Steve Kimock: Further Adventures

Before this March, it had been over three years since Steve Kimock had hit the road to tour with his own band. Fortunately for those of us who lurk in this part of the world, he closed out the last tour of the Steve Kimock Band in 2006 with a series of gigs in North Carolina, one in Asheville, and the last, a few days later, in Carrboro, only three and a half hours east by interstate. As I mentioned in a post at the time, they were excellent shows.

Since then there have been many sit-ins and one-off gigs, jams and shows in various repeated configurations, more shows, up until the death of horn player Martin Fierro, integral to Zero's sound, with his old band Zero than any time since 1998, and lots of good playing. Very little of it, though, occurred in the context of Kimock's own material, which is, for me, where he best displays his gift for the architecture of sound.

The most interesting of his various recurrent gigs, for me at least, Grateful Dead fan that I am (or was; I have to admit that I've put their work aside for the last few years. So much music to explore, so little time), have been his performances with various former members of that band. He was an integral part of the Rhythm Devils during their tour in the summer and fall of 2006, along with Micky Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mike Gordon, and during the summer and fall of 2007 he toured with Ratdog, Bob Weir's band, filling in for Mark Karan, who was undergoing treatment for cancer. He toured again with Hart in 2008.

Hart appreciated Kimock's strengths as a player, of course; they've played together in various configurations through the years. The context of the Devils, though, with its emphasis on percussion, didn't often give him room to stretch out.

Ratdog proved a more congenial context. In fact, Kimock sometimes transformed that band's sound. Weir said that he found himself astonished five or six times every show, and if you listen to the shows, you'll hear why.

In the summer of 2008, the Mickey Hart Band included more players on strings and keys, and proved a fine context for Kimock's style of extended playing. Their July shows are still worth a listen.

Curiously, before working with these post-Dead bands, Kimock had little relation to the Dead's material. He wasn't a Deadhead; he had his own work to do. And when he helped form Zero, it wasn't to play Dead material. The Zero songbook was much less rooted in Appalachian Americana, more bluesy, and their playing, initially driven by the guitars of Kimock and Quicksilver Messenger Service veteran John Cipollina, sounded very little like the Dead's, even if both groups explored the boundaries of small band improvisation.

During Mark Karan's convalescence, Blair Jackson interviewed him and relayed this recollection at Dead.net:

Kimock's been playing the Dead material now for years, and has played with almost every band that's emerged from the Dead family, from Missing Man Formation, The Other Ones, Phil Lesh and Friends, to the current incarnations of the Rhythm Devils and Ratdog. He may not have been so well versed in the material initially; Mark Karan said awhile back that Kimock often got credit for his work when they were both in The Other Ones.

That tour with The Other Ones went down in 1998. By the next year and the 1999 incarnation of Phil Lesh and Friends, though, there's no disputing that Kimock's playing on Dead classics was magisterial and magnificent. Listen, for instance, to the version of the Dead standard "Terrapin Station" from 10/23/1999 (but give yourself plenty of time, since it's forty-five minutes long - and worth every minute. If you're too busy for the whole song, hang in through the twelve minute mark for an extra-tasty ensemble transition ). The jamming is sharp and tight, and offers a richer development of the song's motifs, especially the later, Terrapin-proper, ones, than any other version I know - including, even, any ever played by the Dead. Paul Barrere (of Little Feat) plays wonderful counterpoint to Kimock's "anti-gravity guitar"- that's Phil's description - and Bill Payne (also of Little Feat) complements the guitars with powerful and tasteful playing on keys.

Still, the material in which Steve Kimock is most at home is his own, and the tour with his new band, Crazy Engine, featuring Melvin Seals on keys, Trevor Exter on bass and vocals, and John Morgan Kimock (Steve's son) on drums, gives those of us who are his fans new cause to rejoice as we prepare for transport on the waves of sound Kimock generates with his guitar.


Steve Kimock and Crazy Engine play the Orange Peel Thursday, November 12. Doors at 8:00, show at 9:00 PM. Tickets are $15 in advance, $17 at the door.

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The video features a Crazy Engine version of Kimock's composition "A New Africa" from July 25.

