Planet Poet - Words in Space

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my April 26th 2022 WIOX show featuring Jerrice J. Baptiste, a poet of exceptional lyricism.  Jerrice will discuss and read from her upcoming poetry collection, Coral in the Diaspora. 

 Planet Poet’s endlessly interesting and erudite Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce also joins us on the show! 

 Jerrice J. Baptiste is the author of eight books. She’s a poet in residence at the Prattsville Art Center in NY. Jerrice was also the recipient of a residency at the Omega Institute for the Women’s Leadership program in 2019.  She has been extensively published in journals and magazines such as The Yale Review; Kosmos Journal; The Caribbean Writer; Mantis and many others.  She lives in NY where she joyfully teaches poetry.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my April 12th, 2022 WIOX show featuring returning guests, poet, essayist and novelist Sparrow to discuss his books Small Happiness & Other Epiphanies and The Princeton Diary, and novelist and essayist Violet Snow to discuss her new novel To March or to Marry. 

 Sparrow lives in a doublewide trailer in the salutary hamlet of Phoenicia, New York. He has published 10 books, the most recent being Small Happiness & Other Epiphanies (Monkfish Publishing). Sparrow plays tonette in the axiomatic pop group Foamola. 

Violet Snow wrote regularly for the Woodstock Times for 17 years. She has been published in the New York Times “Disunion” blog, Civil War Times, American Ancestors, Jewish Currents, and many other periodicals. Her fiction and memoir have appeared in Otter Magazine, Pilgrimage, Tinker Street, and the podcast series “The Strange Recital.” An excerpt from her historical novel, To March or to Marry, has been published in the feminist journal Minerva Rising.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my March 15th, 2022 WIOX show featuring returning guest, the unique poet and novelist Lee Slonimsky, who will read from and discuss his latest erudite and poignant poetry collection, Bright Yellow Buzz. This show has a  fascinating range - from Pompeii and the Lisbon Earthquake to Pythagoras, Vermeer, and the DNA commonality of trees and humans.

 “Lee Slonimsky’s poetic achievement in Bright Yellow Buzz is more than technique, more than memory, though master technique and master memory are everywhere in this work: it is nothing less than ‘spirit’s truth;’…his landscape is written as though pen touched on bough.”  Dr. Robert Basner

 LEE SLONIMSKY’s sonnet sequence, Pythagoras in Love, has been translated into French and Greek, was published in Polish this summer and will soon be translated into Italian.  His poem “Dragonflies in Love” was included in the new anthology BuzzWords: Poems About Insects, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series, edited by Kimiko Hahn and Harold Schechter.  Lee’s newest American collection, Bright Yellow Buzz, was just published by Spuyten Duyvil Press.  Lee earns a living managing a hedge fund called Ocean Partners LP.”  

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my December 21st, 2021 WIOX show for my conversation with poet Elizabeth J. Coleman and photographer

Michael Craig Palmer on their beautiful new book, Experiencing Autumn, and their unusual and imaginative collaboration.  

 Elizabeth J. Coleman is the editor of HERE: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), with a foreword from His Holiness the Dalai Lama. She is the author of two poetry collections, published by Spuyten Duyvil Press (PROOF and THE FIFTH GENERATION), and translated Lee Slonimsky’s sonnet collection PYTHAGORE, AMOUREUX into French (Folded Word Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Colorado Review, Rattle, and Bellevue Literary Review, and in a number of anthologies.  Elizabeth’s website is www.elizabethjcoleman.com. 

 Michael Craig Palmer is a photographer who has explored the architectural legacy of the German Jewish exodus from Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, he was unable to continue with architectural projects. Luckily, in September 2020, he was invited to join the Hudson Valley camera excursions hosted by the noted photographer Jade Doskow of Peekskill, New York. Over the three months of autumn 2020, Michael photographed the vibrant and changing fall colors up and down the Hudson. In the snow and cold of January and February, he assembled these pictures into the statement of 

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my February 15th, 2022 WIOX show featuring returning guest, the remarkable poet and teacher Geoffrey Nutter. Geoffrey reads poems from his latest collection, Giant Moth Perishes, and shares his brilliance and exuberance about poetry including his lightheartedly profound wrangling of the comparative mysteries of Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar” and Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.”

