Thomas Rain Crowe and the Boatrockers: Rocking Out

Sometimes I wonder why I spend
The lonely nights
Dreaming of a song
That melody haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you
When our love was new
And each kiss an inspiration
Ah, but that was long ago
Now my consolation
Is in the stardust of a song ...

That's Hoagy Carmichael, of course - or the lyric, at any rate, to his magnificent old song, "Stardust". Carmichael wrote most of his work before even my time (he recorded "Stardust" in 1927)*, but I came to love his wonderful song through a version that (averting eyes in embarrassment) Pat Boone did back in 1958; I was fourteen, and it stayed with me. Decades later, I could still sing my daughter to sleep to its fluid quavering lilt.

The origins of music, like the origins of poetry, are buried in the dust - make that the strata of dust- of time, but we know that they've been hand-in-hand, or perhaps heart-to-heart, for eons. The lyric voice of poetry is named for the lyre which, an age or two ago and an ocean away, often accompanied it; the term "lyric poetry" has been in use in English since at least 1581, and is used to denote, as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, poetry

adapted to the lyre, meant to be sung, pertaining to or characteristic of song. Now used as the name for short poems (whether or not intended to be sung), usually divided into stanzas or strophes, and directly expressing the poet's own thoughts or sentiments.

It's the voice of Shakespeare's Sonnets, most of Keats and Shelly, Tin Pan Alley, Irving Berlin, "I Want To Hold Your Hand", a million singer/songwriters - and even Charles Olson's "The Ring Of"; so deeply imbued is it in the project of poetry in our language that poets who wish to work in other modes still have to contend with its voice.

There's something in the fusion of words - lyrics, we call them - and music that makes them more powerful together than either is separately; their combination seems to permit them to insinuate song into the synapses where our deepest memories dwell.

That the lyric is such a common voice of poetry and song, of course, makes the task of anyone who approaches it all the more daunting. How be heard, among so many voices? As always, the answer is to find the new - even if, sometimes, what's new is re-covered from an ancient past, another tongue.

Ever the adventurous archaeologist of imagination, poet and translator Thomas Rain Crowe brings this ancient fusion to life once again on September 7th, when he and The Boatrockers will kick off their fall "Thief of Words Tour" at (where else) the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in downtown Asheville.

The band will be performing a mix of material, some of it as ancient as the 14th century Iranian poet Hafez, many of whose lyric ghazals Crowe has translated, and as new as now, with echoes of everything from Chicago blues to New Orleans jazz and Jamaican reggae - including this piece, a poem, as Crowe says, "for voice and band":

The Sound of Light

Music is the blood of the stars.
The laugh of God.
The sound of the breath of the moon
In the child asleep.
The sadness of the earth as it sings.
And the yawn of the
Old man as he gently dies....

Even the ant is listening to the voice of the sky!
Weaving it's way through the grass
In that light.
As Eternity joins in the chorus
Of day as it makes love to the night.

All mankind is singing!

Like gyroscopes in the blood of space.
Or luminescence on thresholds of pain.
In the wind, in the trees, in the rain....

Let the colors become the song.
Then sing!

Everyone is singing.
The shepherd. The clown.
The weaver and priest.
And the ones we can't quite see.

All singing.
All in the same key.

Crowe's fellows in the Boatrockers are an accomplished group of musicians, able to blend, elegantly, the traditional acoustic music of the Middle East (Iran, Iraq, Turkey, India) with the sounds of modern electronic technology. Chris Rosser, a nationally known and award-winning singer-songwriter and string-instrument virtuoso, brings the voice of Eastern instruments to the Boatrockers eclectic mix on such instruments as sarod, dotar, jumbush, sitar, and saz, as well as the Spanish guitar and keyboards. An accomplished and much-sought-after studio musician, his solo recordings include Archeology, The Holy Fool, and Hidden Everywhere.

Wayne Kirby, a former member of the Debbie Harry-fronted band Blondie, has composed and performed music for both Broadway and Off-Broadway musicals, conducted small orchestras in Las Vegas on its famous strip, and is an experimental electronic music composer. Currently he is a member of the cross-genre band Jibblin the Frolines and head of the Music Department at UNCA.

Doug Shearer, an accomplished and versatile drummer, plays everything from the trap set typical of rock and jazz, to Middle Eastern hand drums. Originally from Pennsylvania and New York City, he now resides in Asheville, NC.

Nan Watkins, a piano keyboard prodigy, studied music at Oberlin College and the Vienna Academy of Music, and with some of the best teachers in both Europe and America. Now an electronic keyboard performer and composer, her latest solo CD, entitled The Laugharne Poems, appeared on the Fern Hill Records label.

Sal D'Angio, an accomplished tabla and guitar player, has studied with music masters in Nepal and India, and has performed and recorded with world-music bands in both Philadelphia and Denver before joining the Boatrockers and moving to Asheville.

Greg Olson is a recording studio owner and accomplished recording engineer. As a talented guitarist, he has recently released an all-instrumental CD, entitled Speaking to the Water, which was produced by legendary record producer Bill Halverson. He was a founding member of the world-music and reggae band One Straw, and joins Kirby as a member of his current band, Jibblin the Frolines.

After the Asheville show the band will hit the studios of WNCW in Spindale for a live version of the station's "Local Color" on Sept. 12; and will be at Lenoir-Rhyne College (in Hickory) on Sept. 13. For more information on these shows, call 828-293-9237.

The festivities will get under way at the Center at 8:00 PM. The Boatrockers' undertaking is as new as iTunes, as old as time - or at least our human time here on this fair orb- and they're extraordinary indeed at what they do, so they should provide us all an evening to remember.

