KRCB-FM: WordTemple

This month on Word Temple, Katherine Hastings airs a tribute to Lenore Kandel who died in October (2009). Also, Hastings plays a recording of Dylan Thomas reading his story A Child's Christmas in Wales. Finally, Allen Ginsberg reads C'mon Pigs of Western Civilization Eat More Grease.

This month, The Selected Poems of Freidrich Holderlin will be read and discussed by the translators, poets Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover. Also, Rebecca Foust talks with host Katherine Hastings and reads from her first two award-winning collections, Dark Card; and Mom's Canoe.

Host Katherine Hastings throws a Poetry Party this month, featuring poetry and music from Yusef Komunyakaa, John Updike, Marilyn Hacker, and Anais Nin reading from her diary about French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director Antonin Artaud. Plus Kate Royal singing "I Have Dreamt" from Wuthering Heights, and poet Arisa White with the Jessica Jones Quartet. Also included is a visit from Sonoma County poet Michael Rothenberg who will give an introduction to Rockpile, a collaboration between Rothenberg and David Meltzer that will send them through eight cities in the U.S. to perform poetry and prose composed on the road with local musicians and artists in each city.

An in-depth interview with poet Brian Tso Jones, author or the award-winning collection, Raking the Hollow Bones. Also, host Katherine Hastings introduces the life of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton.

Tribute to David Bromige - August 26, 2009

Poet, critic, playwrite and radio personality Jack Foley performs a number of his poems and his ten-minute play, The Boy, the Girl, and the Piece of Chocolate along with his wife, poet Adelle Foley who will also read work from her book, Along the Bloodline, and more recent haiku. Following the Foley's, Alabama poet, songwriter, singer and musician Jake Berry perfroms segments from his magnificent work of poetry and music, Brambu Drezei.

Word Temple host Katherine Hastings introduces The Green Carnation, an 1894 novel by Robert Hichens that played a part in the famous trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for homosexual activity, followed by a recording of Wilde's poem "the Ballad of Reading Gaol," written after he served two years in that prison.

In the second half of the program, Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes, reads James Joyce's The Sisters - his first published work of fiction which would later become the first story in The Dubliners.

Featured on Word Temple are Jane Hirshfield and Nathaniel Tarn. Born in Paris in 1928, Tarn was a leading anthropologist for many years, and the pioneering translator of Pablo Neruda. His own poetry was praised by Octavio Paz for it's "rich temperament, a remarkable linguistic inventiveness, and a vision both original and universal." Tarn talks with Katherine Hastings and reads from his latest collection, Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers.

Jane Hirshfield, the popular author of six collections of poems including her latest book, After, reads new poems from her home in Northern California. Robert Bly says, "There is something subtle and new in Jane Hirshfield's poems...She has absorbed the vertical line through her discipline, and it gives her poems and intensity that doesn't kill ordinary life, or subdue the body as some vertical studies do."

Hastings also plays French music by popular French musicians and composers.

Word Temple - April 15, 2009

Word Temple - March 18, 2009