 Planet Poet’s endlessly interesting Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce also joins us on the show with her entertainingly erudite musings on a common obsession among writers: their typewriters!

 Geoffrey Nutter is the author of Giant Moth Perishes (Wave Books, 2021), A Summer Evening (winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize), Water’s Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize), Christopher Sunset (winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award), The Rose of January (Wave Books, 2013), and Cities at Dawn (Wave Books, 2016). He recently traveled in China, giving lectures, workshops, and readings as a participant in the Sun Yat-sen University Writers’ Residency. Geoffrey’s poems have been translated into Spanish, French, and Mandarin. Soir d’été, a bilingual edition of his poems translated into French by poets Molly Lou Freeman and Julien Marcland, was recently published in France, and a German translation of his book Water’s Leaves & Other Poems will appear in 2021. He has taught poetry at Princeton, Columbia, University of Iowa, NYU, the New School, and 92nd Street Y. He currently teaches Greek and Latin Classics at Queens College. He runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in New York City.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my January 18th, 2022 WIOX show featuring Maria Mazziotti Gillan, poet, teacher, artist and visionary founder of the renowned Poetry Center at the Passaic Community College in Patterson, N.J., on her new book, When the Stars Were Still Visible.  Planet Poet’s erudite and endlessly interesting Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce also joins us with her musings on poetry, art and life.

 On When the Stars Were Still Visible

 “… It is as if this book rose out of an alchemist’s compound comprised of Calabrian limestone and the cement of the back stoop on 17th Street in Paterson, New Jersey, where Mazziotti Gillan grew up.  By the end of this poignant and resonant book, the poet accepts her double heritage with all is pain and obstacles and with all its beauty and grace.” – Stephen F Austin  State University Press, Nacogdoches, Texas

 Maria Mazziotti Gillan, American Book Award recipient for All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions) and author of twenty-four books, founded the Poetry Center in Paterson, NJ, is editor of the Paterson Literary Review and is Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at Binghamton University- SUNY. Her newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2021). Other recent publications include What Blooms in Winter (NYQ 2016) and the poetry and photography collaboration with Mark Hillringhouse, Paterson Light and Shadow (Serving House Books, 2017).

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my November 23rd, 2021 

WIOX show for my conversation with poet, music critic and founder of Parnassus Records, Leslie Gerber on his collection of poems Losing Tara, An Alzheimer’s Journey, published in 2020 by Post Traumatic Press, in honor of his late wife, writer Tara McCarthy. Leslie and I will also listen to and discuss recordings released under his independent label Parnassus Records.

 “The spouses and loved ones of patients with dementia experience a devastating emotional burden as they watch them decline.  Leslie Gerber has taken the unusual and compelling step of publishing the poems he wrote in honor of his wife during her tragic course.  This is an eloquent way to memorialize their times together and also her most human qualities, which dementia progressively destroys.” - Dennis J. Selkoe MD, Coates Professor of Neurologic Diseases, Harvard Medical School

 Leslie Gerber was born in Brooklyn in 1943.  He was graduated from Brooklyn College with a degree in creative writing.  For 39 years he ran a mail-order classical music business, Parnassus Records, while writing thousands of music reviews and articles.  Leslie’s most recent CD release is “Black Swans,” recordings of the earliest African American classical performers.  In 1970 he moved to Ulster County and has lived there ever since.  He began writing poetry in 1999. In addition to his latest book, Leslie had published two earlier poetry collections, Lies of the Poet and The Edge of Sleep, both published by Post Traumatic Press.  Leslie has three daughters, two granddaughters and one great granddaughter.  He is a proud member of the Goat Hill Poets, founded by Cheryl A. Rice and himself.  He lives in Woodstock New York with his dog Winnie.  Website: www.lesliegerber.net.  

 Planet Poet’s erudite and endlessly interesting Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce will also join the show this month with her musings on poetry, art and life.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my October 26th, 2021 WIOX show with my in-studio guest, poet, essayist, translator and teacher, Philip Pardi who will read from and discuss his prize-winning poetry collection, Meditations on Rising and Falling and talk about his life as writer, activist and teacher.  

