"We had to destroy the town ..."

One of the most memorable chunks of language to surface from slimy pit of the Vietnam War was the statement attributed to an anonymous U.S. Air Force Major by AP war correspondent Peter Arnett after the destruction of Ben Tre, a town of 65,000 people: "it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it" - or, as it's usually paraphrased "we had to destroy the town in order to save it." Well, folks, the management of the Mountain Area Information Network, license-holder for WPVM, ought to issue a like statement after the actions of its Executive Director, Wally Bowen, last week.

The station had been bleeding volunteers, and the original programming they produced, ever since Bowen's heavy-handed intrusion into station management last fall, and Bowen effectively eliminated the rest of WPVM's original schedule last week by forcing all volunteers to re-apply, and then denying the applications of all those whom he deemed undesirable for whatever reason. Those undesirables included virtually all of the station's remaining on-air hosts.

One of the shows so canceled, sadly, was Wordplay. I'd anticipated Bowen would take this step at some point, given that he'd included me as one of nine (later ten) volunteers he'd "disinvited" from the station a few months ago. All the ten, curiously, had been among the group that had actually kept the station on the air after the station manager had resigned last September, or had been among the volunteers who had had the temerity to approach MAIN's feckless board with a plan to reorganize the station and structure its relationship with its parent organization during the winter. Funny about that. I figured I had till Asheville Wordfest, the poetry festival that grew out of Wordplay (but which Bowen now touts as "an outreach project of the Mountain Area Information Network" on its Facebook page) had become history, since he'd probably not want to blow a hole in the festival's ranks until after it was over. For whatever reason, that proved to be exactly right.

I'd planned to take a sabbatical this summer, in any case, to travel and do some recording for future shows, so I'll begin it a little earlier than I'd planned. I've offered apologies to guests whom I had already booked, and regrets that we won't get to do those live shows just yet.

While it's too soon to say more, I believe there's a very good chance that Wordplay will once again bring poetry "to the airwaves and the ether" in the near future, and I certainly look forward to it.

Thanks, as always, for listening.

And stay tuned for more.

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.

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.