WordPlay

Now on NatureS ...

2008-05-26T20:19:00.003-04:00

New posts about Wordplay now go up on the station blog and at NatureS; I've become the only one writing them, for now, and just want to simplify my blog life.

I've been exploring options for our permanent Archive, and will probably post a note here when it's up; it very much is in the works.

Jeff

A Feast of Words

2008-04-21T19:15:00.001-04:00

Hard to believe that we're now only a week away from Wordfest, the new Asheville poetry festival. It hits the stage - or one of its stages - this coming Thursday, April 24th, with a 7:00 performance by Patricia Smith and Rick Chess at UNCA's Humanities Lecture Hall. It should be an interesting event, given the distance between the writing & performance styles of the two featured poets; Patricia comes from the world of the slam, and Rick from the halls of the university.

That difference, of course, is precisely the point, a signal of the range of poets and poetries the festival means to include.

The whole thing grew out of a series of conversations over coffee at Malaprops, Asheville's great independent bookstore, following Wordplay shows early last year. Laura Hope-Gill, then a Wordplay host, and Jim Navé, of the Writing Salon, had fond memories of the first Asheville Poetry Festivals, held for a few years in the early 1990s - festivals that I had missed - had been, in fact, only vaguely aware of. Those festivals had grown out of the slam scene in Asheville, a scene in which I hadn't been involved, and had found, given the directions my own work was then taking, of little interest. Some poets of real energy and authentic voice, though, had emerged from that scene, including Laura herself, and her good friend (and also occasional Wordplay host) Glenis Redmond. The longer we talked, the more our conversation turned to creating a festival anew, one that would honor all the approaches to poetry we'd variously come to enjoy and understand, that had come to have place in our community. You won't find it anywhere in the festival materials now, but when we initially tried to define a statement of intent for the festival, the phase we came up with was "echo and reach"; we wanted to honor the history of the arts of language in these mountains, home through the centuries to Cherokee singers and to the poets of Black Mountain College, to ballad singers and to beats, slam masters and professors of writing. Over the months we talked with our friends and fellow poets, and gradually came up with a list of poets we believed covered, if not the full range of activity we might wish to honor, a pretty decent part of it.

Here's the schedule:

RICHARD CHESS‚ PATRICIA SMITH

Thursday April 24 7:00 pm UNC-A Humanities Lecture Hall

SIMON ORTIZ‚ MARIJO MOORE‚ KATHRYN STRIPLING BYER

Friday April 25 7:00 pm UNC-A Humanities Lecture Hall

GLENIS REDMOND‚ ALLAN WOLF‚ JIM NAVE‚ LAURA HOPE-GILL

Re-Opening the Green Door: a Retrospective of the 1990’s Performance Poetry Scene
Friday April 25 10:00 pm Malaprops Bookstore/café corner of Walnut and Haywood St.

COLEMAN BARKS WITH ELIOT WADOPIAN

Saturday April 26 2:00 pm The Fine Arts Theater 36 Biltmore Avenue

WORDFEST AT MALAPROPS: RECEPTION AND SIGNING

Saturday April 25 4:00 pm Malaprops Bookstore/café

FATEMEH KESHAVARZ‚ GALWAY KINNELL

Saturday April 26 7:00 pm UNC-A Humanities Lecture Hall

POETIX LOUNGE

Saturday April 26 10:00 pm Bobo Gallery on Lexington Avenue

FLOOD GALLERY READING: GLENIS REDMOND‚ SEBASTIAN MATTHEWS‚ LAURA HOPE-GILL‚ JEFF DAVIS‚ and MARK PRUDOWSKY

12:00 noon. 109 Roberts St. at corner of Clingman and Roberts by the river.

LEE ANN BROWN‚ CATHY WAGNER‚ DEVIN JOHNSTON

This History Isn’t Closed: A Protospective of The Black Mountain College Legacy: Sunday April 27 2:00 pm Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center

WORDFEST LOCAL: DAVID HOPES‚LEE ANN BROWN, GARY COPELAND LILLEY‚ THOMAS RAIN CROWE‚ ROSE MCLARNEY, ALLAN WOLF‚ KEITH FLYNN

Sunday April 27 7:00 pm Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, 56 Broadway in downtown Asheville.

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There's more information over at the festival website.

Glenis, Rick, Navé and I will also be providing workshops in various approaches to poetry; mine will focus, as you might suspect, on writing about or from what we usually call "Nature". More on those workshops in another post.

Come out if you can to catch us all at work, doing what we love most to do, celebrating language of the mind, heart and imagination.

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Thanks to Megan McKissack for creating the festival poster.

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Cross-posted at NatureS.

2008-03-22T19:24:00.001-04:00

features Chattanooga poet Chad Prevost, author of Snapshots of the Vanishing World (out from Cherry Grove Press in 2006) and Chasing the Gods, a chapbook (Pudding House, 2007). It was a fun show, and Chad read several of his hilarious new mock-autobiographical prose pieces. It'll be available as online stream and podcast from the WPVM archive page through Sunday, tomorrow.

I'm still going through recordings for tomorrow's show, but it will feature Jonathan Williams, who passed on last Sunday night at the age of 79.

All the hits ...

2008-03-06T04:36:00.003-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross-posted at NatureS.

NatureS on the air, now, actually

2008-02-22T03:52:00.001-05:00

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

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

(We do like to mix things up.)

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Cross-posted at NatureS.

