Category: Poetry Technology (Page 8 of 8)

Continuing on my journey of exploring poetry podcasts, I've caught up with two more programs.

To catch a poetry podcast, you can either visit iTunes and download episodes that appeal to you or you can subscribe to a podcast on iTunes and have the latest episodes (audio programs similar to NPR interviews), download automatically to your mobile listening device (iPod or iPhone or other brand) whenever you do updates. You can also listen to these downloaded audio files from your computer if you don't have a mobile thingamajig. Just visit iTunes (or podcast homepage if one exists).
  

Poets for Tomorrow – Recommended with Caveat

There are only five podcasts here and they stopped producing more in 2010 so these are a bit outdated. I listened to two podcasts on the topic of "The Self," both  interviewing or showcasing a New York City performance poet.  I felt the podcasts did not stay true to the Self topic and in one episode the sound quality was a bit raw. One episode interviewed a poet who grew up struggling to define himself in a land of NYC gangs and he was very much a new poet working his way through the world of performance poetry. For this reason, this podcast is not for the self-serious poet listener. If you have a hard time suffering newbies, go elsewhere for your fix. I liked that about this podcast, how democratic it was in interviewing experiences of poets on many levels.

The second podcast on The Self, blew me away. It was a 14-minute performance of a poem about the Philippines called "Colt 45" by Daniel Darwin, an autobiographical rant with heavy refrains. The poem covered a lot of territory both physically and intellectually describing American-Philippines conflicts, Asian sexuality, homosexuality and finally going meta by breaking the 4th wall. It was definitely a performance you had to hang in there for…but I was glad I did.

Depending on your poetic temperament, there may be finds in here for you.

Scottish Poetry Library – Highly Recommended

I listened to their 45-minute interview of Robert Pinsky. Best sound quality of all the podcasts I've heard so far. Very professional sign-ons and sign-offs. Pinksy had somewhat funny things to say like, "My voice is my instrument…I write with my voice." He talked about his love of jazz and his www.favoritepoem.org readers-reading-poems project which he stared when he was US Poet Laureate. I was intrigued by Pinksy's claim that he "doesn't advocate for poetry," meaning Why does poetry need an advocate? It's great! If people love it they'll come to it. I appreciated that kind of attitude, coming from a position of power as it does, very Riot Grrrl 3rd-wave feminist thinking-like.He said poetry does not need an ambassador, a defender, commercials. "It's like advocating singing."

I also appreciated how Pinsky threw love to pop culture icons like Sid Caesar as influences. He also talked about studying with Francis Fergusson and his ideas of art imitating actions, about Pinksy's idea of pitch in poems, musicality, and his Poem Jazz CD project.

This is definltely a podcast worth following.

See more reviews of poetry podcasts.

Recently I've started to explore poetry podcasts, available free from the iTunes store. It's been good, good times listening to these podcasts over the last few weeks.

I had download issues exploring them through my iPhone. I had trouble getting podcast segments down to my phone at all and then quickly ran out of my data-plan bytes. It was much easier to deal with it all from my iTunes interface through to my iPod.

Poets Reading Their Poems

Poets.org – Not Recommended

This would be an interesting podcast to recommend. After all, they're posted by The Academy of American Poets. But this is the podcast that gave me the most technical anguishing. The last podcast was posted in March of 2008 and the rest are listed as available…until you try to download them and iTunes can't locate them for you. I listened to the only available March 2008 segment called Ars Poeticast, a series of readings of poems about poetry to celebrate National Poetry Month of that year. The podcast ran 9 minutes with readings by Philip Schultz ("Ars Poetica"), Russell Edson ("Soup Song") and Robert Kelly ("Science"). I loved "Science"

Science explains nothing
but holds all together as
many things as it can count

science is a basket
not a religion he said
a cat as big as a cat

the moon the size of the moon
science is the same as poetry
only it uses the wrong words.

I also loved Kenneth Koch reading "One Train May Hide Another." Would have loved more Podcasts but alas…Poetry.org has left us at the altar.

News Hour Poetry Series – Highly Recommended

I listened to four of these. They're short and sweet (3-5 minutes) and well edited:

– Mark Doty reading his "Handel's Messiah" (posted on 12/21/11). The segment not only included his reading, but excerpts of Handel's piece. "Glory shall be revealed" indeed.

-  Tony Hoagland reading "Romantic Moments" (posted on 2/14/12). This poem surprised me with its Santa Fe locations of Canyon Road, the Plaza, pink adobes and plaza jewelry stores.

