GSP Announces Publication of William Seaton's Planetary Motions

 

(Freeport, NY) Giant Steps Press is pleased to announce the publication

of Planetary Motions, a new book of poetry from Hudson Valley writer William Seaton. The volume includes lyrics written since the author’s last collection Spoor of Desire as well as Seaton’s sound poems, which he calls “adult nursery rhymes,” and translations from German, Greek, Latin, and French. In the foreword Seaton describes his works as “snapshots of consciousness reflecting glints of shattered truth which I wave in the dark like a blessedly naïve child with a sparkler.” 

In advance reviews Kirpal Gordon praised “the music these poems make and the momentum they create” with a “just-so-ness of phrase and sound.”  Steve Hirsch said Seaton reveals “new heart-treasure and insight into who we are.”  For Janet Hamill “he establishes an elegant pattern with this kaleidoscope of words.” 

Seaton has long been active in the Hudson Valley poetry scene.  He ran the Poetry on the Loose Reading/Performance Series, co-founded the Northeast Poetry Center and taught in its College of Poetry, and worked with the Seligmann Center for the Arts, producing numerous artistic and scholarly events including the Surreal Cabarets of performance art.  He maintains a “largely literary” blog at williamseaton.blogspot.com.

The book is available from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MS5KNJB/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=seaton+planetary+motions&s=books&sr=1-1.  

Founded in 2011, Giant Steps is a small New York City press named in tribute to the classic John Coltrane album, specializing in publishing books on jazz and jazz-influenced poets. 

"Place de l'Horloge, Avignon" by William Seaton

photo by Patricia Seaton

Place de l'Horloge, Avignon

Beneath the fourteenth century Gothic clock

where animated figures strike the hour

the double-decked old carousel turns round.

Its horses' riders grin and laugh and wave.

Some ride above the others, some below,

some sit on steeds and some on frogs and some

on swans or pigs or ornamented thrones.

And all around are lovely painted scenes

of heroes, quiet ponds and mountain heights

that -- were they not so fine -- could all be real.

The riders speed along and go nowhere.

(Their motion by itself is motive too.)

Each face betrays a soul absorbed in what

is happening just then. This must be wise.

But when the music stops -- it always is

too soon -- the children know the jig is up.

They then descend a few more minutes old.

They've passed the time and I’ve done nothing more.

William Seaton, from his forthcoming collection, Planetary Motions, Giant Steps Press

Ralph La Charity's LITANIES SAID HANDELY Reviewed by Kirpal Gordon

Listeners and lovers of the open mic, ancient-to-the-future scribes of the oral-aural, laya yogis and lyrical-miracle technicians of the sacred, cross-country Whitmaniacs of every stripe and Democratic Vista impulse will delight in journeyman Ralph La Charity's latest from Dos Madres Press in Loveland, OH, ($20.00 at www.dosmadres.com): Litanies Said Handedly: poetry, collage, & performance.

The tongue-in-cheek title is the key that opens this delightful book. Consider the words: Litanies (Middle English) are simultaneously “petitions for use in church services or processions, usually recited by the clergy and responded to in a recurring formula by the people” AND “tedious recitals or repetitive series”---that is to say that both meanings are jokes. The only church he gets remotely close to, or reminds one of, is the Church to John Coltrane. As for tedium, even as he delivers his ghost-driven/rust-belted Homeric tales, Orphic songs in hell and street-wise celebrations of signifyin’ monkeys, Frankie-&-Johnny lovers, neo-Irish aborigines and bar room Crazy Janes, one is at the edge of one’s seat.  This is oral story telling at its best. As for Said Handedly: beware! Even reading the poetry silently causes the ear to want to hear these sounds aloud, but one must view La Charity actually kicking it live (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-xSNw8N4ZI&feature=youtu.be) to realize that his presentation of his work, a combo of Joe Cocker spasmodics meeting Robert Bly’s arm-wave scansions, is indeed said with his left hand in full metric swing and his voice a trained instrument of multiple meanings and dial-a-dialect possibilities!

