Wordplay celebrates Wordfest with Patricia Smith

Asheville Wordfest gets under way this week, so Sunday I featured a reading from last year's festival by the dynamic Patricia Smith. A few hours before her reading she came by the station and shared some reflections on her poetry and her poetics with the Wordplay crew, including Glenis Redmond and Sebastian Matthews, so that interview is featured as well. She's a real griot, a tale-teller who wears many masks, so check it out.

Patricia herself told me what music to blend into the mix. Well, not exactly, but in the interview she read actually recited from memory poems for Dizzy Gillespie and John Lee Hooker, so I used Dizzy's "Night in Tunisia" in a re-mastered version from 2002's Afro, and John Lee Hooker's "Don't Turn Me Away from Your Door", from the 1963 album of the same name - an old favorite, one I used to own, back in the days of vinyl. I opened the show with Malian guitarist Habib Koité and Bamada performing "Africa", from the 2007 CD Afriki.

Last week's show with Jonathan Williams is still on the server, as well; sorry about the bad link in the first program note. You'll find it right here.

The original program note for the Williams show is below, here.

Enjoy!

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Photo by Peter Dressel, from Blue Flower Arts.

Update: There's a fine clip of Habib Koité and Bamada over at YouTube.
Later: And here's a still better one.

WordFest 2008: The Photos

Former WordPlay sidekick Laura Hope-Gill has now joined FaceBook, and she's put up an album of photos (sorry, I don't have the public link) from April's WordFest 2008. It features lots of shots from the readings - and some from our trip to the old Black Mountain College campus with Galway, as well.

I've added a few more from the trip to Camp Rockmont here.

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The photo has Galway Kinnell standing on the porch of the Studies Building during our visit to the site of Black Mountain College, now Camp Rockmont. Lake Eden and the Black Mountains shine in the background.

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.

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Coleman provided the photo, taken by his son Benjamin.

A few changes ...

The WordFest schedule has had a few changes - not unusual for an event with so many particulars - "moving parts", as the saying has it, all of them human. It remains dynamic. So:

The Sunday reading at the Flood Gallery will start at 1:00 pm, rather than noon.

The cast of Flood readers has had a minor change, as well: I'll now be reading at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center at 7:00 pm Sunday, rather than at the Flood.

Glenis had to cancel her workshop on Saturday.

Mine still starts at 11:00 am tomorrow morning, but we'll gather at the Humanities Lecture Hall at 10:45 before heading to the Botanical Gardens.

Speaking of workshops ...

I'll crash. The first two events, though, have been really involving and fascinating, and introduced me to poets whose work I didn't really know. I skipped the Green Door event at Malaprops earlier tonight just to have a little downtime; last night some fifteen of us went to the New French Bar and had too much fun until too late. We'll probably do something similar tomorrow, since Galway seems to have an interest in exploring downtown Asheville after his reading.

Today a group of us took Galway out to Camp Rockmont, home of Black Mountain College when he attended a summer session in 1947. It was the first time he'd been back since then, and the re-encounter seemed to spur recollections of friends and fellow writers among the faculty and students - and of skinny dipping with a lady friend in one of the nearby streams.

Sebastian and I will try to schedule some studio time with Galway to do a (somewhat more) formal interview between now and his departure Sunday night; I expect we'll be joined by the electric Kerouac scholar Audrey Spenger, who's in town this weekend to continue her research into the opening of American letters - and the culture at large - that began in the fifties and sixties.

And that's the news from the festival trenches for now.

(Sounds of incipient sleep.)

Going Outside

As part of Wordfest, I'll be holding a workshop on writing from/with/about what we call "nature". Given the focus, I thought it'd be better to hold it outside rather than in a classroom, so we'll be meeting at UNCA's Botanical Gardens, at the northwest corner of the campus. If you'd be interested, drop a note to workshops@ashevillewordfest.org, or drop me a note at jeffbdavis at gmail.com.

Here's the description from the festival website:

In jazz, when a musician wants to change the color and feel of a composition, and move it into territory beyond the known and understood, he or she will often “go outside”, move out of the conventions of tonal structure for the piece, and transform it. It’s a mark, perhaps, of our alienation from our ecology, our oikos, home, that to speak authentically of the natural world, poets also must open up and move beyond the conventional tonal structures we find enshrined in the poetic canon. In this workshop, we’ll actually go out into the natural (if not quite wild) world to find ways to address the interaction of consciousness and world that move beyond metaphor, which too often just appropriates some apparent fact of the world as a trope of human rhetoric. We’ll look at things, feel them, smell them, dwell with them for a bit, and then try to speak for them – or from them. We’ll also look at poems by Ponge, Issa, Basho, and Rilke that have gone outside to help open our human eyes.

