Planet Poet - Words in Space

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my August 3rd, 2021 WIOX Radio conversation with Robert Milby, poet, teacher and freelance thinker.  Milby was Poet Laureate of Orange County, NY from 2017 to 2019.  He’s given over 500 featured readings and hosted 30 poetry series including Calling All Poets in the Hudson Valley. He’s been published in over 2 dozen magazines and 25 anthologies, including: Home Planet News, Chronogram, Waymark, and on many websites. His chapbook, Gothic, Orange  (poems inspired by Orange County, NY) was published through the County Historian’s office, in October 2018.  Milby was the 2020 winner of the Wild West Poetry Contest sponsored by Flying Monkey Productions in Kingston, NY. His latest collection, Corona d’état:  The Pandemic Poems, 2020 was published by Lion Autumn Music Publishing in 2021.  And, each October, since 2003, Milby and Ulster County, NY Artist, Carl Welden haunt the Hudson Valley as the duo Theremin Ghosts!    Robert Milby lives in Florida, New York in the Hudson Valley.             

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my June 8th, 2021 WIOX Radio conversation with poet, editor and publisher Jared Daniel Fagen on his forthcoming poetry collection, The Animal of Existence and two books from his literary press, Black Sun Lit:  I am writing you from afar by Moyna Pam Dik and Apostasy by Katy Mongeau. 

 Jared Daniel Fagen is the author of The Animal of Existence, which is forthcoming from Black Square Editions in 2022. His prose poems and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner, Asymptote, Prelude, and Caesura, among other places. Currently residing in Arkville, he is the editor of Black Sun Lit, a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, and an English instructor at the City College of New York.  More @ jareddanielfagen.com

 Jared Daniel Fagen on Black Sun Lit 

 ... We propose a renewed aestheticism that values beauty- not communication or identification – as the end of literature.  Beauty is for us the experience of the limit, an autonomy beyond that of life itself.  We search for it in all forms of extreme expression: whether in minimalism or maximalism, ultramodernism or neotraditionalism, in the experimental or in the archaic, in a desire that exceeds the body or in the longing for boredom.   Beauty is the encounter between the saint and the hedonist, the prostitute and the Buddha: a truth that, like staring into the face of Medusa, petrifies the gaze into a contemplation of nothingness.  We value beauty that can be discerned in the fragmentary and the sacred, the dysfunctional and the erotic, the derelict and the obsessive… 

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my 2017 WIOX Radio conversation with transcendent poet Rosaly DeMaios Roffman on poetry’s power to “fix, change and heal things real life cannot.”

 Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, internationally acclaimed poet and writer, is Professor Emerita at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where she taught creative writing, myth and literature, Japanese and Chinese Literature in Translation and founded the IUP Center for the Study of Myth and Folklore in the 1970’s.  In 2002, Roffman established the Rossaly DeMaios Roffman Collection Center for the Study of Myth and Folklore, which grew into the IUP Dessy-Roffman Myth Collaborative, formally dedicated on April 24th, 2021 (https://www.iup.edu/news-item.aspx?id=294439&blogid=6121).  

 Among her myriad accomplishments, Roffman co-edited the prize-winning LIFE ON THE LINE, and is the author of Going To Bed Whole, TOTTERING PALACES, THE APPROXIMATE MESSAGE and, IN THE FALL OF A SPARROW. Her latest book I WANT TO THANK MY EYES was published by Tebot-Bach in 2012. As the recipient of a distinguished faculty award in the arts, Roffman was guest poet on the BBC program “Writer from Abroad.” Roffman collaborated extensively with other writers, artists and composers and has facilitated Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop since 2099.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my May llth, 2021 

WIOX Radio conversation with the original and exuberant poet Roberta Gould on her latest collection Woven Lightning (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and other works.  

 “The tension between the lyrical and the practical, the soaring and the quotidian give her poetry its arresting and archetypical energy.  A procession of gongs and silences, powerful and affecting.  A poet to the bone.  – Stanley Nelson, winner of the Thomas Wolfe Poetry Award.

  “Roberta Gould is a poet who brings all her senses to her work …the focus is beautifully and lovingly on the familiar…poems that are full of spirit and inventiveness.”  

--Donald Lev

 Planet Poet’s Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce will also join the show this month to talk about Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky and spirituality in art and poetry.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my April 13th, 2021 

WIOX Radio conversation with poet, essayist, novelist and blithe spirit Sparrow on his new book Small Happiness & Other Epiphanies.  Sparrow urges us to “dance your way to health” among other spiritually whimsical (or whimsically spiritual) suggestions for better living. Hear Sparrow’s original musical offering “Bungalow Bop” performed by Sparrow (words, flute/guitar) and Robert Burke Warren (music, vocals/guitar).

 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. 

 Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet’s Poet-At-Large, also joins the conversation with a fascinating segment on the art of collage in jazz, art and poetry.

LISTEN  to Planet Poet-Words in Space for my conversation with poet Maxima Kahn on her  intriguing and deeply felt debut poetry collection Fierce Aria (Finishing Line Press, 2020). 