Check his opening shot, “he was a dandy mon.” On the page (p. 81 in the book) the language is a tad spooky and the repetition of “a dead man walking” a bit grim, but to hear him rock it aloud is to experience real fright that won’t quit. Note that his voice jumps into song and then returns to speech in a performance matched by his body’s full participation. This reviewer heard the spoken version first, and although a reader may think that the 25 minutes of youtube is all one needs (BTW: he recites entirely/tirelessly from memory!), I have taken great delight in finally seeing his spoken word in print. Moreover, the twelve collages, multiple front matter dope, and his appendices on the art of oral poesie, really contextualize his Algren-esque quests.

Regarding this art form, in “Prefatory notations,” he calls it “an obscure-side apprenticeship, akin to learning pick-pocketry; a dark economy guild of seers & sounders” and sees himself as “a practitioner of call/caul poetics, a self-embodied variorum; a calling forth from within fused with a calling out of the surround, this transactional dynamic yielding a utility of rare gas bases for actualizing the Body Poetique; a Harm’s Way Yoga of public poet alchemizing.” He sees poetry as “the shapeliness of form worn as sound cloak” and calls the book “an assemblage of Ever-Dance, the shards captured mid-melt as scored scourings meant for the tongue-trigger emptying forth of an early dog days evening.” In “Interrupted,” he remarks that “Makars commune with the dead & artists / who’ve brought back are who’ve / brought back from the Other side.”

This graybeard big daddy from Cincinnatti encants, enchants and takes the kind of chances that an improvising be-bopper might take with the chord changes---or that, as the nuns would say back in the day when we danced too closely at the parish dance---“leave room for the Holy Ghost.” His dedication reads, “…These poetics descend in a rush, tripping off the tongue, resonant to the blind who will, unaccompanied, sing.” He's the real deal.

Bill Bradd's CONTINENT OF GHOSTS Reviewed by Kirpal Gordon

Bill Bradd offers us a portal into a multi-dimensional universe via this book of poems and prose poems. Using Pangea for his metaphor of the undivided self at birth and the death of his mother (when he was two and of whom he has no memory) as our point of departure, we enter “the Continent of Ghosts, where all the people you used to know reside now.” Wearing the mask of the Trojan soldier Aeneas---“stitcher of songs, a wandering performer from occasion to / occasion, hoping for payment of some kind, a room or a meal”---Bradd weaves and re-weaves tales of ancient Greece alongside Biblical events, Native American lore and moments torn from his own life. In addition, the narrator is shadowed by Belial, envoy of Satan, and the many surprise shifts in voice and diction add an element of the kaleidoscopic to this already shape-shifting, interconnecting experience.

For more, visit wildoceanpress.com

                                                                                            

Bending to Beauty: An Interview with Dian Zirilli-Mares

Kirpal Gordon: Congratulations on the publication of your first book of poetry, Bending to Beauty. As your neighbor on Burton Street, I remember how back in your teenage years you were already writing verse, taking photographs and winning awards at Bishop Reilly’s Robert Frost contest. So, after retiring from a life as a reading teacher and elementary school administrator, what inspired you to write a book of free verse at this point of your life?

Dian Zirilli-Mares: I began writing this book at the prompting of my sons, Justin and Jared. These last few years, as we watch their ninety-four year old grandfather become forgetful, we began to realize how precious and ephemeral the past truly is. We regret questions that have to go unasked now; my dad no longer remembers the answers. It became another cautionary tale. The boys knew I have been writing poetry since I was a young girl and urged me to create a book that would preserve a piece of my life for them to cherish when I---or my memory---was gone.

Kirpal Gordon: Justin and Jared are both in the arts, yes? Your mom was something of a poet, too, no? I remember both your mom and dad as open-minded people who in the early Seventies had learned how to meditate. Your husband Ray is quite the rock ‘n’ roll musician. You have been around literature and music your whole life. You mention all five of these people in your dedication.

Dian Zirilli-Mares: My dedication is to my beloved five. My son Justin is a published author, aspiring television writer, and entertainment journalist. Jared is a New York-based actor and singer who has worked on Broadway as well as in television and film. My mom was a voracious reader who dabbled in writing herself, long before it was fashionable to self-publish. She and my father were always ahead of their time. At my father's urging, they were among the first trained in Transcendental Meditation by its founder, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. True to his garage band roots, Ray began singing and playing again in a rock 'n' roll band six years ago. But from the moment we began dating fifteen years ago, I was serenaded often, much to the delight of my inner teenager. Literature and music have been my constant backdrop. I can't imagine my life without them.