Sometimes you get THE show ...

Sometimes not. While I enjoyed Steve Kimock Crazy Engine's session at Asheville's Orange Peel on November 12th, and the friends with whom I went, both of whom had seen Kimock in various bands before, had a good time, not everyone was ecstatic. Long-time fan David Riddle, for instance, decidedly was not:

Musically, this was probably the low point in my Kimock career. That's not to say that it was bad...because it didn't feel bad, per se, but there was pretty much no emotion whatsoever. It was as unimpressive a band performance as I've seen in a long time. There was just no energy at all. Kinda weird really...but whatever, better luck next time right?
...
... there were absolutely no IT moments. Regardless of my past shows and interest in Steve's career, the one thing that has always been a constant is some moment during the show where he takes you on a trip that melts the flesh, and has you floating in a sea of sonic bliss. This show didn't get close. That's a first for me personally...
...
The weirdest part of the night was probably whenever Steve took the mic and said, "Well...normally this is the time of the night where we say goodnight and walk offstage." They'd played 8 songs and had been on stage for roughly 75 minutes. That was a true "what the fuck" moment for everyone there. Trevor and John were standing up and looked to be thinking setbreak...then looked entirely confused. Steve then said something like, "we're just gonna play a little more and then walk off". Somehow they stretched it til maybe 10:45 and got two hours out of the set, but the whole scene after that was just weird....and I don't think that's subjectivity either...it was palpable confusion. The venue's curfew was 1am and people were just starting to wake up. We were on the street looking for something to do by 11pm.

The relative shortness of show was weird for me, too, since every Kimock show I've ever been to, aside from festival sets, has raged on for a good hour longer.

So maybe the band had an off-night. Bands do that. That's one reason that, back in the day, even I, not a tour rat, would try to catch a couple of shows when the Dead were nearby; and the Dead, during the later stages of their odyssey, made it easy to catch multiple shows by playing two and three night stands in major cities. You were almost certain to get a few IT moments, as Dave calls them, out of the run.

And the Kimock band seems to have taken things up a notch the next few shows, and got rave reviews on the Kimock list for their performances in Charlotte and Atlanta. I'll keep an eye out for them on the Live Music Archive; so far there's no recording there of the Charlotte show, and the Atlanta recording is missing the second set. Oh, well. Hopefully another will turn up.

And, for now, I'll just wait for next time.

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Photo: Steve Kimock Crazy Engine at the Orange Peel. L to R: Steve Kimock, John Morgan Kimock, Trevor Exter, Melvin Seals.

Steve Kimock: Life Beyond Zero

As a poet, I know I engage the world through language, much as a sculptor might engage it in terms of mass and form, but I've always had an ear for music. There were no musicians in my family as I was growing up, though my father had been a singer in men's choral groups in his youth, and clearly loved music; he would unwind when he came home from the office by listening to records in the living room, leaning back on the couch, his eyes closed. My sister and I both had our obligatory music lessons (I still have my clarinet stuck away in a closet somewhere), but music didn't stick for me as a way I could articulate my take on the world, my sense of it.

Still, one of the dimensions of poetry is, in fact, its music, the sound of the poem. Melopoeia, Ezra Pound called it, borrowing from the Greek, "wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning." Basil Bunting, the great Northumbrian poet who died in 1985, said it this way in a conversation with Jonathan Williams in 1976: "I believe that the fundamental thing in poetry is the sound, so that, whatever the meaning may be, whatever your ultimate intention in that direction might be, if you haven't got the sound right, it isn't a poem. And if you have got it right, it'll get across, even to people who don't understand it." Perhaps it's that dimension of my own approach to the world that's given me an open ear, and a deeper than usual commitment to making music of almost all kinds a real part of my life.

And, then, perhaps it also was the entheogens (more familiar still as “psychedelics”), those sometimes harrowing keys to the doors of perception. Certainly they opened my ears anew in the late sixties and early seventies, and let me hear dimensions of music I'd not appreciated before – the spiritual, sacramental quest that can sometimes happen when musicians are listening deeply to one another, finding a common voyage. I've heard this it, this groove, in the performance of classical music – a really good string quartet, say, can certainly find it – but have found it more often in musical idioms that are more improvisational, like jazz and, well, "electric music for the mind and body", as Country Joe McDonald used to call it, good old rock-and-roll. When improvisational musicians take their voyage, they take us with them; aware of their roles as navigators, they set out to discover new territory in their playing, and bring themselves and us all somehow back to port, transformed by the adventure.