Wordplay, Mercury retrograde edition, part 2

2008-02-17T20:00:00.007-05:00

Today's show with Lori Horvitz was really fun, had a great spontaneous flow, and Lori read some material from her memoir-in-progress that included really well-observed scenes and stories of some wonderful encounters - I especially enjoyed those that included her father. Unfortunately, if you didn't hear it live, you never will. Once again the WPVM archiving system failed to record the show, and neither Sebastian nor I, sadly, had brought a blank CD to use in the low-tech, but mostly reliable, back-up system. So it's gone, sound waves dissipated into the atmosphere.

My apologies to Lori; we'll have her back on the show and do it all again just as soon as her schedule and the show's permit.

After the show I poked around and found another issue: the automated FTP upload for last week's show had also gone awry, and the show never uploaded to the site from which it podcasts and streams. In fact, it's impossible to tell now when the last show uploaded. So we'll be talking again to WPVM's beleaguered manager about how we can fix the latest round of glitches, and make as certain as possible that they won't occur in the future.

At least until Mercury once again goes retrograde.

This week on Wordplay: Natures

2008-02-16T21:44:00.008-05:00

This week’s show, still available via stream or podcast from the WPVM archive page, features my debut reading of NatureS from April, 2006. The reading took place at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and I talked a bit about the Black Mountain poets, especially Creeley, and my sense of their relevance to my own work. I also wanted to speak to the poetics that informs the work, and so spent probably too much time talking about parataxis, as practiced particularly by Robin Blaser, and about Novalis, whose Encyclopedia explores the identity of the character each of us calls “I” in a way that remains useful some two hundred years, now, further on.

Listening to the recording for the first time just ten or twelve days ago, I realized that I had seriously mangled my recapitulation of Creeley’s accounting of the argument between Wittgenstein and Russell. Wittgenstein refused to agree with Russell’s assertion that there was no rhinoceros in the room, and Russell, so the story goes, tried to prove to him empirically that, in fact, no such creature was around; he looked under tables and chairs, and so on. My telling scrambles Wittgenstein’s position, and so obscures the import of the whole argument - and, sadly, likewise obscures the humor of the situation as legend tells us it unfolded. When Creeley told the story, he managed to keep that humor. My apologies to Bob’s spirit, and to any who might listen to this version, for getting things scrambled in my jangled brain that night.

We don’t offer feature our own work on Wordplay, but we had a week with no guest on board, and I’d been having difficulties cleaning up a noisy recording of Jonathan Williams that I wanted to air, … so there it is. Enjoy. We’ll hopefully be able to include the Williams reading in a future show.

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Update: Coming up Sunday (or Monday via on-demand stream and podcast), Lori Horvitz.

Cross-posted at NatureS.

This week: Ed Dorn

2008-01-15T19:43:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Donald Allen's 1960 New American Poetry, Ed Dorn is still primarily known as a Black Mountain College poet. After his years at the college, though, he went on to become one of the foremost poets of the American West, in all its dimensions. This week's Wordplay features Dorn reading two works that helped to define that legacy: Idaho Out and Recollections of Gran Apacheria.

The Idaho Out opened a 1962 reading, probably in Albuquerque (Robert Creeley, who'd been his Examiner at Black Mountain, introduces him, and Creeley was then, I believe, still teaching in New Mexico). Dorn followed it with an equally spirited take on "From Gloucester Out", but I decided to save that poem for another show so that I could fit the second reading, from April 19, 1974, in Buffalo, into our hour. This reading was one of the first to which I lugged my trusty Uher reel-to-reel; I set up on Dorn's right, fairly close to the front of the room, and held the single mic in my hand (no mic stands in those days, so I could travel light) for the duration. I also managed to shoot several photos of Dorn as he read; I've posted them over at Facebook (that's the public link), and will probably upload them to Flickr also.

Before he read Recollections that night, he read a few short selections from the later books of Gunslinger, whose conclusion hadn't yet been published. I omitted those from the show in order to include all of Recollections - or all I had; back in those days of reel-to-reels, I always had to keep my fingers crossed that one five inch tape would make it all the way through a reading. That night it didn't, not quite: the end of the tape slipped through the capstan and across the heads just before Dorn spoke the last few words of the final poem. I supplied those for the show.

The readings are both now available online, the 1962 reading at the Slought Foundation, and the 1974 reading at PennSound; I uploaded it a few years ago to The Factory School site, and it somehow made its way across Philadelphia to PennSound. Ah, the wonders of the internet.

The music I played to open the show was "Apache", by The Shadows; I found it at YouTube. That's also where I found Vaughn Monroe's version of "Ghost Riders in the Sky", which led into the break. Leading into Recollections, and then out of the show, are short sections of two cuts from the Peter Kater/R. Carlos Nakai collaboration Natives, as haunting, and haunted, as the West which they echo.

Enjoy.

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Photo: Ed Dorn reading in Buffalo, April 19, 1974.

A new year for Wordplay ...

2008-01-03T20:01:00.000-05:00

Behind the scenes ... er, no, I should use a less visual metaphor. How about "off-mic?" As, something that happens in a radio studio that the audience never hears. If you've listened to Wordplay, you know that it's been a half-hour show for that past two and a half seasons. For the last several months, though, I've been gently nudging the powers that be at WPVM, Wordplay's home, to let us go to a longer format, one that would allow us to play more of pre-recorded events, and to entice our live authors into stretching out, telling us more about what they're up to. And now all the off-mic activity is about to be audible indeed.

