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May 26, 2008

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April 15, 2008 - Tuesday

6:49 AM - SASCHA FEINSTEIN & YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA on Moe Green Wednsday

The World Wide Word Radio Network

Is proud and honored to present the following upcoming show
(check out the bios for our guests below)


This Wednesday,
April 16th on
The Moe Green Poetry Hour
To listen to the show click below
Listen live or later
Feel free to download any of our archived shows
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onword/
Call in number (718) 508-9717

4pm Pacific time, 7 pm Eastern
Join Moe Green (AKA) Rafael F. J. Alvarado & Cassandra Love
as they listens to the poetry of

SASCHA FEINSTEIN
&
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA
______________________________________________



And the bios go like this…

SASCHA FEINSTEIN won the Hayden Carruth Award for his poetry collection Misterioso. Individual poems have appeared in such publications as American Poetry Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. His most recent book, Ask Me Now: Conversations on Jazz & Literature, collects ten years of interviews; an essay collection, Black Pearls: Improvisations on a Lost Year, will be published next year. He is the author of two critical books, including Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present, and co-editor (with Yusef Komunyakaa) of The Jazz Poetry Anthology and its companion volume The Second Set. Individual essays have appeared in various publications, including The Southern Review, African American Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. He teaches at Lycoming College , where he edits.

Yusef Komunyakaa is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including Dien Cai Dau (Wesleyan, 1988), a collection of poems chronicling his experiences in Vietnam, and Neon Vernacular (Wesleyan, 1994). Komunyakaa has co-edited two volumes, Jazz Poetry Anthology and Insomnia of Fire. His prose writings are collected in Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, Commentaries. His verse play adapted from Sumerian legend, Gilgamesh: A Verse Play, was published in the fall of 2006 by Wesleyan. Warhorses, his thirteenth collection, is due from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in October 2008.
Komunyakaa won the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Prize for Neon Vernacular, as well as Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Thomas Forcade Award, the William Faulkner Prize, the Levinson Prize from Poetry Magazine, the Hanes Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999 and was awarded the Shelley Memorial Prize by the Poetry Society of America.
Born in the rural community of Bogalusa, Louisiana , Komunyakaa graduated magna cum laude from the University of Colorado in 1975, after having received a bronze star for his service as a journalist in the Vietnam War. He completed his Masters degree in 1978 at Colorado State University, and earned an MFA from The University of California at Irvine in 1980. He has taught at Indiana State University, Washington University, University of California at Berkeley, and the University of New Orleans, and is currently a professor at New York University.

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March 29, 2008 - Saturday

9:02 AM - unobstructed today at 3pm pacific 6 pm eastern
Category: Writing and Poetry

"Unobstructed"

hosted by

Alaina Alexander

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket


.To listen to show click below

Listen Live








The World Wide Word Radio Network,
click to listen
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onword/page/3


The World Wide Word Radio Network,
Presents

Saturday March 29
3 Pm PAcific 6 Pm Eastern
Unobstructed
Hosted by Alaina R. Alexander

She Wil Be Talking to
Lisa Gill

Lisa Gill is the recipient of a 2007 National Endowment for the
Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She has published two books of
poetry, Red as a Lotus: Letters to a Dead Trappist (La Alameda
Press) and Mortar & Pestle (New Rivers Press). A third
collection, Caput Nili: How I Won the War and Lost My Taste for
Oranges, is a hybrid of poetry and prose and will include art
and MRI brainscans and is forthcoming with the avant garde art
press Burning Books. She also has work forthcoming in Blue Mesa
Review, Tuesday; An Art Project, and the anthology Looking Back
to Place. She is currently serving as artistic director for
STIR: A Festival of Words which is slated for September 12-14,
2008 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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March 26, 2008 - Wednesday

7:30 PM - friday on the network
Category: Writing and Poetry

The World Wide Word Radio Networks

presents

Cerebral Mediation





This Friday
March 28 on

Cerebral Mediation
To listen to show click below
Listen live or later
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onword/page/3
Call in number (718) 508-9717

5 Pm Pacific time 8 PM eastern
Join Roy Johnston and His Cohost Stacey Mangiaracina

as they talk to Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna Mort was born in 1981 in Minsk. She has published two collections of poetry and received a number of European awards for her work. Her new book, Factory of Tears, will be published by Copper Canyon Press this year.
In her first American publication, poet Valzhyna Mort contends with the joys and sorrows that comprise the heartache of self discovery. Factory of Tears, co-translated from the Belarusian by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright, juxtaposes youthful coming-of-age against the struggles of a nation’s emergent vitality. ... Self identification, national independence, and the bounty of metaphor and language take us to that edge where everything is wild.