What: Thomas Rain Crowe and the Boatrockers
Where: The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
When: Friday, September 7th, 8:00 pm
Admission: $8, $5 for BMCM+AC members and students w/ID.
For more information: 828-350-8484

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

* He lived until 1981, but his work by then had long been eclipsed from the popular eye by Rock and Roll.

L to R in the photo:
front, from left: Sal D'Angio, Thomas Rain Crowe
back, from left: Wayne Kirby, Nan Watkins, Chris Rosser, Greg Olson, Doug Shearer.

This post appeared in somewhat different form in the Rapid River for September. Thanks to Thomas Rain Crowe and the Boatrockers for the photo, band bios, and new poem.

Ken Wainio Leaves the Scene

News came last week that poet Ken Wainio, one of the Baby Beat generation of San Francisco poets, has slipped off the mortal coil, and gone to have a drink with Philip Lamantia, his fellow master of the Surreal. Thomas Rain Crowe, back from France, writes that Ken died on January 26, in the hospital in Redwood Valley, CA. "He had admitted himself to the hospital on the 13th of January ... with acute stomach problems and dizziness. The doctor attributed his cause of death to liver and kidney failure. He was cremated, according to his wishes, after three days (according to Egyptian funerary rites), and his ashes were scattered in the San Francsico Bay."

Lamantia, who was an early advocate for Wainio's work, wrote of his Crossroads of the Other, published in 1994:

The very title Crossroads of the Other suggests that the poet has found the way to mediate composition, to paraphrase Andre Breton, from "communicating vessels" of unconscious sources of inspiration and conscious activity. For Wainio the erotic-marvelous arrives on dove's feet, branded with suffering, clear-obscure, even, yet flashing redolent sparks.

I didn't know Ken, and have come to know a little of his work only in the last few years, but the work I know does indeed spark.

Here's a prose poem from Crossroads, republished late last year in the Baby Beat Generation anthology:

Getting Rid of the Ego

It's like getting married in the rain. A coach will pull up at the edge of the dam when the flood starts and the bride throws her flowers at the drowned. If you don't believe this, go to a monastery for ten years and study the light through a keyhole. Without moving your eye from the door cut out a piece of sky and wait for somebody to come with a key.

The flood is well up by this time. The dead are getting married in rowboats and copulating on pieces of wreckage. If you still don't believe it, take out your keyhole and study the drowned. They are discussing the possibilities of islands and shaping tombstones into anchors. Their children hold their breath underwater and pray to the God of Rain. He is holding himself in a cloud making everybody worship the flood. He is quite fond of suffering and has never understood sociology. But the dead come with their pogo sticks and stare up at the seat of his pants.

If you still don't get this, go sit down in the nearest bar and study the runway of faces. If anyone comes up to you and demands your marriage certificate, take out your keyhole and blast them with a peak of stars. If they arc still sitting there waiting for you to kill your ego, tell them the world is flat and has an edge like the table. Drop something transparent over the side and tell them it was the argument of Columbus on his way to the new world.

That has a real quickness, reinvents its apparent statement phrase by phrase, opening into one new lucidity after another, though at the end it remains somehow integral, a luminous unity.

Ken had been scheduled to go to France with his fellow Baby Beats for the reading series that celebrated the anthology's publication, but was too ill to make the journey. Notwithstanding that, his death came as a surprise; he had a long history of precarious health, and had seemed to have more lives than any known cat.

Ken's friend and editor Thomas Rain Crowe assembled this biographical note:

Ken Wainio (1952 - 2006) was born in Ukiah, California about two hours north of San Francisco in 1952. The Rimbaud of the Baby Beats cadre from the San Francisco 1970s and one of the foremost surrealist poets and writers in the U.S., he began to write at the age of fifteen--having been influenced by the writing of the French poets Lautremont, Rimbaud and Nerval. He moved to San Francisco at the beginning of the 1970s to study at San Francisco State University with the Greek surrealist poet Nanos Valaoritis, and met the American surrealist poets Philip Lamantia and Stephen Schwartz. It was a couple years later, in an informal “poetry class” being conducted in the home of Harold Norse that he met Thomas Crowe, Neeli Cherkovski and Luke Breit, with whom he would later help to resurrect Beatitude magazine; he was co-editor of issue # 26, which appeared in 1977. During the 1970s, his poems were published in most all of the important literary magazines being produced in the Bay Area: the City Lights Review, Beatitude, LoveLights, and Bastard Angel. With Jerry Estrin, he was a founding editor of the pan-surrealist publication Vanishing Cab. After driving a taxicab for the entire decade of the 1980s, and after living for more than twenty-five years in San Francisco, he moved to Glenhaven, California, where he resided until his untimely death on January 26, 2006. His travels have taken him to Greece, Turkey and Egypt, where he has spent considerable time in the past two decades. His poems and fiction continue to be published both here and abroad in such journals as Nexus, Asheville Poetry Review, Litterature en Marche and Greges in Montpellier, France. His books include Crossroads of the Other, which was written during the 1970s, Letters to Al-Kemi (an Egyptian travel memoir), Starfuck (a novel published in 1996) and Automatic Antiquity (poems, published in 2004). Forthcoming books include a book of autobiographical fiction from New Native Press titled Scene of the Crime: Confessions of a Baby Beat and Slab Window, a collection of his most recent poems from Beatitude Press.

Good news there that there's more work to come; he may be gone, but we haven't seen the last of him.

Adios, Ken, and I hope we meet the next time around. For now, let me just offer this, something you surely knew, to see you on the way; it's adapted from the Egyptian Papyrus of Ani:

O you who open a path and open up roads for the perfected souls in the House of Osiris, open up a path for him, open up the roads for the soul of Ken in company with you. May he come in freely, may he go out in peace from the House of Osiris, without being repelled or turned back. May he go in favored, may he come out loved, may he be vindicated, may his commands be done in the House of Osiris, may he go and speak with you, may he be a spirit with you, may no fault be found in him, for the balance is voided of his misdoings.