 “I have learned to walk into the valley of my fears and losses,” writes Maxima Kahn, and the evidence of what she has learned is all over these amazing poems. Fierce Aria is a book with a post-Wallace Stevens mission: to coax the still perfection of ideas out of the abstract realm, so they can take shape in the messy wilderness of reality. Distinctive, honed, vulnerable, musical, courageous, honest, Maxima Kahn’s poems are fully ripened, fully considered—each one ready to drop richly into the hand like a subtly contoured fruit.  Taste them.

–Annie Finch, author of Spells: New and Selected Poems

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my 20016 WIOX Radio conversation with renowned, award-winning poet, Arthur Vogelsang.  Vogelsang is the author of seven books of poetry, including Twentieth Century Women and Cities and Towns, which received the Juniper Prize. His work has been included in numerous anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, The Pushchart Prize, The New Breadloaf Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and American Hybrid. Arthur was coeditor of the Norton anthology The Body Electric: America’s Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. He is the recipient of a California Arts Council fellowship and three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry. Arthur’s newest book, Orbit was published by University of Pittsburgh Press.

 "Part vaudevillian, part shaman, Arthur Vogelsang celebrates the tenacious hopes of the hopeless and repeats aloud the snarling prayers of the lost. Voice-driven and maximal, each its own tonal high-wire act, Arthur Vogelsang's poems sear the imagination while either touching or ripping out the reader's heart." - David St. John

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my January, 2021 WIOX Radio conversation with Bruce Weber to discuss his life as a poet, poetry event organizer and art historian, and to delve into his new book There Are Too Many Words In My House recently published by Rogue Scholars Press.

 Bruce Weber is the author of five previously published books of poetry: “These Poems are Not Pretty” (Miami: Palmetto Press, 1992), “How the Poem Died” (New York: Linear Arts, 1998), “Poetic Justice” (New York: Ikon Press, 2004), “The First Time I Had Sex with T. S. Eliot” (New York: Venom Press, 2004), and “The Break-up of My First Marriage” (Rogue Scholars Press, 2009). 

Bruce’s work has appeared in numerous magazines, as well as in several anthologies, including “Up is Up, But So Is Down: Downtown Writings, 1978- 1992” (New York: New York University, 2006), “Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers” (New Paltz, New York: Codhill Press, 2007), and “The Unbearables Big Book of Sex” (Autonomedia, 2010). He has performed regularly in the Tri-State area, both alone and for many years with his former performance group, Bruce Weber’s No Chance Ensemble, which produced the CD, “Let’s Dine Like Jack Johnson Tonight” (http://members.aol/com/ncensemble). 

A former museum curator and director of research and exhibitions for a major gallery in New York, he has organized many exhibitions and authored numerous publications on American art. Currently Bruce is lecturing, writing and curating exhibitions revolving around the historic Woodstock art colony. 

For twenty-five years, Bruce produced the Alternative New Year’s Day Spoken Word / Performance Extravaganza in New York City. Bruce moved with his wife, the artist and writer Joanne Pagano Weber, to Saugerties in 2018. This January 1st marked the second Hudson Valley New Year's Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza . The first was held at the Beverly Lounge in Kingston, N.Y.  and he hopes to return there next January 1st, This year because of the pandemic, Bruce organized Perfect Pitch -a live stream that took place New Year’s Day with curators including Teresa Costa, Phillip Levine, Sam Truitt and Mikhail Horowitz, and David Schell a Green Kill Performance Space in Kingston, which featured 36 writers and musicians from the Hudson Valley area, each performing from 6 to 8 minutes, that was broadcast on You Tube:  Perfect Pitch  

 Yours in Radio, Sharon

 Planet Poet – Words in Space:  A WIOX Community Radio Production 
Planet Poet theme music by Robert Cucinotta 

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my 2020 WIOX Radio conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon.  Hear his views on poetry, teaching, and on the process and challenges of producing last year’s Sharon Springs Poetry Festival (the Festival’s fourth year) virtually during Covid.  Please note that the Festival was upcoming when this show was initially broadcast in October. A great highlight of the show:  Hear Paul Muldoon read his poem, “The Bannisters” from his 2020 poetry collection Frolic and Detour.

 Paul Muldoon is the author of 14 major collections of poetry, innumerable smaller collections, works of criticism, opera libretti, books for children, song lyrics, radio and television drama.  His poetry has been translated into twenty languages.

 The Times Literary Supplement has described Paul Muldoon as “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War”.  Roger Rosenblatt, writing in The New York Times Book Review, described Paul Muldoon as “one of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems – word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy.  And angry.  Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury.”

 Also featured: Planet Poet’s Poet-At-Large, Pamela Manché Pearce and composer Robert Cucinotta’ s recent work - “Wagner Night at Brighton Beach.”

            Yours in Radio, Sharon

Planet Poet – Words in Space:
A WIOX Community Radio Production 

Planet Poet theme music by Robert Cucinotta 

LISTEN to my 2020 WIOX Radio conversation with poet and award-winning artist Anique Sara Taylor on her splendidly lyric debut poetry collection, Where Space Bends (Finishing Line Press, 2020).