Tag Archives: Poet As Radio

Poet As Radio Remembers Colleen Lookingbill

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From the May 25th Poet As Radio:
On Sunday we gathered an unprecedented number of poets at Lightrail Studios to celebrate an unparalleled poet and spirit, Colleen Lookingbill, who unfortunately left us on March 30th. Besides the Poet as Radio hosts, Tiff Dressen, Susanne Dyckman, Todd Melicker, Joseph Noble, Steven Seidenberg, Candy Shue along with Colleen’s husband Jordon Zorker took part in a memorial show, which included a reading of Colleen’s work and a discussion of her life. We heard work from both her books Incognita (Sink Press, 1992) and a forgetting of (Lyric & Press, 2011), as well as some other pieces published in literary journals.
After the break, the group shared anecdotes from Colleen’s life and artistic endeavors. Jordon told us that she was influenced by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and she liked the term ‘experimental poetry.’ Colleen was also a visual artist and she created visual poetry that was included in a forgetting of. Colleen was an incredibly open and giving person. Tiff introduced Colleen’s relationship to Buddhism and Jordon expanded on this, discussing her interest in different spiritual traditions. Joseph told us about his experience of book shopping with Colleen, where she gravitated towards obscure texts. One of her last projects was an anthology of women poets she compiled with Elizabeth Robinson, As If It Fell From the Sun (Ether Dome, 2012).
Thank you to all the poets who took part in this show.
And thank you Colleen for your poetry, your presence and the beautiful mark you left on this writing community. You are surely missed.
Click Here to Listen:
Poet and Visual Artist, Colleen Lookingbill

AWP 2013: Poetry Blooms in Boston

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Thanks for stopping by to say Hi! I hope you’re having a fantastic AWP and are inspired to write, write, write when you get home and recover from the excitement.
A short hello about me: I’m a poet and book reviewer whose work can be heard on the online show, Poet As Radio. I earned my MFA from the University of San Francisco and was recently awarded a Kundiman Fellowship. My writing has appeared in Drunken Boat, Versal, EOAGH, Spiral Orb, The Collagist, Mead Magazine, Eratio, and other journals. Currently I’m working on a chapbook titled “Whiskey, Water, and White Dwarves”, as well as a series of essays on tantric meditation and poetry.
I’ll be staffing the Kundiman Booth at AWP (#408) on Saturday from 11:30am-5:30pm. Come by and we can talk poetry and play a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock.
Take care, dream big, and I hope we cross paths again soon!

On The Airwaves

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My poem, Undercurrent, was broadcast on the July 30, 2011 episode of Poet As Radio.
Click on the link above to listen to it.  Click on Poet As Radio link to listen to the show, where you can hear a wide-ranging conversation with Chris Stroffolino and Delia’s cool, multi-track poem, “She Do the Police In Different Voices”.
Thanks to Jay, Delia and Nicholas for their great work.

Cubist Pronouns Unite

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When I was writing my review for Juliana Spahr’s book of poems, Well Then There Now, I thought I would describe her use of pronouns, which seemed very cubist to me. Then I ended up writing about the biography of the poems melding with the autobiography of the poet. I guess reviews are like poems–they never turn out the way you think they will!
I like the way Spahr narrates many of her poems in the collective “we,” using a choral technique to embody the universal nature of experience. Here’s an excerpt from “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache”:
We come into the world.
We come into the world and there it is.
The sun is there.
The brown of the river leading to the blue and the brown
of the ocean is there.
Salmon and eels are there moving between the brown
and the brown and the blue.
The green of the land is there.
Elders and youngers are there.
We come into the world and we are there.
And we begin to breathe.
We come into the world and there it is.
We come into the world without and we breathe it in.
We come into the world and begin to move between the
brown and the blue and the green of it.
But I think her boldest move, pronoun-wise, is seen in this snippet of the poem, “Unnamed Dragonfly Species,” which is narrated by an unnamed “they”:
They heard about all this cracking and breaking away on the news
and then they began to search over the internet for information
on what was going on. Blue Whale On the internet they found an
animation of the piece of the Antarctic Pine Island glacier breaking
off. Bluebreast Darter After they found this, they often called this
animation up and just watched it over and over on their screen in
their dimly lit room. Blue-spotted Salamander. . .
The descriptions and thoughts in the poem can be assumed to be the speaker’s own, but she chooses to write from the viewpoint of the other, which leads the reader to imagine that the speaker is part of a subgroup of people doing the same thing in different parts of the world, having the same thoughts and worries and hopes. By acknowledging that she is a part of this subgroup, the poet also places herself in opposition to those who aren’t doing what she is. She becomes part of the “they” of the poem. Wow, being a cubist poet is kind of a yoga-like activity, isn’t it?
I really admire Juliana Spahr’s use of pronouns–by writing poems from different vantage points, she expresses the presence of an “I” in “we,” “they,” and even “you.” To be  able to occupy so many perspectives at once seems like a very cubist position!
 

Poet As Radio–Streaming Online Now!

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I caught the  inaugural show of the Poet As Radio last Saturday (May 21st), which had a great interview with Sarah Rosenthal, author of A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area.
Rosenthal made a terrific comment on “experimental” or “difficult” poetry.  “Experimental writing can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people,” she said.  “But one of the things it tends to mean is that the poet or the writer has left room for the reader to–there’s not this idea of delivering the whole cloth meaning to the passive reader . . . .  It’s an engagement, it’s an interaction, it’s co-creating the meaning and each reader is invited to co-create that meaning in his or her own way.”
I love the sense of the poet and reader engaged in the mutual activity of creating meaning together–isn’t that what we should be doing (ideally) in all areas of our lives?  It’s definitely one of the things I find incredibly satisfying about reading poetry.
The founders of Poet As Radio are Nicholas Leaskou, Jay Thomas and Delia Tramontina, all of whom are very fine poets and artists themselves.  They named the show after Jack Spicer’s idea that the poet is a conduit, not a creator, and I think Spicer would appreciate the doubling effect going on here with the poets/radios floating their words back on the radio waves.  Recently I’ve been conducting some lucid dreaming experiments in order to “catch” my own radio signals to put into poetry–with some very interesting results!
You can check out the archived episode at www.savekusf.org.  The second half of the Sarah Rosenthal interview will air on Saturday, May 22nd at 9am.