Notes: The upper photo is a relatively recent shot, though I don't have a date; the lower photo was taken during a trip to Egypt in 1979. Thanks to Thomas Rain Crowe for both.

You can find the "Papyrus of Ani" in The Egyptian Book of the Dead, translated by Raymond Faulkner (San Francisco, 1998).

Here are links to some of Ken's work available on the web:

Four poems from Nantahala Review;

eight poems from Exquisite Corpse;

prose from Oyster Boy Review;

and part of Starfuck, also from Nantahala Review.

Original content © 2006.

Catalog of the Wordplay Archive

Wordplay is back on the air -- well, the ether, anyway -- for its fifth season. The program's now at AshevilleFM, and airs at 5:00 PM on Sundays. Some new shows are now up, others will be going up shortly.

I'll also be uploading some older shows that, for whatever reason, never found their way through the clouds to ibiblio. Most of 2008's and 2009's shows are now up, and many of 2007's, but there are raw recordings of many from 2006 as well, and a few from 2005, so I'll be editing those into podcasts in the coming weeks and months, as time allows.

Update, 11 October, 2009: Shows from 2005 and 2007 featuring Cathy Smith Bowers added.

Update, 21 October, 2009: Shows from the fall of 2007 added, featuring Joanna Cooper, Thomas Rain Crowe, Steve Godwin, Rose McLarney, Glenis Redmond, and Audrey Hope Rinehart.

Update, 5 July, 2010: Season V's shows begin to appear, with editions of the Laureate's Radio Hour featuring Michael Beadle and Stephanie Biziewski.



As of now, the shows below are available in the Archive.




(Note: Before 2008, shows were thirty minutes long; shows broadcast in 2008 and after are an hour long. Clicking on the date will take you to the .mp3 file for the specified show, clicking on "(production note)", where that's an option, will take you to the original Natures note about the show, where you'll often find information about the music used and other bits of incidental intelligence. The note, though, will also contain the original link to the program on the station's server; shows stayed on that server for only two weeks, so those links have long since been broken.)


Enjoy, and thanks for listening.

2005:

November 13, 2005 Stephanie Biziewski, one of the original Wordplay team, invited Cathy Smith Bowers in for a show in the very first season of Wordplay; Gillian Coats and Lori Horvitz engineered and produced, respectively (production note).

2006:

September 3, 2006, featured Laura Hope-Gill and Sebastian Matthews

2007:

January 28, 2007 Sebastian Matthews, Laura Hope-Gill and I were co-hosting the show, and we invited Cathy Smith Bowers back a little over a year after her first appearance.

February 11,2007 featured John Crutchfield.

March 18, 2007 featured Laura Hope-Gill discussing her work with alchemy.

April 29, 2007 Laura Hope-Gill and I read and discussed the work of Robert Bly.

May 27, 2007 featured Samuel Adams.

June 10, 2007 featured Robert Bly reading at UNCA (production note).

June 17, 2007 featured Keith Flynn.

July 1, 2007 featured Allan Wolf.

September 2, 2007 featured Thomas Rain Crowe, and includes recordings of Crowe with his band, The Boatrockers.

September 9, 2007 featured poet Joanna Cooper.

September 16, 2007 featured a reading by Glenis Redmond at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.

September 23, 2007 brought Steve Godwin into the studio, and Steve, Sebastian and I talked over poems we enjoyed, from recent work by Van Jordan (Sebastian) to an HD piece from 1921 (me). Music included tracks from Neil Young and Steve Kimock.

September 30, 2007 highlighted the work of poet Audrey Hope Rinehart.

October 14, 2007 featured Gary Hawkins.

October 21, 2007 found then-Marshall poet Rose McLarney in the studio for her annual near-birthday reading of new work. (Update, October 21, 2009: and she'll soon be back)

October 28, 2007 featured archival recordings of Walt Whitman, Alfred Tennyson, and other old masters.

November 4, 2008 featured Buffalo poet Jessica Smith (production note).

November 11, 2007 featured recordings of William Matthews.

November 18, 2007 featured Robert Morgan (production note).

December 2, 2007 featured Laura Hope-Gill.

December 9, 2007 featured Nan Watkins presenting her translations of Yvan Goll (production note).

December 16, 2007 featured Mara Simmons.

December 23, 2007 featured Laura Hope-Gill reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales".

2008:

January 13, 2008 featured Ed Dorn (production note).

January 20, 2008 featured Katherine Min.

January 27, 2008 featured Gary Hawkins and Landon Godfrey.

February 3, 2008 featured Sebastian Matthews and Dick Barnes.

February 17, 2008, featured my April, 2006 reading for the publication of Natures.

February 24, 2008 featured the very literate singer-songwriter Angela Faye Martin.

March 2, 2008 featured Thomas Rain Crowe reading from Radiogenesis, and young poet Blaise Ellery.

March 9, 2008 featured Chattanooga poet Chad Prevost (production note).

March 23, 2008 featured Jonathan Williams reading at Sylva's City Lights Books in May of 2005 (production note).

April 7, 2008 featured Galway Kinnell reading at Breadloaf in 2002.

April 13, 2008 featured Laura Hope-Gill reading new work and pitching on the pledge drive show.

May 25, 2008 featured Ross Gay in an interview with Joanna Cooper, and reading at Asheville's Malaprops Books (production note).

June 1, 2008 featured Coleman Barks performing at the Fine Arts Theater in April, 2008 (production note).

June 8, 2008 featured Wayne Caldwell, author of Cataloochee.

June 15, 2008 featured archival recordings of Robert Creeley, including some recorded at Black Mountain College.

