KRCB-FM: WordTemple

WordTemple host Katherine Hastings carries on an annual December tradition. Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, we can always celebrate the great Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, reading his short story, A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Following Thomas, Hastings interviews Marin County poet Terry Lucas. Lucas reads from his first full-length collection, In This Room, talks about his press, Trio House, and his upcoming book Dharma Rain.

“There’s a dark and pungent biography half-hidden in these lines. There’s a boy who came to spend half a lifetime in fumbling foreplay with God, a clothing store clerk on Black Friday ushering you into the maw of America, … a man smitten with the geography of California…At the center of In This Room is a breath-taking sequence of poems, ‘The Gate,’ honoring the Golden Gate Bridge. At its rounding curve is a hilarious account of neighbors having a fight. Imagine the ghosts of Hart Crane and Larry Levis welcoming Terry Lucas to their fraternity.” — Alicia Ostriker

Katherine Hastings airs a reading by Susan Kelly-DeWitt given at Readers Books in Sonoma in October 2016. DeWitt is the author of ten collections of poetry, including her latest Spider Season. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, and has been featured on Ted Kooser´s American Life in Poetry. Jane Mead says ¨The poems in Spider Season reflect our human desire to weave the inner and outer worlds into an ordered pattern: like the spider´s web, these poems are delicate, made of strong filament, and vulnerable - impermanence proves to be a force as strong as the desire for order. This book beautifully renders the process, rewards and disappointments of this universal struggle.¨

Following DeWitt, Hastings airs an interview from 2011 she conducted with the late poet and activist Francisco X. Alarcòn. Although he died in January 2016, Alarcòn's work remains extremely relevant today. This is a segment not to be missed. His collections of poetry, some for adults, some for children, include Sonnets to Madness and Other Misfortunes; Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation (winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation); From the Other Side of Night/Del otro lado de la noche: New and Selected Poems; Ce Uno One: Poems for the New Sun; Borderless Butterflies: Earth Haikus and Other Poems; Laughing Tomatoes: And Other Spring Poems; and Canto condo/Deep Song, among others. His work portrays Latino and gay identity, the Nahuatl language, Mesoamerican history, mythology and American culture. He received the 1984 Chicano Literary Prize, the 1993 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and a Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association in 2002. In addition, he served as director of the Spanish for Native Speakers Program at the University of California at Davis, and taught for the Art of the Wild workshop and the California Poets in the Schools program. Juan Felipe Herrera called Alarcòn the "dark hummingbird, alone still and yet in motion in the arc of time."

Hastings also includes two pieces of music from Herbie Hancock's The Imagine Project.

WordTemple host Katherine Hastings presents a poetry party! On this program you’ll hear a wide variety of poets reading their work, music written by poets, poets reading with music and much more. Included are Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure with Ray Manzarek, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, June Jordan, Louise Bogan, H.D., Al Young, Gertrude Stein, Jake Berry, Sonoma County poet Gwynn O’Gara, the WordWind Chorus and much, much more! Where else in the North Bay are you going to hear poetry and music like this on the radio. Celebrate poetry and celebrate KRCB by tuning in for this very special program.

