Thank you for your patience!

Hi Poet as Radio listeners! As you might have noticed, we have not posted a show in a few weeks. This is unfortunate considering the great live guests we've had. On 10/6 we were joined by New York writers Farrah Field, Dan Magers and Jared White. On 10/14, Candy Shue joined us in the studio to read one of her fabulous book reviews, and help us discuss writing and process. Due to some shifts happening at San Francisco Community Radio, these shows are not archived yet. But as soon as they are, we will post them here. As always, thank you for your support!

September 22, 2012- Dean Rader Live!!!

We love having live guests and on September 22nd, San Francisco poet Dean Rader certainly did not disappoint. Dean is a professor at University of San Francisco and the winner of the 2010 T.S Elliot Poetry Prize for his book Works & Days (Truman State University Press). Dean drew inspiration for his book and title from a Hesiod poem. Touching on both form and content, we discussed the construction of the book. Works & Days is divided up into three sections, and comprised in part, of 'self portraits' and 'Frog and Toad' story pieces. Listen to Dean Rader share his wonderful work with us!
Click here to listen

September 15, 2012 George Albon Part 4

This past Saturday we played our fourth (and sadly final) part of our interview with San Francisco poet George Albon. We had the pleasure of playing (and hearing) his song 'What the Forgotten Want'. George talked more his specific process in composition. We continued to discuss poem as structure or site as well as fluency and difficulty. How is the reader intrigued by the challenge of a poem? George also covered the way poetry is taught in schools. After the break, we heard more from and about his book Momentary Songs.
Also, look out for his essay Aspiration, forthcoming from Krupskaya Press in 2013!
* Please note, the beginning of the archives starts with Dana Teen Lomax's interview. This is because we were late getting to the station this day. Please keep listening. We come on a couple of minutes in
Click Here to Listen

September 8, 2012- George Albon Part 3

On September 8th, we listened part three of our interview with George Albon. Before and after the interview, we finally played his beautiful song 'What the Forgotten Want.' But for the bulk of the show,  we continued to listen to George read from and discuss his essay on the lyric, Aspiration (which is forthcoming from Omnidawn.) In discussing boxes, toys and computers, we continue looking at the poem as site. The three of us mused about what kind of creators we are as poets. Next week, we will conclude our interview with George Albon. Click here to listen

September 1, 2012- George Albon Part 2

This Saturday we (sadly without Jay) played part two of our interview with San Francisco Writer George Albon. He spoke more about his book Momentary Songs. He generously told us about his process in constructing the book, as well as the sections within. We talked about his upcoming work Aspiration, which tackles the lyric and the 'site' within which poetry is built. We talked about how philosophy influences and communicates with poetry. This is a very dense interview and we had little time to chat in studio this week. Lucky for our listeners, who get to spend so much time listening to George Albon! Click here to listen

August 25, 2012 George Albon Part 1

This past Saturday we aired (sadly, without Jay) the first part of your interview with San Francisco poet George Albon. He read quite a bit from his book Momentary Songs (Krupskaya Press, 2008). He discussed how he strives for writing that 'lifts off the page.' Again, we talked about poetic language that runs counter to the language commonly found in advertising and jargon. George always challenges himself to do something different in each of his projects. His use of rhyme manages to be new and surprising and, perhaps due to his background as a musician, his rhythm is ever-present. We discussed his interesting use of form and font and how politics and the elements are present his work. We had a wonderful interview which will continue in weeks to come. Click here to listen

A Little Turbulence

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UPDATE: The archives seem to have been restored. Yay! Not sure whether or not this is permanent -- I'll update again when I know more.

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To everyone who has listened, been on the show, and supported us -- thank you so much! Personally, this has been one of the most enriching projects I've ever taken part in, and it's all because of the incredible writers and community I've gotten to know by helping to put these shows together.

Before I get to what the title of this post alludes to, please know that this isn't a "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish" post. But we have hit a bit of snag in the production of our show, and it will cause an indefinite (but hopefully short) delay in the production of future shows.

The essence of the story is this: shows will no longer be archived and archived shows will no longer be available via the kusf-archives.com site. Rest assured, thanks to Bryan Chandler and the good people at KUSF in Exile/San Francisco Community Radio, all of the archived audio still exists and is in our hands -- it simply cannot be streamed at this point.

We're currently working on moving our archived shows to a place where they can still be downloaded (and, ideally, streamed), but the path forward is a bit murky at the moment. Most likely, the shows will be packaged as downloadable podcasts which you can access via iTunes or another podcast client. In the long run, this may be a blessing in disguise, as it will have the potential to expand our reach and won't impose a strict length requirement on the material.