June 29, 2008 featured Nan Watkins presenting her translations of Yvan Goll - the extended edition (production note).

July 6, 2008 featured Landon Godfrey (production note).

July 13, 2008 featured Chall Gray.

July 20, 2008 featured Jeffery Beam (production note).

August 3, 2008 featured Ken Rumble (production note).

August 10, 2008 Columbia, S.C., novelist Jenna McMahan visited Wordplay to discuss and read from her fun, insightful coming-of-age novel Calling Home . The show featured tunes by Van Halen and even Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird" - probably the only time that song has been played at WPVM. What can I say? Are there any coming-of-age stories set after 1960 in which sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll don't play a major part? They certainly do in this one.

August 17, 2008 Long-time co-host Sebastian Matthews returned to host a show that featured recent work and recent reading.

August 24, 2008, featured Laura Hope-Gill (production note).

August 31, 2008, featured Glenis Redmond (production note).

September 7, 2008, featured Thomas Meyer (production note).

September 14, 2008 Asheville poet Pat Riviere-Seel dropped by to share recent work and read from her upcoming book, The Serial Killer's Daughter. A Little-Known Fact: Pat was on the original enormous Wordplay production team.

September 28, 2008 Sebastian Matthews again hosted.

October 5, 2008 Wordplay regular Rose McLarney returned to share recent work and discuss her adventures in and out of creative writing programs.

October 12, 2008 Lee Ann Brown returned to Wordplay to give us a look at her recent work. Another Little-Known Fact: Lee Ann was the "guest" on the demo of Wordplay submitted to WPVM's Programming Committee way back when (production note).

November 2, 2008 Lee Ann returned with British Columbia poet Peter Culley, who was completing a residency at Marshall's French Broad Institute of Time and the River.

November 9, 2008 This show featured a reading Peter Culley gave in Marshall a few days before, and some archival recordings of the modernist great, Ezra Pound (production note).

November 16, 2008 Sebastian Matthews, Landon Godfrey, Laura Hope-Gill, Glenis Redmond and I celebrated the women of Black Mountain College, including poet Denise Levertov.

November 23, 2008 Bob and Arlene Winkler dropped by to discuss their RiverSculpture project, and to introduce the Asheville reading by poet Mark Strand that they'd sponsored (production note).

December 14, 2008 North Carolina Poet Laureate Kay Byer, featured in a reading from early 2008 at the Asheville Art Museum (production note).

December 21, 2008 The extraordinary Robert Bly reading -... er, performing would be more accurate - at the Diana Wortham Theater with the Asheville world-music trio Free Planet Radio, and discussing his translations of Hafez, his trip to Iran with Coleman Barks, and other wonders. (production note).

December 28, 2008 Laura Hope-Gill, Sebastian Matthews, and Glenis Redmond dropped in for a lively show featuring their own work, the upcoming WordFest, and Sebastian's new plan for his magazine Rivendell (production note).

2009:

January 11, 2009 Tim Peeler surprised me by bringing the one-of-a-kind mythogeographer Ted Pope along, and we had a hoot talking about ancient Egypt, Antarctica, and baseball (production note).

February 15, 2009 featured Jargonaut Thomas Meyer reading his elegy for Jonathan Williams, part of which has now been published as Kintsugi (production note).

March 1, 2009 Asheville novelist Wayne Caldwell returned to share parts of Cataloochee and his unpublished new novel, Requiem By Fire, which is scheduled to appear in early 2010.

March 8, 2009 Hendersonville storyteller Karen Eve Bayne graced the show with her stories and stories about her stories, and made a pitch, too, for the Do Tell Festival of poetry and stories coming up on July 11th in Hendersonville.

March 22, 2009 featured Hickory poet Scott Owens.

March 29, 2009 New Hampshire poet Mimi White, down south to fly-fish in the Davidson River, dropped by the studio to share her work, and to talk about poets, dogs, and other complex life forms.

April 5, 2009 Landon Godfrey, Gary Hawkins, Steve and I all weighed into a discussion of "nature" and what that term might mean for poetry, and read some "nature" poems by poets from Wordsworth to Frank O'Hara.

April 19, 2009, our Easter show, featured a reading by the late Sage of Scaly Mountain, Jonathan Williams, from 1981 (production note).

April 26, 2009 Performance poet Patricia Smith visited the studio last spring to talk about her work with Glenis Redmond, Sebastian Matthews, and me, just a few hours before her reading at Wordfest 2008 (production note).

May 17, 2009 The last show for Wordplay at its old home featured great Canadian/New American poet Robin Blaser reading in 1965 and 2004, and discussing his work in a BBC interview from 1994 (production note).

November 15, 2009 brought Tryon poet Cathy Smith Bowers, long-time Poet-in-Residence at Queens University in Charlotte, into the studio to celebrate her birthday. We listened to George Jones, Nina Simone, and Leonard Cohen, and she read from her most recent volume, The Candle I Hold Up to See You.

(A few months later, of course, she became North Carolina's Poet Laureate, and now co-hosts Wordplay once a month)

2010:

January 10, 2010 featured Lucy Tobin, who explores a middle ground between lyric and narrative in her very interesting work. Music by Allison Kraus, the Mountain Goats, and Heretic Pride.

January 3, 2010 celebrated the publication of Thomas Rain Crowe's Blue Rose of Venice. The archiving system dropped part of the show, but what survived is worth a listen. Caleb Beissert sat in, and shared his translations of Neruda. An earlier note on the show is below, here.

February 21, 2010 Cathy Smith Bowers launched the Laureate's Radio Hour series by talking about the impact the laureateship had already had on her life, and discussing her intentions and hopes for the duration of her tenure - including featuring poets once a month on Wordplay. Musical cuts by Nina Simone and her daughter, Lisa Simone.

