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The Poetry Show -- Aug 14, 2017 -- Janet discusses the poetry of Jeanne Wagner

Jeanne Wagner is a native of San Francisco, California. She has B.A. from the University of California Berkeley in German and an M.A. from San Francisco State in Humanities. A retired tax accountant, she began writing seriously in 1996. Since then she has published four chapbooks and two full length collections and has won several national awards. The chapbooks are The Falling Woman (Pudding House Press, 2001), The Conjurer (Anabiosis Press, 2004), Medusa in Therapy (Poets Corner Press, 2008) and The Genesis Machine (Sow's Ear Poetry Review, 2017), winner of the 2016 Sow's Ear Chapbook Competition. Her full-length collections are The Zen Piano Mover, winner of the 2004 Stevens Manuscript Prize, and In the Body of Our Lives (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010). Among her prizes and honors are the National Foundation of State Poetry Societies Founders Award, the Ann Stanford Prize, and the Frances Locke Award. She has also won the Hayden's Ferry Flash Prose Competition and the 2013 Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred. 
 
Her poems vary in subject from the scientific to the personal, from nature to mythology, and they reflect her curiosity about and engagement with the world on many levels. In an interview with William Ruof, she reflects on memory: "Memory is like Schrödinger’s Cat, it changes the moment you peer into the box where you think it is kept." 
 
This week's featured poem is "The Disappearance of the Polar Bears," from her collection In the Body of Our Lives (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010). 
 
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE POLAR BEARS
 
They were our saints and our hermits,
our ursine angels. 
 
In exile they found a promised land
where cold
 
condensed under their feet and they
walked on it; 
 
where they moved soundlessly as ghosts, 
hearing, 
 
even under ice, the strenuous beating
hearts of seals. 
 
Some journeyed as far north as the Pole, 
that skullcap of ice, 
 
its whiteness the imagined afterlife of
ordinary bears, 
 
their bodies solid as icons: squared off
limbs, shoulders that
 
tapered to a muzzled head, dog-small
and low-slung. 
 
Yet who could fail to love their
black-eyed cubs, 
 
born with the furred innocence 
of harp seals, 
 
or the way they swam, legs paddling
in circles, 
 
tractionless as the running in our
dreams. 
 
That's why I keep this image of
a single bear
 
standing on the pole, his white body
on the whiter ice, 
 
like the pulse of something warm
inside the cold. 
 
Could the problem be the airplanes, 
when they scattered
 
the angels from their wisps of cirrus
cloud, while below, 
 
on cruise ship tables, ice sculptures
slowly began to melt away? 
 
 
Writing prompt of the week: Choose any compelling image from the natural world. While describing it, add in a supernatural or mythological image, the way Jeanne Wagner blends angels and polar bears in her poem. 

The Are You Crazy Show: Choosing a Therapist: Aug 8,2017

Dr Leslie-Beth Wish, Dr Zakee McGill, and John Case host this podcast of the Are You Crazy Show, broadcast on Enlightenradio.org August 8, 2017 from Harpers Ferry, WV.
 
The topic of "Choosing a Therapist" drives the discussion.

fanny and stas fragment

fragment from 6.7.17 show

The Poetry Show -- Aug 7, 2017 -- Carl Dennis

This podcast was broadcast On Enlightenradio.org Aug 7, 2017 in Bolivar West Virginia
 
Carl Dennis was born in St. Louis, Missouri on September 17, 1939. Neither of his parents were literary; his father founded a chemical company and his mother had been a registered nurse, although she had a strong interest in the arts. However, Carl Dennis had an inspirational and influential high school English teacher, Augusta Gottlieb. After high school he searched for a college that would resemble "the ideal Platonic Academy," attending Oberlin College and the University of Chicago before graduating from the University of Minnesota. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of California at Berkeley and subsequently to teach at the University of Buffalo (1966-2001), where he now holds the title of Artist-in-Residence. Dennis has published twelve volumes of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize winning Practical Gods (Penguin, 2001), a New and Selected Poems 1974-2004 (Penguin, 2004) and, most recently, Another Reason (Penguin, 2014). Additionally he has written a book of literary criticism, Poetry as Persuasion: an Essay for Writers (University of Georgia Press, 2001). He has received many honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and, in 2000, the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, awarded to a living author for outstanding achievement in poetry.  
 