Beginning Sunday, January 13th, Wordplay will be moving two hours up on the station program schedule, to 2:00 PM, and going to a full hour format. Woohoo!

Sebastian and I have already been recording additional material with some of the guests we've had on the show this fall, and booking new guests who'll fit much more comfortably into the hour format. The show should be a bit more spontaneous, and we plan to enrich and vary its sonic collage more than we've had the simple time to to this point. We believe you'll find the shows even more interesting, more engaging, than the ones we've produced so far.

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There have been several requests for a replay of the early November show which featured the work of William Matthews, Sebastian's father and my friend during my last year in Chapel Hill; this week it's available again from the station's archive page as a stream or podcast.

This coming Sunday we'll take a look back at a few of the fine moments from 2007 with a show that features poems by a diverse crew, including Robert Bly, Fred Chappell, Cathy Smith Bowers, Matthews, and Matthew Dickman.

And let me be the thousandth person so far to wish you a Happy New Year. Onward!

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Radio image from Travel Talk Radio Network's site.

Cross-posted at NatureS

This week, too

2007-11-30T03:01:00.000-05:00

Robert Morgan's interview about his biography of Daniel Boone is available as either stream or podcast at WPVM.

(Inertia of Thanksgiving and all ...)

This coming Sunday, former co-host Laura Hope-Gill joins Sebastian and me to talk once again about poetry - and about WordFest (parts of the site are still under construction), the poetry festival that will unfold in Asheville next April. I hope you'll join us.

This week: Robert Morgan

2007-11-20T04:03:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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Thanks to Malaprops for the photo.

This week: William Matthews

2007-11-14T18:55:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

Give him a listen.

Jessica Smith comes to WordPlay

2007-11-03T05:41:00.000-04:00

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

The program broadcasts (and streams) at 4:00 PM on Sunday, and then is available from the station's archive page as either a stream or a podcast through the following Sunday.

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

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

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

Just make your checks payable to WPVM.

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

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

Jessica's photo via Facebook.
Cross-posted at NatureS.

Marvin Bell tonight

2007-10-24T14:55:00.000-04:00

While we were running down upcoming poetry events on last Sunday's show, I believe that Sebastian and I both mentioned the Bell reading at UNCA; unfortunately, we gave the wrong day for the reading. It's tonight, not Thursday, or tomorrow. Hopefully there's been enough other information about the event out there that most folks who'd attend have the date right.

Sorry about that.

Coming up this week ...

2007-10-16T21:15:00.001-04:00

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

Hope you'll come join us.

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

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

Fifty years later, still no Howl

2007-10-16T21:10:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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Cross-posted at NatureS.

Last week ...

2007-10-08T15:37:00.000-04:00

on WordPlay, Audrey Hope Rinehart, who wrangles poets for the Flood Gallery reading series, sat down with me to talk about her own work and read some recent poems. Our conversation will be available as a download or stream on the station Archive page until Sunday night.

So I wrote last week over at NatureS.

Make that next Sunday night, October 14th, though, because the station's automation system glitched, and didn't record yesterday's fine program with California poet Mara Leigh. If you were listening live, you heard something much more ephemeral than any of us could know at the time!

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

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WordPlay this week ...

2007-09-27T16:57:00.000-04:00

This week Sebastian and I rushed back from a fine reading at the Flood Gallery by our own sometime co-host Glenis Redmond, A. Van Jordan, and Juilian Vorus to talk with poet Steve Godwin. Fortunately, Steve had also been at the reading and could share his impressions of it, as well as some recent work. Sebastian read from Jordan's new Quantum Lyrics.

Two weeks ago I took some time off to visit my son in Chapel Hill - and, of course, book addict that I am, hit a couple of used book stores, including the great The Bookshop on Franklin Street. There I found some early books by the sage of Scaly Mountain, Jonathan Williams, including his Amen Huzzah Selah, which collected very early work from the period when he was a student of Charles Olson's at Black Mountain College. From it I read "The Anchorite", a poem that's held up well enough through the years to have been included in 2005's Jubilant Thicket, a selection of poems from his whole career. We had a little time, so I also read a poem by the great Hilda Doolittle, or H.D., as she preferred to be known, her musical take on Sappho's "Fragment 113", neither honey nor bee for me ...

Enjoy. And, hey, it won't hurt you to read a poem this week.

(Similar text cross-posted at WPVM).

(And now at NatureS)

Gary Snyder on WordPlay

2007-07-31T23:01:00.001-04:00

Back in April Gary Snyder came to Hickory for a reading at Lenoir-Rhyne College, so fellow poet Thomas Rain Crowe and I headed down the mountain to hear what he had to say. Though we'd both read his new work as it had appeared through the years, neither of us had heard him since the 70s. Snyder gave us permission to record for the show, so this week we feature excerpts from that April reading, and a rare clip of him reading in 1965, as well.

The show will be rebroadcast tomorrow morning at 7:00, but you can always listen from the Archive page; just scroll down to the WordPlay link and stream away, or download the podcast.

We're working with the station web master to create a new feature for WordPlay, by the way: a permanent online archive of some of our best shows. When we've worked it all out, this one will be likely be there.

August 6th Update: Sebastian and Laura were both out of commission yesterday, so I decided to play the Snyder reading again - so it's held over, and will be available for another week.

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I took the photo of Gary Snyder and Thomas Rain Crowe at the reception following Snyder's reading in Hickory. There are more here, over on Facebook (no membership required).

