KRCB-FM: WordTemple

Katherine Hastings presents a recording of the book release party for this timely anthology. Recorded live at the WordTemple Poetry Series at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts in September 2017, over a dozen of the poets represented in the book read their work. Edited and published by Katherine (WordTemple Press), poets in the anthology include Devreaux Baker, Ellen Bass, Gillian Conoley, Sharon Doubiago, Camille T. Dungy, Annie Finch, Molly Fisk, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirshfield, Lynne Knight, Mary Mackey, Jane Mead, Rusty Morrison, Melissa Stein, Laura Walker, Arisa White and many others, including several Sonoma County poets — Janine Canan, Sandy Eastoak, Terry Ehret, Kathleen Winter and more. Tune in and join the celebration of this terrific anthology of poetry written by women, but for everyone!

On today’s very special program, Hastings speaks with Cave Canem Fellow Cortney Lamar Charleston. His debut collection, Telepathologies, won the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, selected by D.A. Powell. In 2017, Charleston was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Lamar began writing and performing poetry as a member of The Excelano Project when he was an undergraduate studying economics and urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His poetry is described as a marriage between art and activism, and a call for a more involved and empathetic understanding of the diversity of the human experience. His academic background, coupled with his upbringing spent bouncing between Chicago’s South Side and its South and West suburbs influence his written work, grappling with race, masculinity, heteronormativity, class, family, faith and how identity is, functionally, a transition zone between all of these competing markers. Charleston’s poems have arrived at a time when we are reminded daily how important works like this are, as art, as a recording of history and as a call for change. From lyrics remixed from Kendrick Lamar and Tupak Shakur to Lucille Clifton and Barak Obama, from atrocities pulled from today’s news to what it means to grow up Black in America, these poems need to be read, must be heard, and then heard again.

“Cortney Lamar Charleston's poems testify in the eternal court of history; he speaks, as Aime Cesaire once did, "for miseries that have no mouth" and to liberate "those who languish in the dungeon of despair." Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner and nine slain members of Mother Emanuel AME Church―voices silenced through institutionalized racism and the unchecked power of hate―form the nucleus of this powerful indictment of an America still suffering the legacy of its slave-trading past. Timely, immediate, imperative; this is poetry from inside the center of the storm; an urgent and articulate call for change.” (D.A. Powell, judge of the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize)

WordTemple host Katherine Hastings airs a reading by Gregory W. Randall recorded at the WordTemple Poetry Series in June of 2017. Randall was celebrating the release of his first full-length collection of poetry, A Cartography of Selves. Susan Terris says “A Cartography of Selves is a series of complex, luminous poems. Some are in the voice of the poet, examining his many selves. Others are intimate views of the relationship of husband to wife, wife to husband, all told with a raw, loving, compelling urgency. There are also poems that delve into art, artists, music and nature, approaching these subjects with a similar sense of the transience of beauty.” Hastings says, “From the first poem in A Cartography of Selves where a young boy searches earnestly for the lunar Sea of Serenity as a place of refuge for himself and his mother, to poems where lovers discover each others bodies or “sit in lawn chairs in broad daylight/with shotguns and a case of beer,’ this collection offers a full palette of vulnerability, sensuality and surprise.”

Jodi Hottel sits with Hastings to discuss and read from her most recent collection, Voyeur, the result of her ongoing interest in poetry related to man other artistic forms, including literature and films. Marin County poet laureate emeritus, Joseph Zaccardi says “In Voyeur, a word that comes from the French meaning ‘one who views, one who sees’, (Hottel) composes her poems with a voraciousness of someone seeking to consume and somehow preserve every fiber of our senses; her poems are deftly crafted with a lyrical paintbrush of words like alabaster, bone who, and dry salt white ‘on a vast white canvas’, to touch and remind us of our shared human frailties and strengths.”