Philip Pardi is the author of Meditations on Rising and Falling (University of Wisconsin Press), which won the Brittingham Prize and the Writers' League of Texas Award for Poetry. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared widely in journals and anthologies. His most recent project, completed with the support of the NEA, is a volume of selected translations by the Salvadoran poet Claudia Lars. He teaches at Bard College and serves on the Advisory Board of LIDE, a non-profit organization devoted to empowering and educating Haitian girls through the arts.

On Meditations on Rising and Falling: “A truly exceptional volume of poems. Wry, wise, and powerful, this work offers highly nuanced sketches and shrewdly observed scenes of profound human reckoning. With a child’s awe and an adult’s caution—and compassionate care—the speaker in these calm and elegantly philosophical poems wins our trust time and time again. The measured, lyric ease of these poems is matched only by their superb tonal complexity and masterful, celebratory ease.”—David St. John, Brittingham Prize judge

LISTEN to my March 31st, 2021 WIOX show with my guest co-host, the erudite poet and novelist, Lee Slonimsky.  Lee invited poet and eminent physician Robert Charles Basner to read and discuss his evocative and original poetry.
 
 Robert Charles Basner, holds the titles of Professor Emeritus of Medicine, Columbia University, and Special Lecturer in Medicine, Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He is an internationally recognized physician and biomedical researcher, author, editor, editorialist, and educator. A former faculty member of the Harvard Medical School and current faculty member of his alma mater, the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, he is a laureate of an NIH Academic Career Award of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and of the Sidney Zolot Music Award of the City College of New York. He has published poetry in numerous journals including the Columbia Review, Promethean, and Chronogram and is working on a first collection of verse, “Ancient, Autumnal” as well as a sequence of musical settings for voice and viola.
 
 Lee Slonimsky has published nine full-length volumes of poetry.  His third book, Pythagoras in Love, has been translated into French by Elizabeth J. Coleman, Greek by Stamatis Polenakis, and most recently into Polish by Henryk Cierniak.  With his wife, Hammett and Mary Higgins Clark award winning mystery writer Carol Goodman, under the pen name Lee Carroll, Lee has co-written the Black Swan Rising trilogy featuring vampire hedge fund manager and poet Will Hughes.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my September 28th, 2021 WIOX radio conversation with remarkable poet and teacher, Geoffrey Nutter by phone from Manhattan to read from and discuss his latest poetry collection, Giant Moth Perishes (Wave Books, 2021), and share his brilliance and exuberance about poetry and living in this world.

 Geoffrey Nutter is the author of Giant Moth Perishes (Wave Books, 2021), A Summer Evening (winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize), Water’s Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize), Christopher Sunset (winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award), The Rose of January (Wave Books, 2013), and Cities at Dawn (Wave Books, 2016). He recently traveled in China, giving lectures, workshops, and readings as a participant in the Sun Yat-sen University Writers’ Residency. Geoffrey’s poems have been translated into Spanish, French, and Mandarin. Soir d’été, a bilingual edition of his poems translated into French by poets Molly Lou Freeman and Julien Marcland, was recently published in France, and a German translation of his book Water’s Leaves & Other Poems will appear in 2021. He has taught poetry at Princeton, Columbia, University of Iowa, NYU, the New School, and 92nd Street Y. He currently teaches Greek and Latin Classics at Queens College. He runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in New York City.

 from Wave Books:

 With exquisite detail and humble sensibilities, Geoffrey Nutter’s sixth collection of poetry offers myriad delights in language and the imagination. In cityscapes, nature, books, and color, we find respite in the complexities of the commonplace—from clocks to teardrops to moths. Here are poems that teach us how to live in the world with curious attention. And at the heart of this daydreaming is a spectacular earnestness, firmly embedded in the idea that the landscape of poetry is limitless and wild.

 Planet Poet’s erudite and endlessly interesting Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce will also join the show this month with a fascinating talk on collage in art and in writing.