2007-06-08T14:33:00.001-04:00

In late April poet Robert Bly came to UNCA for a reading that featured many of his translations of Kabir, Jiminez, Rilke, and others, as well as some of his own recent work. WordPlay, of course, was there. Bly graciously gave us permission to record the reading, and this Sunday we hope you’ll join us to listen to this master at work. Tune in at 4:00 PM, or for the rebroadcasts Tuesday at 6:00 PM and Wednesday at 7:00 AM. The show will also be available all next week as streaming audio and podcast.

Oops ...

2007-04-30T04:11:00.000-04:00

Technical issues today, and the automation system that usually records the show got only twenty minutes of it before it croaked for reasons unknown. I'll try to get in to the station tomorrow to add ten more minutes of something; the first twenty minutes have Laura and me talking about Robert Bly's reading and workshop last week, so a few more Bly poems would seem to be in order. If you stream or download the show before Tuesday, you'll get the abbreviated version, so check back later in the week.

Tables Turned

2007-04-13T18:36:00.000-04:00

As a WordPlay host I've interviewed a score or more of poets for the program. Last Sunday, though, found me on the other side of the console, interviewed myself by co-hosts Laura Hope-Gill and Sebastian Matthews. The program includes readings of several poems from my book NatureS, including the serial set "Strata: Rhododendron". The show’s still available via streaming or podcast from the archive page.

This Sunday’s show will feature a reading by Oregon poet Matthew Dickman; it was recorded last month at Warren Wilson College by WordPlay team-member Dylan Flynn. Tune in at 4:00 for his warm and genial presentation of his work.

And a happy birthday ...

2007-02-01T02:50:00.001-05:00

The Writer's Almanac today shares the news that it's Galway Kinnell's birthday:

It's the birthday of poet Galway Kinnell, born in Providence, Rhode Island (1927). He became obsessed with the poetry of William Butler Yeats in college when his roommate, the poet W. S. Merwin, woke him up one night and read Yeats to him until dawn. After that night, Kinnell devoted himself to writing poetry.
He's the author of many books of poetry, including Body Rags (1968) and Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980). His Selected Poems (1980) won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He said, "Maybe the best we can do is do what we love as best we can."

Kinnell's also the author of Strong Is Your Hold, published this past November, his eleventh collection. I've not yet seen it, but have heard reports that it's an intense, rich book - what I'd expect, given his previous work.

A little known fact: though not generally associated with the Black Mountain Poets (Olson, Creeley, Dorn, Jonathan Williams, et al.), Kinnell did attend Black Mountain College just after he'd encountered W. S. Merwin and the poetry of Yeats. More about that, no doubt, in a future post.

Happy birthday to one of the essential poets of his - or any - time.

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Thanks to famouspoetsandpoems.com for the photo, and to Laura for the news that Kinnell attended BMC.

This Sunday...

2007-01-12T02:47:00.001-05:00

This Sunday we'll welcome poet Lee Ann Brown to Wordplay.

Originally from Charlotte, Lee Ann attended Brown University, received her BA in Women’s Studies & English and American Literature with Honors in Creative Writing in 1987, and her MFA in writing in 1993. After graduation she moved to New York and became active on the New York poetry scene. She's now an Assistant Professor of English at St. John's University in New York.

Her two major collections so far are Polyverse, published in 1999 by the Sun & Moon Press, which was selected as winner of the New American Poetry Prize by Charles Bernstein, and The Sleep That Changed Everything, published by Wesleyan University Press in 2003.

She's read several times in Asheville at UNCA, Malaprops, and the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and shares a home near Marshall with husband Tony Torn and daughter Miranda when work permits her to spend time in the mountains.

There's an earlier appreciation of Lee Ann over at NatureS.

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The photo finds Lee Ann on the front porch of her Marshall home in July of 2005.

THE EARLY 90's

2007-01-02T23:47:00.001-05:00

I was going through old photographs I keep in a Dobbs Bowler hatbox (the bowler, alas, long ago missing), and I found one of myself sitting on the ground outside the Green Door on Carolina Lane, a poetry notebook open in my lap, a pepsi by my foot. I'm wearing black jeans, white t-shirt, black velvet vest. Somewhere, there's a cigarette burning but I hid it from the camera. I was so hard core back then, such the poet. My long hair is unbrushed but clean. Sometimes a girl's hair sums her up completely. That was me in the moments before one of what seems like a hundred performances in the amazing Green Door, home to the early 90's Asheville poetry scene. Lately, we here in the Wordplay studio have been talking about "those days." What they were like, who was involved, what we did. First, it's impossible to imagine the poetry scene without that darn green door on the lane. Allan Wolf began the poetry slam there. Bob Falls, Bob Mills, Glenis Redmond, Christine Lassiter, Jim Nave, myself--we all took our turns at the standing mic on the concrete stage. And slowly a movement grew around the words. Pat Storm beat me in the only slam I did (it was something called a skydive slam or something--the poems could only be one minute or shorter in length. I did Jas H. Duke's "Productivity:" "Wool grows just as fast on a lazy sheep." Pat ran out after I was finished and shouted something nobody understood then dove onto the ground spraying all of us with fake blood. So, he won. That's the kind of evenings we had.
My favorite piece of our history as poets in this town has nothing to do with poetry at all, though. I think it was in 1994, we approached John Cram of Blue Spiral and asked if we could help turn the Fine Arts (meaning porn) Theatre into a Fine Arts (meaning independent cinema) Theatre. He agreed to match our labor and then continue with the project. The next thing we knew, we were there at the Fine Arts in virtual hazmat suits and goggles tearing the place apart, pulling the red velvet in long skeins from the walls. The building itself was a history lesson.There was a door behind the box office which had been the Black entrance under Jim Crow. The upstairs theatre had been the area where only African Americans sat, and there was glass separating it from the open air. Now, when I watch a film upstairs I can't help but consider what this space once represented. Anyway, John held up his end of the bargain and the poets held up theirs and the theatre we enjoy today is the result of that partnership.
Christine Lassiter and Pat Storm are no longer with us. But Allan Wolf, Jim Nave, Bob Falls, Glenis Redmond, myself, and countless others, continue to move in the written world. And I feel of late that some new energy is rising for poetry in Asheville. A whole new kind of thing. . . .