March 21, 2010, Cathy Smith Bowers, co-hosting once again for the Laureate's Radio Hour, welcomed her former student Stephanie Biziewski to the show, and workshopped a poem Stephanie had underway.

April 18, 2010 Cathy welcomed the very versatile Michael Beadle to the show, and he read texts that ranged in voice from the personal/lyrical, through the historical, to the performative.

May 29, 2010 This time around the laureate turned the tables on the host, and wrangled me into reading some of my own work, both poems from Natures and so far unpublished pieces I plan to include in a second book. Music from Pierre Bensusan, the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and the Steve Kimock Band.

July 18, 2010 For this Laureate's Radio Hour, Cathy hosted poet Katherine Soniat, author of Alluvial, A Shared Life, Notes of Departure, and other titles, including the upcoming The Swing Girl, due next year from LSU Press.

August 22, 2010 Sebastian Matthews joined Cathy and me to share some of the work of his father, the poet William Matthews, and to treat us to some of his own new poems. Musical breaks by Charlie Mingus, Bill Evans, and McCoy Tyner. Another Laureate's Radio Hour.


And as always, much more to come ...

Season VI Begins: Catalog of the Wordplay Archive

Wordplay has kicked off its sixth season. The program's now at AshevilleFM, and airs at 5:00 PM on Sundays. Some new shows are now up, others will be going up shortly.

I'll also be uploading some older shows that, for whatever reason, never found their way through the clouds to ibiblio. Most of 2008's and 2009's shows are now up, and many of 2007's, but there are raw recordings of many from 2006 as well, and a few from 2005, so I'll be editing those into podcasts in the coming weeks and months, as time allows.

As of now, the shows below are available in the Archive; the shows' dates serve as the links to the recordings.




(Note: Before 2008, shows were thirty minutes long; shows broadcast in 2008 and after are an hour long. Clicking on the date will take you to the .mp3 file for the specified show, clicking on "(production note)", where that's an option, will take you to the original Natures note about the show, where you'll often find information about the music used and other bits of incidental intelligence. The note, though, will also contain the original link to the program on the station's server; shows stayed on that server for only two weeks, so those links have long since been broken.)


Enjoy, and thanks for listening.

2005:

November 13, 2005 Stephanie Biziewski, one of the original Wordplay team, invited Cathy Smith Bowers in for a show in the very first season of Wordplay; Gillian Coats and Lori Horvitz engineered and produced, respectively (production note).

2006:

September 3, 2006, featured Laura Hope-Gill and Sebastian Matthews

2007:

January 28, 2007 Sebastian Matthews, Laura Hope-Gill and I were co-hosting the show, and we invited Cathy Smith Bowers back a little over a year after her first appearance.

February 11,2007 featured John Crutchfield.

March 18, 2007 featured Laura Hope-Gill discussing her work with alchemy.

April 29, 2007 Laura Hope-Gill and I read and discussed the work of Robert Bly.

May 27, 2007 featured Samuel Adams.

June 10, 2007 featured Robert Bly reading at UNCA (production note).

June 17, 2007 featured Keith Flynn.

July 1, 2007 featured Allan Wolf.

September 2, 2007 featured Thomas Rain Crowe, and includes recordings of Crowe with his band, The Boatrockers.

September 9, 2007 featured poet Joanna Cooper.

September 16, 2007 featured a reading by Glenis Redmond at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.

September 23, 2007 brought Steve Godwin into the studio, and Steve, Sebastian and I talked over poems we enjoyed, from recent work by Van Jordan (Sebastian) to an HD piece from 1921 (me). Music included tracks from Neil Young and Steve Kimock.

September 30, 2007 highlighted the work of poet Audrey Hope Rinehart.

October 14, 2007 featured Gary Hawkins.

October 21, 2007 found then-Marshall poet Rose McLarney in the studio for her annual near-birthday reading of new work. (Update, October 21, 2009: and she'll soon be back)

October 28, 2007 featured archival recordings of Walt Whitman, Alfred Tennyson, and other old masters.

November 4, 2008 featured Buffalo poet Jessica Smith (production note).

November 11, 2007 featured recordings of William Matthews.

November 18, 2007 featured Robert Morgan (production note).

December 2, 2007 featured Laura Hope-Gill.

December 9, 2007 featured Nan Watkins presenting her translations of Yvan Goll (production note).

December 16, 2007 featured Mara Simmons.

December 23, 2007 featured Laura Hope-Gill reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales".

2008:

January 13, 2008 featured Ed Dorn (production note).

January 20, 2008 featured Katherine Min.

January 27, 2008 featured Gary Hawkins and Landon Godfrey.

February 3, 2008 featured Sebastian Matthews and Dick Barnes.

February 17, 2008, featured my April, 2006 reading for the publication of Natures.

February 24, 2008 featured the very literate singer-songwriter Angela Faye Martin.

March 2, 2008 featured Thomas Rain Crowe reading from Radiogenesis, and young poet Blaise Ellery.

March 9, 2008 featured Chattanooga poet Chad Prevost (production note).

March 23, 2008 featured Jonathan Williams reading at Sylva's City Lights Books in May of 2005 (production note).

April 7, 2008 featured Galway Kinnell reading at Breadloaf in 2002.

April 13, 2008 featured Laura Hope-Gill reading new work and pitching on the pledge drive show.

May 25, 2008 featured Ross Gay in an interview with Joanna Cooper, and reading at Asheville's Malaprops Books (production note).

June 1, 2008 featured Coleman Barks performing at the Fine Arts Theater in April, 2008 (production note).

June 8, 2008 featured Wayne Caldwell, author of Cataloochee.

