Have Words Will Travel

We have returned from vacation, all three children are back in school, and today was my first day alone in my house with peace and quiet for writing and po-biz.  I worked for awhile on a flash fiction piece I’m writing for an anthology.  I read most of a collection called Sisters by Nickole Brown (look for a review in the coming days), which isn’t technically writing, but it does feed the pool from which my poetry comes.  And then a poet friend challenged me to write a poem about the Large Hadron Collider, which was fired up today in Geneva.  Physics is a particular passion of mine and I was very excited that they finally got the thing up and running.  So, although I know a lot about the LHC and what it’s supposed to do, I spent a couple of hours researching it, and wow is there a lot of natural poetry present in physics.  I’m dreaming of a whole collection of poems inspired by physics.  It’s a big task — it’s not easy to write about science in a way that’s accessible and evocative.  But I always enjoy a challenge.

To continue yesterday’s discussion of podcasts, this morning I found that a good podcast makes running on the treadmill ever so much more enjoyable. This morning was especially good, with a podcast from alt.NPR: Poetry Off the Shelf. They featured the site From the Fishouse: An Audio Archive of Emerging Poets.

For one thing, what a fantastic idea. They record emerging poets reading their own work, and then post the recordings on their site. They have dozens. Maybe hundreds? It’s remarkable and one could lose hours and hours listening to the poems.

What made the podcast so super-fantastic, though, was that they played a recording of a poet named Tyehimba Jess reading his poem, “leadbelly vs. lomax at the modern language association conference, 1934.” I was interested immediately because, coincidentally, I had just read a whole article in last week’s New Yorker about how people went around recording folk music back in the 20’s and 30’s and some of those artists, such as Leadbelly, went on to become famous. In the article, it mentioned Leadbelly being asked to wear prison stripes for public appearances to exploit the fact that he was an ex-con, thereby making him more interesting to the music consumer. It was a fascinating article, and then there I was on the treadmill listening to this random podcast with a poem by someone I’ve never heard of about that very subject. Not only that, but the poem is amazing. Amaaaaazing. It’s pretty cool to read, with interesting formatting of parallel dialogue–one side representing Leadbelly’s words and the other, Lomax’s. But when the poet reads it, first the one side, then the other, then both together (with the help of another person), it is incredible. You can hear it here. Go listen. I’ll bet anything that at the end, you can’t help but say, “Wow!” out loud.

And if you like it as much as I think you will, you might want to make a little donation to Fishouse. They strike me as a resource well worth supporting.