– For sentimental reasons, one of my favorite poets is Phil Levine, (known as our "working class poet"), 82 years old and talking about being Poet Laureate and reading his perennial "What Work Is" (posted on 8/10/11). They talked to him about working at the auto plant in Detroit with the ubiquitously condescending question elitist poets love to ask: "What was poetry then?" Levine also talked touchingly about his wife who "honors what he is doing" and how important it is to be honored "not by an abstract nation but by family. It keeps you going."

– Natalie Diaz on location on a boat trip through the Mohave desert down the Colorado River talking about her weekly workshops to preserve the Mohave language (and make a talking computer dictionary for students) and themes of hunger in her work. You get to hear her read, which is extraordinarily full-throttle.

Authors & Poets – Recommended

From the Academy of Achievement, lots of good stuff here. I was only able to get to the 13 minute Rita Dove segment from June 1994. She talks about where inspiration comes from and reads "Flash Cards" and the beautiful Billie Holiday poem "Canary." Loved her quote in the reading warning us that "Evil is not stupid and can be very creative." The last podcast was posted in October of 2012.

Learn Out Loud – Recommended

Simple: readings of a single poem or two, sometimes by the original poet. I like the broad range of eras and styles represented. The last podcast was added in October 2010 and there are 21. I picked William Yeats reading "The Song of the Old Mother" and "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." What a creepy reader he was, rolling his r's and reading like an incantation. Have I just been cursed?

Indie Feed – Highly Recommended

Probably one of my favorite podcasts. They are short (6 minutes) and updated frequently, recording live performances of indie poets around the country followed by short interviews with them. I listened to Greek American Angela Kariotis read HiNRG protest poetry from her one woman show Stretch Marks (posted on 2/6/13). Loved it. Also listened to Brendan Constantine (posted on 2/8/13). He read a bit overbearingly in that tone of poets. He was much more comfortable in his interview. His father is Michael Constantine from My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Brendan is a poet and teacher. The host asked him if he planned to go into acting and he said "No, two dead end jobs are enough."

Interviews and Lectures

Poet Tech – Recommended

There are some aggravations with this podcast. They were a bit tricky to  download, there aren't many and they stopped on 3/17/10. Also host Will Brown could have edited them a bit cleaner and the interviews are via phone.

However, when I finally listened to the last 45-minute podcast, an interview with poet/gamer Radames Ortiz and his multi-media partner musician Jonathan Jindra, I was blown away. It was worth the slight hassle. They talked about multi-media poetry projects, poetry CDs with "extra features" (how interesting!), social media marketing, theatrical projects with projectors, comics poetry…they so had me a hello. Ortiz read his poem about gaming called "Grand Theft Auto Monstrocity." The podcast ran a bit too long but I was inspired by their projects.

Poetry Lectures – Highly Recommended

The Poetry Foundation has about a million podcasts. I picked this one to start with and wasn't disappointed. The first lecture/interview explored Palestinian poets Fady Joudah and Ghassain Zaptan (posted on 1/13/13). The host had a calm NPR voice and delved into what Palestinian poetry is all about, both classical and modern. They explored themes of statelessness, longing and revolution. They also read from two women poets. One had written a great archaeology poem called "Bone Taste" and I couldn't catch the author's name but the lines went like this:

Who will teach us to protect our bones
from archaeologists and myths
that glow in the plazas.
The worms will ask us
the questions of the Gods.
But who will ask them
about the taste of bones?

They implored us to never stop learning from the younger generations and discussed the art of translations, saying "rewriting is the closet form of reading" and translations offer something new to English, not just "an anthropological study of another culture." What is created is a new thing.

I also listened to the podcast Three Native American Poets from 3/20/12. These podcasts run about 45 minutes and this one had Allison Hedge Coke interviewing Linda Hogan and Sherwin Bitsui, both alumni of the Institute of American Indian Arts. They talked about native aesthetics and ceremonials, colonialism and their favorite poets: James Welch (they read "Harlem, Montana. Just Off the Reservation"), Ofelia Zepeda, Simon Ortiz, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, Maurice Kenney, and Diane Burns. Sherwin talked about border towns. Linda talked about poetry in the body ("What would my feet write? Where does the mind really live? Where does the poem really come from?") Sherwin talked about restorative poetry and always having to re-harmonize yourself to place. He recommended James Thomas Stevens (current faculty at IAIA) and read from Stevens' poem "Tokinish."

Serendipitous because James just gave me a copy of his book Bulle/Chimere which I hope to start next week.