June 15, 2008 featured archival recordings of Robert Creeley, including some recorded at Black Mountain College.

June 29, 2008 featured Nan Watkins presenting her translations of Yvan Goll - the extended edition (production note).

July 6, 2008 featured Landon Godfrey (production note).

July 13, 2008 featured Chall Gray.

July 20, 2008 featured Jeffery Beam (production note).

August 3, 2008 featured Ken Rumble (production note).

August 10, 2008 Columbia, S.C., novelist Jenna McMahan visited Wordplay to discuss and read from her fun, insightful coming-of-age novel Calling Home . The show featured tunes by Van Halen and even Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird" - probably the only time that song has been played at WPVM. What can I say? Are there any coming-of-age stories set after 1960 in which sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll don't play a major part? They certainly do in this one.

August 17, 2008 Long-time co-host Sebastian Matthews returned to host a show that featured recent work and recent reading.

August 24, 2008, featured Laura Hope-Gill (production note).

August 31, 2008, featured Glenis Redmond (production note).

September 7, 2008, featured Thomas Meyer (production note).

September 14, 2008 Asheville poet Pat Riviere-Seel dropped by to share recent work and read from her upcoming book, The Serial Killer's Daughter. A Little-Known Fact: Pat was on the original enormous Wordplay production team.

September 28, 2008 Sebastian Matthews again hosted.

October 5, 2008 Wordplay regular Rose McLarney returned to share recent work and discuss her adventures in and out of creative writing programs.

October 12, 2008 Lee Ann Brown returned to Wordplay to give us a look at her recent work. Another Little-Known Fact: Lee Ann was the "guest" on the demo of Wordplay submitted to WPVM's Programming Committee way back when (production note).

November 2, 2008 Lee Ann returned with British Columbia poet Peter Culley, who was completing a residency at Marshall's French Broad Institute of Time and the River.

November 9, 2008 This show featured a reading Peter Culley gave in Marshall a few days before, and some archival recordings of the modernist great, Ezra Pound (production note).

November 16, 2008 Sebastian Matthews, Landon Godfrey, Laura Hope-Gill, Glenis Redmond and I celebrated the women of Black Mountain College, including poet Denise Levertov.

November 23, 2008 Bob and Arlene Winkler dropped by to discuss their RiverSculpture project, and to introduce the Asheville reading by poet Mark Strand that they'd sponsored (production note).

December 14, 2008 North Carolina Poet Laureate Kay Byer, featured in a reading from early 2008 at the Asheville Art Museum (production note).

December 21, 2008 The extraordinary Robert Bly reading -... er, performing would be more accurate - at the Diana Wortham Theater with the Asheville world-music trio Free Planet Radio, and discussing his translations of Hafez, his trip to Iran with Coleman Barks, and other wonders. (production note).

December 28, 2008 Laura Hope-Gill, Sebastian Matthews, and Glenis Redmond dropped in for a lively show featuring their own work, the upcoming WordFest, and Sebastian's new plan for his magazine Rivendell (production note).

2009:

January 11, 2009 Tim Peeler surprised me by bringing the one-of-a-kind mythogeographer Ted Pope along, and we had a hoot talking about ancient Egypt, Antarctica, and baseball (production note).

February 15, 2009 featured Jargonaut Thomas Meyer reading his elegy for Jonathan Williams, part of which has now been published as Kintsugi (production note).

March 1, 2009 Asheville novelist Wayne Caldwell returned to share parts of Cataloochee and his unpublished new novel, Requiem By Fire, which is scheduled to appear in early 2010.

March 8, 2009 Hendersonville storyteller Karen Eve Bayne graced the show with her stories and stories about her stories, and made a pitch, too, for the Do Tell Festival of poetry and stories coming up on July 11th in Hendersonville.

March 22, 2009 featured Hickory poet Scott Owens.

March 29, 2009 New Hampshire poet Mimi White, down south to fly-fish in the Davidson River, dropped by the studio to share her work, and to talk about poets, dogs, and other complex life forms.

April 5, 2009 Landon Godfrey, Gary Hawkins, Steve and I all weighed into a discussion of "nature" and what that term might mean for poetry, and read some "nature" poems by poets from Wordsworth to Frank O'Hara.

April 19, 2009, our Easter show, featured a reading by the late Sage of Scaly Mountain, Jonathan Williams, from 1981 (production note).

April 26, 2009 Performance poet Patricia Smith visited the studio last spring to talk about her work with Glenis Redmond, Sebastian Matthews, and me, just a few hours before her reading at Wordfest 2008 (production note).

May 17, 2009 The last show for Wordplay at its old home featured great Canadian/New American poet Robin Blaser reading in 1965 and 2004, and discussing his work in a BBC interview from 1994 (production note).

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 in November, 2010.

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

November 15, 2009 brought Tryon poet Cathy Smith Bowers, long-time Poet-in-Residence at Queens University in Charlotte, into the studio to celebrate her birthday. We listened to George Jones, Nina Simone, and Leonard Cohen, and she read from her most recent volume, The Candle I Hold Up to See You.

(A few months later, of course, she became North Carolina's Poet Laureate, and now co-hosts Wordplay once a month).

2010:

January 10, 2010 featured Lucy Tobin, who explores a middle ground between lyric and narrative in her very interesting work. Music by Allison Kraus, the Mountain Goats, and Heretic Pride.

January 3, 2010 celebrated the publication of Thomas Rain Crowe's Blue Rose of Venice. The archiving system dropped part of the show, but what survived is worth a listen. Caleb Beissert sat in, and shared his translations of Neruda. An earlier note on the show is below, here.

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.

February 21, 2010 Cathy Smith Bowers launched the Laureate's Radio Hour series by talking about the impact the laureateship had already had on her life, and discussing her intentions and hopes for the duration of her tenure - including featuring poets once a month on Wordplay. Musical cuts by Nina Simone and her daughter, Lisa Simone.