Kirpal Gordon: Why did you title the book Bending to Beauty?

Dian Zirilli-Mares: A few years ago, I became addicted to silver fabrication. The role of the  torch in the ultimate beauty of a piece fascinated me. In the jeweler's world, fire doesn't destroy. The flame is necessary for the smoothing, shaping, and building of silver jewelry. As I examined my life and wrote my poems, it became clear to me how perfect a metaphor the flaming torch would be. Life's "fiery strokes" may bring pain, but they also forge strength---and strength can bring the possibility of joy again. I have been blessed, no matter the pain or loss in my life, to always be able to "bend to beauty."

Kirpal Gordon: What was your writing process like for these thirty-eight poems?

Dian Zirilli-Mares: Athough I have written many poems over the last fifty years, they mostly burst out of me onto the page. There was no process involved at all. Whenever I felt something intensely, there was a good chance it would eventually find its voice in a poem. I knew that this approach to a book would never do if I wanted to finish it in my lifetime. On the other hand, the sheer act of sitting all day and "waiting for lightning to strike" was daunting. But it was all I could think of doing; I had never tried to discipline my creativity before. It wasn't going well and I felt like a college student writing a term paper. I was always finding "really important" phone calls to make, bills to pay, and laundry to do instead of courting my muse. Happily, I confessed my growing hatred of my writing prison, to my son, Justin, who is a published writer himself. He suggested I begin my early morning writing with a timer set for just 10 minutes. During that time I was to write about anything that came to mind. I should not even attempt to write a poem. When the timer went off, I would be free to move on to something less excruciating. Unless, of course, I was happily writing. Every week I was to add 10 minutes to my timer. Before  long I was up to a half an hour and I didn't want to stop writing. Many days I didn't. My daily musings often contained seeds that eventually grew into strong poems. Some of them surprised me. Although first drafts poured out of me quickly, it took many, many revisions and edits to chisel each poem to where it needed to be. But the greatest gift of these last two years is that when I had to change hats and proof formatted first runs and final files, I realized how much I missed writing poems. Professional writers tell me this is what happens. That maw of silence and lack of creativity eventually seduce you back to the torturous and glorious writer's chair.  And mine is calling as we speak.

Kirpal Gordon: In the book’s epigram, you quote Anne Lamott: All I have to offer as a writer is my version of life. Every single thing that has happened to me is mine…. If people wanted me to write more warmly about them, they should have behaved better. Is this a word to the wise or just good fun?

Dian Zirilli-Mares: A word to the wise.

Kirpal Gordon: Your book is broken down into four sections. The first, "Hallowed Places," is rich with memory.

Dian Zirilli-Mares: "Hallowed Places" holds memoir poems.  As I grow older, and lose those I love, these sharp childhood memories become dearer still. The poems in this section capture the past, and some of the people and the times that are precious to me. 

Kirpal Gordon: Marona mia, bella! These lines are also incantatory and become universal when they invoke the sights, smells, joys, mysteries, loves and uncertainties of a young girl: Halloween’s autumn alchemy in Beechurst; your dad playing Italian love songs on his tape recorder; Aunt Rose’s sweet tooth; laying under the balsam Christmas tree; watching wrestling on TV with your grandma on your first sleep-over; your mom praying in the living room. We share the innocence of childhood meeting the wonders and terrors of this world. Perhaps “Waiting for Steve,“ in all its rhythms of puberty and Godot-like comedy, reveals this quality best:

In the heat of summer dusk,

we sit on the curb in front of our house

waiting for the boys to come out.

Scraps of conversation billow up between us,

settle down again,

like brightly colored flags in a sudden August breeze.

Staring straight ahead, eyes never meeting, we tell secrets.

When I grow up I want to be a torch singer. Or a cloistered nun.

You whisper a dream to dance in a cage

in those white go-go boots from Thom McAnn’s.

Jump up to twirl on one ice blue thong.

Sit down beside me again.

We float a leaf and a Wrigley’s wrapper

down the car wash stream at our feet.

Wonder – how much longer till Steve comes,

ringing his bells into the fireflied night.

We hope the boys will come out then.

Pat our damp pixie bangs in place.

What a tribute to an ice cream man! What a tribute to teenhood!