My anthropologist husband, Mr. Bang Bang, said to me this weekend, "Culture is always changing. That is, in fact, the definition of culture. If it never changed, we wouldn't even have books."

So if you hate the inevitable march of culture (and it's eBooks), you have to forsake your beloved books as well.

I have come around to eBooks. Last year I published my own eBook campanion to Why Photgraphers Commit Suicide. You can't escape the reality that eBooks save trees, they save author's money (with bigger royalties due to lower production costs), and they save your customer both money and time (for example, if they need to download research material quickly for deadlines). In this brave new world, book-lovers will have categories of books they own: favorite books on a bookshelf and school books, research books or "books to take a chance on" for the mobile devices.

But as much as I appreciate the benefits of eBooks, there are still a few ways in which physical books rule:

1. You can hallow out a book to sneak a gun into your lover who is in prison.
    
2. Marooned in the cold wildnerness, you can use the pages of a book to start a fire and stay alive.
    
3. You can read a book in a bathtub without the worry you will drop it into the water and subsiquently be out of a $300 phone.
    
4. You can read a book on the beach without the fear it will be stolen from under your beach towel while you are tubing in the sea.
    
5. Related to items #3 and #4, a book can survive water damage.
     
6. With your physical book covers, you can impress other passengers on trains and plains. You're an intellectual, not a frivolous Draw Something gamer.
    
7. You can become a connoisseur of the smell and feel of various book papers.
     
8. You get to savor the delicious sound of flipping pages and spine bending.
    
9. With paper, it's easier for Fascists to make a book burning look dramatic.
    
10. It's harder for robbers to steal your entire library inadvertently while they are stealing your techie toys.
     
11. You get to experience the feel of a pen as it rolls ink out to create your marginalia.
      
12. You get the obsessive compulsive satisfaction of organizing and re-organizing your bookshelves to impress your house guests.
      
13. Real books work in a pinch to steady lopsided dinner tables.
     
14. Dog-earring.
      
15. Best of all is the joy of unpacking after a move and pulling all your books out of boxes with delight in remembering long lost treasures you somehow forgot you had.

One of my goals this year is to explore poetry apps on my iPhone. There are many many many. Some are helpful and fun. Some are annoyingly boring and pointless.

Poets & Writers (free) is one of the pointless ones. You can only manage your subscription with it, something it takes a simple website to do. Obviously P&W miss the point of why an app is worth having. No one will be using this non-tool (even subscribers) and so the advertising opportunity of luring in new subscribers with a free tool is missed. P&W should look to the business model of United Airlines and their app for an appreciation of how to make an app that is useful beyond your limited customer base but that will further your brand.

Poetry Daily (free) 
is a very popular poetry-of-the-day site that has offered up a very easy to use app. I actually look forward to Poetry Daily's well-picked fare. My only issue with this app is that you cannot re-size the text to fit your screen. For poems with long lines you have to move your screen right then left for every single line. It's annoying. I give up on every poem wider than the size of my iPhone. This happens more than you'd think. User frustration is not what makers of apps want for their customers.

I've tried a few visual poetry apps for fun. They were of limited gaiety to be honest. The first was Visual Poet (free). Basically this poem just matches three photos of your choice with three lines of verse you enter. I can't see what use this would be beyond a haiku. To try it out, I created a visual poem from the first haiku in my 2004 book St. Lou Haiku. You can pick the photos from Tumblr, Flickr, Google or your camera and adjust the font size and positioning. Then you can email it.

Credits:

St. Lou Haiku
Mary Elizabeth Ladd &  Julie Wiskirchen
2004
Timberline Press
ISBN 0-944048-32-3
29 pages: 107 haiku/4 illustrations by Clarence Wolfshohl       
5.5×8.5/letterpress

The poem represented was composed by Julie Wiskirchen.

A similar program is called Visual Poetry (0.99). This app is slightly more fun in that it takes a line of poetry and creates some word art out of it. There are color and font choices and 18 art styles, which I felt was a limited amount. You can then email the art piece to your friends.

I tried something with the first line from my 2012 book Why Photographers Commit Suicide: "Imagine your life in a glass box."

Credits:

Why Photographers Commit Suicide
Mary McCray
2012
Trementina Books
ISBN 0985984503
87 pages/8 illustrations by Emi Villavicencio       
9×6/paperback and eBook

Of all three apps reviewed so far, I would probably only recommend Poetry Daily for repeated use, although I will keep watching Virtual Poetry and the new art opportunities for one liners.