Olson's Maximus Too Much?

Maybe so! At least for the CD player in AshevilleFM's Studio A. It freaked out Sunday and cut short the first three tracks I tried to play from Olson's Maximus Poems. Fortunately, most of the material I'd intended to use for the show was available from the great PennSound website, so I was able to go online and stream the poems I'd programmed. Of course, I'd also planned to use three poems that weren't on PennSound, my own edits from Fred Wah's recording of the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, but, thankfully, the CD player worked fine for them. Go figure.

The glitches did mean that I couldn't include the "Maximus From Dogtown IV" I had on the playlist, but I'll edit it in when I post the show to the WordPlay archive on ibiblio, along with the tracks the player truncated.

Celebrating Robin Blaser (updated)

On May 7th Robin Blaser, one of the last major figures among those who came to public notice via Don Allen's New American Poetry, passed away in Vancouver, just shy of 84. Though he will forever be associated with Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer as a primary figure in the renaissance of San Francisco poetry in the late forties and early fifties, he also recognized affinities between their work and that of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and the other Black Mountain poets. His 1987 lectures on Olson are a rich resource for Olson's poetics, and his own. He and Creeley were friends from the sixties till Creeley's death in 2005. He taught at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC, for many years, and also occasionally at Naropa's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

(An earlier post on his passing is here.)

I never successfully recorded Robin myself; both times I tried, my usually trusty Uher developed problems. Thankfully, the great Penn Sound audio archive has hours of readings and lectures in his voice, so I put together this week's Wordplay from three of its recordings. The first finds him reading in Vancouver in 1965; the second, discussing his work, and that of his fellows, in a BBC interview with Iain Sinclair from 1994; the third, reading at Milwaukee's Woodland Pattern Bookstore in 2004.

In Vancouver he read "The Moth Poem", an early exploration of serial form; it's a great poem, but the recording, given that it was made on analogue tape over forty years ago (probably by Fred Wah, though he's not credited), had some hiss that I removed for better audibility. In Milwaukee, Blaser began his reading with the introductory section of his extended poem on Dante, then switched to shorter poems, and then returned to the "Great Companions" piece on Dante, saying he hadn't "prepared anything else". I brought the two pieces together for the show. It's a powerful reading.

Music for the show by Bach (the Allegro and Adagio from the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 2 in E Major, performed by the Camerata Romana, conducted by Eugene Duvier); the Kronos Quartet, playing Jimi Hendrix' "Purple Haze"; and Olivier Messiaen, "Praise Eternity" from the Quartet for the End of Time, performed by the Orchestre de l'Opera Bastille, Myung-Whun Chung conductor. The Quartet was one of Robin's favorite pieces of music in the mid-seventies, when I had the good fortune to be at least a peripheral* participant in the continual commotion that was Vancouver poetry scene - at the epicenter of which, I believe most then there would say, stood Robin Blaser.

Enjoy.

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* I actually lived most of the time not in Vancouver, but in Alert Bay, a fishing village a day's journey north. Anyone curious can glean a little of what I was up to from this post from a few years ago.

Uncredited photo from a collection of shots from Blaser's Berkeley years over at the EPC.

Update, 23 May, 2009: And it turns out that this was the last Wordplay - for awhile, at least. See the story here.

Robert Creeley this week on Wordplay

It's no secret that I see Robert Creeley one of the essential poets of the last fifty years. From early to late, his work opened new territories of mind and heart for poetry; I believe his fine ear and remarkable articulation of the rhythms of American speech insure that folks will still be reading his poems centuries from now.

In the 70s and 80s I recorded several Creeley readings on my trusty Uher 4400, but it recorded in a unique four track monaural format that makes the tapes playable only on a like machine, and mine needs repair. For the Fathers' Day show now up on the WPVM Archive page, then, I selected readings from among the many recordings at the ever-expanding Creeley collection at PennSound. The show begins with poems recorded at Black Mountain College in 1954 and poems from the same period (a few the very same poems) recorded at readings at Chicago's The Second City in 1961 and at Harvard in 1966. These were all clearly recorded on analogue tape, and transferred after the tapes had become somewhat degraded. I cleaned them up as best as I could for the show, but there's still some audible hiss; I also had to edit out the "fuck" in "Ballad of the Despairing Husband," since the FCC still considers that a word you can't say on the radio.