Host Katherine Hastings airs a recording from her WordTemple Poetry Series featuring Ada Limòn, Greg Mahrer, and Julia Vose. Ada Limón is the author of four books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry and one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Year by The New York Times. Her other books include Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program, and the 24Pearl Street online program for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also works as a freelance writer splitting her time between Lexington, Kentucky and Sonoma, California. “The lyrical genius of these poems sings to us of the perennial theme of home and our primordial ache of belonging. Ada Limòn captures all the nuances that these colossal words call to mind with the gorgeous voice of her diction, and the timbre of her images. Both soft and tender, enormous and resounding, her poetic gestures entrance and transfix.” — Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet Sonoma County poet Gregory Mahrer reads from his first collection, A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent (Fordham University Press), winner of the Poets Out Loud prize. His work has been published in The New England Review, The Indiana Review, Green Mountains Review, Volt, Colorado Review, Haden’s Ferry Review and elsewhere, as well as the web sites Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Several of his poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. In 2014 one of those poems, “Refrain,” received a Pushcart Special Mention. WordTemple is very pleased to host the Sonoma County release of this fine book. Come support your local poet! “Let me say quite simply that Gregory Mahrer is the most dazzling poetic cartographer since Italo Calvino and Raymond Roussel, and Mahrer’s exquisite explorations of the imagination carry with them the same remarkable riches and glorious thirsts that we find in those great writers. Conceptually brilliant and relentlessly inventive, Greg Mahrer teaches us the many ways every map is made of language, and that geology, geography, and history must all be understood as deeply human psalms. In this astonishing new collection, there is only one direction left to the poet— beyond the page’s horizon.” — David St. John Sonoma County poet Julia Vose opens the program. Author of Moved Out on the Inside (The Figures Press), Vose is the winner of an Academy of American Poet’s Prize. Her poems have appeared in Deep Down (Farrar Strauss and Giroux); This is Women’s Work (Panjandrm); Changing Harm to Harmony: Bullies & Bystanders Project (Joseph Zaccardi, editor); Digging Our Poetic Roots — Poems from Sonoma County(Katherine Hastings, editor); American Poetry Review; and Marin Poetry Center anthologies. Vose has taught and/or consulted poetry writing at San Francisco State University and UC Exension, as a Writer-In_Residence at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco, and with California Poets in the Schools.

Heathcote Williams is an English poet, actor, dramatist, screenwriter. He has also written song lyrics, including a collaboration with Marianne Faithful. He has authored several book-length collections that are “documentary/investigative” poetry, including Autogeddon; Falling for a Dolphin; Whale Nation — one of the most powerful arguments for a worldwide ban on whaling — and the focus of today’s program, Sacred Elephant. The work begins “The shape of an African elephant’s ear is the shape of Africa. The shape of an Indian elephant’s ear is the shape of India.” Sacred Elephant moves us through the life of elephants in their natural habitats without saving us from the horrors of their lives in captivity. As he did in Whale Nation, Williams underscores the poem with classical music.

WordTemple opens with a short tribute to East Bay poet and arts activist, Adelle Foley. Adelle, who passed away on June 27, 2016, was the author of Along the Bloodline, a collection of haiku praised by beat poet Michael McClure and California State Poet Laureate Dana Gioia. A second collection of her haiku is forthcoming. She served on the board of Poetry Flash for many years, as well as PEN Oakland. Married to poet, critic and radio personality Jack Foley, Adelle often performed her poetry with her husband — the duo creating lively, memorable evenings of poetry throughout Northern California and beyond. This tribute was created as a “last minute” homage; Hastings hopes to air more of Adelle Foley’s work in the future.

It’s not that I write

Because of what I see. I

See because I write.

— Adelle Foley

Following this tribute, host Katherine Hastings speaks with Lucille Lang Day, author of ten collections of poetry, including Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope (winner of a Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature); The Curvature of Blue; The Book of Answers; Infinities and her most recent book Becoming an Ancestor. Autobiography, ancestry, surprise, science, myths and the natural world are just some of the elements that make up this lovely new book. Included are deeply moving poems written during and after the death of her daughter, Liana, at the age of 50.

“Following centuries of fateful migrations, Lucille Lang Day becomes the California teller of tales that wow us with her own intimate versions of how need, time and again, restores our lives to living streams of love.” — Al Young, California Poet Laureate Emeritus.

WordTemple host Katherine Hastings presents a reading by Sonoma County poet Gregory W. Randall. Randall is the author of Double Happiness, winner of the fifth annual Camber Press Chapbook Award, selected by Mark Doty. Previous poetry collections include Blue Water Views; Uncommon Refrains; and A Room in the Country. From the cover of Double Happiness: Double Happiness is a tale of myth making and transformations. Modeled on the song cycles of Schubert and Schumann in which each song/poem unveils a new aspect of narrative and dimension of character, this sequence of eighteen poems chronicles episodes in the lives of two unnamed lovers…As life together unfolds, the lovers begin morphing from flowering trees to migratory cranes, even snakes eternally entwined in each other’s coils as they seek to move beyond a language of impermanence toward a desired immutability.”

