Tagged: Poetry

Ranjit Bhatnagar is no stranger to cool projects...he's made iambic pentameter from tweets, and is creating a bunch of instruments out of unexpected items, like a robo- toy piano.  Now, the sound artist can add one more feather to his cap...coming on our show.

Maxine Kumin’s career has spanned over half a century. She's the recipient of  awards such as the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Kumin was the poetry consultant for the Library of Congress in 1981-1982, and has taught at many of the country’s most prestigious universities, including MIT, Princeton, and Columbia. Despite traveling away from home to lecture at schools and universities around the United States, Kumin has retained close ties with her farmhouse in rural New Hampshire.

Award-winning poet and New Hampshire native Wesley McNair was born in Newport, grew up in the Connecticut River Valley, and has lived for many years in Mercer, Maine, the state for which he has been named Poet Laureate. Drawing from his personal experiences, McNair's poetry is emblematic of both family and economic hardships, and New England living.

Last week, we reviewed new experiments in spoken word with Marc Masters of music review site Pitchfork. He told us about the new spoken word album Sex Magic – a poetic reading of lyrics from the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s 1991 release, Blood Suger Sex Magik…

Afterwards, we asked listeners to suggest songs for us to “Blankenship,” our new term for reading song lyrics as poetry.   Here’s the best one we came up with.

Today, we celebrate National Poetry Month with a mix of audio craft and spoken word.  Poetry Out Loud was a band of poets which experimented with spoken word forms in the 1970s.

It’s been said that poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. We asked folks to tell us about their memories of how a poem had affected their life. Rodger Martin from Harrisville, New Hampshire remembered hearing a poem that helped him return to civilian life after a tour of duty in Vietnam.

RODGER: The state of the country was in a far different place in 1970.