March 21, 2010, Cathy Smith Bowers, co-hosting once again for the Laureate's Radio Hour, welcomed her former student Stephanie Biziewski to the show, and workshopped a poem Stephanie had underway.

April 18, 2010 Cathy welcomed the very versatile Michael Beadle to the show, and he read texts that ranged in voice from the personal/lyrical, through the historical, to the performative.

May 29, 2010 This time around the laureate turned the tables on the host, and wrangled me into reading some of my own work, both poems from Natures and so far unpublished pieces I plan to include in a second book. Music from Pierre Bensusan, the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and the Steve Kimock Band.

July 18, 2010 For this Laureate's Radio Hour, Cathy hosted poet Katherine Soniat, author of Alluvial, A Shared Life, Notes of Departure, and other titles, including the upcoming The Swing Girl, due in 2011 from LSU Press.

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!

August 22, 2010 Sebastian Matthews joined Cathy and me to share some of the work of his father, the poet William Matthews, and to treat us to some of his own new poems. Musical breaks by Charlie Mingus, Bill Evans, and McCoy Tyner. Another Laureate's Radio Hour.

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.


And, as always, more to come ...

News notes ...

I missed this when it first got posted, but on Thursday Ron Silliman reviewed Thomas Rain Crowe's new chapbook, The Blue Rose of Venice. What's more, he liked it, noting of it's short "Song of the Gondolier" -

Short bridges.
Narrow canals.
A single wooden paddle
from a black boat on dark water
the only sound
as
the gondolier begins to sing
eeoo, eeoo
into the evening
and the mouth of
a cellular phone.

that "it’s perfectly executed and I found myself reading it over & over, luxuriating in each moment."

Congratulations to Mr. Crowe!

(Other posts about Thomas and his work: here)

&&

Thomas joined me on Wordplay on January 3rd, and as soon as I get it edited (the station internet stream, which feeds the archiving system - or used to, now - dropped several times during the show, so it's incomplete and fragmentary), but I'll post it to the Wordplay Archive.

He read much of the Blue Rose, and friend and fellow poet Caleb Beissert, who joined us in the studio, read some translations of Neruda, and some of his own work as well .

&&

Speaking of Wordplay, thanks to the hard work of Greg Lyon, we've now gotten that archiving system actually, you know, archiving and uploading to the stream server, so each show will be available online for two weeks after its initial air date. I'll post it to the ibiblio archive after that.

Last week's show with poet Lucy Tobin is even now available from the Programming page, here, though it's in unedited form, which means you'll hear a few minutes of Diet Riot before Wordplay, and sundry other sonic artifacts that will disappear before it goes to ibiblio.

I'll be uploading this fall's and winter's shows to ibiblio anon.

&&

And the complete text of Robert Creeley's Collected Essays is now available online, as well, complete with index. Creeley's one of the indispensable guides to poetry in the late great 20th century, so it's wonderful to have his work available for free.
(a tip of the hat to Silliman's blog for the link)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Photo: Thomas Rain Crowe and Caleb Beissert in the AshevilleFM studio for WordPlay.

The Spirit of Black Mountain College ... coming right up

This weekend brings the Spirit of Black Mountain College festival at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory. The festival, celebrating the 75th anniversary of Black Mountain College's founding, kicks off Thursday evening with a reception and a reading by Galway Kinnell, and runs through Saturday. Along the way, a mix of events, a melange of dance, music, visual arts and, of course, poetry. It's really a treat to be joining Lee Ann Brown, Thomas Meyer, Michael Rumaker (who'll actually read as a poet, though he's best known as a novelist and memoirist), Lisa Jarnot, Thomas Rain Crowe, Ted Pope, and the rest of the large company for all the brouhaha.

Here's my schedule, if you'd like to catch up with me or check out my work while you're there:

Friday:

10:15 am in Belk Centrum: Weekend overview with all performers

2:00 pm in Belk Centrum: Reading/Performance with Thomas Meyer and Lisa Jarnot. (This looks to be my main reading)

3:00 pm in Belk Centrum: I'll be the facilitator for a panel discussion: "The Poets of Black Mountain College". Is form nothing more than the extension of content?

5:00 pm at the Lenoir-Rhyne dining hall: Ed Dorn's Gunslinger Book I (a readers theater performance with Thomas Meyer, Lee Ann Brown, Lisa Jarnot, Thomas Rain Crowe, et al.)

6:00 pm at the Hickory Museum of Art: Opening reception

8:00 pm at Hickory Museum of Art: Introduction of Poets

Saturday:

11:00 am at Hickory Museum of Art: Workshop (this is still billed in the online schedule as a reading, so I'm not quite sure which it is - but I'll be there either way).

2:00 pm in Belk Centrum: "Remembering Jonathan Williams (1921-2008): A Tribute". Thomas Meyer is coordinating this; I'll read a couple of Jonathan's poems, and speak from my memories of him.

And then I become an audience member, and spectator, hopping between shows and events. There will be some wonderful performances, I'm sure, and the exhibits will include some great pieces; much of the Black Mountain College Museum +Art Center's collection, for example, will be on display. If you're within range, do try to catch some of the festivities.

Thomas Crowe: Baby Beats' "Time To Shine"

When Tuckasegee poet Thomas Rain Crowe left for France on January 14th, he was completing, in a sense, a trip he began many years before, in the nineteen seventies.

