May 26, 2012: Alice Jones

Last Saturday, Alice Jones joined us to read from and discuss her recent Apogee Press collections Plunge and Gorgeous Mourning. First, Alice shared a few pieces from her current (collage) poem project, Spell, which explores both spelling and casting spells. “This is your skin, prepared for a thousand tongues. This is your tongue, prepared for four scrolls.” Moving into a discussion about form and formlessness and the “wavelike” patterns of the sestina (the machinery of the sestina as a “braiding”), Alice then read from Plunge and shared a little about her sestina and haiku driven process. She also mentioned how her poetic and psychoanalytic practices stream into one another, informing the other—to make “room for the unconscious to say itself between the words” and to "bring language into being" that hasn’t been voiced before. We also enjoyed listening to Alice read from Gorgeous Mourning, which she called “anchored in the domestic” and mentioned that there was great freedom in writing the prose poems in the collection—the kind of freedom that allows for a bit of slanted humor from words clashing (crashing) up against one another or playing off the other. Prose poems as “sound constructions,” language with its complex wave of human utterances, slippery syntax, personal pronoun usage, and translation as a “membrane connecting one world to another” are a few things touched upon toward the end of the hour. Thank you Alice for sharing your work and time with us! Click Here to Listen.

May 19, 2012: Todd Melicker

On 5/19 Todd Melicker joined us in the studio and helped celebrate our one-year anniversary at KUSF In Exile with a live reading! Todd read from his recent Little Red Leaves chapbook King & Queen, beautifully handcrafted from recycled textiles. We discussed the multi-ways of reading his collection—visually they read both downward and upward on the page (each like a playing card) and Todd read them “upside down and backward.” Inspired by both Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets and a Henry Moore sculpture, Todd shared some thoughts on his process—reassembling poems, slippage, collage, the Osiris/Isis myth, the I/You relationship, and the possibilities of the King & Queen pairings/poems as equally gendered and mirrored iterations of the self in communication with one another and “slipping in and out of each other." Todd also read from an end to birds, an accordion-fold collection of antibird acrostic poems (secretly loving birds:) and then concluded with recent poems published in Volt. Thanks again Todd for driving down from Santa Rosa to spend your Saturday morning with us! Click Here to Listen.

April 28, 2012- Dennis Phillips Part 2

This past Saturday we aired our second, and (sadly) last, part of our interview with Dennis Phillips, who we met with prior to his reading at Canessa Park on April 9th. He shared more of his poetry from his new collected works Navigation, which was published in 2011 by Otis Books/Seismicity  Editions. We talked about how the 'capitalist agenda' has informed the 'denaturing of language' and the his efforts to 're-valorize language.' We also talked about his complex novel Hope, published by Green Integer in 2007.  Phillips talked about the experience of writing a novel, as opposed to poetry. He also talked about his current project On, from which he read, both for us, and during the reading following the interview.  Click Here to Listen

April 21, 2012: Dennis Phillips

On Sat 4/21 we began part one of our interview series with poet, professor, director, editor, novelist, and surfer Dennis Phillips, who read from his recent collection Navigation (Otis). Craft constraints, lyricism, complex music, intention, language, Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” meteorology, mourning, politics, sentimentality, fragments, presence in absence, pronouns, automaticity, prose poetry, the sea, and “rhythm and pacing" are just a few things we touched on during and after our conversation. Dennis Phillips is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Arena, Credence, Sand, and most recently Study for the Possibility of Hope (Pie in the Sky Press) and Navigation: Selected Poems, 1985 – 2010 (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions). His work, both poetry and commentary, regularly appears in various national and local poetry journals. In 1998 he edited and wrote the introduction for a book on some of the early essays of James Joyce, Joyce On Ibsen. His novel, Hope, came out in 2007. Of Phillips Navigation, George albon writes, “There is rarely a moment when something remarked on in a poem is not contingent to something else, exerting a pull on the first thing and making it part of a warping sequence, just as the something else must also yield gravity to the appearance-field of the new arrival. One could in fact experience the work-line, poem, book, selection—as a progress of appearance-fields.” Click Here to Listen.

March 31, 2012: Rose Metal Press

This past Saturday we started out the show reading a poem (and excerpt from an essay) by Adrienne Rich who died on March 27. We then moved on to discuss the representational and non-representational in art and writing, aesthetic “programs” influencing the way we write, writing on the surface of language, and mixing poetry and prose—which lead us to our featured mixed genre guests from Rose Metal Press: Carol Guess, Loren Erdrich, Sierra Nelson, and Jim Goar.

“…fist, the stone you skipped as a girl, you were a boy then…” we heard Carol Guess read from Tinderbox Lawn (2008). Thank you Carol for recording several prose poems from this collection, and while sick! Next up was the Invisible Seeing Machine—a collaborative effort consisting of Loren Erdrich and Sierra Nelson who read from I Take Back the Sponge Cake: A Lyrical Choose-Your-Own-Adventure (2012). Mixing image and word and allowing reader participation in the making, we enjoyed hearing them share their project. Finally, we concluded with an awesome and energetic reading from Jim Goar, who read from his book The Louisiana Purchase (2011) “assembled from fractured myths, westerns, Disney, fictions, childhood memories, life abroad…” Click Here to Listen.

More info about these writers and their books can be found at rosemetalpress.com.

March 24, 2012 Amick Boone Part 2

On Saturday, we played the second half of our interview with writer and reading series co-curator Amick Boone. As hosts of Bang Out reading series, Amick and Kevin Hobson conjure a theme for which writers 'bang out' a submission. Writers are chosen, based on that submission, to read at a bi-monthly reading. To submit to Bang Out, go to submissions@bangoutsf.com. Amick talked about her past work with Ecstatic Monkey, as well as other reading series that strive towards turning the usual reading format into a more interactive experience. Amick shared her poetry with us, her inspirations ranging from meditation to online dating. Click Here to Listen

March 17, 2012 Amick Boone

Last month we had a lovely interview with Amick Boone, writer and co-curator of the popular Bang Out reading series. This Saturday we played the first part of that interview. Amick discusses the process of being a writer post-graduate school. She talked about the concept of 'negative capability' and 'anxiety as a misuse of imagination.' She reflected on how travel, retreat and meditation fueled her writing and the writer's impulse.  It was a great discussion about BEING a writer. Part 2 airs on 3/24/12. Click Here to Listen