Most of the show, though, focuses on Creeley's middle and later work, from Pieces on. Perhaps that's just because I met him in 1968, the year Scribners brought out that collection, and so simply find in this work the voice I knew. From then till the end of his life he often worked in what became his long form, the serial suite. I've included "The Finger" and "Follow the Drinking Gourd" from a 1974 reading at Vermont's Goddard College; the complete "Histoire de Florida," from a 1995 Buffalo reading; "En Famille" from a 2000 reading at his Maine home, and "Wild Nights" from the same occasion; and two poems from a 2000 reading at the University of Pennsylvania, "Myself" and "Where Late the Sweet Bird Sang".

Did Bob ever write about music? He sometimes worked with musicians, of course, but I don't remember ever talking with him about music, and have no idea what he listened to day in and day out; I had to wing the soundscape. The show kicks off with a version of Miles Davis' "So What?" recorded at the Blackhawk in San Francisco (Miles was a big favorite at Black Mountain), and the other music featured in the program includes bits of "Stating Intention" from Peter Kater and R. Carlos Nakai's Migration; "So Long Michael" from Pierre Bensusan's Intuite; and Debussy's La Mer, performed by the Orcestra of Radio Luxembourg, Rolf Reinhardt conductor.

Head on over to WPVM and check it out.

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The photo was taken by Joel Kuzai at Creeley's home in Providence, RI, in 2004.

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Update 6/27/2008: Having just listened to the show, I feel I should apologize for the rough cross-fades between the music and Bob's readings. They're one of the hazards of doing the show live with balky equipment.

I'll do another show on Bob's work when my tapes are digitized, and try to make the transitions in that one less abrupt. Hopefully the station will have a couple of new CD players by then.

This week on Wordplay ...

We'll be repeating last week's show with Jonathan Williams. We've repeated shows before, usually when something's gone haywire with the station's automatic archiving system, and the show hasn't uploaded properly to the server from which it streams and downloads. This week ... well, Sebastian's in Seattle, and I've been busy with Robert Bly's performance last night and workshop today, and at show time tomorrow, I'll be recording Kay Byer, North Carolina's Poet Laureate, at a reading at the Asheville Art Museum. So.

The show features Jonathan's May, 2005, reading from Jubilant Thicket at Sylva's City Lights Books, and it probably won't hurt anyone to hear it again. In fact, listen to those meta-fours again, and see if they aren't even better the second time around. The man could be subtle and very very dry, after all.

Production notes are just one post down.

The upside: we've got what looks to be a good recording of Bly's plugged-in performance with Free Planet Radio last night, and a half- hour interview from this very afternoon as well.

Back next week with a new show, promise.

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Update, 31 March: And here's the new direct link for the show featuring Jonathan's reading. You can also get it by going to the station website, hitting the link for the Archive page, and cruising down through the alphabet to "Wordplay", if you'd like to get a glimpse at what else is shakin' at the Progressive Voice of the Mountains.
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Update, 19 April, 2008: Jonathan's reading at City Lights is now archived at PennSound, here.

Jonathan Williams on the air

This week, Wordplay features a reading Jonathan gave at City Lights Books in Sylva, North Carolina, on May 27, 2005, shortly after Jubilant Thicket had come out. Almost any reading that followed the organization of the book, beginning, as it does, with the "meta-fours" that Jonathan wrote so many of in the last couple decades, would be fun, given their spirited play; it didn't disappoint.

A few production notes:

The room in which the reading was held was very warm, even in May, and there was an electric fan near the chair from which Jonathan read; one of my mics was close to the fan, and inevitably picked up its steady, annoying hum. I was able to filter out most of the noise, but at times Jonathan's voice sounds a bit as though it were echoing off cavern walls as a result.

Two of the four pieces of music I used for intro, breaks, and outro were pieces Jonathan had praised in conversation; one was by a musician he'd written a poem for, or about. I don't know how Jonathan felt about Miles Davis, but he was a favorite of Charles Olson's during the Black Mountain era, so I figured I was on pretty solid ground in selecting one of his classics.*

The tunes:
The intro was Miles Davis' "Bye Bye Blackbird" from 'Round About Midnight;
the first interlude was Charlie Mingus' band doing "Memories of You", from East Coasting;
the second interlude, Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia on Greensleeves", as performed by the Academy of St. Martins in the Fields, conducted by Neville Marriner;
and the outro was the first three minutes or so of Williams' "The Lark Ascending", also performed by the Academy.

Enjoy.

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* Update, 28 March: Not to worry, Jonathan dug Miles. I've been reading so much Jonathan over the last few weeks that I can't for now nail down the source (was it somewhere in Blackbird Dust? No Jonathan book ever had an index, of course ... Or somewhere in Jeffrey Beam's dialogue with the Colonel over at Jargon? Or in the 1973 issue of Vort - more from that soon?), but Jonathan claimed early on to own as many Miles Davis records as he did of Bach - twenty-one each. That's a fan.