Dian Zirilli-Mares:  I loved going back to the memories of Burton Street and my childhood. I craved the feeling of peace they brought me.  These memories remain an antidote to the darkness and fear I feel as I grow older and watch the world change.

Kirpal Gordon: "No Surprises," the book‘s second section, is an abrupt shift.

Dian Zirill-Mares: In "No Surprises" the poems highlight the everyday wisdom and matter-of-fact learnings of a life fully lived. From the stance of my later years, my poems illuminate what I now see as obvious truths about people, life, and living.

Kirpal Gordon: Not only has the eye of experience replaced the eye of innocence, but the tone of these poems is reflective, rather than evocative. From the last line of your last poem in “Hallowed Places---“Welcome her home,“ a rembrance of your deceased mom---comes “The Battlefield“‘s eight lines:

Day 29 of meditation

and I cannot stanch the rage.

Past betrayals and pains are fresh, bleeding again,

like wounds roughly stripped of their protective gauze.

I survey the littered terrain, learn there are no surprises.

What I do not honor,

what I tamp down and swallow,

does not die.

Dian Zirilli-Mares: The hard work of this later part of my life seems to be to speak my truth no matter the cost.  I've spent too many years framing and reframing the disloyalties of  people I trusted in order to carry on. My poem reflects what I have learned about how effective that is in the long run. It is a Pyrrhic victory.

Kirpal Gordon: Throughout this section, but especially in “The Choice,“ your Rumi-like reflections on motherhood are in such sharp contrast to daughterhood and maidenhood in “Hallowed Places.“ In "Fiery Strokes" you also have some exceptionally strong work. Again, the tone of these poems shift as well. These poems summon the courage hard won of a lifetime learner. Not only do they skillfully meditate on the art of aging, but they read like an Ars Poetica. Like you say: “Driven to gnaw at my life, I cut to the quick. / The tenderest meat is close to the bone.”

Dian Zirilli-Mares: "Fiery Strokes" contains poems of different kinds of loss and pain. But, again, the title poem "Bending to Beauty" reminds that suffering endured can bring strength and growth. Although the poems show no happily-ever-after, the reader can assume the story has not ended.

Kirpal Gordon: I quote in full your title poem:

Every loss I survive marks me.

Just as the torch takes solder and smooths it to an unbroken stream,

I am made stronger with each fiery stroke.

If you work silver to follow your will too long,

it resists and hardens, soon becoming unmovable,

no longer able to bend to beauty.

Only the brush of flame softens, makes it malleable again.

Yet silver holds the memory of all it has withstood.

In the heat and light of the burning torch, it forgives everything,

and everything becomes possible, once more.

Your metaphor of heat and alchemy reminds me so much of India’s yoga poets singing of tapas (inner heat) uncoiling the kundalini.

Dian Zirilli-Mares: I love that!  Although I have yet to read the yoga poets, I am a lover of Kundalini yoga and have been practicing it for the last three years. I was drawn to its emphasis on spirituality, the chanting of mantras, and the focus on the chakras and meditation as gateways to transformation. I have no doubt that Kundalini played a part in the evolution that led to my being ready to write  my truth in Bending to Beauty.

Kirpal Gordon: Once again, your next section, “Vigil Candles,“ shifts mood and tone dramatically from “Fiery Strokes.“

Dian Zirilli-Mares: Like the votives flickering before the statues in a church, "Vigil Candles" honors and marks special intentions, loved ones, and prayers answered and unanswered. The stories behind these poems continue to keep a silent vigil within me. I accept that they always will. It was my hope that others might read them, and recognize something in their lives as well.

Kirpal Gordon: The section opens with these eleven lines:

This morning, a text from a friend –

I was cooking and thought of your Mom,

her trick of bending asparagus to break at its most tender spot.

My mother died at sixty-five.

Some days, she appears unexpectedly.

These endless years without her,

I spit-shine her memory,

parrot her wisdom,

understand her boundaries.

I am a vigil candle.

It’s hard to say where she ends and I begin.

Those last two lines, like the last section itself, suggest an affirmation of lineage, continuity and love. Perhaps in love the boundary between self and other can finally be erased. Certainly that’s the celebration in this section, especially in the love poems to your husband Ray.

