Twas the end of December and feeling like hell
Covid and flu, do these things ring a bell?
Pre-emptions and scrambling to get the work done
The rain and the snow and the where-is-the-sun?
Inspiration was meager, the cupboard was bare
There was nothing to say, I had nothing to share
I was feeling the blues, and I have to confess
I was stuck for a piece for the next Arts Express...
Find out how it turns out in our year-end Arts Express thank-you poem, as broadcast today on the Arts Express radio show heard on WBAI-FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to listen!
Kenneth Patchen’s poetry is a bullet right between the eyes.
Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear Mary Murphy and me read a selection of poems by Kenneth Patchen, as broadcast today on the Arts Express radio program on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the country.
Get your free subscription to the Arts Express Magazine, the companion magazine to Arts Express Radio, by sending an email with the word “subscribe” in the subject line to:
For Halloween, an original update of an old-time radio show, we call 2121: A Tale of the Near Future.
In a world where efficiency must be maximized, are poets and artists non-essential workers to be imprisoned and exterminated?
Featuring Mary Murphy as Caroline, Rick Tuman as the Guard, Julius Hollingsworth as the General Manager, and myself as James T. Randall. With music from Kojiro Miura.
Click the triangle or mp3 link above to hear the story, as broadcast today on Arts Express on WBAI FM NYC, and Pacifica stations across the country.
Today we’ll be celebrating the work of much-loved poet Denise Levertov, who published her poems over a span of 40 years and influenced generations of British and American poets.
Levertov has said that “I knew before I was ten that I was an artist-person and I had a destiny.”
Click the triangle or mp3 link above to hear the segment I produced, with the poems read by Mary Murphy, broadcast today on Arts Express on WBAI and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
I first heard poet Paul Hostovsky reading in a poetry series out of Boston called Rozzie Reads. His poems immediately struck me as funny, closely observed crafted stories, the kind you come home and tell your intimate other about.
Paul’s work for the past decades situates him in a unique position with regard to language: Hostovsky is a sign language interpreter and a Braille instructor who has been a recipient of an award from the American Association of the DeafBlind “for being a devoted friend and ambassador by promoting the interests and well-being of DeafBlind Americans.”
Click on the triangle or the mp3 link above to hear the poems as broadcast yesterday on the Arts Express radio program on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica stations across the nation.
I was happy to become acquainted recently with Toronto-based writer Molly Peacock and to help produce a selection of her poems for broadcast, voiced by the always wonderful Mary Murphy.
Whether Molly is writing as a poet, biographer, essayist or novelist, we love how her multi-genre literary work is always infused with both playfulness and rigor.
Molly’s latest poetry collections are The Analyst: Poems andCornucopia: New and Selected Poemspublished by W.W Norton and Company. She is a former President of the Poetry Society of America and Poet-in-Residence at the American Poets’ corner. She’s also the co-founder of Poetry In Motion on New York’s subways and buses and the founder of the series The Best Canadian Poetry.
Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear a selection of Molly’s poetry as broadcast today on the Arts Express radio program on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
You’ll never hear a Shakespearean sonnet again in the same way. Folk singer Steve Earle makes a good case for Shakespeare being the Bob Dylan of his era—or vice versa.
I was happy to voice these poems of poet Connie Norgren on the Arts Express program. Click on the triangle to hear the poems as broadcast today on WBAI NY and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
It’s August and that’s the month poet Charles Bukowski was born in 1920. With over 5000 poems and six novels and hundreds of short stories to his name, he’s become a kind of cult figure over the last decades. While his writings have stamped him with the indelible persona of an alcoholic anti-social misanthropic and misogynistic git, yet there’s also a gentler humanness in Bukowski.
He died at the age of 74. On his gravestone the epitaph reads, “Don’t Try.”
Come with us now as we go out to our favorite virtual watering hole, knock down a couple of drinks, and listen to a performance of some of Bukowski’s poems as broadcast today on Arts Express radio on Pacifica stations across the nation.
Click on the grey triangle or mp3 link above to listen.
This month we celebrate the birthday of Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, the winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature, born July 2, 1923. Her experience of the German occupation of Poland during WWII was the backdrop to some of her most famous poems, but she was also a keen observer of everyday domestic life as well.
I recently had the pleasure of performing a selection of her poems along with Mary Murphy for the Arts Express radio program. All of the poems are from Szymborska’s recently published collection of works called MAP.
Click on the triangle or mp3 link above in order to hear the poems as broadcast today on Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
Many thanks for permission to publicly broadcast the poems granted by the Wisława Symborkska Foundation and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishers, the publishers of MAP, excellently translated by Clare Cavanagh and Staislav Baranczak.