Crowe first went to France early in that decade determined to find there his identity as a poet. He planned to live there, in the land of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and become part of the French literary scene, perhaps the next Rimbaud; he left, disappointed and ill (he’d contracted undulant fever while working on a dairy farm) after a year. After he recovered at the home of his parents, who were then living in Pennsylvania, he wandered on to San Francisco, and the rest, as they say, is history: he found there the identity and community he sought, and became a poet who picked up the torch of the great Beat poets, his mentors. He was particularly moved by the work of Gary Snyder, shared his ecological vision, and came to know Snyder personally. Eventually, Snyder urged him to return to his native South, to light the lamp of ecological and bioregional awareness there – that is, here. Crowe made the journey back across the continent, found a cabin in the woods near Saluda, and lived there with rare human company, but daily visits of deer, foxes, raccoons, hawks and the other wild denizens of that specific place. That stay was the genesis of his memoir Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods, published last year by the University of Georgia Press to wide acclaim; it won the Ragan Old North State Award for the best book of nonfiction in the state of North Carolina for 2005. His work as a poet continued, of course, enriched by the contact with the familiar earth of the Appalachians, and he soon founded his own publishing company, New Native Press, to publish his work and that of poets whose work he felt spoke from some of the same recognitions his own did. Each New Native Press book contained, as books usually do, an address for the press, and when one of his titles found its way to the Winding Stairs bookstore in Dublin, Ireland (Crowe had done a reading there while promoting a collection of Celtic poets), the ground for a magical bit of serendipity was prepared.

And so … Crowe was surprised one day in 1999 to receive a letter from one Matias de Breyne, of France, who wanted to translate some of the poems he’d discovered in Crowe’s collection Personified Street and publish them in French literary journals. Where had he come upon Crowe’s book? In one of fate’s curious twists, de Breyne had picked up Crowe’s book at the Winding Stairs, and had been immediately struck by the language and vision of the work. Crowe was delighted, of course, and responded. Over the next few years, with Crowe’s encouragement, de Breyne expanded his project to include other poets who had been active in San Francisco while Crowe was there, and then assembled his work into a bilingual anthology, Baby Beat Generation. Crowe, no longer in search of identity, has now led a group of San Francisco veterans to France, his first visit since his earlier travail, to introduce that book to the French audience. M. de Breyne will accompany Crowe and his Baby Beat comrades on the promotional tour, and will act as both translator and reader of the French versions of the poems. “Mathias de Breyne has done an amazing job with this book,” Crowe said as he prepared for his trip. “It took him almost three years to translate all the material that appears in this large volume, and he has done so with remarkable accuracy and poetic skill. This was not an easy job, as the styles and voices of the poets who appear in the pages of this book are very diverse, if not complex. If there is a French prize for translation, Mathias de Breyne should win it, hands down, in 2005 for his work with this book.”

In his Preface to the anthology, Crowe describes San Francisco during the 1970s and the flurry of literary and artistic activity that followed the famed 1960s Hippie scene, and draws analogies between it and the Paris of an earlier era. “From the early 1970s through the early 1980s, San Francisco was often compared to Paris at the turn of the century. Young poets, artists and musicians were arriving, almost daily, from all over the country, and in fact the world, to add their voices to the chorus of a growing international community of bohemian brethren. It was an exciting time, and we were literally living, eating, and sleeping poetry and the arts. A group of us had resurrected the old Beat literary magazine Beatitude, and you could find us in the bars down on Columbus Street and Broadway at night and in the cafes up on Grant Avenue during the day. A lifestyle that we often referred to as ‘the university of the streets’.”

“It’s been twenty-five years since all this occurred,” said Crowe from his home in Tuckasegee. “Much of the work of those who were on the front lines of the 70s scene has gone unnoticed for a quarter century. That is, until now. It’s taken the French to recognize the impact and the importance of this scene, and what we accomplished. This has often been the case in terms of progressive and alternative arts and counter-cultural activity in this country – that it has been embraced first and foremost by countries in Europe and abroad. My cohorts from those years in San Francisco had all but given up hope for any kind of recognition, thinking that they and their work had fallen between the cracks during the dominance of the academic scene here in the U.S. for the past three decades. We owe a huge debt of gratitude – to the French poet Mathias de Breyne and to Pierre Courtaud at La Main Courante, the book’s publisher, and to the French bookstores and venues who are part of this 'Tour de France', as we are calling it – for this second chance.”

Readings for the tour were scheduled in such well-known venues as the historic Shakespeare & Co. Bookstore in Paris, the American Library in Paris, the Modern Art Museum, the famed Café de la Mairie, L’Alimentation, one of Paris’s hottest nightclubs, and several other venues between Paris and Lyon. An email from Paris reveals Crowe’s excitement as the tour gets underway: “The anthology is in the front windows of the bookstores, including Shakespeare & Co! First event/reading of the tour, tonight. Have been meeting with other French poets, painters, musicians, who will join us for many of the readings. A general buzz about town regarding our being here and the tour, etc. Posters all over the place.... Seems that this is, indeed, our time to shine.”

The Baby Beat Generation was released in France in late November, and is now available in the U.S.; Malaprops in downtown Asheville, in fact, has it in stock. The American launch for the book was held at the Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center in downtown Asheville this past December as part of the celebration of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Other events celebrating the book’s publication and commemorating the 1970s San Francisco Renaissance are being planned for New York and San Francisco later in the winter and the spring of 2006.

Crowe definitely plans to be on hand for those celebrations. He’s especially looking forward to the trip to San Francisco. Just as he hadn’t returned to France since his disappointed departure many years ago, he’s hasn’t been back to that city, so crucial to his coming to his work as poet, since his pilgrimage east, the trip that led him to the solitude of that cabin at Zoro’s field.

If the current trip is any measure, much has changed since then. As the country sage Zoro Guice, for whom that field was named, told Crowe many years before, “All you need is a little patience.”

(Note: The photo of Crowe was taken by Mark Olencki.)