"Writing in Progress" is our weekly radio show where staff casually discuss articles, read poems
and chat about poetry as it intersects with our lives.
Join in on the conversation!
Archive
If you missed any of our shows, check out the archive below and listen in at your leisure.
Tuesday, May 16th, 2017
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For our last show of the season, the titles from which we read could be their own poem: "Escape of the Leopard," "Of Gods & Strangers," "Catalogue the Insanity," "Six Sides to a Man," "Kaleidoscope." Each respectively by, John Moffitt, Tina Chang, Staceyann Chin, Marianne Moore and the 2011 edition of Bryn Mawr College's art and literary publication. Fascinating, how poetry is an invitation to borrow its language...and make it memorable. We hoped you enjoyed the season and did just that. See you in the fall!
Tuesday, May 2nd, 2017
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Benjamin Button. For this show, we regressed a bit in our technical skills. The volume is low. We randomly hit the background music button. There are a bunch of sound effects entering in and out as we speak. How thrilling! We eventually catch on & share wonderful poems by Nikki Giovanni, Philadelphia poet Lovella Calica, Belizean writers as well as Basho's haikus. Join in on the conversation!
Tuesday, April 25th, 2017
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In our weekly divination, digging for books in a bin we pulled: Charles Simic's That Little Something, Summer Unbound by E.L. Mayo, the 60th anniversary collection of Canisus College's arts & literary publication, Quadrangle (2012), Edgar Allen Poe's Eureka prose poem and Nathanael William Stotle's A Beggar's Book of Poems. In the scatter plot that was today's selection, quoting Poe, there was a present, diffused force of expansion. Join in on the conversation!
Tuesday, April 11th, 2017
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Today's show considers outsider perspectives, outsiders who locate themselves on the boundaries or in liminal spaces. Jacqueline Woodson in Brown Girl Dreaming in a free-verse poetry memoir shares what it was like growing up both in South Carolina and in Brooklyn, looked at with great suspicion on either side. In Poetry Like Bread edited by Martín Espada, the epigraph is a quote by Rigoberta Menchú after receiving her Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 where she offers both omen in prophesy in sharing that those bodies deeply immersed in risk and the events of their time will decide which piece of the sky is theirs. Poet in Andalucía by Nathalie Handal recounts fleeing with her family from Southern Spain. Handal "reminds us of what's inconsolable, of what's multiple, of what's irreducible, and what's simultaneous"(Rattapallax Magazine). Join in on the conversation!
Tuesday, April 4th, 2017
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Reading is a mixed media activity. For today's show, we celebrate "Book 2.0," a journal distributed by IntellectBooks promoting innovations in book consumption and progressive practices in literacy, book design and distribution. From dub poet Mutabaruka's double volume book "The Next Poems," which turns upside the notion of what constitutes the front or back cover of a book to Sara Jane Stoner's prose poem collection "Experience in the Medium of Destruction" that creatively uses the inside front and back covers as works of art, we explore the connection between reading wars and book design. (Prerecorded. For copies of the journal Book 2.0, visit: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=198/)
Tuesday, March 21st, 2017
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Returning to our origins, for today's show, we welcome all that is in progress, all that is chance divination, all that is the quantum effect of reading words. On the desk, there are two anthologies: Norton's Postmodern American Poetry and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry by Alan Kaufman & S. A. Griffin. We stick our thumb in them and see from what we are called to read. The cards dealt: Elizabeth Willis, Jennifer Moxley, Catherine Wagner, Assata Shakur, Hubert Shelby Jr. and Gerald Locklin. Join in on the conversation!
Tuesday, March 7th, 2017
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Marianne Moore coined the term "conversity" to describe the referential dialogue between poems and poets. For today's show, we read from poets who, in their compilation, speak to other poets as well as read from friends whose poetry collections with which we are in dialogue. We read vowel chapters from Christian Bök's Eunoia and Nava Fader's Hitching Post where she pays homage to visual and sound poet Michael Basinski. Join in on the conversation!
Tuesday, February 28th, 2017
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In our pockets, we brought Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems--his ode to the cityscape, a collection poems often composed on his lunch breaks while curator at the Museum of Modern Art in the late 50s and early 60s. O'hara brought everything, all the clamoring references, into his pieces: newspaper headlines, conversations with friends, the color of the nearby john. Erin Belieu, in similar wit and satirical energy, captures an O'Hara musicality in her wry, beautifully unruly collection Slant Six. From there we began by reading "When at a Certain Party in NYC" and ended with "I Growed No Potatoes to Write about, Sir," settling us into Lucille Clifton's 1991 book, Quilting. There she asked--"How does this poem end?" Join in on the conversation!
Tuesday, February 21st, 2017
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A meandering: Today's show wandered through clusters of words, heading up rivers where the banks were bordered by paintings atop an old Victorian novel. We read from Tom Phillips' A Humument, which is an erasure poem novel that includes images drawn directly over the words of an old 1892 Victorian tome by W. H. Mallock called A Human Document. We listened to archival recordings of Frost. We read from The Unswept Room by Sharon Olds, "Kindergarten Abecedarian," about the tongue lashing that is learning language. Join in on the conversation!
Tuesday, February 14th, 2017
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It is St. Valentine's Day. As many proclaim both love and disinterest in corporate holidays, we thought to share the poems of artists who write about love and war, who write their hearts in times of war. In protest, one often forgets that it is the championing of alternative ways of being, loving and living that ultimately wins. This show features the poetry of Pablo Neruda, Ted Hughes, Tracy K. Smith and Lamont B. Steptoe. Join in on the conversation!
Holiday Break
Tuesday, November 8th, 2016
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Art for politics? Art for art's sake? With the winner of 2016 U.S. presidential election being decided today, we thought it would be apropos to share election day poems. This episode features works by Emily Dickinson, Charles Bernstein, Walt Whitman, Lawrence Ferlingetti, Donald Revell and Guy Kettelhack. We close with Whitney Houston's rendition of the Star Spangled Banner.
Tuesday, November 1st, 2016
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If you missed the LitTech Forum at the Digital Innovation Garage this past Tuesday, we recap the conversations, videos and speaker presentations that all took place.
Tuesday, October 18th, 2016
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From Slate to The Atlantic to The New York Times as well as well as all of the twitterverse, writers and the general public are in uproar regarding the awarding of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature to singer/songwriter Bob Dylan. We cover the gamut: Those who are for it, against it, ambivalent as well as those who question the impartiality of awarding bodies in general. We close by reading some of Dylan's lyrics, commenting on their poetic quality. Join in on the conversation!
Tuesday, October 11th, 2016
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Given the hailstorm of controversy unleashed last Friday, October 7th following the news release of Donald Trumps' 2005 lewd statements about women and inappropriate conduct, we felt it was important to discuss poetry and feminism.
Annie Finch's article "Female Tradition as Feminist Innovation" (2005), discusses how women poets who write in form are often viewed as sentimentalists and do no receive the kind of scholarship male poets do. She traces the historical and psychological paths that have drawn women to form and in search of our foremothers.
Finch argues for reworking an understanding of women enlisting form as discovery of "boundarylessness", similar to the freedom women have created for themselves in interior spaces, forging complex lives and identities.
Join in on the conversation!
Annie Finch's article "Female Tradition as Feminist Innovation" (2005), discusses how women poets who write in form are often viewed as sentimentalists and do no receive the kind of scholarship male poets do. She traces the historical and psychological paths that have drawn women to form and in search of our foremothers.
Finch argues for reworking an understanding of women enlisting form as discovery of "boundarylessness", similar to the freedom women have created for themselves in interior spaces, forging complex lives and identities.
Join in on the conversation!
