Have Words Will Travel

I promised a full recap of the Big Day of the Poets Forum in New York, and yet here we are, two weeks later, and no recap.  I blame the sinus infection and bronchitis.  Antibiotics are my friend, though, and I’m almost feeling human again.

Of course, now a lot of that day is reduced to scrawls in my notebook, and my faulty memory.  I will say this: all the poets had really great insights to share about writing.  It was a very worthwhile series of panels and I wouldn’t hesitate to attend again.  I am disappointed that I didn’t get the opportunity to speak with any of them — people were quite aggressive about talking to them at length during the social bits afterward, so unless you’re really pushy, it was hard to get a word in.  I definitely had things I would have liked to say to a couple of them in response to their statements during the panel, but alas.  I may just have to resort to writing a few “charming notes” as Carolyn See would call them.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working like a fiend, writing, submitting, not getting any responses from my dozens of submissions that are out in the world (what is that all about? ), and now doing reviews.  I’m nearly finished with the review of Sally Van Doren’s book Sex At Noon Taxes, which will be published around December 1 on the site Gently Read Literature.  I have also offered them a review of the Cody Walker book Shuffle and Breakdown, which was given to me by a friend, and which I absolutely adored.  It’s a knockout.

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.