Dian Zirilli-Mares:  Ray and I are testaments to the power of the past and a love that never forgets. Our long and winding road back to one another from Burton Street where we grew up, fell in teenage love, then went our separate ways, took 35 years.  But, here we are, the lead singer in the rock“n“roll band and the poetess. Together at last.

Kirpal Gordon: How did it feel tapping into the past, the pain, the fear that comes out of these poems?

Dian Zirilli-Mares: Since I was very young, my writing has been the way I understand and navigate the feelings and choices in my life. I write in order to discover what the truth of a situation is. It is as though the act of struggling to find that perfect word in a poem or a story forces me to see clearly what I am feeling. My writing has worked me through suffering. It has helped me more fully celebrate my joys. Revisiting so many of my life's emotional moments while writing Bending to Beauty was no different. "A Tiny Circle of Light," an essay I wrote for my Master's thesis many years ago, speaks of this. "Always my strongest thoughts surface as poetry. It is as if the original experience is so painfully rich and deep, it grows roots and bears fruit. That fruit is my poetry."

Kirpal Gordon: What's next?

Dian Zirilli-Mares: I think I was unprepared for the extent of withdrawal I would experience after two years of working on Bending to Beauty. The daily discipline of facing my demons and angels while wrestling them to paper became cathartic. However, the more I continued to work at my craft, the more critical I became of each poem. I made a deal with myself, especially in regards to those more complicated, emotional poems---either I would be brutally honest or I would be silent. What is the point of poetry that plays games or hides in artifice? That took care of the heart of my poems. But the longer I worked on each one, the more I demanded of it technically. In the end, at least 25 poems were cut from the original collection because they were not ready to face the light of day.  Perhaps in another two years they will be.  Meanwhile, I am sure there is a great deal more agonizing ahead to be done over the exact word, the perfect metaphor. I am looking forward to picking up my pen again to revisit these first draft poems this winter. Spring.  Fall... 

Paul Hoelen's Photography Meets Peter Handke's "Song of Childhood"

photo by Paul Hoelen

 

Song of Childhood

by Peter Handke

When the child was a child
It walked with its arms swinging,
wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
and this puddle to be the sea.

When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.

When the child was a child,
it had no opinion about anything,
had no habits,
it often sat cross-legged,
took off running,
had a cowlick in its hair,
and made no faces when photographed.

When the child was a child,
It was the time for these questions:
Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?
When did time begin, and where does space end?
Is life under the sun not just a dream?
Is what I see and hear and smell
not just an illusion of a world before the world?
Given the facts of evil and people.
does evil really exist?
How can it be that I, who I am,
didn’t exist before I came to be,
and that, someday, I, who I am,
will no longer be who I am?

When the child was a child,
It choked on spinach, on peas, on rice pudding,
and on steamed cauliflower,
and eats all of those now, and not just because it has to.

When the child was a child,
it awoke once in a strange bed,
and now does so again and again.
Many people, then, seemed beautiful,
and now only a few do, by sheer luck.

It had visualized a clear image of Paradise,
and now can at most guess,
could not conceive of nothingness,
and shudders today at the thought.

When the child was a child,
It played with enthusiasm,
and, now, has just as much excitement as then,
but only when it concerns its work.

When the child was a child,
It was enough for it to eat an apple, … bread,
And so it is even now.

When the child was a child,
Berries filled its hand as only berries do,
and do even now,
Fresh walnuts made its tongue raw,
and do even now,
it had, on every mountaintop,
the longing for a higher mountain yet,
and in every city,
the longing for an even greater city,
and that is still so,
It reached for cherries in topmost branches of trees
with an elation it still has today,
has a shyness in front of strangers,
and has that even now.
It awaited the first snow,
And waits that way even now.

When the child was a child,
It threw a stick like a lance against a tree,
And it quivers there still today.

photo by Paul Hoelen

 

 

Creating "Songs-Voices-Poems," a Radio Show: Jackie Henrion Interviewed by Kirpal Gordon

Jackie Henrion at the KRFY 88.5 broadcast desk

Kirpal Gordon:  “Songs-Voices-Poems” is big fun and a great use of radio in our screen-obsessed culture. It also suggests, as opera loving Ezra Pound said, “Lyrics and music are one, not two.” What led to the creation of the show?