Holidays, Holy Days ...

2006-12-29T03:16:00.000-05:00

Last week's show is still up on the archives, and if you like Dylan Thomas, it'd be a worthwhile listen, since Laura read the whole of his "Child's Christmas In Wales", a story that beautifully discloses the wonderment of childhood and winter, and the dear quirky world of a small Welsh community.

As we didn't manage to say during the show, it first came out in 1954 - not, in other words, until after Thomas had died, in 1953, not yet forty. I doubt that it's ever been out of print.

This Sunday we'll be reading and responding to some other poems of the holidays, of beginnings and endings, renewals and celebrations, so join us for the first ever WordPlay New Year's Eve.

Thanks to composer John Mitchell's site for the portrait of Thomas.

Tomorrow: Jaye Bartell

2006-12-02T16:39:00.000-05:00

Poet Jaye Bartell, who's been an important part of the Asheville poetry scene for the past five years, is planning to shuffle off to Buffalo in a couple of weeks. We've invited him to join us again in the studio this Sunday to talk about his work, read new poems, and tell us what he has planned for his farewell reading, scheduled for next Friday, 8th December, at 9:30 PM at the New French Bar. Hope you'll tune in and join us.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Note: There's a selection of Jaye's poems in the December Rapid River, available now; his blog is Makes a Bird.

Surrealism Part II

2006-11-24T02:19:00.000-05:00

... is coming up on this Sunday's WordPlay.

Last Sunday (scroll down to listen) Sebastian, Glenis and I began a discussion of Surrealism, dug into its roots in spiritualism, and read poetry by Andre Breton and Jean Follain, among others. Breton, of course, was a founder of the movement, and author of the "Surrealist Manifesto" of 1924. We'll look again at the Surrealist project this week, and read some more Surrelaist poetry, some by American poets. I'll be bringing some Philip Lamantia, and others will bring ... well, who knows?

With any luck, we'll get to Oulipo.

It's bound to be lively. Hope you'll join us.

(Cross-posted at NatureS. The portrait captures Andre Breton in 1930)

Tomorrow: Thomas Rain Crowe

2006-11-11T17:22:00.000-05:00

Thomas Rain Crowe joins us tomorrow on WordPlay to continue our discussion of music and poetry; this week we get to hear a little of Thomas with the BoatRockers, the musical group with which he sometimes performs. The program's at 4:00, and will be rebroadcast Tuesday at 6:00 PM and Wednesday at 7:00 AM at 103.5 FM locally, or on the web; it'll be available as a download from the Archive page beginning Monday morning. Hope you'll join us.

Boatrockers making waves

2006-11-02T20:12:00.000-05:00

Airwaves, that is. Thomas Rain Crowe writes to say:

Yo.... Check it out. TRC & The Boatrockers will be on WNCW "Local Color" program on Friday night at 9:00pm in a live studio session.

If you miss this broadcast, you can catch it on a rebroadcast on Nov. 12, Sunday, at 7:00pm.

Mark your calendars and tell your friends and family, and pass the word.

Word passed. You can also listen live from the station's site, wncw.org.

Thomas will also be joining us on WordPlay this Sunday at 4:00 PM on WPVM, 103.5FM, or streaming from the station's website at WPVM.org; the program will be available via podcast beginning Monday November 6th. No Boatrockers (we'll hear them next week), but good poems and good conversation with Sebastian Matthews.

Cross-posted at NatureS.

Mercury retrograde, indeed!

2006-10-30T18:24:00.000-05:00

As Sebastian noted below, Mercury is indeed retrograde, so everyone in blogland should take care travelling and communicating for the next few weeks, till it goes direct again on November the 18th. It's in the sign of Scorpio, so it's impact will be greatest for those who have Sun or Mercury in that sign, Taurus, Leo, or Aquarius.

There's a post over at NatureS that links to an archived post about astrology and the personal history that led to my interest in it. Hint: it involves Mercury. Retrograde.

Keep it in the road ...

2006-10-29T20:55:00.001-05:00

Well, Jeff dubbed this week's show "The Mercury in Retrograde" Show. And he's right.
Starting with my screw-up on the board, which led to three minutes of dead air, to the bizarre sound effects on guest Jim Nave's mic, which made him sounds like a fish in an aquarium,
to problems in editing and a cantakerous editing machine, Jeff and I stumbled through this week's fundraising show. The upside: we got to fundraise for this great station, and Nave was a perfect guest, using his radio know-how and good humor to help us through the bumps in the road.
Yowsa!