It was their commitment to such musical discovery that made me a fan of the Grateful Dead in the early 1970s. It's cool these days, of course, to disparage the Dead, their music, and particularly their "scene", and, in truth, as their audience grew from a few thousand to a few million, as guitarist Jerry Garcia fell more and more into the power of his own druggish devils, there were excesses, and there were losses. But whatever might be said about the later history of the band (on a good night, they were, to my ears, still very, very good, right till the end – but there were fewer good nights), the first fifteen years or so of their run produced some amazing shows, concerts after which you knew for a certainty that something indefinable had changed in your understanding of the world, and of yourself as you stood in it – in, perhaps, the very balance of the Cosmos – and it had changed, against all odds, for the better.

When I set out to the Black Mountain Music Festival in the fall of 1997, it'd been over two years since Jerry Garcia had died in his sleep, and I'd become reconciled to the likelihood that his death had meant the end of my experience of music as a soul-making venture. Phish, as good as I could hear they were, didn't have it for me. The jazz greats who were still living, still doing vital work, didn't come to Appalachia very often, and that's where I lived. I was fifty-two, had been married, was then separated, a father twice over, and had long ago given up tripping at concerts I was able to attend. The festival that fall featured Bruce Hornsby, Peter Rowan and Tony Rice, and I enjoyed their various approaches to music; Bruce, after all, had played keys with the Dead during one of their good late periods. So, as I sat on my tarp on the wet ground beneath the cloudy October sky waiting for the scheduled performance by Rowan and Rice, I was expecting a show I'd enjoy. The intermittent rain had thrown things off schedule at the outdoor stage, though, and finally someone with the festival came on to say that Rowan and Rice would be performing on the stage in the gym instead, and another group, Zero, would be up soon on the outdoor stage. Zero? I'd never heard of them. Hmm. Oh, well. I gathered my backpack and tarp, bade goodbye to the folks in near proximity with whom I'd been passing the time, and proceeded down past the stage toward the gym. As I neared the stage, though, a woman whom I knew from the food co-op, a recently found friend, greeted me. She asked where I was headed, and I explained that I was off to the gym to hear Rowan and Rice, thinking that she'd perhaps missed the announcement. But she hadn't.

"You don't want to do that," she said.

"I don't?"

"No, you really want to stay here. You want to hear Zero." There's was something about the way she said it that led me to put my gear down over by the speaker tower and wait for them to come on. She'd heard them in Colorado, where she'd lived for a decade before coming to Asheville, and thought they were a special band. I knew she was a member of some standing in the great anonymous association of entheogenic voyagers, a true head, so I decided to see what might happen here as the band set up and plugged in.

And then they started playing. The opening number, an instrumental, positively lifted the top of my skull, and within a minute I was down at the front of the stage dancing, tears flowing down my cheeks. A month or two later I learned that they’d opened with "Tangled Hangers", one of their signature songs, written by their guitarist. That was my introduction to the music of Steve Kimock.

That was Zero's one foray into the southeast, so I never heard them again. I signed up for their listserv, though, and soon was collecting tapes of Zero shows, and dubbing them for others. The band continued to evolve – mostly, it seemed to me, because Kimock was becoming more and more adventurous as a player. By the spring of 1998, he and Bobby Vega, Zero's bass player, had formed a side-project with drummer Alan Hertz and Frank Zappa veteran guitarist Ray White: Kimock Vega Hertz and White, or KVHW. Over the next two years, through the end of 1999, KVHW played more gigs, and Zero played fewer and fewer; by the end of 1999, Zero was effectively history. Unfortunately (or not) so was KVHW. White, who had been somewhat erratic – late for some gigs, absent from others – through the run of the band, didn't show for a scheduled performance, and his band mates decided they'd had enough. After a month off, Kimock was on the road again, once more with Vega, later with Vega and Hertz, but this time the band was unmistakably his; it was the Steve Kimock Band. And, no matter the changes in personnel along the way, it's been so since. Since that first show on February 11, 2000, at the Wetlands in New York City, the band has played nearly 400 show (Setlist.com lists 397 as of yesterday, the end of November), including three in Asheville. They'll be back again, at the Grey Eagle, on Thursday, January 19th, 2006, doors at 8:00 PM.