 

Jackie Henrion: Most things I do tend to start with curiosity. In the spring of 2014 I saw that the local public radio station was starting a training program and I was curious about the station. I knew many of the people there already and when I went to the initial session I liked the community.  It was diverse in the same way my hometown of Greenwich Village was. 

 

I had been a strange, Suzuki Bean kind of kid growing up on Bleecker Street. I memorized Poe's “Annabelle Lee” as a small child and I remember the look on my parents’ faces when I recited it to them. They asked why that poem, and I said I just liked the sound. It was not uncommon for my parents to have readings and art happenings in their living room by poets such as Howard Hart and Bob Nichols and I devoured Lear's Limericks and the Golden Books of Poetry and the beautiful graphically illustrated Illiad and Oddysey. While trained in classical music, I was also drawn to the lyrics of folk songs such as Peter Paul and Mary's “The Great Mandella,” which was the first song I ever learned to play. I also was fascinated by French songs, playing and translating Le Deserteur for my Junior High School French class.

 

So after the training at the station about FCC regulations and how to operate the equipment, which wasn't any different than the equipment I had used for my folk song production and performances since 1995, I shared my thoughts about a show. I submitted a proposal and sample show. The one comment I received was that I needed to put more of myself into the show. So I started to think more deeply about song lyrics and how the best lyrics were crafted like poems. The title went from "Poems With Wings" to the broader (and less cute) title of “Songs-Voices-Poems.” 

the original logo/banner

the current logo/banner

 

Kirpal Gordon: I noticed that each show is different. How do you decide what to feature?

 

Jackie Henrion: Each week I think of a theme for the show. I just keep my mind open for a subject that has caught my attention, or something I've been studying, a news event, local happenings in Sandpoint, Idaho, or people I interact with who are still in NYC. Perhaps the group of writers I meet with each week, where we do extemporaneous, timed writings and readings, has given me the confidence that every moment in life contains a myriad of creative possibilities. Like Dickinson said, I dwell in possibility. Then I research our extensive radio library for illustrative songs. I then use the incredible resources available on the internet such as poetry.org, UPenn's sound recordings and others for relevant poems. For the poetry, I reach out to the authors to request permission to use material on the show. As a result, I have corresponded with all kinds of poets from Charles Bernstein, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Amy King, to Mark Toby. I also have corresponded with the BBC, the 92nd Street Y and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe for audio permissions. You see, our public radio license only covers music available through standard commercial copyright channels. 

 

I spend 15 to 20 hours to create a rough script for the show that weaves relevant information cohesively. I like to write the script early in the week, so as the week progresses, I can edit it to a more relaxed, less stentorian, less pedagogical tone. Then I go to the station every Sunday evening and do the show live after checking the song lists, uploading and sound-adjusting any spoken verse. We don't have separate engineers, so I run the boards during the broadcast which goes from 7 to 8 pm. I like the challenge of radio to make something entertaining yet interesting and informative and perhaps even inspirational.

 

Kirpal Gordon: Say more about what you mean by inspirational.

 

Jackie Henrion: I mean that it might inspire the audience to think of things differently. One of the characteristics I value most about poetry is the presentation of a different perspective. Many people don't get the opportunity to become aware that their own personal reality is an illusion. Some come to that awareness through inebriants or even psychotropics.  Me, I find a little sleep deprivation helps to realize how we create reality and have a kind of double torus rotation of energy that is constantly testing outside reality and altering internal beliefs accordingly, as well as the even more potent reverse: Our beliefs alter reality.  With that in mind, I appreciate the challenge of modern poetry to co-create meaning. 

 

Dar Williams and Jackie Henrion

 

Kirpal Gordon: Some critics have suggested that songs and poems are different genres entirely and a good poem and a good song are not comparable. 

 

Jackie Henrion: I've tried to drop the words "good" and "bad" from my lexicon. I am drawn to the concepts of spectra, wave form distributions and Venn diagrams, even as I acknowledge the possibility of platonic beauty and truth. It's a paradox I embrace. This is getting pretty headsy, but much of our cultural discussion takes the form of dialectic, logic, either/or propositions. Those who study and absorb these propositions value that approach. It has the appearance of intelligence. But what I try to do on my show is to illustrate that shared characteristics improve both. Well crafted song lyrics are as potent as any poem and most poems call on a sense of music or sometimes visual arts to engage. My perspective is that commercial pressures to appeal to the broadest population results in pop products. If I were to avoid the use of the term 'bad', I would say that pop lies on the opposite side of the spectrum of creative, expressive arts. But at any moment, an artist may choose any point on the infinitely variable spectrum to suit their needs.

