"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 welcomes Peter Culley ... and Ezra Pound!

For this week's fall fundraiser we featured the British Columbia author of The Age of Briggs and Stratton, who read just over a week ago at The French Broad Institute of Time and the River. A project of Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn, the Institute is definitely putting new life in the nightlife of Marshall, NC.

Peter's done several residencies in the Smokies, now, and they're beginning to find their way into his work.

We sometimes do archival shows on Wordplay, and have featured readings by Whitman, Tennyson, Yeats, and others whose voices recording technologies have happily saved from time during our three years of broadcasting. Today we featured the great Ezra Pound in readings from 1938 to 1967; he was 82 in the latter year, but still had a strong, complex voice. His reading of Canto LXXXI is exquisite, and poetry doesn't get much better than that. "What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross..."

A huge thanks to PennSound for making its Pound archive available through the 'net.

By the way, you might notice a few pops and distortions during the first minute of Peter's reading. I'd set up that night to record the stage, but everyone decided to perform on the floor instead. What you hear is me moving the mics to get a more balanced recording. Sorry about that.

Music for today's show included tunes from the remarkable Anni Rossi, who performed at the Institute as part of the program which included Peter, and California flutist Suzanne Teng.

Do lend it an ear (.mp3 file)

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Photo by Tony Torn, borrowed from Peter's EPC page, linked above.

Wordplay: radio ephemera

Last Sunday I sat down with young poets Abby Wendle and Jenn Dumbrowski. They read some fine work and we shared a great conversation about their visions of poetry, their practice as poets, and a range of other topics (the crowd for a Sarah Palin rally was lining up in front of the Asheville Civic Center next door, and I'm sure we mentioned that). Sadly, as has happened several times before, the automatic archiving system at WPVM broke down, and the show didn't record. Argh. Oh, well. I'll try to get them on again.

The bottom line: the show featuring the musical Lee Ann Brown remains accessible for another week via the Archive page for streaming and podcast.

This coming Sunday's show occurs during WPVM's fall fundraiser, and we'll be pitching along with the rest of the station's volunteers.

Wordplay this week: Lee Ann Brown

This past Sunday we celebrated the work of New York (and Marshall, NC) poet Lee Ann Brown. I drew on several recordings of Lee Ann, the first from 2002, when she came to Asheville for the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center's "Under the Influence" festival. It was her first North Carolina reading, and she was in high spirits - but, then, Lee Ann seems always to be in high spirits. The reading took place at Malaprops, Asheville's wonderful independent bookstore; it was recorded by Adam Johnson.

The Museum + Arts Center itself furnished the venue for the second reading, a celebration of the East Coast Beat poets. Lee Ann performed, among other things, lovely versions of a poem by Allen Ginsberg and of Ginsberg's and Ed Sanders' arrangements of William Blake songs. The Jar-e Jazz Quartet provided musical support and sonic texture. The reading took place on February 11, 2005, and Jason Brady recorded.

This past January Lee Ann was in Marshall for the holidays, and met me at the WPVM studios to read some recent work and talk about the directions she's currently exploring. I've used a substantial portion of our interview in the show's final segment.

I opened the show with an Iraqi folk song performed by Beth Brown, Lee Ann's sister, and her husband Ra'ed Rawawey at Malaprops for the 2002 reading. At the first break you'll hear Pentangle performing the old Child ballad "Omie Wise," from their 1989 release A Maid That's Deep in Love. The second break features Ronald and Anna-Wendy Stevenson performing "Lady Charlotte Campbell," from their 2005 release Gowd and Silver. The show's outro has Charles Lloyd performing another old old classic, "The Water Is Wide." I'm not sure which of his collections the track originally appeared on, but it's now on iTunes, where I found it. If you listen to the interview, you'll know why it was just the right piece on which to close.

Thanks to Lee Ann, and to all whose work made this show possible. It'll be on the station archive through October 26th, and will re-broadcast this Sunday, October 19th, at 2:00 PM, since I'll be at a funeral in Charlotte.

Enjoy.

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There are several shows waiting for me to upload them to the archive, and I'll do notes on those as I get them transferred. For the last six weeks or so, since the resignation of the station manager, I've been helping to manage WPVM, and it's involved many meetings, hours and hours of computer support, and many other commitments of time and energy. My apologies to the authors whose shows await the renewed light of day on the net.

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Photo: Lee Ann Brown at her home in Marshall, May 2005.