Joining Steve this time will be the extraordinary drummer Rodney Holmes, Steve's principal collaborator since November of 2000; Reed Mathis on bass; and Robert Walter on keyboards. Rodney’s played with a host of other great lights in rock and jazz, including Santana (he played on Santana's huge radio hit "Smooth"), Wayne Shorter, Larry and Julian Coryell, and Joe Zawinul. Mathis also plays with the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey. Robert Walter, of New Orleans, sometimes leads his own bands; the best known is probably Robert Walter’s 20th Congress. I've not seen this lineup, but I've listened closely to several shows (SKB shows taped from the stage are available at digitalsoundboard.net, and audience recordings of many shows are available for free at the amazing Internet Archive (www.archive.org ), and these guys have a wonderful warmth and play with a freedom of interactive imagination that can only rise from being absolutely dug in to what they’re doing.

What is it about Kimock's work that grabbed my head on that cloudy day eight years ago? He's recognized as a master of tone, and plays extremely clean, richly contoured lines. He’s a master of the lyrical phrase, has a phenomenal sense of time (which he loves to warp in ways large and small), and never seems to lose the structure of his work, no matter how discursive and exploratory the jam. It’s difficult to speak about the emotional content of music – two different listeners hear two different shows, and what either hears may have little to do with what’s on the musician’s mind – but Kimock is Zen-like in his attention to getting himself, his head, out of his way. He’s not standing up there thinking about the next note he’s going to play, he’s not-thinking about it, and playing from somewhere else. Of the uniquely powerful and moving structures of sound he builds, a phrase of an old friend of Steve’s, Doug Greene, now passed on, perhaps said it best: his playing gives you both the wound and the balm, its cure.

In a recent interview with Randy Ray at Jambase.com, when Randy proposed a relationship between Steve’s “method” and Zen, Steve said this about his approach to playing:

There's certainly an attitude of some of that which I try, paradoxically, to keep in mind. How best to explain that? Here's the easy way to look at it - for me, when I think the thing is working, when I think people are actually feeling the music, you know, when you're really getting it for a minute, you're not in any kind of dualistic space. You're not thinking, 'Well, I'm here and my feet hurt' or 'I'm doing this and she's doing that. These people are doing this and I wish I was doing this.' You're not in your mind at all. There's no time in it or this, that, or the other thing - it's just a totality.

Anytime you're thinking [you’re in dualistic space]. Anytime you're thinking at all. [When you’re playing] it is not a mental place - it's an entirely feeling place. It is not a place where your mental activities are keeping events discrete. There's no sense of I'm trying to do this or I'm succeeding at doing this or I'm feeling good about myself because I'm doing this.' That is automatically not where it's at. I take every opportunity to steer myself away from those states of mind, so that when I get to a place where maybe I can play, I'm playing from the same kind of place where somebody who is being receptive to music may also be feeling it too. You know what I mean? Instead of being from some ego point of view or a point of view of trying to accomplish something."

RR: Within your own framework, are you trying to gather musicians that think that way? Musicians that don't get in the way of that open space?

I don't know if it's possible to do that, or if it's entirely necessary. I think it's more important to understand how you feel music as a listener, without trying to engage yourself in it in an intellectual way or trying to define what's happening. I think when you're really enjoying something, you're really enjoying something. If you're feeling it, you're feeling it, so I try to leave it there as much as possible."

If you like jazz-inflected small band improvisation, you might want to check his show out. Who knows, you might find your own head lifted. If the creeks don't rise and the sky don't fall, I'll see you there. Whatever they play, I won't have heard it like that before; listening will be like discovering a new book by a favorite poet.