 

An example of a songwriter who has used the craft of poetry extensively is Dar Williams in her song Iowa:

 

Well I had everything,

I gave it up for the shoulder of your driveway

And the words I'd never felt.

And so for you I've come this far

Across the tracks,

Ten miles above the limit and with no seatbelt

(And I'd do it again.)

For tonight I went running

Through the screen door of discretion

As I woke up from a nightmare

That I could not bear to see;

You were wandering out on the fields of Iowa

And you were not thinking of me...

 

I've talked with Dar about her process and she is very much into the conversation between fine arts, poetry, internal philosophy and her songs.

 

 

Kirpal Gordon: No question—the wide commercial appeal impulse, often at odds with what makes the work art, can dumb down the authenticity of a lyric and weaken its power of witness. Perhaps in a more niche-driven market, there may be less need to sell millions of copies and more need to build community. Which leads me back to the radio show, which certainly appeals to a niche audience yet is available to millions of listeners. I like the use of the word "Voices" in your title. Say more about that.

 

Jackie Henrion: Actually in the development of the show title, I considered 'songs versus poems' in a didactic sense. A sound tease went through my mind to pronounce it like the native New Yorker I am, and then realized it sounded like 'voices.' I realized that title gave me a chance to discuss voices both physically and metaphorically. Since I've studied with numerous vocal coaches, I felt that it enabled me to explore the keening quality produced in women's voices like Souad Massi's "Raoui" to Joanne Shanendaoah's Native American chants to Enya's Celtic stylings, to Baltic throat singers. In my studies I have learned that, in Ancient Greece, women were banned from keening at funerals because it would diminish the capability to raise armies. Metaphorically, the possible discussion of the uniqueness of one's voice is crucial to discovering how our language is so populated by short-cuts, that we don't pay attention to our choice of words. 

 

Kirpal Gordon: Are there any podcasts of the shows that folks can hear?

 

Jackie Henrion: Unfortunately, no. At this point the format of my show includes material restricted by copyright laws. While our public radio station pays a certain minimal amount which we hope finds its way to the rights holders, we do not have rights to re-podcast the material. For now I like the fact that what I do is ephemeral, kind of like performance art. But, like the old days, you can hear the show on KRFY 88.5 fm or via Internet stream every Sunday at 7 pm pacific. It can also be picked up by going to KRFY.org "live streaming" or Tune-In radio. But someday I may chose to focus my energy on using my scripts and song lists to create a published work. 

 

Kirpal Gordon: I remember hearing you sing and play guitar in a folk music context that I found refreshing and innovative. How has hosting “Songs-Voices-Poems” affected your own work?

 

 

 

Jackie Henrion: During the last two years, my exposure to poetry has broadened considerably. My most recent experiments involve reciting my songs as spoken word along with the guitar accompaniment. I have also started writing more abstractly, using tools that create a randomness of syntax and thought. I became interested in the works of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky. So I've stopped performing for a while, while I am in a kind of transition and discovery process.

 

Kirpal Gordon: Stein and Zukofsky! I got my first real taste of both writers while studying at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

 

Jackie Henrion: Interesting, perhaps a peek of unified field. Because I will be applying to Naropa's low residency MFA in Creative Writing for the fall of 2016. And the reason was partially because I read the Giant Steps Press interview of David Cope describing his experience with Alan Ginsberg at Naropa. I was drawn to the humanness of his remembrances and the honoring of artistry which passes from a teacher to a student. I checked into the writings of the Naropa professors and I have particular projects that would benefit from exposure to their guidance. In addition, I am really excited about the integration of contemplative philosophies within the curriculum. I've practiced Vipassana meditation for many years and it has colored my work. When I met you over 10 years ago, I felt that "field" from you and a respect for your focus and energy.  I appreciate the time you have allocated to do this interview. 

 

Kirpal Gordon: Likewise, Jackie! A unified field! Well said! Grazie.