20 August Dr. Michael Schuldiner

Dr. Shuldiner, author of Gifts and Works: Spiritual Life and Political Controversy in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts, editor (I assume) of The Selected Writings of Mordecai Noah and all 'round swell mensch joined us on the show today.

Dr. Schuldiner spoke at length about American poets of the 1960s in particular Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsburg, and W.H. Auden (I know he wasn't American but what can I do it was a great story).

We heard an excellent recording of Sylvia Plath reading "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus." The tape Dr. Shuldiner brought to the show was untouched and the quality phenomenal. I thought I had heard these recordings before. I was mistaken.

Dr. Schuldiner also performed (and I choose that verb specifically) "Ghost Tantra" which was by far the best-read poem on the show thus far.

Usually this is where I copy one of the poems shared on the air. However, not only can you hear the show (without the music sadly) as a podcast here, you really should listen to it for yourself.

I had more fun doing this show than I have any other. I hope Dr. Schuldiner will visit the show again soon.

13 August Carolyn Stice

Carolyn Stice joined me on the show today. Carolyn graduated from the University of Alaska Fairbanks M.F.A. program. She shared her poetry and some of her favorite pieces by contemporary female poets including Gwendolyn Brooks and Anne Sexton.

Carolyn Stice was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study poetry written by Venezuelan women. She leaves the first of September with her new husband Jake.

Here is one of the poems Carolyn shared with our audience:

Honeysuckle Vine

The girl stands contemplating the honey
on her lips, her hand reaches among bees
who work flower to flower, she squeezes
another bloom on her tongue. A noise from
the house drowns the bee's private humming, draws
the girl back. Now she considers branches,
touching each one with her fore-finger and
thumb. Too thick and she may as well have picked
the belt, too thin and the whipping cord breaks
the skin. She chooses something in between
and turns then, back to the house, last week's welts
red as a tattoo down her butt and thighs,
stinging ever so slightly as she walks.

6 August - The poetry of Charles Simic

Today's show was dedicated entirely to Charles Simic, the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States. On the air today I read my favorite Simic poems, shared some of his biography provided by the Poetry Foundation, and listened to a few MP3s of Simic reading his own work. Some of the poems on this program were:

Prodigy
Toward Nightfall
Little Night Music
Medieval Miniature
Mystic Life
Muttering Perhaps, or Humming
De Occulta Philosophia
Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators
Riddle
Dark Farmhouses
The Street of Martyrs
Mystics
Evening Walk
The Devils
My Shoes
Jackstraws
For the Sake of Amelia
St. Thomas Aquinas
The Devils
Trees at Night
Watch Repair
Butcher Shop
Fork

In preparing for the show, I read all of the Simic I had on hand. I put together a nice list of what I wanted to read. To my knowledge, I had never read Simic aloud until today. Doing so gave me a new appreciation for poems I'd overlooked until now. I also realized today that Charles Simic is obsessed with clocks and shadows.

Mystics

Help me to find what I've lost,
If it was ever, however briefly, mine,
You may have found it.
Old man praying in the privy,
Lonely child drawing a secret room
And in it a stopped clock.

Seek to convey its truth to me
By hints and omens.
The room in shadow, perhaps the wrong room?
The cockroach on the wall,
The naked lovers kissing
On the TV with the sound turned off.
I could hear the red faucet drip.

Or else restore to plain view
What is eternally invisible
And speaks by being silent.
Blue distances to the North,
The fires of the evening to the West,
Christ himself in pain, panhandling
On the altar of the storefront church
With a long bloody nail in each palm.

In this moment of amazement...
Since I do ask for it humbly,
Without greed, out of true need.
My teeth chattered so loudly,
My old dog got up to see what's the matter.
Oh divine lassitude, long drawn-out sigh
As the vision came and went.

These poems and the others read today were selected from Unending Blues, Selected Early Poems, Jackstraws, The Book of Gods and Devils, Hotel Insomnia, A Wedding in Hell and The Voice at 3:00 A.M..

Poet Laureate

Congratulations to Charles Simic, this nation's newest Poet Laureate.

When I heard the news this morning, I went to my bookshelf pulled down my Simic favorites, "Walking The Black Cat", "Selected Poems", and "School For Dark Thoughts". As Poet Laureate should, he inspired me all over again.

In honor of one of my favorite living poet's recent honor, next week's "Line Break" is devoted to the man who had "Hitler and Stalin as travel agents" - Charles Simic.

"Watch Repair" was the first Simic poem I read. The moment,the poem- vivid and profound as personal tragedy, still awakens in me a great love for small things and words.


Watch Repair

A small wheel
Incandescent,
Shivering like
A pinned butterfly.

Hands thrown up
In all directions:
The crossroads
One arrives at
In a nightmare.

Higher than that
Number 12 presides
Like a beekeeper
Over the swarming honeycomb
Of the open watch.

Other wheels
That could fit
Inside a raindrop.

Tools
That must be splinters
Of arctic starlight.

Tiny golden mills
Grinding invisible
Coffee beans.

When the coffee's boiling
Cautiously,
So it doesn't burn us,
We raise it
To the lips
Of the nearest
Ear.

A short biography of Charles Simic is provided by the Academy of American Poets