Note: The quote from Pound is from his “How To Read”, included in the Literary Essays of 1954, and the Bunting quote is from a conversation published in St. Andrew’s Review, Spring-Summer 1977, as “A Conversation With Basil Bunting”. Steve’s full interview is here.

Steve Kimock: Further Adventures

Steve Kimock is back on the road with a new band - it's one, though, that includes some folks he's played with many times in the past, like Melvin Seals (keys, especially his trademark B-3), Billy Goodman (guitar and vocals), and his son, John Morgan Kimock, who's become a fine drummer. Susan J. Weiand has some nice photos, including the one above, up at Jambase. Like they say, check 'em out.

Here's his last great band playing "Tongue N' Groove", from the 2005 CD Eudemonic, which she likewise shares:

More Tangled Hangers

Andy Boyd provided a link to the Zero set at the Black Mountain Music Festival where I first caught Steve Kimock in the comments to my post on Steve Kimock: it's here.

And, he adds it was a "very fine Tangled Hangers indeed..."

Update: I've fixed the link; for some reason, Andy's brought up a "no such show" error for me. If you'd just like to download that "Tangled Hangers" (in the lossless flac format; others are available), the link for it is here.

It seems I wasn't the only one particularly moved by this Zero performance. Sawbuck, in the reviews of the show at Archive.org, says this:

My first live Zero show ... Steve's tone blew us all away! Tangled hangers was everything we had hoped for. Yes , It's true, Just like the dead it was everything we had heard on tapes (remember those) and more, it was the real deal. Tears rolled down my face.

Another birthday for guitarist Steve Kimock

This clip has Kimock joining old friend Billy Goodman at The Concert Hall in New York, NY, on September 27, on Goodman's "Best Friend."

Happy Birthday, Steve.

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Thanks to Kimock lister (and much more) Charlie Miller for the link.

Mr. Kimock at work ...

This is actually from long ago 1998, when Kimock (that's Steve Kimock) was playing in Kimock-Vega-Hertz-White, or KVHW (and sometimes KVHHW, if Terry Haggerty was sitting in). The song is "Tangled Hangers", and the video seems to capture most of the initial improvisational section. Keep your eyes peeled, and around three minutes twenty seconds in, you'll see SK demonstrate what it means to play while not-thinking. Tasty.

The Return of Zero

There's a nice review of the recent three-night Zero "Chance in a Million" reunion in Denver at Jambase. It was written by Andy Dorfmann, long-time member of the Zero and Kimock list servers, who coincidentally first heard Zero in 1997, the same year I did; it sounds like Andy enjoyed the shows!

The Steve Kimock Band show in Asheville was, to my ears, outstanding - and the consensus pick on the list for best show of the southeast tour. It also sold out, a first for the band in Asheville; more than five hundred fifty people packed the Grey Eagle. I drove down to the flatlands for the show in Chapel Hill (or Carrboro) on Sunday night, and really enjoyed it as well. It featured some songs relatively new to SKB, "Vernal Equinox", a song by bass player Reed Mathis (he's performed it with Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey since 2001), and "Adelita", a Robert Walter tune introduced in December. It's named, according to Charlie Miller, the band's recording engineer, for "a whore house in Tijuana". The show has now been released by the band as a free download.

I've posted some photos of the SKB shows at Flickr, and also shots of the Zero show in 1997 that introduced me to Kimock's playing, the KVHW show I caught in Athens in December, 1999, and an early SKB show in Winston-Salem in October, 2001.

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The photo of Zero features an earlier incarnation of the band, with Bobby Vega on bass and Chip Roland on keys. It was used by the venue to publicize the recent Zero reunion shows.
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 ...

New old shows

Now up on the Wordplay Archive at ibiblio, shows from the fall of 2007 (all links in the show dates are to the .mp3 audio files):

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 21, 2007 found then-Marshall poet Rose McLarney in the studio for her annual* near-birthday reading of new work.

Enjoy, and thanks for listening.


*which means she'll soon be back.

So Far: The Catalog of the Wordplay Archive

Wordplay in in the midst of its seventh season. The program airs at AshevilleFM at 5:00 PM on Sundays. 