For those of you who listen live, I don't have a sense of when our Saturday morning broadcasts on savekusf.org will continue. For now, the top priority is ensuring all of our past shows are safely hosted and available again.

Finally, I want to make it very clear that KUSF in Exile/San Francisco Community Radio has been nothing but supportive of our show, and we're deeply grateful to them for giving us a voice and birth-place for Poet as Radio. We continue to support them in their extremely important legal battle against the sale of the radio station -- a battle which has very real implications for the future viability of college and community radio across the country -- and urge you to do the same.

As always, thank you for listening.

July 14, 2012 Dana Teen Lomax

Dana Teen Lomax joined us live in the studio today to discuss her book Disclosure (Black Radish Books 2011). In Disclosure, Dana publishes documents from her life, from her fourth grade report card, to her recent bank records. This interesting conceptual work illuminates not only societal values, but also how we all participate in those values and judgments. She talked about the process of choosing documents for this very vulnerable and revealing work. During the second half, Dana discussed editing the upcoming SPT-related project, Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, & Stories for Children. Dana also read from her current manuscript, Lullaby, a project that is a reaction to how the family structure mirrors societal norms.  Click here to listen

July 7, 2012 Tiff Dressen live in studio!

On Saturday, Tiff Dressen joined us live in studio. Tiff is a member of the g.e. collective and a member/editor of Kelsey Street Press. She discussed her own work but also the poetry that inspires her. She started off reading Inger Christensen's work which influenced her to write Because Icarus, Children (published by Winteredpress). The chorus and use of different voices are highlighted in Tiff's poems. She also read from her self-made chapbook Messages (contact her at tiff_dressen@yahoo.com for a chapbook of your own!). Tiff shared her unique use of space on the page and the rhythm that is so integral in the construction of her poetry. Click here to listen

June 30, 2012 Karen Hannah and Zumbar Press

On June 30th, Karen Hannah joined us live in the studio to talk about her press, Zumbar Press. Karen started off talking about how she came to love letter press printing and the evolution of her unique project. With Zumbar, she creates limited edition broadsides that are, from start to finish, a recorded collaboration with the writer. By recording the correspondence with the writer on her website, the process of creation is illuminated and celebrated, as opposed to the usual practice of only revealing the finished product. Karen also talked about how sound is important to the writing she solicits for her press. We discussed the physicality of not only letter press, but also the letter itself. Karen read from her piece 'the hearkening is ours to haunt' which is strongly influenced by sound, press making and space.  Find out about Zumbar at http://www.zumbarpress.com/  Click here to listen

June 23, 2012 Naomi Ruth Lowinsky live!!!

This past Saturday we were so fortunate to have writer and Jungian therapist Naomi Ruth Lowinsky live in studio to talk about her books Crimes of the Dreamer (Scarlet Tanager Books, July 2005) and Adagio and Lamentation (il piccolo editions, June 10, 2010). She gave us some background on Jung and the ways in which his philosophy informs her work, including the 'shadow aspects' of the personality. In writing, Lowinsky gets inspiration from her muse, The Sister From Below. She writes about dreams, family history and the Shoah (holocaust), using both her narrative and surrealist instinct. Some of her work has been set to music and we hope to play some on a later show. Stay tuned!  Check out Lowinsky's blog at http://www.sisterfrombelow.com/
Click here to listen

June 16, 2012 Paul Vangelisti part 3

On Saturday we aired part three of our interview with writer and translator Paul Vangelisti, who talked to us about his books Two (Talisman 2010), and Wholly Falsetto with People Dancing (forthcoming in 2013). We talked about how past creative works and the legacy of the word makes their way into current writing. He further discussed translation and how he strives to create context in his poetry. We touched on the Los Angeles and San Francisco writing scenes. As before, Vangelisti impressed us with his endless knowledge regarding just about everything Click here to listen

June 9, 2012 Paul Vangelisti part 2

On June 9th we aired part two of our interview with writer and translator Paul Vangelisti, who was kind enough to join us during his visit to San Francisco last month. He discusses being a writer in Los Angeles and what he calls 'cynicism' in language and how language has been corrupted by advertising and media. Again, we were impressed with his diverse knowledge of poets and poetic history. He recounts some of his experience in being a translator. In studio, we were spurred to talk about the possible responsibility of the reader to investigate the references and content in a given creative piece. Part three of this wonderful interview will be aired June 16th!

