The Progressive Voice of the Mountains

For this week’s fall fundraiser we featured the British Columbia author of The Age of Briggs and Stratton, who read just over a week ago at The French Broad Institute of Time and the River. A project of Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn, the Institute is definitely putting new life in the nightlife of Marshall, NC.

Peter’s done several residencies in the Smokies, now, and they’re beginning to find their way into his work.

We sometimes do archival shows on Wordplay, and have featured readings by Whitman, Tennyson, Yeats, and others whose voices recording technologies have happily saved from time during our three years of broadcasting. Today we featured the great Ezra Pound in readings from 1938 to 1967; he was 82 in the latter year, but still had a strong, complex voice. His reading of Canto LXXXI is exquisite, and poetry doesn’t get much better than that. “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross…”

A huge thanks to PennSound for making its Pound archive available through the ‘net.

By the way, you might notice a few pops and distortions during the first minute of Peter’s reading. I’d set up that night to record the stage, but everyone decided to perform on the floor instead. What you hear is me moving the mics to get a more balanced recording. Sorry about that.

Music for today’s show included tunes from the remarkable Anni Rossi, who performed at the Institute as part of the program which included Peter, and California flutist Suzanne Teng.

Do lend it an ear.

This week on Veterans’ Voices, we add a bit of humor. Imagine the swiftboating of Gearge Washington….or the blue states leaving the red states!

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Join the many people who have already donated to WPVM. Veterans’ Voices has some special thank you gifts.
This piece of art can be yours if you are the first person to donate over $35 during Veterans’ Voices. Just tell them you want the painting. If you miss the painting, ask about the Boston Tea Party shirts.

If you missed last week’s podcast, get it before it’s gone.

Tune in to Veterans’ Voices at 5 pm every Wednesday or stream/podcast here.

Tonight at 11pm!

Adam will be featuring new tracks from Crazy P, Max Essa, Pnuma Trio, Beat Pharmacy and Raz Ohara as well as a retro track from Tough Alliance that will have you nostalgic for the ‘93 warehouse days.

Tune in and turn up the sub…

This week on Veterans’ Voices we speak with local lawyers, Bruce Elmore and Frank Goldsmith about rebellion.  Duke University Professor, Michael Hardt joins the conversation by phone from Raleigh.

We have pictures from the VFP & IVAW protest before the final debate, where an Iraq Veteran was trampled by police on horseback.

Iraq War Vet Nick Morgan (photo by Bill Perry)

We discuss what happened and how it could play out in the courts.

If you missed last week’s discussion about Columbus Day, get it before it’s gone.

Tune in to Veterans’ Voices at 5 pm every Wednesday or stream/podcast here.

This week on Veterans’ Voices we will play part two of our talk with Yana Pitner, UNCA Professor of European History and Russian-American, about the Georgia / Russia conflict and historical perspective. Additionally, we will talk to Bruce Gagnon. He serves as Secretary/Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. He has been working on space issues for the past 20 years and helped create the GN in 1992. He has been named to Helen Caldicott’s Nuclear Policy Research Institute Board of Advisors. For 15 years he coordinated the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice. He was trained as an organizer by the United Farmworkers Union.

If you missed last week’s interview, part 1 with Yana Pitner, get it before it’s gone.

Next week: The truth about Christopher Columbus.

Tune in to Veterans’ Voices at 5 pm every Wednesday or stream/podcast here.

This week on Veterans’ Voices we will play part one of our talk with Yana Pitner, UNCA Professor of European History and Russian-American, about the Georgia / Russia conflict and historical perspective.
In our art segment we play Russia by Russian artist, Bichevskaya Zhanna.
If you missed last week’s interview with Yvette Coil, wife of a Veteran and member of the Kent State Antiwar Committee, get it before it’s gone.

Next week: Our talk with Yana Pitner continues and it’s ‘Keep Space for Peace Week‘!!

Tune in to Veterans’ Voices at 5 pm every Wednesday or stream/podcast here.

Not actually, mind you; he didn’t drive all the way over from Scaly Mountain to sit down in the studio this past Sunday. But he didn’t have to, since I’d recorded several of his readings in recent years, and had sat down with him in another studio back in 2006 to talk about (among other things) his translation of the classic Chinese text daode jing.

Tom’s a terrific poet, of course, so it was great fun to revisit the occasions I’d recorded. Those readings included one from September 30, 2005 at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, in which he gave, I thought, a really good overview of his work, from the poems collected in At Dusk Iridescent, to the long poem Coromandel (on line at the link), to his translation of the dao, which was then unpublished. He came back to the Center in March, 2006, though, after the dao’s publication by Flood Editions, to present the text in full, so I used that recording for the show, as well as a snip from that interview we’d done the same day, rather than the excerpts from the previous fall.

When Hillsborough poet Jeffery Beam visited Asheville in July, he brought along several tapes featuring readings by, or interviews with, Jonathan Williams. One of those tapes, from a midsummer, 1994, reading at The Literary Institute, Muker, Swansdale, Yorkshire, also included a brief reading by Tom; I opened the show with it, since Tom hadn’t featured its material in the 2005 foray back into his earlier work.

Since we were beginning the show in Yorkshire, I used Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on Greensleeves” for the show’s opening theme, and honored the multivoiced Coromadel from 2005 with “Taboehgan” by the Balinese Gamelan Semar Pegulingan (recorded in 1941, and available on Music for the Gods from the Library of Congress). Tom had said he loved Bollywood soundtracks, but I didn’t have any handy, so I closed with Ali Akbar Khan’s “Blessings of the Heart, Part 2″, from 1993’s Garden of Dreams. Khan has composed for film scores throughout his long career, after all.

Oh, you might notice that the show that’s now available from the WPVM archive is several minutes longer than Worplay’s hour, so I should confess that it’s not the show that aired. If you happened to be listening live, you had an experience that the station’s rickety archiving system failed to record. When I came back to the station Sunday evening to re-produce the show, I included a little more of the music than I could squeeze into our live slot.

Give it a listen.

(The show will be up through Sunday the 14th, and then migrate over to the new Wordplay Archive, where you’ll find it here.)

Jeff

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Photo of Tom by Reuben Cox.

Cross-posted at Natures.