Of the photo, Alex Gildzen writes:

Doug Moore took this picture of Jonathan (which appears on the back cover of The Magpie's Bagpipe) in my livingroom on Morris in Kent.

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Update, 19 April, 2008: Jonathan's reading at City Lights is now archived at PennSound, here.

Update, 9 September 2008: The Wordplay show featuring Jonathan's reading is now archived at ibiblio, also, as part of Wordplay's permanent archive:

March 23, 2008, featuring Jonathan Williams reading at Sylva's City Lights Books in May of 2005.

Wordplay this week: Ed Dorn

Thanks to Donald Allen's 1960 New American Poetry, Ed Dorn is still primarily known as a Black Mountain College poet. After his years at the college, though, he went on to become one of the foremost poets of the American West, in all its dimensions. This week's Wordplay features Dorn reading two works that helped to define that legacy: Idaho Out and Recollections of Gran Apacheria.

The Idaho Out opened a 1962 reading, probably in Albuquerque (Robert Creeley, who'd been his Examiner at Black Mountain, introduces him, and Creeley was then, I believe, still teaching in New Mexico). Dorn followed it with an equally spirited take on "From Gloucester Out", but I decided to save that poem for another show so that I could fit the second reading, from April 19, 1974, in Buffalo, into our hour. This reading was one of the first to which I lugged my trusty Uher reel-to-reel; I set up on Dorn's right, fairly close to the front of the room, and held the single mic in my hand (no mic stands in those days, so I could travel light) for the duration. I also managed to shoot several photos of Dorn as he read; I've posted them over at Facebook (that's the public link), and will probably upload them to Flickr also.

Before he read Recollections that night, he read a few short selections from the later books of Gunslinger, whose conclusion hadn't yet been published. I omitted those from the show in order to include all of Recollections - or all I had; back in those days of reel-to-reels, I always had to keep my fingers crossed that one five inch tape would make it all the way through a reading. That night it didn't, not quite: the end of the tape slipped through the capstan and across the heads just before Dorn spoke the last few words of the final poem. I supplied those for the show.

The readings are both now available online, the 1962 reading at the Slought Foundation, and the 1974 reading at PennSound; I uploaded it a few years ago to The Factory School site, and it somehow made its way to PennSound when the Factory School audio archive closed. Ah, the wonders of the internet. There are links to both archives in the sidebar.

The music I played to open the show was "Apache", by The Shadows; I found it at YouTube. That's also where I found Vaughn Monroe's version of "Ghost Riders in the Sky", which led into the break. Leading into Recollections, and then out of the show, are short sections of two cuts from the Peter Kater/R. Carlos Nakai collaboration Natives, as haunting, and haunted, as the West which they echo.

Enjoy.

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Photo: Ed Dorn reading in Buffalo, April 19, 1974.

Update: Chunks of Tom Clark's Edward Dorn: A World of Difference are now up at Google Books.

Happy Birthday, Ezra Pound

Born 1885 in Hailey, Idaho, and one of the great Modernist poets, whatever the political delusions. So much of his writing remains of actual use. His author page at the Electronic Poetry Center contains links to other good Pound sites, including PennSound, which has a wonderful collection of Ezra reading his own work.

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Photo: © http://www.lit.kobe-u.ac.jp/~hishika/pound.htm, borrowed from the EPC Pound page.

WCW on the web

A recent post over at Ron Silliman's blog contained the news that the complete recordings of William Carlos Williams are now on the web, over at PennSound.

Williams was one of the poets on whose work I grew up, so I headed over and checked them out.

There are a couple of problems with the .mp3 files, though, and a bad link as well; hopefully they'll get these straightened out in time:

- Items #6 (Reading and Commentary at UCLA) and #25 (Reading and Commentary at UCal Berkeley) currently link to 1K file stubs of 0:00 duration;

- Item #18 (Interview on the Mary Margaret McBride Show ... March 25, 1954) actually links to the same .mp3 file as Item #8, an interview with the same host from December 4, 1950.

Meanwhile, of course, the rest of the recordings are a great resource for anyone who wants to literally hear what the man was up to. Roughly half of them were recorded after his first stroke, so you can also hear him in the process of relearning to articulate his work, and to find the voice of the late great poems, such as "Asphodel That Greeny Flower".

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The photo of Williams is borrowed from PennSound.