Also, Hastings talks with local playwright, poet and novelist David Beckman about his upcoming play The Plot Against Shakespeare, to be staged this August at Shakespeare in the Cannery in Santa Rosa. You don’t want to miss this preview! Beckman studied playwriting at New York’s Circle in the Square Theater and, as an actor, toured with the National Shakespeare Company. The 6th Street Playhouse produced his full-length play Becoming Walt Whitman (which had previously been produced at Powerhouse Theatre in Santa Monica) to stellar reviews in 2010. His short plays have been produced in New York, Santa Cruz, Dallas, Santa Rosa and Monte Rio.

WordTemple host Katherine Hastings airs a special event held at the WordTemple Poetry Series on March 26, 2016 celebrating our new California State Poet Laureate, Dana Gioia. Gioia is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet and critic. Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, he is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, as well as eight chapbooks. As Chairman of the NEA, Gioia succeeded in garnering enthusiastic bi-partisan support in the United States Congress for the mission of the Arts Endowment, as well as in strengthening the national consensus in favor of public funding for the arts and arts education (Business Week Magazine referred to him as “The Man Who Saved the NEA”). Gioia’s most recent collection, 99 Poems: New & Selected (Graywolf), was named one of the “Best poetry books” by the Washington Post in February 2016. Joining the celebration are Arthur Timpe, a junior at El Molino High School and Sarah Condello, a sophmore at Analy High School, who recite poems learned for the Poetry Out Loud contest, and Daniel Redman who sings original musical settings for poems from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”

This month’s program features a conversation with Joseph Zaccardi, Marin County poet laureate emeritus and author of four collections of poetry, including Vents; Render; The Nine Gradations of Light; and, most recently, A Wolf Stands Alone in Water. “What is found here, to paraphrase William Carlos Williams, is an uncensored exploration of the human heart. Neither flinching from evil nor denying glimpses of the divine, Joseph Zaccardi guides the reader through visceral encounters with evils announced daily in the headlines (and even darker evils hidden from newsprint and camera) to acknowledge, ‘In everything that holds light, there is room for darkness.’” Yvonne Postelle

Following the interview with Zaccardi, Katherine Hastings brings us a reading by Jane Mead, recorded at the WordTemple Poetry Series in January 2016. Mead reads from her latest collection (her fourth), Money Money Money / Water Water Water. “A tough, wise, and beautiful book about the human destruction of the earth and everything trying to live here: ‘the poisoned planet poisoning.’ All this brilliant poet’s knowledge and experience have been gathered into the fiercae, grieving book, laid at the feet of our global kingdom and powers: ‘How much can you subtract now/How much and still get by.’” — Jean Valentine

Money, Money, Money/Water Water Water addresses not only the economic politics of water, but also the economic politics of investing in your own life. It’s costly, and this book counts the ways. It’s a book of ecooetics in an unusually large send — and one that contributes completely to the genre’s commitment to the political — but it also marks a structural advance in lyric poetry…” Cole Swensen

Mead is the recipient of grants and awards from the Whiting, Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations. She lives in Northern California where she grows zinfandel and cabernet sauvignon wine grapes on the property her grandfather purchased in the early 1900s. She teaches in the Drew University low-residency MFA program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation.

Host: Kathrine Hastings

WordTemple host Katherine Hastings interviews poet, performer, nonfiction writer and verse playwright Annie Finch, visiting from her home in Maine. Her most recent collection of poems, Spells, brings together poems written over a span of 40 years and reflects her passion for poetic craft, from lyrics to chants and more. Joy Harjo says “Annie Finch’s poetry is a pure tone that calls us home to the first impulse of poetry. We link to mystery. We lift off.” Molly Peacock adds “One of the most dexterous formal poets writing in the United States today, Annie Finch is at ease in a dazzling variety of prosodic modes, from the very short lyric to the sonnet to myriad metrical constructions in stanzaic forms…All of her considerable talents are on display in Spells.”

Also, Hastings speaks with Tamam Kahn, author of Untold — A History of the Wives of Prophet Muhammad. Untold demystifies the most influential women present at the dawn of Islam and introduces us to Muhammad’s wives, among them a successful merchant, the leader of an army, two Jewish war captives, and a Coptic Christian diplomat. “Swimming amid ‘the names of God,’ Tamam Kahn has written a brilliant and illuminating book, equally awesome in the depth of its research, the grace of its prose, and the beauty of its poetic voices Untold should be read with joy by any reader who hopes to transcend current stereotypes about Islam. It is a bridge between worlds.” — Alicia Ostriker