 
Carl Dennis is a strong proponent of poetry that is clear and comprehensible. He has said, "I believe poetry should sound like natural speech. When you hear a poem, you should feel that someone is standing behind the lines, talking to an individual, offering a script that something might want to enter." In a similar vein, on the usefulness of poetry, he said, "Poetry is useful in that it allows readers to feel that they are not alone, that others have thought and felt as they have. It can do this more powerfully than any other kind of writing, or at least more directly,  because in a good poem we are made to feel that we are in the presence of a whole human being speaking to us directly, or providing a script for us to enter as we see fit." 
 
This week's featured poem, "Not the Idle" from Practical Gods (Penguin, 2001), is a meditation on what might appear to be idleness and a reminder that things are not always as they seem.
 
NOT THE IDLE
 
It's not the idle who move us but the few
Often confused with the idle, those who define
Their project in life in terms so ample
Nothing they ever do is a digression. 
Each episode contributes its own rare gift
As a chapter in Moby Dick on squid or hardtack
Is just as important to Ishmael as a fight with a whale. 
The few who refuse to live for the plot's sake, 
Major or minor, but for texture and tone and hue. 
For them weeding a garden all afternoon
Can't be construed as a detour from the road of life. 
The road narrows to a garden path that turns
And circles to show that traveling goes only so far
As a metaphor. The day rests on the grass. 
And at night the books of these few, 
Lined up on their desks, don't look like drinks
Lined up on a bar to help them evade their troubles. 
They look like an escort of mountain guides
Come to conduct the climber to a lofty outlook
Rising serene above the fog. For them the view
Is no digression though it won't last long
And they won't remember even the vivid details. 
The supper with friends back in the village
In a dining room brightened with flowers and paintings
No digression for them, though the talk leads
To no breakthrough. The topic they happen to hit on
Isn't a ferry to carry them over the interval
Between soup and salad. It's a raft drifting downstream
Where the banks widen to embrace a lake
And birds rise from the reeds in many colors. 
Everyone tries to name them and fails
For an hour no one considers idle. 

Mike and John take on Jim "you stupid suckers" Justice

Mike and John take on Jim "you stupid suckers" Justice as he renames the classic Greenbrier Resort "TrumpBriar" -- The WV political carnage in the nation's most decrepit state reaches a new low. Lesson: THERE IS NO BOTTOM TO BILLIONAIRE TREASON.
 
This podcast was broadcast on EnlightenRadio.org Aug 4, 2017 in Bolivar, West Virginia.

Podcast: Diesel and Case on Moby Dick and Senator Capito

This podcast was broadcast August 3, 20171. Musical Theme: The Clancy Bros and Tommy Makem -- Carnegie Hall, 19622. The Winners and Losers Radio Program: 6:30 - 9:00 AM -- Mike Diesel and Case do a "drunks delight" version of news and views. First: Shelley Moore Capito's explanation of her health care votes. Second: People who do not like, or have no personal analog in,  Moby Dick, may be deported in the near future. Third: Who is John P Kelley. Fourth. Trump signs unconstitutional bill interfering with his own "foreign policy".

Resistance Radio Podcast: Jamaall Craig on Trump speech to cops

Jamaall Craig, a PhD candidate and former civil rights leader at the United Steelworkers of America, is our guest.  We talk about 45's criminal, fascist speech to cops and Black Lives Matter.
This podcast was broadcast August 2, 1917 on EnlightenRadio.org. The show is hosted by Stewart Acuff, a legendary organizer and former Organizing Director for the AFL-CIO.

Trumper attacks on Local Control, Scout Masters on The Jambpree Fiasco

Julie  Archer from WV Citizens Action on Fair Elections discusses anti-democratic measures against voting by phony "fraud" legislators, as well as a discussion on decentralizing West Virginia. Jerry Harness, a retired Veterinarian, and 50 year volunteer for the Boy Scouts of America takes on the Jamoboree Fiasco where President Trump made highly inappropriate remarks to 34,000 scouts. also Mike and John and Gayle have fun. This podcast was broadcast on EnlightenRadio.org August 2, 2017.