On today’s program WordTemple host Katherine Hastings revisits interviews and readings with three poets — John Hart, Fred Ostrander and Bob Hicok. Poet and environmental journalist John Hart is the author of The Climbers (Pitt Poetry Series) and, most recently and to be included in a future program, Storm Camp. He is the winner of the James D. Phelan Award, the Commonwealth Club Medal in Californiana, and the David R. Brower Award for Service in the Field of Conservation. Editor of the literary magazine Blue Unicorn, Hart reads from his own work but also discusses his late father, Lawrence Hart, and the Lawrence Hart Seminars. Lawrence Hart taught a method of poetry writing he called Direct Sensory Reporting, a discipline any poet will find of interest. Fred Ostrander was a highly respected poet and mountain climber, having conquered mountains in Nepal and Bhutan. He was the author of three collections, the most recent being It Lasts a Moment. His work reflects his concerns about the world, especially the environment. Ostrander died of a heart attack in 2016 and we’re pleased to have this reading recorded for WordTemple. Bob Hicok is the author of many collections of poems, including The Legend of Light, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry; Plus Shipping; Animal Soul, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Insomnia Diary; This Clumsy Living; Words for Empty, Words for Full; Elegy Owed, also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Sex & Love. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Hicok has taught creative writing at Western Michigan University and Virginia Tech. Finally, Katherine Hastings announces a new anthology — Know Me Here — An Anthology of Poems by Women, which she edited and will present at the WordTemple Poetry Series on Saturday, September 23 at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts. Just some of the 43 poets in the anthology include Ellen Bass, Sharon Doubiago, Camille T. Dungy, Annie Finch, Jane Hirshfield, Danish Lamèris, Jane Mead and Kim Shuck. A number of Sonoma County poets are also represented, including Terry Ehret, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Elizabeth Herron, Jodi Hottel, Julia Vose, and Kathleen Winter.

On July 1, 2017, English poet, actor, playwright, screenwriter, political activist and dramatist Heathcote Williams passed away. The author of several book-length polemical poems, including Whale Nation which has been called “the most powerful argument for the…worldwide ban on whaling;'” Sacred Elephant; Autogeddon; and Falling for a Dolphin, Williams invented his “documentary/investigative poetry” style to bring environmental and political issues to the attention of the public. He was also a magician, fire-eater and naturalist who discovered a new species of honey-producing wasp in the Amazon. If you haven’t heard of him, it may be because he eschewed publicity and public readings. Fortunately, you can hear Williams performing Whale Nation — host Katherine Hastings’ personal favorite of his works — this month on WordTemple.

Recorded live at the WordTemple Poetry Series, host Katherine Hastings presents Sonoma County poet laureate emeritus, Bill Vartnaw, John Shoptaw and devorah major.

Author of In Concern: for Angels and Suburbs of My Childhood, Sonoma County poet laureate emeritus Bill Vartnaw is also the publisher for Taurean Horn Press which has published Carol Sanchez, q.r. hand, jr., Kim Shuck and a dozen others. He was born and raised in Petaluma, CA and was an original member of the Bay Area Poets Coalition. Vartnaw has been a powerful and highly appreciated force in helping to plan and orchestrate the annual Petaluma Poetry Walk.

John Shoptaw was raised in the drained Mississippi River floodplain of the Missouri Bootheel, where he picked cotton, was baptized in a drainage ditch and worked in a lumber mill. He is the author of Times Beach, winner of the 2015 Notre Dame Book Prize and the 2016 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. He has also published a critical study, On the outside looking out: John Ashbery’s Poetry (Harvard UP 1996), and a libretto on Lincoln’s assassination for an opera by Eric Sawyer, Our American Cousin (BMOP Sound, 2008). He teaches poetry writing, ecopoetry, and Emily Dickinson in the English Department of the University of California at Berkeley. His essay “Why Ecopoetry?” was published in Poetry (September 2016).

devorah major celebrates her fifth collection of poetry, and then we became (City Lights, 2016). A California born, San Francisco raised, granddaughter of immigrants, documented and undocumented, major served as San Francisco’s Third Poet Laureate (2002-2006). She has two novels published, Brown Glass Windows and An Open Weave. In addition to her five poetry books and four poetry chapbooks, she has had two biographies for young adults, and a host of short stories, essays, and individual poems published in anthologies and periodicals. Among her awards is a First Novelist award from the Black caucaus of the ALA for An Open Weave and a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award for her poetry book street smarts.

This month’s program features three poets — Terry Ehret, Erin Rodoni and Gillian Wegener — recorded live at the WordTemple Poetry Series.

Terry Ehret is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Night Sky Journey. Poet laureate emerita of Sonoma County, her poems have won several literary awards including the National Poetry Series, California Commonwealth Club Book Award, Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize and four Pushcart Prize nominations.

