldn't take part in the festivities; I'll try to get her back soon.

Music was provided for the occasion by the Malagasy artist Rossy ("I''m a Lonesome Fugitive", from A World Out of Time, Volume 2), Janet Robbins ("Nibiru's Crossing", from Carrying the Bag of Hearts Interpreting the Birth of Stars, Volume III)**, and Pierre Bensusan ("Kadourimdou", from Intuite) (Note: there's auto-playing audio at the link, just so you don't get surprised).

The show's playing all this week over on AshevilleFM's Wordplay page, so click over and give it a listen.

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* We haven't done on-air fundraisers at the station, but now would be an ideal time to help out with a donation if you enjoy hearing poetry over the Internet's airwaves - and would like to keep our poets cool so they don't keel over in the studio.

** It's "Nibiru's Crossing" that I'm talking over unintelligibly at about the halfway mark. Note to self: must wear headphones when mixing ...

Wordplay: Miss Landon Godfrey celebrates her birthday

... on the radio. She was in high spirits, given the special occasion, quick and eloquent in discussing her poetry, as she sees it -- in speaking of her attention to the materiality of language, for instance, as well as its referential sense.

Landon has studied both poetry and painting, and received her MFA in writing from the University of Houston. If you don't yet know her work as poet and painter, now's a good time to begin. Her website's over here, and here are a couple of the poems she read for Wordplay:

PEBBLE

Calculus, lapillus,
rounded, shapely—one—
alone but friended,
       kept in pockets, skipped

across smooth platters
of silver, blue, green, black
water, an arrow
      with blunt tip

and wide-gyre wake,
the idea of circle
pursuing, like pack
      chasing rabbit, greyhound

sleek, panting, flying, greyhound
mob, more than field
doubled, the violent math
      of loose cohesion, spun

and spinning, like oranges flung,
but encased in a burlap sack,
off a cliff, separate
      trajectories hitting one

target. Oy!
Praise chaste thumb-twinner,
ruminator, counter, score
      keeper, even-keeled

balancer, jiggler & sounder
of seven-eight:
taptaptaptaptaptaptaptap,
      silent aspect a ruse

and the Buddha-thing
a clever form of begging—
love me (We do). No,
             cherish me (We do). No,

wait, adore me (Oh, baby,
we do. You’re everything
we’re not). Praise
       monk mime with its monkey

joie de vivre, all
curve, heft & lightness,
dense little soul marker
      escaped from garden duty

having renounced
the civilizing footprint—
so many grouped around a grass
      tuft and voilà

a Stonehenge-Versailles-Central-Park
argument lauding something
called nature, a form of now
      filled with a whole

lot of then—escaped.
Praise and write a postcard
to wandering worn-away,
      visiting ancestors all over the world,

accretions, striae, cairns & mountains,
boulders on pedestals, buildings,
ruins, roads fine and almost
       frictionless and those cobbled

bicycle rumblers where bloody
knee knows to count
its blessings and be grateful
       for wounds that heal

because hungry dogs
can mistake lump-shadow
for crumb and that’s-not-a-potato
       boiled in a pot

is not soup for the starving
and throwing, tossing, pelting,
lobbing, flinging, heaving,
       hurling, casting, slinging,

nailing, launching, firing
can be graving, battle & war
manglers of the horizon,
        a straight line only


in as much as it stands in for one
side of a coffin.
Bless tiny earth-double,
       countless angels dancing

on its ellipse, or one
big angel crushing it
under heel, but, no,
       arch bends up, foot

surrounds humblest orb,
now hiding in makeshift
shelter, spared, not believing in angels.
       Whence the blind eye-ball?

Whence the hopscotch bob?
Whence the mirrored fig,
without leaf to cover luminous energies?
      Whence the memento,

lying next to palm, the word
caress not undermined
by saccharinization, for once
       all care and s, tongue

taking flight, tracing the arc
of sibilance, a one-
letter lovesong to a symbol
       of simple.

Embrace this heat-
thief in hand
and it gives
       warmth back in kind,

the illusion of symbiosis
like perfume, seductive, fleeting.
But the thing itself
       a permanence.

TO CITRINE

You flash bright
green bright shine so even
lying on the sidewalk
next to a marble pillar
you seem alive
before I can pick you
up a little boy lifts your body
his mother hums
hummingbird he hums
hummingbird back into the mirror
of her voice the sad
sound reflecting
off their tongues
and off your jewel-belly
which nudges the sun
like a hill in
a miniature landscape
painting echoing diminishing
song and off the tearless
joy of eyes hearing
your green fire

Check out the rest here (that's the .mp3 stream), or head over to the Archive page at WPVM.

Carla Bruni's No Promises furnished the music for the show. It features Bruni's sung versions of English poems by William Butler Yeats, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Auden, and others. We listened to two by Yeats ("Those Dancing Days Are Gone" and "Before the World Was Made"), Rossetti's "Promises Like Pie Crust", and closed with another I didn't note as we cleared out of the studio and made way for Siren's Muse.

The show will be available as a stream or podcast through next Sunday, 13 July.