WordPlay Hosts Perform This Week

2006-10-16T07:06:00.000-04:00

Action on the poetry scene gets off to a fast start this week in Asheville. Monday night at 7:30, there's the HeartStone reading at Warren Wilson College. A WWC theatre class is going to transform the Cannon Lounge into a set with, I'm told, "a riverine feel." There'll be music of harp, cello, and perhaps flute, and the WWC Chorale will sing mostly, according to Margo Flood, the event co-ordinator, Appalachian ballads having to do with"water" before the reading and between pieces.

Eight readers are scheduled to participate: Janisse Ray, John Lane, Thomas Rain Crowe, Ann Turkle, Gary Lilley, Catherine Reid, and WordPlay hosts Sebastian Matthews and yours truly, Jeff Davis.

Tuesday night the New Southerner crew, including Kathryn Stripling Byer, Thomas Rain Crowe, and John Lane, and several others, reads at Malaprops at 7:00, and at 9:00 WordPlay host Sebastian Matthews and Gary Lilley perform at the BoBo Gallery on Lexington Avenue.

Looking a little further ahead, I'll be reading at Malaprops next Thursday, the 26th, at 7:00.

(Cross-posted in slightly different form over at NatureS)

Coming Up, Rose McLarney

2006-10-13T04:42:00.000-04:00

I met poet Rose McLarney at the studio last night and taped a reading and interview for this Sunday. There's more on Rose, and several poems - including some you'll hear on Sunday - over at NatureS. Tune in at 4:00 pm on Sunday to hear her reading them in her own voice, or download or stream the show any time next week after early Monday.

Ikkyu Meets Glenis Redmond

2006-10-06T17:05:00.000-04:00

After the show last Sunday, the first in which co-host Glenis Redmond has been able to participate, I was struck by the eerie coherence of the event that unfolded. It certainly wasn't planned; insofar as there had been a plan, it involved reading poems over music. I'd chosen some poems by the fourteenth century Japanese poet Ikkyu, an unconventional Zen monk, that I planned to read over flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal's lovely Japanese Melodies. Ikkyu's work, though, includes erotic poems. Did I mention that Ikkyu was unconventional? Here's one, in John Stevens' translation:

A Woman's Sex

It has the original mouth but remains wordless;
It is surrounded by a magnificent mound of hair.
Sentient beings can get completely lost in it
But it is also the birthplace of all the Buddhas of the ten thousand worlds.

A man's erotic poetry celebrates the feminine - the Goddess in woman - so Ikkyu's poems actually resonated, I thought, with the poems Glenis read, some of her own, some by other strong women poets. Listen to the show and see what you think.

(The poem is from Ikkyu, Wild Ways, translated by John Stevens, published by White Pine Press, Buffalo, NY, 2003.)

(Cross-posted with minor edits at Natures)

Bummer Poetry

2006-09-21T05:44:00.000-04:00

I am reading Thomas More's Care of the Soul right now. In March I was reading Mark Epstein's Open to Desire. What an interesting inner year it has been. First, Epstein's killer treatise on Buddhism's realistic view of its own detachment tenets, which aren't what I'd thought at all, some rational decision not to feel, but rather an outrageous commitment to feel deeply. And now More's book about the soul provides a sort of roadmap or shopping list (terrible ways to say it) of what the vitals of our spirits need to feel. Basically, I'm learning, we need the negative as much as the positive. It is the negative that shapes and feeds our souls as much as the positive smoothes it. This brings up in me endless reconsiderations of suffering, and I recall Mark Mathabane's warning in a speech delivered at Christ School two years ago: be weary of the easy life for it teaches you nothing.

I learned of a terrible tragedy last week. The best friend of someone incredibly close to me shot himself, leaving my friend's name in the suicide note. My friend has been dealing with the tragedy on all levels: taking care of his friend's 5 and 7 year old daughters, all the legal matters, packing up the belongings. He is doing, as we say, all he can. It was this event, this ongoing process, that led me to think about that WCW quote, "People die alone and miserable for lack of what is found" in poetry. The quote has followed me around all my life, popping up, and I'd usually put it back, not wanting to think about it. But I'm ready to face it now: the alone and miserable part has been jarred into comprehension by my friend's friend's suicide. The alone and miserable part is hard to swallow--poetry brings us face to face with our solitude and, quite often, our misery. And in so doing, shows we are not so alone. But it's more than just a linguistic bridge over troubled waters. It serves the part of the life the soul feeds on, that place where loss brings us near death and lets us celebrate life simply by choosing to stay in it.

I read the Agha Shahid Ali poem "Farewell" to feed this. It is the closest thing to a "good cry" on paper. The tumbling rhythm, the refrains, the imagery of loss. This is language at the soul's best, hewing from the silence a lexicon for the tragic. "If only somehow you could have been mine," Shahid calls out, "what would not have been possible in this world?" And it's this. It is the "if only's" and the "somehow's" and the "possibles" that break us down into our respective nothings, and it's there in our nothing that we find the opportunity to affirm breath.

We are supposed to feel deeply in order for our souls to eat, hums More throughout my current paper journey. Suffering leads us to the soul's mouth. Poetry tells us what to put in.

Here is the poem: the linebreaks are different from those in the book. I'll correct them soon. Now, I have to go to work.

Farewell

At a certain point I lost track of you.
They make a desolation and call it peace.
when you left even the stones were buried:
the defenceless would have no weapons.