Click here to listen

June 2, 2012 Paul Vangelisti Part 1

This past Saturday we aired the first part of our interview with poet and translator Paul Vangelisti. Before getting to the interview, Delia and Nicholas talk about the experience of reading Paul's book Two (Talisman 2010), and the constraints used in his poems. During the interview, Paul talks about his experience writing the book and getting it published. He talks about the current state of education, its effects on our understanding of language, and the 'corruption' of language.

Click here to listen

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 part 1

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…”

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

Click here to listen

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

March 10, 2012- The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov

This past Saturday we did our official wrap-up from our Aaron Shurin interview shows of the preceding four weeks. During this interview we talked about the poetic conflict between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov. We used this portion of Shurin's interview as a launching pad for our own discussion about the debate between Duncan and Levertov. We read excerpts from the The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, published by Stanford University Press in 2004. We then had our own lively, if not inconclusive, discussion about the debate between didactic and expansive poetry. Click here to listen

March 3, 2012 Aaron Shurin Part 4!

This past Saturday, we played our fourth and final installment of our interview with writer and teacher Aaron Shurin. He continued to talk about his book King of Shadows. He discussed how he tackled the didactic and the personal and how the narrative element is integral to these prose pieces. We heard more about his writing about the AIDS epidemic. We unfortunately encountered some technical difficulties which kept us from closing the show as planned. So we will be doing our wrap up show next week, closing with more discussion about Aaron Shurin's interview and the Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov letters. Click here to listen

February 25, 2012 Aaron Shurin, Part 3

On Saturday February 25th, we played part 3 of our interview with Aaron Shurin. During this segment we moved into talking about his book of personal essays King of Shadows. Aaron talked about what was made possible through writing in prose rather than poetry. We talked more in depth about the letters and conflict between Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan and discussed the balance between moral and poetic 'imperitives' in poetry. He also talked about his older work Unbound, which tackled the HIV epidemic in both the 'factual' and the 'creative.' And again, we got to hear his wonderful work. Click here to listen

February 18, 2012- Aaron Shurin Part 2!

This past Saturday, we played part 2 of our interview with Aaron Shurin, which concluded our talk about his new book Citizen, recently published by City Lights Books. We touched on how characters emerge in the book, including the use of gender in the text. Again, Shurin generously shared his process with us and how this book benefitted from a 'permission' to intensity that he reached at this point in his wonderful writing career. We got to sink our teeth into his complex, 'exuberant' language and hear him read quite a bit from the book. We started to talk about how (political) content is tackled in poetry without slipping into the didactic. Click here to listen

February 11, 2012- Aaron Shurin Part 1

This Saturday, we played the first part of our interview with Aaron Shurin, writer and professor at USF, who recently published his book Citizen with City Lights Books. Besides hearing some of his wonderful work, he discussed the construction of his book, his writing and editing process and his use of sound and sensuality in his poetry. Shurin generously tells us about the building blocks of Citizen, including his use of found text, his ideas about language and how place informs the work. Please listen on February 18th for part 2! Click here to listen

January 14, 2012- Spicer, MLK and gateway 'drugs.'

On Saturday, we read a couple of our favorite African American poets in honor of Martin Luther King Jr's birthday. We finally revealed the Spicer poem that was the source for our show title and got to hear Mr Spicer himself perform 'Sporting Life.' From there we discussed what instigates our writing. Aliens? Spirits? How does craft effect our writing? How do we let our emotions into our words? We read some song lyrics and talked about own non-poetry inspirations. We ended with some Velvet Underground and finally more homage to MLK.
Click here to listen

January 7, 2012... The Apocalypse!!!

This Saturday we talked about apocalyptic poetry and read some pieces that reminded us that the world is scheduled to end in December. We played Dylan Thomas reading his own work. We also listened to  Thomas's piece 'Vision and Prayer,' performed with challenging vocals and synthesized music composed by Milton Babbit. You can find this piece here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8gH-TbXUIc. The very interesting visual text can be found here:http://visoundtextpoem.blogspot.com/2008/10/vision-and-prayer-by-dylan-thomas.html.

To answer the trivial pursuit question, which Delia may have misquoted: What living creature kills humans SECOND only to humans: Mosquitos.

We discussed a show idea for a later date: What other types of art inspired us to become writers? For instance, music, art, song lyrics. Send us your own 'gateway-to-poetry' drug experiences at poetasradio@gmail.com

Click here to listen