Erin Rodoni is an exciting new poet celebrating her first collection, Body, in Good Light. '“I walk toward you/barefoot,” writes Erin Rodoni, a poet who can speak with ease of private elegies and public journeys, of childbirth and of changing trains in Krakow"…Here is a book that journeys out into the world, and also inward, into the mysteries of private life of the body where “bliss, like a memory, can be unearthed by scent.”’ — Ilya Kaminsky

Finally, Gillian Wegener gives an entertaining and energetic reading from her second collection, In This Sweet Haphazard. Poet laureate emerita of Modesto, Wegener is an award-winning poet whose new book brings us from one astonishing place to another — the former Old Mill Cafe, Hurricane Katrina, forest fires, bulldozed almond fields, the redwoods of Humboldt County, and more.

In celebration of Women’s History month, today’s program features five iconic American women poets reading their own work: Gertrude Stein, H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bogan and Muriel Rukeyser. With little to no interruption between poets, sit back and experience these historic recordings of our poetic ancestors. Each offered something new when they burst upon the scene and now, decades later, their work maintains its relevance. Listen to these poems as you would listen to music. How do they speak to you in 2017?

WordTemple host Katherine Hastings pays tribute to David Meltzer who died on December 31, 2016. Meltzer was, as Diane DiPrima put it, “one of the secret treasures on our planet. Great poet, musician, comic; mystic unsurpassed, performer with few peers.” On today’s program you’ll hear part of a reading Meltzer gave at the Beat Museum in San Francisco in February 2007 where, “Beats,” he said, “hang on the walls like wombats," an interview Hastings conducted with him at his home in March 2007, music performed by David with is late wife, Tina, and more. There is no better way to celebrate the gifts David Meltzer left the world than by listening to the man himself. Tune in and enjoy.

When I was a Poet

Everything was Possible

there wasn’t Anything

that wasn’t Poetry

— from “When I Was a Poet”, David Meltzer

Recorded live at the WordTemple Poetry Series in Sebastopol, three poets celebrate new collections — Sandra Angfang, Lee Slonimsky and Katherine Hastings. Introduced by Sonoma County Poet Laureate Iris Jamahl Dunkle. Opening Poet Sandra Anfang is a prize-winning teacher, poet and visual artist. Her most recent collection is a chapbook from Finishing Line Press, Looking Glass Heart. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Poetalk; West Trestle Review; and Spillway, among others. Sandra is a California Poet/Teacher in the schools and the founder and host of the monthly poetry series, Rivertown Poets, in Petaluma, CA. Lee Slonimsky’s new collection is Consulting With the Swifts — New and Selected Poems, 1982 — 2016. Many Sonoma County residents have been treated to his previous collections, including Pythagoras in Love (now translated into a French edition by Elizabeth Coleman); Talk Between Leaf and Skin; Money and Light; Red-Tailed Hawk on Wall Street; Logician of the Wind and Wandering Electron. Lee is also the author of a mystery, Bermuda Gold. Visiting from New York’s Hudson Valley, Slonimsky is co-author with his wife, Carol Goodman, of an urban fantasy trilogy starting with the riveting Black Swan Rising. His poems have appeared in numerous places, including The New York Times; Best of Asheville Poetry Review and The Carolina Quarterly, and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize seven times. When he’s not walking and writing poems in the process, Slonimsky is the manager of a hedge fund, Ocean Partners, LP, and of its humane/vegan side pocket, Green Hills Partners LP. “The best poems here, and they are many, all reclaim a moment from the clamor of the world; and each such poem in turn presents the attentive reader with a like moment of refuge…Like Monet with his haystacks or cathedrals, Slonimsky achieves repetition and variation without monotony…The poems invite us to focus, to traingulate, to seek out correspondences. Writing these poems helped Slonimsky to do these things; reading them helps us.” — Rachel Hadas Sonoma County poet laureate emerita, radio host of WordTemple on NPR affiliate KRCB FM, and founder and host of the WordTemple Poetry Series, Katherine Hastings celebrates her third collection of poetry, Shakespeare & Stein Walk Into a Bar (Spuyten Duyvil, NYC, August 2016). Previous books include Cloud Fire; and Nighthawks. Shakespeare and Stein Walk into a Bar is animated by the two most rewarding and replenishing of poetic forces: dexterous formal diversity and a fierce, unflinching searching. “Where to go from here?” the book begins, lifting us through “the world we’ve left to ourselves” and singing us at last to the still point where “We, too, dissolve” with “all of it finding its way — somewhere.” Shakespeare and Stein Walk into a Bar is more than a collection of poems; it is a quest fulfilled by destination. —Malachi Black, author of Storm Towards Morning.