Wordplay welcomes Jeffery Beam

(Click for a larger version)
Hillsborough poet Jeffery Beam was in town last weekend for Loco Logodaedalist, the celebration of Jonathan Williams' work hosted Saturday night by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, so I talked him into coming into the micro-studio at WPVM to talk about his work. He read a few poems from his Visions of Dame Kind (Jargon, 1995), a book whose approach to the natural world I've long admired, but we spent much of the program reading and discussing poems from his new (as in brand new) The Beautiful Tendons, Uncollected Queer Poems 1969-2007 (White Crane Books, 2008). It's a fine, emotionally searching and honest, collection of love poems - when we're in the kingdom of love, it doesn't matter whom we see as the other, the same rules pertain, and this book limns them with a forthright grace.

Several of Jeffery's poems have found musical settings, so we discussed the relation of music and poem, and Jeffery, in honor of his lifetime love of the old songs he grew up singing in Kannapolis (he feels they still inform his work), closed the show with a remarkable rendition of the old Methodist hymn "In the Garden".

If you don't yet know his work, here are three poems from Beautiful Tendons that he read on the show, just to give you a glimpse:

TWO LOVES

This is my lesson in humility.
My lesson in grief.
My lesson in the cruelty of the human heart, my own.
Trudging through deep southern snow:
finding both of your faces frozen in the white.
Sparrows still singing in the shrubbery.

I could not say it then.
I cannot say it now.
My heart split in two.
A tree limb weighted by ice.
A white        quiet and protective.
A white        dangerously warm.
My hands spiritless in the drifts.

Why do birds continue to sing?




LOVE COMES

not silent,
but noisy and indiscreet,
     rowdy and persistent.
He comes in leaf fall.
musty earth in his palms.

     Held out to me
I can do nothing but take it,
and take it gladly,
     earth being the one coolness
other than water
to be enjoyed.

     The fact of the matter is this:
tomorrow he may come silent.
Tomorrow may be love quiet as mist,
     but today,
his cheeks rough with new hairs,
I smell furrows of new fields.
     I turn over fertile soil.
I hear burrowing insects, happy worms.

I taste the gentle, crude, excavating damp.
     The stain of love upon the earth!
Stain of love!
His sleep rattling me.
     His sunrise and breath awakening me.






THAT NIGHT

That body        tree on a misty hill
That face        fawn with dark eyes
That full moon       surrounded by evening skies
That hour        pavement ending in dust
That grass        green with summer's black-green
That night        coming over us with its breath
That sound        crickets singing at eye level
That body        me on the ground with their song
That body        another touching me with fire
That fire              round as the moon burning as the sun
That face        fawn with dark eyes
That you        speaking in tongues unknown and green
That sound        crickets singing in my ear
That body        tree on a misty hill

There were many more, so give the show a listen. Ordinarily, it'd be available just through this Sunday at WPVM's web site (just scroll down to Wordplay) as on-demand stream and download - but this weekend Asheville hosts Bele Chere, its big annual street festival, and the station's in the festival zone, so I'll let Jeffery's session play again. It'll be on the station's Archive page through Sunday, August 3rd.
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The show opened with McCoy Tyner playing "Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit" from the 2007 release McCoy Tyner Quartet. We also heard three of Billy Holiday's classic performances, "Easy to Love," "Life Begins When You're in Love," and "Summertime," all from Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles. Keith Jarrett's "Paint My heart Red," from the 2006 The Carnegie Hall Concert: Selections for Radio, took the show out.

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25 July, 2008: Updated to note that the show with Jeffery will air until August 3rd, thanks to Bele Chere.

The photo of Jeffery is by M. J. Sharp.

Wordplay ... all the hits

Some Sundays Wordplay is the high point of my week - we'll have a guest whose work provides unexpected pleasures, or who's really on and leads us into great conversations or a happenstance collaboration. There are many ways it can exhilarate and delight.

So it was great to learn tonight at the monthly WPVM staff meeting that in the latest reporting period, Wordplay's podcasts got over 5000 hits, which makes it one of the station's most popular downloads.

It seems that some folks out there in cyber-radioland enjoy the show, too. Thanks.

We've got some fine programs coming up, including readings and interviews with Coleman Barks, Ross Gay, and Jonathan Williams. Sebastian and I are both working with our former co-host Laura Hope-Gill to produce the upcoming Asheville Wordfest 2008 poetry festival, and we'll be recording many of the readings and performances it'll bring to town for future shows.

So, keep coming back, whoever you are; we'll certainly try to make it worth your time.