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December 23, 2007 - Sunday

1:49 AM - Sunday Alice James Books poets on moe green
Category: Writing and Poetry

----------------- Bulletin Message -----------------
From: Moe Green Poetry Hour Hosted By Rafael FJ Alvarado
Date: Nov 7, 2007 8:58 AM


World Wide Word Radio Network

presents

This week on The Moe Green Poetry Hour

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket


To listen to show click below

Listen Live

http://


TAM





The World Wide Word Radio Networks

Presents
An Afternoon Of Alice James Books Poets
http://www.alicejamesbooks.org/about_ajb.htmlcontact [This is a link to part of http://www.alicejamesbooks.org/about_ajb.html]

This Sunday December 23 on
The Moe Green Poetry Hour
To listen to show click below
Listen live or later
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onword/page/3
Call in number (718) 508-9717

11Am Pacific time 2PM eastern
Join Moe Green (AKA) Rafael F J Alvarado and
His cohost . Stacey Mangiaracina
as they listen to the poetry of

Doug Anderson

Sarah Gambito


Tom Thompson


"Doug Anderson has written two books of poetry, of which The Moon Reflected Fire won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police a grant from the Academy of American Poets. His poems have been widely anthologized and have appeared in many distinguished literary journals. He has received grants from the NEA and other funding organizations and has won many prizes, including a Pushcart Prize for 2005. He has also written plays, screenplays and criticism, and has just finished a memoir, Don't Rub Your Eyes, about the Vietnam War and the nineteen sixties. He has work forthcoming in the Massachusetts review and Azul Editions.


Sarah Gambito is the author of Matadora (Alice James Books). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, The New Republic, Field, Quarterly West, Fence and other journals. She holds degrees from The University of Virginia and The Creative Writing Program at Brown University. She is co-founder of Kundiman, a non-profit company serving Asian American poets.

Tom Thompson is the author of LIVE FEED, which came out in 2001, and THE PITCH, published in 2006--both books were published by Alice James Books. His poems and book reviews have recently appeared in Black Clock, BostonColorado Review, Conduit, and Verse. Tom works at an advertising agency, and lives in New York City with his wife and two sons. Review,

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December 19, 2007 - Wednesday

7:11 PM - HANGING LOOSE PRESS POETS ON MOE GREEN THURSDAYS
Category: Writing and Poetry

----------------- Bulletin Message -----------------
From: Moe Green Poetry Hour Hosted By Rafael FJ Alvarado
Date: Nov 7, 2007 8:58 AM


World Wide Word Radio Network

presents

This week on The Moe Green Poetry Hour

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket


To listen to show click below

Listen Live

http://


TAM



The World Wide Word Radio Networks

Presents
A Night Hanging Loose Press Poets
http://www.hangingloosepress.com/index.html

This Thursday December 20 on
The Moe Green Poetry Hour
To listen to show click below
Listen live or later
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onword/page/3
Call in number (718) 508-9717

7 pm Pacific time 10PM eastern
Join Moe Green (AKA) Rafael F J Alvarado and
His cohost . Stacey Mangiaracina
as they listen to the poetry of

Kathleen Aguero

Jack Anderson

Donna Brook

Robert Hershon


Kathleen Aguero's most recent book of poetry, Daughter Of, is published by Cedar Hill Books. She is the author of two previous books of poetry, Thirsty Day (Alice James Books) and The Real Weather (Hanging Loose Press). She has edited three volumes of multicultural literature published by the Univiersity of Georgia Press and has an essay in the anthology, Why I'm Still Married. The recipient of grants from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and the Elgin Cox Foundation, she is a Professor of English at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA, teaching in their low-residency MFA and undergraduate programs.

Jack Anderson, a poet and dance writer, is the author of nine books of poetry and seven books of dance history and criticism. He is a dance writer for the New York Times, New York correspondent for The Dancing Times of London, and co-editor (with George Dorris) of Dance Chronicle, a journal of dance history. His most recent dance book is Art Without Boundaries: The World of Modern Dance, an international history of modern dance. His other books include The One and Only: The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Choreography Observed, Ballet and Modern Dance: A Concise History, The American Dance Festival, and The Nutcracker. He has a B.S. in Theatre from Northwestern University and a M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Indiana University. He has taught dance history and criticism at the University of Adelaide (Australia), the North Carolina School of the Arts, the University of Minnesota, the College of St. Catherine (St. Paul, Minnesota), the New School for Social Research, Herbert L. Lehman College (New York City), and the American Dance Festival. He has also served on the dance panel of the National Endowment for the Arts.