When the ibex rubs itself against the rocks,
who collects its fallen fleece from the slopes?
O Weaver whose seams perfectly vanished,
who weighs the hairs on the jeweller's balance?
They make a desolation and call it peace.
Who is the guardian tonight of the Gates of Paradise?

My memory is again in the way of your history.
Army convoys all night like desert caravans:
In the smoking oil of dimmed headlights, time dissolved- all
winter- its crushed fennel.
We can't ask them: Are you done with the world?

In the lake the arms of temples and mosques are locked in each other's
reflections.

Have you soaked saffron to pour on them when they are found like this
centuries later in this country
I have stitched to your shadow?

In this country we step out with doors in our arms
Children run out with windows in their arms.
You drag it behind you in lit corridors.
if the switch is pulled you will be torn from everything.

At a certain point I lost track of you.
You needed me. You needed to perfect me.
In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.
Your history gets in the way of my memory.
I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.
I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy.
Your memory gets in the way of my memory:

I am being rowed through Paradise in a river of Hell:
Exquisite ghost, it is night.

The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves.
It is still night. The paddle is a lotus.
I am rowed- as it withers-toward the breeze which is soft as
if it had pity on me.

If only somehow you could have been mine, what wouldn't
have happened in the world?

I'm everything you lost. You won't forgive me.
My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.
There is nothing to forgive.You can't forgive me.
I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself.

There is everything to forgive. You can't forgive me.

If only somehow you could have been mine,
what would not have been possible in the world?

-- Agha Shahid Ali

Technical Difficulties ...

2006-09-21T02:02:00.000-04:00

The system scripts that manage the uploading of files to the automation system that keeps WPVM on the air have gone bonkers this week, and the only person who knows the architecture of the system well enough to fix them is, of course, on vacation. One result of this is that the WordPlay show that's available for streaming and podcast on the station website is actually last week's show with Gary Lilley. It's a good one, complete with live music performed in the studio, so just look on this as a second chance to listen to it or download it.

We'll rebroadcast the show you're missing sometime when you least expect it.

Latest Show

2006-09-19T18:27:00.000-04:00

What can I say? We've got a nice little rhythm going. How fun to play with Jeff and Laura! We seem able to truly go with the flow, making up the format of the show a few minutes before we go on. This Sunday Laura suggested we use WCW's famous remark about people dying for lack of poetry. Then, without us trying, all the poems we read seemed to revolve around her central question: what is it about poetry do we need? Jeff read all James Wright poems, three of his most famous, including "A Blessing." Laura read Agha Shahid Ali and a couple others. I read mostly jazz poems from the upcoming Asheville Poetry Review.

We all look forward to Glenis' presence in the studio. I hope to take over the board next time so Jeff can join Laura and Glenis on the other side of the mic.

What I like most about the show so far is the ease with which we communicate. There's a lot of laughing. We still have a lot to learn, and my wife Ali seemed to think we had too many long pauses. But Laura's idea of naming poems after we read them, and giving book titles, etc. should help. I read one poem without mentioning the author. I'll do it here. The Chick Corea poem was by Matthew Dickman, who has a chapbook due out this fall from Q Ave Press. Keep an ear and an eye for this young poet. Tony Hoagland writes that he has some of the deepest pockets of the young poets working today. I tend to agree. Positively Whitmanesque.

2006-09-10T19:28:00.000-04:00

Just got back from a day down on Lexington for the street fair. Slipped away for a few hours to host this Sunday's show with Jeff, intrepid in his engineer's cap, and Gary Lilley, who brought in a full band. And I mean full. We stuffed into the tiny WPFM on-air studio: drum set and drummer, bassist and amp, flute player, didg/sax man, Gary, myself & Jeff. We even had a small audience in the office. (Hey Janet!)

The whole event was spur-of-the-moment, much in the spirit of the street fair below. No time for sound check; not enough mics to go around; having to jot down key stats on post-its. A little soulful irony as we counted down the last 30 seconds--the Chambers Bros were on, busting out their 60s anthem "Time." Then 1,2,3..."I'm Sebastian Matthews, your host for this week's WordPlay. Our guest today is poet Gary Lilley..."

Gary started with his blues-rap "Asheville," conjuring Thomas Wolfe and O Henry and the unremembered Cherokee. Then the band opened with a new piece, "Alpha Zula." It was hard to tell as they were playing if what we were capturing on the mics was going to sound as good as it did in the studio. Jeff kept trying to keep Gary's mic from taking in too much bleed-through from the musicians. I couldn't tell if Gary's voice was getting drowned out by the band. At one point Jeff just raised up his hands and laughed.

After a couple more tunes and some light-hearted q-and-a, it was time to wrap it up. We'd burned through the 30 minute show so fast I felt dizzy. Maybe we just needed to open the studio door. Thank you Mr. Lilley and His Afterschool Special! Thank you Gary, Dan, Brian, Brian and Eric. And thank you, Jeff, for some serious engineering mojo. Because when we got in the back to archive the show for the podcast, we couldn't believe our ears. Despite the topped out mics and miscues and everything, it sounded good. It sounded great, in fact.

Then back out onto the street to wander through another kind of collaborative madness, with its bike jousts, mimes and face-painted children; then in my car as the first drops began to fall. And home. Now for a glass of wine, and a toast to poetry, music, collaboration, blind luck and good old Asheville!!

This Sunday ...