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Up this week: Thomas Rain Crowe, reading from his recent collection Radiogenesis, and Blaise Ellery, a young poet from Black Mountain whom Thomas said "stole the show". See what you think; it's available as a stream or, of course, podcast, from the station archive page (just scroll down).

NatureS on the air, now, actually

Well, last week’s show with Lori Hovitz was permanently lost in the aether, but the show from the week before, in which I give my first reading of NatureS, to the delight, amusement, and/or consternation and utter bafflement of an audience at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, back in April, 2006, is now actually up, ready to be streamed or podcast from the WPVM Archive page. Enjoy.

This week (2:00 Sunday) we’re hosting the very literate singer/songwriter Angela Faye Martin, who’s said she’s bringing her guitar.

(We do like to mix things up.)

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Cross-posted at WPVM.

Wordplay this week: Robert Morgan

A little over a week ago, poet and novelist Robert Morgan made a visit home, and gave a few readings while he was here. After his reading at Malaprops, we walked over to the station and talked about his new biography, Boone. The book takes as one of its tasks the liberation of Daniel Boone from the two century deep accretions of folklore and media-made myth which have come to surround him, and in our interview you'll hear that Morgan has indeed gone to work and pulled back as many veils as could be pulled from the image of the real woodsman.

Give it a listen; you're likely to learn some surprising things about this complex early American icon.

The program will be broadcast and carried on the station's live stream Tuesday at 6:00 PM and Wednesday morning at 7:00. It's also available as either a stream or podcast from the Archive page through next Sunday.


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Thanks to Malaprops for the photo. Cross-posted at Wordplay.

Wordplay: William Matthews

Sebastian had a trove of old cassette tapes of his father, William Matthews, reading his work, so I digitized them and made a selection for last Sunday's show; were Bill still living, it would have been his sixty-fifth birthday, so it seemed a more than appropriate moment to listen to his work.

Given the limits of our thirty minute format, we wound up favoring the more formal readings Bill made for his 1984 cassette collection Days Beyond Recall, just because that choice allowed us to include more poems. We closed the show, though, with two poems from a live reading Bill had given at The Poet's House in Ireland in 1992, complete with the "amiable banter" that provided settings of the poems for that audience.

I'd worked with Bill in the late 60s on the little magazine Lillabulero, and have though ever since that he was one of the most gifted of my contemporaries; it was great to hear his voice again, preserved on these thin charged strips of polyester film.

Give him a listen.

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Cross-posted at the Wordplay blog.

And a happy birthday to Jessica Smith

Today was Jessica Smith's birthday; she's now twenty eight. Through Sunday of this week she reads from her book Organic Furniture Cellar and talks about her work on the archived edition of Wordplay.

If all goes well over the next couple of days, this Sunday we'll be featuring another Scorpio poet, though one who worked very differently: William Matthews. If you're curious about what Bill was up to, much of his third book, Rising and Falling, is online. Sebastian had some CDs and older cassettes I've now digitized; all we have to do now is select what we want to play from the literal hours of recordings.

Not too far down the road ... well, let me just say for now that it's likely we'll be able to play somewhat more of the material we have available on any given Sunday, get deeper into our interviews, and give our poets more room to stretch out. But more on those changes when we get closer to introducing them.

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Jessica's photo via Facebook.

Update: It was also the birthday of Albert Camus, so Jessica's in some interesting company.

Jessica Smith comes to WordPlay

Well, actually, Wordplay went to her. But in any event, this week Charlottesville poet Jessica Smith reads from her book Organic Furniture Cellar and talks about her work. Her poems have spatial as well as the usual temporal dimensions we associate with poetry, which most often remains, as Susan Howe put it in the title of her 1987 book, the articulation of sound forms in time. While there's no way to share the visual fields via the airwaves, you'll find, I think, that there's plenty left to catch your ears.

The program broadcasts (and streams) at 4:00 PM on Sunday, and then is available from the station's archive page as either a stream or a podcast through the following Sunday. [Update, 17 September, 2008: Here's a new link to Wordplay for November 4, 2008, featuring Jessica]

If you check the archive before Sunday, you'll hear Walt Whitman (yes), Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and Edgar Lee Masters on a special fall fundraiser edition of the show. The recordings were drawn from the collection Poetry on Record, produced in 2005 by Rebekah Presson Mosby, though I had to do some additional digital cleanup on the Whitman to make it listenable.