His volumes of poetry include Field Trips on the Rapid Transit, The Clouds of That Country, The Invention of New Jersey, Toward the Liberation of the Left Hand, Selected Poems, and most recently Traffic. His poems have also appeared in many anthologies and one of his prose poems provided the title for the anthology The Party Train. He has also been a visiting writer at the University of Kansas and the College of DuPage in Illinois, and has received a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship and a National Endowment literary award.

Donna Brook was born in Buffalo, raised in Detroit, and has lived in New York since 1979. She has taught at widely, at Wayne state University, York College, The Chapin School, and others. She is the author of five books of poetry, most recently A MORE HUMAN FACE, and JOURNEY OF ENGLISH, a history of the language for young readers. Brook has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. She is associate editor of Hanging Loose Press.

Robert Hershon is the author of twelve books of poems, the most recent being CALLS FROM THE OUTSIDE WORLD. He is co-editor of Hanging Loose Press and executive director of The Print Center, Inc., a non-profit production facility for publishers. He has won two fellowships from the NEA and three from New York State

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November 26, 2007 - Monday

6:03 PM - Our Big Easy Poet of the Week, Matthew Nolan!
Category: Writing and Poetry

We are pleased to bring you Matthew Nolan!  After two long years of being a "Katrina evacuee", he is finally back home in New Orleans celebrating his birthday, Thanksgiving, working on his new book and meeting new friends.  We wish him well!


Matthew Nolan is a New Orleans writer living in the artistic surroundings of the Lower Garden District. He can be seen taking the St. Charles Streetcar to local poetry readings and bicycling through French Quarter haunts. Nolan holds degrees in behavioral science, theatre arts, general education, and studied emergency medicine. He has been nationally awarded for his outstanding academic achievements and community leadership.

Nolan has performed in numerous Shakespeare productions and has appeared in major motion pictures. He is a nationally published writer in the Sigma Kappa Delta Hedera helix, Sigma Tau Delta Gyre, Muse, and Athenian.

While living in New Orleans bohemia, Matthew Nolan wrote his first book Crumpled Paper Dolls: A New Orleans Poet. Nolan achieved his dream of selling his book out of his bicycle basket on Jackson Square, a magnet for local street artists, vendors, and tourists. Soon thereafter, Matthew Nolan got an unexpected break from a major bookstore chain, and nothing has been the same since.

 


Caterpillar Girls

Should have known!
Should have known!
Between a phony butterfly
and a never evolving caterpillar—

Her pleasant sincerity is a funny hat
that droops over her face,
a blind dunce,
a cartoon caterpillar;
a squirming, eyeless caterpillar,
on its back in loose dirt,
like Marilyn Monroe posing on satin sheets
saying,
"Me! Me! Pick Me! Love Me!"

If only she could see her dirty white lies,
countless as her dirty green caterpillar legs
spread as wide as a caterpillar can,
collecting tree sap between them,
pasting her tiny opening shut

With her wide, munchy caterpillar mouth she says,
"Sorry I am a liar! So sorry!
Pick me! Pick me!"

She can't cocoon.
She can't become pretty things like
the phony butterfly skipping in the air,
dodging under a thorn bush to
organize a glassy, green, symphony of caterpillars
to inch towards me, to befriend me,
inching inside my belly button, to love me,
then inching back out with my shredded heart lining,
bloody red tears of skin like a menstrual cycle
hanging from mushy caterpillar lips,
bright red Kool-Aid lips;
Gory green caterpillar girls that never evolve and say,
"Me! Pick Me! I am sorry I lied! Pick me!"

 

 

Piles of Curtains

You drove me to the mucky beach,
rattling, the tire I changed
in shoe polished arms,
your little boys hanging out the car window
spying down on me for beetles or a melted popsicle,
cream and sugar, July in New Orleans,
salty lips and sweaty moods making me feel poor again,
reminding me of when my little bare eyes and feet stared
up from the backseat into the back of my Mother's head,
July in Florida
 
The beach was desolate, the back of a cereal box,
too many dead things in the sand,
too many alive things bouncing down from the heavens
through my soul while you play water games with your
boys, the other half of them elsewhere,
spying in a freezer for a frozen popsicle;
it is so cold in their father's house as we become bananas
in the sun with his sons
 
