The oaks have
dropped more acorns
this year than anyone
can remember. It’s
like walking on ball
bearings, except
sometimes they pop:
a cap comes off
& one blank face
gains a split. It
must be lonely
having the only
mouth. Do you take
a breath? Do you
invent eating?
Do you look for
another broken soul
& improvise some
kind of minimal
kiss? But wait
a while: soon
everyone will awake
& turn & stick
a yellow tongue
into the earth.
Woodrat Podcast 22: Julia Martin on Bread for the Head
Julia Martin has been a witty and erudite presence in my corner of the blogosphere for several years now, first simply as a commenter on other people’s blogs and eventually at a site of her own, Clumps and Voids. But I wanted to talk to her about her day job as executive director of Bread for the Head, whose mission is to provide books to low-income children in the Chicago area and try to convert them into life-long readers. This is Banned Books Week in the United States as well as National Literacy Month, but outright banning isn’t the only thing keeping books out of the hands of children, and all too often literacy programs fail to inculcate a love of reading. Bread for the Head, which Julia founded five years ago, takes the radical position that, as their mission states, “pleasure reading is no indulgence, but a necessity.”
If you don’t have time to listen to the podcast right away, at the end of it, Julia asks listeners to share the titles of their own favorite books for children (which don’t have to be children’s books per se). Please use the comments below, or contact Julia directly: juliaannmartin at gmail dot com. And of course if you live in the Chicago area, Bread for the Head can always use more volunteers.
Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes
Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)
Woodrat Podcast 21: Dylan Tweney
Dylan Tweney is the editor and publisher of tinywords, which has been serving small poems daily since 2000. The Haiku Society of America has recognized it as the “largest-circulation journal of haiku in English.” Dylan is also a senior editor at Wired, in charge of gadget news, new product reviews, and other ultra-geeky topics. The motto at the top his website reads, “If you’re bored, you’re not paying attention.” I spoke to him last month by phone, and got him talking about everything from how he handles a large volume of submissions on a part-time basis, to what he learned from studying poetry with Louise Glück, to why he decided to live-tweet a Wagner opera.
Here are a few of Dylan’s favorite haiku and micropoems from the past ten years of tinywords.
- the junkyard crane… [haiku]
- Another weekend over… [one-line poem]
- gnarled banksias… [tanka]
- hail storm… [haiku that spawned a 316-poem renga in the comments]
- prairie sunset… [haiku]
- A boy swims alone… [haiku]
- cherry-petal shells… [haiku]
- cardiogram… [haiku]
Tinywords is currently accepting submissions (through September 30) for the next issue, on cities and urban life. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow the magazine: @tinywords as well as Dylan himself: @Dylan20.
Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes
Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)
Woodrat Podcast 20: American Quran
The internet is great, especially since the advent of modern search engines, but what if you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it? Then you need either a revelation from God or a shortwave radio. You never know what you might stumble upon late at night on an old radio! This appears to be a reading from Ahmed Ali’s translation of the Quran, Sura 6, “The Cattle.” There are a few words missing toward the end, presumably from problems in the recording or the transmission, but otherwise it seems to be a complete reading, delivered in one take.
Here are some links to help contextualize things:
- American Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong? (Laurie Goodstein, The New York Times)
- Islam for Americans (Khadija Anderson, qarrtsiluni)
- “You’ve Never Met a Muslim”: Four New Yorkers on what it means to be a Muslim now (Zeba Iqbal, Ameena Meer, Haroon Moghul and Hussein Rashid, Religion Dispatches)
- An American Tune (Teju Cole, Via Negativa guest post)
- Opposition to ‘mosque’ directly linked to anti-Islam sentiment, poll shows (Greg Sargent, The Washington Post)
- If the ‘Mosque’ Isn’t Built, This is No Longer America (Michael Moore)
Woodrat Podcast 19: Lorianne DiSabato
Lorianne DiSabato is a writer, photographer, naturalist, college instructor, and Zen teacher who’s been blogging at Hoarded Ordinaries for nearly seven years. We’ve been friends for almost that long, and first met in person in March 2005, but I realized there were still some questions I’d never asked her. I got her talking about how she got into nature, how or whether she would categorize Hoarded Ordinaries, journaling versus blogging, getting married at the zoo, nature writing as a pilgrimage, the myth of the literary hermit, blogging and Buddhism, the danger of Zen books, and more.
Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)
Woodrat Podcast 18: Clayton Michaels
At qarrtsiluni, Beth and I are really excited by this year’s winner of our poetry chapbook contest: Watermark by Clayton T. Michaels, which we just launched on Monday in dual print and online versions. As part of the latter, we put together a audiobook podcast of the author reading his poems, for which he also composed and performed an original guitar theme, but I thought it would be fun in addition to record a conversation with Clayton and find out where all this great poetry is coming from. So I called him up last Saturday, and peppered him with questions about writing poetry and music, teaching, heavy metal, comic books, and more.
Links
- Clayton’s blog
- Watermark online
- Two essays by Richard Hugo from The Triggering Town: Essays and Lectures on Poetry and Writing
- “A Story About the Body” by Robert Hass (in Robert Pinsky’s “Poet’s choice” column)
- Stan Brakhage (Wikipedia)
- Brakhage’s Mothlight on YouTube
- Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey
- David Dodd Lee’s blog
Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)
Woodrat Podcast 17: Brent Goodman
I called up poet Brent Goodman (website/blog) in the north woods of Wisconsin and got him talking about how he ended up there; whether his day job as a copy writer for a pet supply company affects his creative writing; how blogging helped him put his first book together; his heart attack last year and how that’s effected his life and outlook; how he met his partner; what it’s like living in the boondocks as a gay man; writing poems about television; and what writers inspire him. Poems read: “Directions to My House,” “Armless Iraqi Boy Bears No Grudges for U.S. Bombing,” “The Ground Left Me,” “Man Smashes 29 Televisions at Georgia Walmart,” and “5 Poets Who Changed My Life (Postcards from Intersections).”
Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)
Woodrat Podcast 16: Alison Kent on sketching, birding, and caring for oiled wildlife
I called up my long-time blogging friend Alison Kent out in Davis, California yesterday. After some reminiscing about the late, lamented Ecotone Wiki, we got into a conversation about nature blogging, sketching and birdwatching, “green” birding, caring for oiled wildlife and balancing wildlife rehabilitation with conservation needs, Alison’s assessment of preparations for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and where the blame for the spill lies, among other things.
Links:
Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)
Woodrat Podcast 15: Howie Good on poetry and journalism
A conversation with poet and professor of journalism Howie Good. Topics and poems include: “Could Be Worse,” real life as a seedbed for poems, “Schoolyard Blues,” “Loops,” and “Pedagogy of the Possessed” (all included in Lovesick), the decline of newspapers, blogging as journalism, professionalism and ethics among citizen journalists, how to get the truth out and whether knowledge of the truth is enough to catalyze action, surrealism as a more accurate reflection of contemporary life, compiling and submitting poetry chapbooks, submitting to online versus paper journals, the value of books, “There’s No Money in Poetry, Someone Said,” and Dying Words.
Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)
Woodrat Podcast 14: Susan Elbe
Topics include: the AWP 2010 conference; doing web work for a living instead of teaching; poetry writing as a practice; solitude and introversion; how Eden in the Rearview Mirror came together; writing about light and darkness; being a reader and writer in a working-class family; growing up in Chicago in the 1950s.
Poems read: “Eden in the Rearview Mirror,” “Order Lepidoptera,” “Out of the Splitberry Dark,” “Chicago Union Stockyards Circa 1957,” “Sunflowers.”
Links:
- Susan’s website
- Eden in the Rearview Mirror
- The Health issue of qarrtsiluni, edited by Susan Elbe and Kelly Madigan Erlandson
- Susan’s poems online
Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)