We'll get together Saturday the 26th, at 11:00 AM.

A Feast of Words

Hard to believe that we're now only a week away from Wordfest, the new Asheville poetry festival. It hits the stage - or one of its stages - this coming Thursday, April 24th, with a 7:00 performance by Patricia Smith and Rick Chess at UNCA's Humanities Lecture Hall. It should be an interesting event, given the distance between the writing & performance styles of the two featured poets; Patricia comes from the world of the slam, and Rick from the halls of the university.

That difference, of course, is precisely the point, a signal of the range of poets and poetries the festival means to include.

The whole thing grew out of a series of conversations over coffee at Malaprops, Asheville's great independent bookstore, following Wordplay shows early last year. Laura Hope-Gill, then a Wordplay host, and Jim Navé, of the Writing Salon, had fond memories of the first Asheville Poetry Festivals, held for a few years in the early 1990s - festivals that I had missed - had been, in fact, only vaguely aware of. Those festivals had grown out of the slam scene in Asheville, a scene in which I hadn't been involved, and had found, given the directions my own work was then taking, of little interest. Some poets of real energy and authentic voice, though, had emerged from that scene, including Laura herself, and her good friend (and also occasional Wordplay host) Glenis Redmond. The longer we talked, the more our conversation turned to creating a festival anew, one that would honor all the approaches to poetry we'd variously come to enjoy and understand, that had come to have place in our community. You won't find it anywhere in the festival materials now, but when we initially tried to define a statement of intent for the festival, the phase we came up with was "echo and reach"; we wanted to honor the history of the arts of language in these mountains, home through the centuries to Cherokee singers and to the poets of Black Mountain College, to ballad singers and to beats, slam masters and professors of writing. Over the months we talked with our friends and fellow poets, and gradually came up with a list of poets we believed covered, if not the full range of activity we might wish to honor, a pretty decent part of it.

Here's the schedule:

RICHARD CHESS‚ PATRICIA SMITH

Thursday April 24 7:00 pm UNC-A Humanities Lecture Hall

SIMON ORTIZ‚ MARIJO MOORE‚ KATHRYN STRIPLING BYER

Friday April 25 7:00 pm UNC-A Humanities Lecture Hall

GLENIS REDMOND‚ ALLAN WOLF‚ JIM NAVE‚ LAURA HOPE-GILL

Re-Opening the Green Door: a Retrospective of the 1990’s Performance Poetry Scene
Friday April 25 10:00 pm Malaprops Bookstore/café corner of Walnut and Haywood St.

COLEMAN BARKS WITH ELIOT WADOPIAN

Saturday April 26 2:00 pm The Fine Arts Theater 36 Biltmore Avenue

WORDFEST AT MALAPROPS: RECEPTION AND SIGNING

Saturday April 25 4:00 pm Malaprops Bookstore/café

FATEMEH KESHAVARZ‚ GALWAY KINNELL

Saturday April 26 7:00 pm UNC-A Humanities Lecture Hall

POETIX LOUNGE

Saturday April 26 10:00 pm Bobo Gallery on Lexington Avenue

FLOOD GALLERY READING: GLENIS REDMOND‚ SEBASTIAN MATTHEWS‚ LAURA HOPE-GILL‚ JEFF DAVIS‚ and MARK PRUDOWSKY

12:00 noon. 109 Roberts St. at corner of Clingman and Roberts by the river.

LEE ANN BROWN‚ CATHY WAGNER‚ DEVIN JOHNSTON

This History Isn’t Closed: A Protospective of The Black Mountain College Legacy: Sunday April 27 2:00 pm Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center

WORDFEST LOCAL: DAVID HOPES‚LEE ANN BROWN, GARY COPELAND LILLEY‚ THOMAS RAIN CROWE‚ ROSE MCLARNEY, ALLAN WOLF‚ KEITH FLYNN

Sunday April 27 7:00 pm Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, 56 Broadway in downtown Asheville.

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There's more information over at the festival website.

Glenis, Rick, Navé and I will also be providing workshops in various approaches to poetry; mine will focus, as you might suspect, on writing about or from what we usually call "Nature". More on those workshops in another post.

Come out if you can to catch us all at work, doing what we love most to do, celebrating language of the mind, heart and imagination.

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Thanks to Megan McKissack for creating the festival poster.

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Updated April 21,2008 to reflect last-minute changes in the schedule.