I cast my body in the water warm and gray as old milk
and feel the mushy sand between my toes, soft and greasy
like when we are making love;
I know there are not enough thrusts in your spine or
fingers on the hands of God to save my soul,
yet we play spiritual tug-of-war,
suctioning skin that wraps crude sand from
decayed fish and crabs so stinky and heavy I just smile and
wonder if you can see the fish tails and crab claws poking
out from my mouth like a flower arrangement of seafood
moving slowly, sad and dying
 
Once a garden grew inside me,
it was bright yellow with breasts of tough green leaves and
fountains of clear water growing rows of fluffy popcorn
where a rabbit lived at the end of a rainbow,
just outside my heart
 
Then something horrible happened
and the fountain showered hard red and
one by one the villagers in my brain gathered
every kernel of fluffy popcorn and replaced them with
stuffed piles of unfolded curtains,
blacking everything out
 
Like that day on the mucky beach,
the sky lowered,
flattening out your candy smile,
melting popsicles, squishing beetles,
shutting out a horizontal sliver of light,
coloring black outside the lines,
waving a dead fish in my face I can only smell,
it smells like me

 

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November 18, 2007 - Sunday

3:10 PM - Our poet of the week, Alan King
Current mood: creative
Category: Writing and Poetry

We are very proud to present the very talented and handsome Alan King!

 

Alan King's fiction and poems have appeared in the Arabesques Review, Warpland, The Amistad, and Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS, among others. A Cave Canem fellow and Vona Alum, his work was also part of Anacostia Exposed, a collaborative exhibit with Irish photographer Mervyn Smyth that showcases the life and energy of Anacostia.

Feel free to visit any one of Alan's MySpace pages:

http://myspace.com/alanking81 
http://myspace.com/bustransfer
http://myspace.com/themusicweare

 

Foghorn Leghorn's Lament

now hold—I say, hold on now.
hawk or no hawk, it ain't right
for that boy to go terrorizin'
older folks like that

shootin' them with arrows,
callin' himself big chickenhawk
engine and dancin' with
his feathered head-piece
like some crazy mohawkin

so what if his kind hunts and
eats what we are--he's still a boy!

I tell him, you can't—I say,
can't go makin' more noise than
a couple of skeletons throwin'
a fit on a tin roof, sonny

and it ain't—I say, ain't smart to
go round bitin' folks bigger than you
that's how you get hurt

Miss Prissy tell me all the time
to let the boy be; that at his age
he's harmless

and I always tell my lammy pie
there's a whole—I say, whole 'lotta
eggs with the crazy notion they're
too fresh for they own yolk

at his age, he need—I say, need
to learn to mind us better, honey bun
and stop this stuff bout survival of
the fittest and all that other nonsense

Barnyard Dawg ain't—I say,
ain't much better for yokin'
the boy along with his mischief,
tellin him new ways to trap me


so I tell sonny he been lied to
for so long, and that all—
I say, all this time I was a horse
instead of a rooster

then I point to that silly dawg
smilin' like a boozehound
after badgerin' ol' foghorn

there—I say, there's your
chicken, boy. all four legs.
go on over and taste him, sonny.
I'm sure you'll like it.

-------------------------------------------------


Loop

you lie in bed, sunlight jutting
through Venetian Blinds and
spreading across your covers

you hope today will be different;
that dumb-luck will find you in a
situation you've been in several times
when a woman's caught you stealing
glances at her in transit

this time, your voice won't retreat
as you go into shock: gaping at peach-
colored lips and vanilla bean thighs
that escape up a knee-length skirt

when you were younger, the only
reason you liked Fall was time
turning back, a second chance
to live the hour differently

what would you change?
you remember wanting to slap
an office worker for lecturing
you on what you're paid to do

or you think about an ex,
wondering if you weren't so insecure,
would you be together now?

these thoughts orbit your mind
as you stare into space, imagining
earth a giant Turntable the celestial
DJ spins your life on and every
dull day's a continuous loop


-----------------------------------------------------


Tony Soprano's Appointment with Dr. Melfi

you probably t'ink I'm a regular
prejudicial prick, but I got Carmela
and da kids to worry about

dis ain't like when my ole man
was around. dem coloreds had deir
neighborhood, we had ours

wit'out sayin' it, we knew
where da bound'ries were.
you didn't have all dis crossin'
into uddah territory

so Meadow brings one
of dem home. dey're on
da couch watching TV

you believe dat?! fifty
t'ousand dollars to send her
to Columbia College, and
she brings home an Oreo

dis guys a regular Richard Pryor.
Cocksucker tells me what to do
with myself when i tell him not
to see my daughter, anymore

Carmela t'inks i'm pushing
our girl away

will you stop it wit' da looks,
already. you're disappointed
but we're both parents, who
want what's best for our kids.

you've seen da guns, drugs, and
whores in dese rap videos, everyt'ings
a party wit' dese people

how's dis different from my life?


oh so you breakin' my balls,
now   well, we're very quiet
how we handle t'ings, don't
like a whole lot of show

but da bright jerseys and doo-rags,
dey're a regular Sammy Davis out dere.
Feds would spot dem right away.

dis Irv Gotti character.
you believe dis guy, taking
a good name like dat?

