Tag Archives: radio

Radio Nowhere

Some days, this, from Bruce Springsteen…

I was tryin' to find my way home
But all I heard was a drone
Bouncing off a satellite
Crushin' the last lone American night
This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?

~

You get older, you recognize that technology is changing, you grew up with the radio and now there are podcasts and streaming platforms and what-all, which are sometimes a pleasure but also not what you were used to; there are so many ways to reach out to somebody, and smaller and smaller chances that anyone is picking up on your wavelength (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSChVd3yQ_A). You’re not lying on the beach with your friends listening to your transistor radio or boombox or mixtapes or iPod. Maybe you need a little more silence and a little less popular culture in your life, maybe you need a coffee meet-up now and then with your besties, maybe you need a long walk in a quiet woods and no headphones or earbuds. Maybe no one is listening.

Maybe you’re feeling like Radio Nowhere.

If you happen to be a writer, do you find there are times you doubt your audience? Are there readers (of your work)? Do they bother to pay attention, maybe for longer than 20 seconds? Can you name some people who support what you do as a word-artist? –I hope the answer to this is yes, but sometimes that dead-air drone of a satellite picking up no signals can feel discouraging. Literary journals that don’t get back to you for many a month; independent presses that offer no feedback for why they kept your manuscript for a year and then rejected it; I could go on, but you get the picture.

And maybe the problem, if there is one, is that you’re not keeping up. No dedicated website, not enough social media presence, no X thread, no podcast, no Tik-Tok book launch, no visual excitement. I mean, I get it. One reason I left academia when I did was that the university was making a change in its education LMS platform. I would have had to re-do all my tests, assignments, syllabi, etc. to mesh with the new platform, which would have required hours of Zoom and in-person training for which I would not be remunerated. Oh, that and the spectre of ChatGPT/Claude. And fibromyalgia symptoms taking over my days.

Nope.

I’m just going to sit with this knowledge for awhile, see whether I can balance 1) my desire to reach people through poetry in books and journals and online with 2) my desire to opt out a bit further from the popular culture that I and most US citizens grew up with. Poetry and popular culture overlap occasionally but not often [Rupi Kaur & such like], except in the poems themselves, since poets can hardly help but live within their cultures/societies. In contemporary poetry, I’ve seen references to cell phones, credit cards, artificial intelligence, smart cars, social media, celebrities. Heck, I have used those things in my poems. I love the metaphorical possibilities of the GPS, for example.

For thousands of years, poems contained images of goats, sheep, horses, chariots, shrines, birds, hearths, wells, orchards, and other things observed in the world of those writers’ contemporaries. Surely poetry can include a far wider range of images, metaphors, content, commentary! So poetry evolves within culture; I cannot ignore the things of this world. I continue working on achieving some kind of acceptable balancing act.

Even if I can’t quite keep up.

Poetry month books & doings

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It is, once again, April: National Poetry Month. My recent trip to the AWP bookfair has given me many poetry books to peruse at whatever pace I please, and because the weather here has been far too wet to do much in the garden, I’m using the free time to read. The outpouring of millions of peaceful protesters who oppose the current administration’s policies and who rallied on April 5 was somewhat heartening to me, but I remain skeptical and am aware that real change takes a long time. For the present, I’m bolstering my spirit through poetry.

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I met Diane Thiel decades ago, briefly, at the West Chester Poetry Conference. She is incredibly talented, intelligent, frighteningly well-educated, and her work impressed me a lot; somehow, though, I did not get around to reading the many books she’s published since then, so her Questions from Outer Space (2022) is a delight and a revelation. Travel, literary and historical references, child-raising, teaching–the poems here cover a large range of topics. I bought her book at the Red Hen Press tables in LA. Red Hen is a terrific source for contemporary poetry books, if you’re looking…

At Saturnalia’s booth (another good small press with a large catalog), I found three of Martha Silano’s books and rejoiced. So far I have finished reading only The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, which I love, but I can hardly wait to read her more recent books. She has a wry sense of weird, nerdy humor that’s inflected with science facts and grocery-store labels, pop culture and life in the burbs, and a healthy questioning of, well, everything.

My fellow Goddard alum and friend Lou Faber has a new book here, and it’s so wonderful to read the work of a long-time poetry colleague whom I haven’t seen in years but whose voice comes recognizably through this collection. The second half of the collection, in particular, deals with the emotionally-complex aspects of being an adoptee and this person’s efforts to untangle where (and who) he’s “from.” Contradictions abound over the years; then, DNA testing sort of, but not quite, sorts out some of the mysteries. But life–well, much of life contains mysteries and always will.

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Meanwhile, this April I will be busy giving and attending in-person and online poetry events–even a radio spot! I’ll be reading mid-day at a local community college, participating in a No River Twice poetry event; and at some point this month, an interview about The Poetry Press Project (and my latest book) will air on WDIY 88.9FM. And a few of my poems will be appearing in print this month, the first of which is here: “Luna, Paloma.” I’ve also signed up for virtual attendance at a couple of poetry reading; and on May 4, I will be among the features for a virtual reading sponsored by One Art journal. My physical stamina isn’t what I wish it were, but thanks to technology that enables me to participate from home, I can manage to do a bit of yard work and STILL get to a poetry event.