I first encountered Indiana poet/musician Peter Davis’s work only a few months ago, but his laconic slacker sensibility, quirky playful sense of humor and self-deprecation immediately appealed to me.
His poems start off ordinarily enough, and then often veer into strange territory, defying expectation. Underlying much of it, the poems are about self-justification and what we say to ourselves and others in order to get us out of the existential jam that we have no idea what we’re doing, even as we proceed with bluff assurance.
Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear my reading of some of Peter Davis’s poems as broadcast today on the Arts Express radio program on WBAI NY, WBAI.org, and Pacifica affiliates across the country.
Here’s a little piece I put together that was broadcast today on WBAI radio’s Arts Express program and on Pacifica affiliates across the country. Just a fun segment about the current craziness, along with some appropriate music for the time.
And here we are with a preview of our third free issue of the Arts Express Newsletter, the jam-packed, super-duper April Issue.
As always, think of the Arts Express newsletter as a print extension of the conversation started on our global radio arts magazine, Arts Express, heard on WBAI 99.5 FM in NYC, WBAI.org, and Pacifica affiliates across the country, in Paris, Beijing, and Berlin.
Every month, it’s full color pages of Arts Express goodness, filled with fascinating interviews, reviews, scripts of our radio drama, photo features, gossip, film, theatre, book recommendations and more.
Here’s a preview of what’s in our April issue, which if you subscribe (just send an email to ArtsExpressList@gmail.com andput Subscribe in the subject line) , you will receive for free the first week in April and every month thereafter:
*Prairie Miller’s interview with South African writer and anti-apartheid activist Tim Jenkin, who talks about his film Escape From Pretoria, which details his escape from Pretoria Maximum Security Prison, and his work setting up a communication system for the imprisoned Nelson Mandela.
*A joyful portfolio of photographs of the world’s largest flower parade held every year in Zundert, Netherlands, the birthplace of Vincent Van Gogh.
* Red Vienna: An Arts Express Extra: Culture critic Dennis Broe writes about the city of Vienna in the 1920s, when a socialist city government planned and built public housing and public facilities throughout the city, which to this day makes Vienna one of the most livable cities in Europe.
* The poetry of Trinidad and Tobagoan poet Camryn Bruno, also known as “Queen Bee,” from her book Queen Bee Cavity.
*And Announcing the Arts Express Community Call-in. Would you like to join your fellow listeners in a telephone conversation about culture in a time of pandemic? Write us at artsexpresslist@gmail.com and we’ll give you more details!
*Plus: The Guest List–our recent and upcoming guests; The Back Room–news and gossip about WBAI and the Arts Express crew; and information about exclusive giveaways, and how to win an opportunity to broadcast your own work on the air.
It’s all in the new free Arts Express Newsletter.
If you’re not yet subscribed, you can get your free pdf copy every month to your email address, by sending an email to ArtsExpressList@gmail.com and put Subscribe in the subject line. We’ll do the rest!
And don’t miss our next radio show, Tuesday 3/31 at 4am NYC time, which you can hear on WBAI.org or WBAI 99.5FM NYC., featuring:
Film: Mrs. America – Actress Margo Martindale discusses playing Bella Abzug in this upcoming feminist mini-series
TV: Asian American actress Keiko Agena on Prodigal Son, Gilmore Girls, Better Call Saul
Report From The Front: Europe And The Coronavirus. Arts Express Paris correspondent Professor Dennis Broe’s news and analysis from the European pandemic epicenter. And what all of this may have to do with austerity and automation; Shakespeare, the plague, King Lear and Macbeth; and Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal – where the poor are served up as a source of nutrition and fine dining.
Plus…Pandemic radio drama, Syrian comic pandemic satire in the No Laughing Matter Comedy Corner episode – and Bernie Sanders in performance.
(The latest pandemic has caused an outbreak of poetical inspiration in me.)
***
There’s nothing to fret about, see?
Even though treatment won’t be for free
Now ladies and gents,
I give you Mike Pence
Whoops, we just lost our latest VP
***
Corona is better as beer,
There’s nothing from that I would fear.
A bottle or two–
We laid up a few–
Will brighten the rest of the year
***
The Plague isn’t new in the mix
In London in Sixteen-Oh-Six,
They shuttered the plays
For hundreds of days
For Lear and for Hamlet, no tix!
***
Please pardon the lace and damask
And the heavy gauge armor–don’t ask
The pads and the plugs
Are all for the bugs
And excuse, please, the Donald Trump mask
Our newest Arts Express contributor, KeShaun Luckie, put together this audio segment highlighting the wonderful poems of Camryn “Queen Bee” Bruno, performed by the author. It was a pleasure to have two such talented artists over here recording.
You can listen to Queen Bee’s reading, as broadcast today on Arts Express on WBAI 99.5 FM NYC, by clicking on the triangle above.