Cocksucker calls his label
Murder Inc. and wonders why
he's picked up for extortion.
dat kind of stupid stuff.

so AJ t'inks da world owe 'em
like dat Shakur character.

da troot is, I'm so sick
of dese moolies mocking
what we do in dere music

Snoopity Dogg t'inks he's
da Doggfadda, he don't
want Tony Soprano
to t'row him a bone

instead of bugging my house,
da Feds should be after da
industry dat's supporting dis.

my uncle Junior survived dis
business and cancer, but somet'ing
like dis would kill da old man.


---------------------------------------------------


Last Call

diner lights go up when one
of your boys recalls the night
before his 30th birthday

brothas, the 20's rolled out
after realizing she didn't have
a future with me

you turned 25 at midnight
and another friend jokes about
it going downhill from there

I'm telling you, yo. You get
to be 30 like me, people start
callin you an old man

sneakers squeak over clay
tiles as busboys hurry to clear
their sections, when the old
man pops into your head

you still in school!? Boy,
I was married and making
good money at your age

and just the day before, coming
out of Gallery Place, you ran into
an old friend from high school

so what'cha doin with your life?
he asked, after mentioning
finishing law school

you remember going blank like
the flat screen over the empty
stools and a bartender buffing
the shiny copper counter

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November 11, 2007 - Sunday

1:01 PM - Our lovely poet of the week, Ashaki M. Jackson
Current mood: cheerful
Category: Writing and Poetry


Ashaki M. Jackson is a social psychologist and writer currently residing in Southern California. Her work, featured in various written and audio anthologies, examines social conflict through cultural practices, including dance and funeral rites. Black Goat Press will publish her poetry manuscript "Thus Are Our Bodies" in 2008.
Ashaki can be heard live tonight, Sunday, November 11th on the MOE GREEN POETRY HOUR at 6pm PST.  And if you miss it, don't worry, you can hear this lovely soul by going to
www.blogtalkradio.com/onword to listen directly from the site or with a simple click of the download button you can have your very own podcast.

 

 

What the Women Did

Women said when it was over. They stopped their milk and crossed their legs. Told the battles to sit down. Told the soldiers to nap. Civilizations collapsed in this way. Some say women became like this when they were hungry and mourning. They cried about the fighting into the laps of other women. Weep and swallow. Eating what was left of the soldiers until every last bit was gone. They continued weeping until dawn, forgetting the dead. That was how they ate a body in ancient times.

_________________________________________________________________________________

 

Cante Jondo

There is only evening, here. The heavy eyes of children who
dread the dark. The tartness and senility of wine.

Men retreat into safe places – behind women's knees,
upon the smooth pomegranate abdomens,

beneath the many napes. Here is a slow walk, a siguirilla
into the night. Men who dream of flying fall deftly from trees

with sobering cadence. At dusk, women collect the fallen figs,
smell their heft, press thumbs into the scrotums


_________________________________________________________________________


Wandering

Sin is dewy, insipid in the morning.
I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

Children hush, emptied like whistles.
The stale bend, sway like palms in the morning.

Ashen streets are communion tongues in-waiting.
Dying idols beg for alms in the morning.

Our Wandering will visit smooth and unblemished.
Scent of flesh warms us balmy in the morning.

Memories, dressed in lights, are buoyed to the moon.
The reverent ones are embalmed in the morning.

___________________________________________________________________

E is for Edifice:

this structure of bones.         Pelvic curves and vertebrae, requisite arches of its entrance.
Imagine lovers dripping off warm beds. Slack-jawed.

Estuary: mouths spilling into the tide,          hosanna swelling the waters with pace –
a Sunday saunter.

E is for gathering: sharing one's skin to the follicle.          A meeting in the altar.

Excrement, collecting on itself meat and grain, patient for benediction.

Ear: a stooped man, limbs drawn into himself.          A collection plate.         A device to
fashion verse into prayer: hammer, anvil, stirrup.

E is for conversion between living and stillness. Eulogy, dirge, exhumation.
Trinity.

 

 

 

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