If you haven't dropped some coins into WPVM's bowl yet this fall, please do click on the "Donate" button on the station's homepage, or drop a check, whatever you can, into the mail to:

Mountain Area Information Network
34 Wall Street
Suite 407
Asheville, NC 28801

Just make your checks payable to WPVM.

You'll be supporting Wordplay and some other fine musical, news, and talk programming - real grassroots radio.

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Update 11/5/2007: The version of Jessica's Wordplay that's available today begins with a couple of minutes of the show which precedes Wordplay, Pathways to the Sacred. Tonight a trimmed version of the show will go up on the internet server. The automation system's been slightly crazed.

And the fundraiser was a real success, but it's never too late to donate and support great radio.

Jessica's photo via Facebook.

Coming up this week ...

Rose McLarney joins us again this week on Wordplay, another year older (happy birthday, Rose), and wiser. She’s now in the MFA program at Warren Wilson, and seems to like it so far, despite earlier reservations about such programs for poets. She’s got lots of new work, so we’ll listen to some of it and talk with her about her developing views on poetry and poetics.

That's 4:00 this Sunday on WPVM, 103.5 FM, or streaming from the station website.

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The photo of Rose dates from a reading at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in May of last year.

Fifty years later, Howl still can't be heard

Knowfish of WPVM's listserve passes along today's editorial from the N.Y. Times which reflects on the fact that 50 years after its having been declared "not obscene", Ginsberg's "Howl" still can't be broadcast on the public airwaves:

WBAI, long the radio flagship of cocky resistance to government excess, decided last week that it couldn't risk a 50th anniversary broadcast of the late poet's recording of "Howl."

...
If Ginsberg were still with us, he would undoubtedly pen a mocking line or two about his poem being banned from the airwaves 50 years after it was ruled not to be obscene. Congress, of course, could redress the F.C.C.'s bullying powers if it wanted to. But lately, the Capitol's most energetic broadcast agenda has been conservative members' organizing against any attempt to restore the fairness doctrine to political broadcast, which could crimp the 24/7 rants of right-wing talk radio. The poet would understand, having once noted: "Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture."

Indeed. We've thought several times about playing "Howl" and "America," another wonderful Ginsberg poem, on Wordplay, but have passed, since we'd have to bleep or cut them under current rules. Strange but true.

Last week ...

on WordPlay, as noted just below, Audrey Hope Rinehart, who wrangles poets for the Flood Gallery reading series, sat down with me to talk about her own work and read some recent poems. Our conversation will be available as a download or stream on the station Archive page until next Sunday night, October 14th, because the station's automation system glitched, and didn't record yesterday's fine program with California poet Mara Leigh. If you were listening live, you heard something much more ephemeral than any of us realized at the time! Hope you were!

Not to worry, though; we'll have Mara on again in the very near future. I'll keep you posted.

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A version of this note also posted at Wordplay.

WordPlay: Further Adventures

For the past few weeks I've been working with Laura Hope-Gill, Glenis Redmond, and Sebastian Matthews to bring the second season of WPVM's WordPlay, "the program by and about poets and writers ...", to the air each Sunday at 4:00. We've had some fun shows already, and we're just getting underway. Last week, poet Gary Lilley, who writes poems very much in the spirit of jazz, brought a band with him to the show. There were, if I remember correctly, seven folks in the studio (it's maybe 10'x10'), probably an all time record. It was a total hoot. Thanks to a malfunction of the station's automation system, you can still hear it in the station's Archive; just scroll down.

We've got a blog underway. We plan to use it to continue the discussions we have on the shows, to present some work by our guests, and ... well, who knows? There's not a whole lot there yet, but check it out.

The WPVM broadcast signal, for several reasons, including the fact that it was chartered as a "low power" station, is too weak to hear much of anywhere, but the station also streams on the web. I've heard some good radio there, regardless of the station's size. Check out the program schedule, if you want, or just dive in. It'll perk up your ears.

New Program Takes to the Air at WPVM

A group of area poets and writers have worked this summer to put together a weekly thirty minute program that will feature poets and other writers live in the studios of WPVM, 103.5 FM. The series will also sometimes catch its quary live in the wild, at readings or other performances. Titled WordPlay, the series kicks off on Sunday October 9th at 4:00 PM. There's an exciting roster of writers already on the schedule, and more to come.

If you can't pick up The Progressive Voice of the Mountains (I can't at home), the signal also goes out via the web. The station is in the process of relocating its transmitter, so should soon have better FM coverage of the city.

There'll be more information in October's Rapid River; it'll be hitting the racks next Saturday, Oct.1st.

And more later here.