The Progressive Voice of the Mountains

Greensboro’s Ken Rumble, one of the founders of the Lucifer Poetics Group, trekked across rivers and mountains to Asheville this past Sunday and visited Wordplay. He provided some keys to Key Bridge (that’s a .pdf file, so give it a few seconds to download), his well-received book from Carolina Wren Press, discussed some his favorite poets, working on typewriters, and read some new work as well. One new piece was a two-voiced collaboration, so I got to fill in as the other voice. It was a hoot.

Ken’s work is always adventurous in its exploration of the dimensions of poetic form - and like, in that respect, the work of one of his favorite contemporaries, Lisa Jarnot. Both seem to draw on the work of Robert Duncan and George Oppen, who drew in turn on the practice of William Carlos Williams, Gertude Stein, and others among the great twentieth century modernists; both go a far piece, of course, beyond the maps defined by Duncan and Oppen into their own territories. But that’s the company, as it seems to me, and it’s a fine company to be in.

Music this week all came from Geoffrey Keezer’s Falling Up; we opened with the title track (long the virtual theme for Wordplay), and also heard “Palm Reader” and “Gollum’s Song.”

Do check it out over on the Archive page (just scroll down to “Wordplay”).

(For the impatient, here’s the direct link to the .mp3.)

The show will be available as an on-demand stream and podcast through next Sunday, August 10th.
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The photo can be found over at Ken’s blog, in his Blogger profile. The closed eyes perhaps testify to its candid occasion …

Cross-posted at Natures.

We’ll talk to Jason Hurd of WPVM’s “Veterans Voices”. Jason and other Iraq Veterans Against the War are on the State of the Union Base Tour, currently heading for Fort Bragg. We’ll talk about what he and the other veterans are doing to try to raise awareness among military families.

David will talk about what George Bush and the Republicans (and some Democrats) don’t want to acknowledge: Socialism is alive and well in America - socialism for the wealthy, that is.

We’ll talk to some of the treesitters from the Magnolia slated for destruction if Stewart Coleman is allowed to build his Parkside condominiums.

This local news and public affairs show focuses on underreported information and encourages civic activism. Tune in live 7-8 pm Monday, catch the 1 pm Tuesday rebroadcast, or stream or podcast.

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

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

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

TWO LOVES

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

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

Why do birds continue to sing?

LOVE COMES

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

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

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

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

THAT NIGHT

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

There were many more, so give the show a listen. Given that Asheville will be in the throes of Bele chere this weekend, it’ll be available through Sunday, August 3rd, at WPVM’s Archive page (just scroll down to Wordplay) as on-demand stream and download.

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The show opened with McCoy Tyner playing “Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit” from the 2007 release McCoy Tyner Quartet. We also heard three of Billy Holiday’s classic performances, “Easy to Love,” “Life Begins When You’re in Love,” and “Summertime,” all from Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles. Keith Jarrett’s “Paint My heart Red,” from the 2006 The Carnegie Hall Concert: Selections for Radio, took the show out.

Enjoy,

Jeff

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

Cross-posted at Natures.

Wednesday, July 16

11pm - 1am

TUNE IN TONIGHT!

WE’RE GIVING AWAY A PAIR OF TICKETS TO NOMO!

NOMO (Ubiquity Records) @ Stella Blue / Thursday, July 17

www.nighttimeswerve.org 

(On-air Tuesdays 2-4PM — Archived Wednesday to Wednesday)

Your host, Easy Mark, plays hot new music — interviews Peter Poffenberger, host of Ooze Out (on-air Tuesdays at 10PM), and features summertime mash ups from djbc.

The Last Word! Commentary from Mumia Abu Jamal - Tribute to Paul Robeson.

Email: easymark @ wpvm.org or feedback @ wpvm.org

(On-air Tuesdays 2-4PM — Archived Wednesday to Wednesday) Your host, Easy Mark, plays some awesome new music — interviews Heather, host of Off The Record (on-air Mondays 9AM-12PM), and features choice mash ups from DJ Earworm.

Word! The Last Word commentary from Mumia Abu Jamal - Uncounted Death!

Email: easymark @ wpvm.org or feedback @ wpvm.org

A little over six months ago, in early December, translator and poet Nan Watkins shared her translations of some of Alsatian poet Yvan Goll’s work with us on Wordplay. At the time, Wordplay was just a half-hour show, but the station had given us the green light to move to our current hour format beginning in January. I really wanted to hear more about her project, and thought the longer show would provide the room to really explore it, so I invited her to come back to the studio to record some further conversation later that month. She accepted, and this week’s show finally airs a more complete presentation of her work with Goll’s poems, especially the last volume, Das Traumkraut (she translates the title as The Dream Weed).

Goll really did help define Surrealism, and wrote some stunning poems in the process. If you don’t know his work (and there’s been little published in English), do click over to hear what the lady has to say.

The show is available 24/7 from the station archive page as both a stream and podcast.

Mercury always seems to be retrograde at WPVM, and during the live broadcast today, one of the CD players just stopped mid-track; by the time I’d cycled power to the machine and persuaded it to resume reading the disk, I realized I’d have to leave out some of the interview with Watkins to avoid going over our time slot. When I got to the production room to edit, though, I added the track back in, and added another song clip to boot.

Music for today’s show included Django Reinhardt, from some 1949 sessions with Stephan Grappelli, playing “Minor Swing” and “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise”; Oscar Allemann, another pre-war master of Paris bandstands, playing “Stardust”; and Maurice Ravel’s “Alborada del Gracioso” - all music Yvan and Claire Goll might have come across during their years in that great city.

Enjoy.

Jeff

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The photo of Goll comes from findagrave.com. Yes, there really is a site for everything.