2006-09-09T12:49:00.000-04:00

Poet Gary Lilley joins Sebastian and me on the air. Here's a poem from Gary's chapbook Black Poem:

A Woman Wearing Red

So I picked up the obscene call on the white courtesy phone and asked the party for the number so I could call her back from the hotel room, and it was a 1-900 number, which I don’t mind, cause everybody got to eat, and then I remembered this escort gal in Charleston, she wore Shangri-La dresses, and had a black heart-of- thorns tattoo on her bicep, and it’s possible I may have loved her about a hundred years, from the moment she told me she poured some very heavy whiskey and then showed me that she did, and she always said I should taste her home fries which I have not yet experienced in any of her mornings, but I believe she’s righteous she looks like the whole truth, and nothing but a real good and necessary lie would ever come from mouth, yes, she had a pretty sweet purr and the right shoes to show her pretty heels, rode a pair of mules to get your attention, the kind of woman who could drive you home even when she’s drunk, the gal you look for if you’re coming down a ragged pier after being under the sea for a few months, and whatever God you have grants you some mercy, oh yes, you have to have the faith that she’s there, in all her pleasant home-spun profanities, to bring some damn grace to your sad sailor life, and you know that she will notice all of your sutures, all your contusions, and won’t ask ‘til it’s private because she’s polite and near perfect in her pathological ways, so I went down the thread-bare hall to my dingy room with the window nailed shut and sat down with yesterday’s news, reading the not-so-funnies, wondering how did she know where to find me.

New WordPlay Oscillates The Airwaves

2006-09-06T01:14:00.000-04:00

Sebastian, Laura and I did indeed launch our new collaboration Sunday; it's available now by podcast on WPVM's website. It was a hoot (even if I did have to engineer; sorry about that briefly dead mic, Laura), an exhilarating conversation about poetry, and I hope you'll give it a listen.

We did, though, give incorrect information about one event coming up this week: the reading by Jaye Bartell, Hope Rinehart and others at the Bo Bo Gallery will be happening this Thursday night at 9:00, rather than Wednesday night, as we remembered it. It's on the theme of ... Velcro. Yeah. Okay, I'm curious - curious enough, given the poets involved, to check it out.

Other than that, we did good.

As Mr. Creeley used to say, Onward!

In Walks Sebastian

2006-09-03T22:14:00.000-04:00

This is Sebastian, one of the new Worldplay hosts. Just sat down with Laura and Jeff
to put together our first on-air collaboration. Glenis out of town for the weekend.
As soon as we wrapped up the show, when she thought we were off the air, Laura
stage whispered, "We're good!" I agreed, then we both cringed when Jeff singalled
us to be quiet. But it didn't get caught on tape. "Not bad, not bad," my old basketball
coach used to say, in between draws on the whistle in his mouth as he ran backward
down the court.

I am not sure I am doing this right. So I will stop here. Welcome! Hello! Is anyone
out there? It's me!

"Ghost Walk" by Laura

2006-08-10T09:42:00.000-04:00

for B.

The feet must move beneath the earth
and slow, this trust of space will widen soon.
Fold your hands inward to the heart, this bird,
this rock, inhabiting an edge for longing
and this is how you move, this earth below
you moving up, inside you as you go, now,
toward, this earth below shall hold you,
all your weight, your heart’s core its core,
the beat of grief, the hard, dark beat of hope.

You must walk as though you are not moving,
for only things discover themselves, illumine.
No call, no breath, these cannot lift you from your
step. Only what you know moves you, these words
close at hand, these words on your tongue, sweet
and lost once spoken. You are in your home most
when you are here, this honest. So, trust the dark.
Trust the cuts the trees make across the stars.

No one can hold you here. Your body only moves.
Here the closing opens with your breathing, allow
loss to hold you still. Bring nothing. Want nothing.
Hope for nothing. What this is is what’s beginning,
slow breath turns the air into singing only the soul
can hear and listens back to you, pawing you into the
still, the dark, the wild in you. The soul leans back
on its haunches, licks the wounds the body caused.

Here, let there be cicatrix. Here, allow for carapace.
Here, what’s wrought are the bones of the hollow
body waiting to be counted and remade into a man.
Wait here as the bones begin their singing, as they
remember the first assembling, a map of home.
What they know of love is the taking, ossuary
wisdom of the bones, so generous, so knowing what
thieves we may take of them. So knowing what we leave
behind us as we move to love, this walk away from
loss that always calls us back, teacher, to this life.

Literary Radio

2006-08-10T09:28:00.000-04:00

One of the most intriguing qualities of WordPlay is its embrace of the borderland between literary and oral literature. In a literate society, the beauty of being read to leaves us as soon as we outgrow our toddler beds. But programs such as this bring the voice back into reading, enriching our relationship with the books we read. I recall reading that Afghanistan has a remarkably high "illiteracy" rate, something like 80 or 90%, but I also know that the people of Afghanistan know their nation's poetry by heart, its stories by heart, and celebrate them in long tellings and festivals.

Not to romanticize illiteracy as it certainly has economic benefits in the technological world. However, as a writer, does it matter to me whether my words are read by mind or recited by heart? No. Literacy of the heart, that achieved by listening and carrying the words in one's body as opposed to one's bag, has a beautiful warmth for me. Perhaps when we share writing on the air, perhaps it goes directly to the heart.

Warmly, Laura

Welcome to WordPlay's Blog.

2006-08-08T21:41:00.000-04:00

We'll be posting here to provide listeners of WordPlay, WPVM's program by and about poets and writers, with additional materials to expand and enhance their listening experience.