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, pu
blished 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 ...