A few new shows are now up, others will be going up shortly - especially if I can recruit an intern who'd like to learn a little something about audio editing and using an FTP client.  

I'll also be uploading some older shows that never found their way through the clouds to ibiblio, home of the Wordplay Archive. 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 edit those into podcasts 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 poet 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.

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

November 4, 2007 featured Buffalo poet Jessica Smith (production note).

November 11, 2007 featured recordings of William Matthews.
 
November 18, 2007 featured Robert Morgan (production note), author of Gap Creek, Boone, and Terroir, among many other prose and poetry titles.
 
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), another Black Mountain College poet, author of the classic Gunslinger and Recollections of Gran Apacheria, among other titles.

January 20, 2008 featured Katherine Min, author of Secondhand World.

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 the great 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  - and, now, 2012, also Requiem by Fire.

June 15, 2008 featured archival recordings of poet Robert Creeley, including some recorded at Black Mountain College, where he taught with Charles Olson. 

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 writer Chall Gray, now proprietor of the Magnetic Field performance space.

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

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

August 10, 2008 Columbia, S.C., novelist Janna 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 ever been played at WPVM (now MAIN-FM) or AshevilleFM . 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 poet Thomas Meyer (production note).

September 14, 2008 Asheville "investigative poet" Pat Riviere-Seel dropped by to share recent work and read from her  book The Serial Killer's Daughter. A Little-Known Fact: Pat was on the original humongous 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 Poet 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 Brown 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 Robert 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 then unpublished new novel, Requiem By Fire, which Random House brought out in February, 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 held on July 11th, 2009, 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 Samuels 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 to discuss 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 at AshevilleFM, Wordplay's new home, 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.

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 since had several new productions  open at the new Magnetic Field performance space in Asheville's River Arts District, including Ruth and The Labyrinth. A new play, Solstice, opens this month (January, 2012).

(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 then co-hosted Wordplay once a month from February, 2010, through February, 2011.

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. After serving as Acting Director of the Asheville Area Arts Council in 2011, Graham is now back with Catalyst Poetics.

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 work-shopped a poem Stephanie had underway with her.

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, poems from Natures and some mostly unpublished pieces (so far) I plan to include in a second book. In a fit of what must have been borderline insanity, I even threw in a few very recent pieces that prove conclusively that a sixty-five year old man can still write idiotic, jejune love poetry. 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 The Swing Girl, published in 2011 by the LSU Press.

July 25, 2010 The summer brought poet Landon Godfrey to the microphone to share some of her work, including some of the poems which would be gathered in her first book, Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown, published early 2011. 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 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.

October 17, 2010 featured Western North Carolina poet Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin on a Laureate's Radio Hour.

November 21, 2010 had Cathy interviewing Charlotte writer Jim McGavran about his lovely deeply-felt memoir In the Shadow of the Bear for one of her Laureate's Radio Hours.

December 19, 2010 brought poet Susan Lefler to the studio for a preview of her upcoming book, Rendering the Bones, since published by Wind Publications. Another Laureate's Radio Hour.

January 16, 2011 - Eastern NC poet/musician Jim Clark made the trek to the mountains to join Cathy and me in the studio for a celebration of his CD "The Service of Song." This lovely CD provides Clark's musical settings of poems by Appalachian poet Byron Herbert Reece, "the bard of the North Georgia mountains," who died in 1958 at age 40. We listened to several cuts from the disc, and some tracks, as well, from one of Jim's other CDs, "The Buried Land." You'll find links to some mp3s from both over at Clark's website. A Laureate's Radio Hour.

February 13, 2011 - Our scheduled guest came down with the flu, so this Sunday found Cathy and me alone in the studio for what would prove to be our last show together. Since it was the day before Valentines Day, we talked, not about love poetry, but about poetry that we loved, poetry that had made us want to join the ranks of poets ourselves. You'll hear us read from the work of, and discuss, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Creeley, Sylvia Plath, and Gary Snyder, with musical interludes by The Beatles. John Coltrane, Leonard Cohen, and the Grateful Dead. It's quite the mix! The final Laureate's Radio Hour.


And, as always, more to come ...