Monday, January 12 - Christopher Buckley & J. Mark Smith

Christopher Buckley

J. Mark Smith

Wow! Two shows again this week. First, a conversation with readings by California poet and essayist Christopher Buckley. Noon. Then, another poetry reading taped by the good folks at Casa Romantica, this by poet J. Mark Smith at 12:30. Christopher Buckley California poet Christopher Buckley has two recent books out, and today he’ll read from and talk about both: Sleepwalk, a collection of essays, and Modern History, twenty years of Buckley’s collected prose poetry. About Sleepwalk, subtitled California Dreamin’ and a last dance with the Sixties, D.J. Waldie writes “It’s the world we’ve just come from re-imagined and reconsidered.” Lauded as a “pioneer of the prose poem” Buckley’s work in assembles a personal cosmology, celebrating, struggling with what Killarney Clary calls his “wonder at the miracle of what happens in the world and how experience lodges under the skin, serves as a way home and a way forward.” Both books pursue Buckley’s themes of history as autobiography --- of narrator, people and place. Christopher Buckley is author of thirteen collections of poetry and prose, too many titles to mention, but most recently Modern HistoryAnd the Sea and Flying Backbone: The Georgia O’Keefe Poems. He has written nonfiction including the seminal Cruising State: Growing Up in Southern California, and been an editor as well as coeditor of poetry collections and the critical anthology A Condition of the Spirit: The Life and Work of Larry Levis. He is also a teacher of creative writing at UC Riverside. J. Mark Smith - 12:30
Poet J. Mark Smith spent time living in Southern California, and shares poems from his time here and elsewhere, including the Sierras, in work read at a recent evening at Casa Romantica’s terrific poetry series in San Clemente. Smith was born in Eugene, Oregon in 1965, and moved with his family to western Canada when he was ten months old. He has published one book of poems — Notes for a Rescue Narrative, “which reveals everyday experience in sharply perceptive, profound ways, and contrasts the complex technology of urban life with the harsh demands of survival in the wilderness.” Smith writes an elegy for a mountain climber who, like his own father, was killed in an avalanche. J. Mark Smith teaches in the English department at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton, Alberta.

Listen live on the radio at KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles or 98.7 FM in Santa Barbara. Or on line, or archived at http://www.kpfk.org

Thanks!

Monday, December 15 - Atkinson/Chin - Two poets, two shows!

Noon: Colette LaBouff Atkinson, Mean.

12:30: Marilyn Chin at Casa Romantica.

Colette LaBouff Atkinson’s debut poetry collection is called Mean, and comprises forty-three connected prose poems which, separately and together, offering a broken and then perhaps reassembled vision of life and love from car windows and memory and movies, with literary and family history, the autobiography of a Southern California childhood --- with songs playing in the background. It’s the narrator’s journey from girlhood in the South Bay to a sad marriage to a difficult man, to friendships with his other ex-wives and the discoveries of her own forgotten family members. LA Times books editor David Ulin writes about Mean: “These bits and pieces --- unexpected, at times half-remembered --- only give more weight to her experience, a heady mix of ideas and influences that reverberates like memory in the mind.” Colette Labouff Atkinson's prose has appeared in: Orange Coast, Seneca Review, River Teeth, Santa Monica Review, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Babble, and elsewhere. She has recently taught in the literary journalism program at UC Irvine and last spring taught poetry workshops at Pitzer College. Atkinson is Associate Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at UC Irvine, and she lives in Southern California.

Poet Marilyn Chin’s recent visit to Orange County’s Casa Romantica poet series in San Clemente offered the poet reading some of the best of her anthemic and bluesy work. Marilyn Chin grew up in Portland, Oregon after her family immigrated from Hong Kong. She received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Her awards include two NEA grants, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, four Pushcarts and a Fullbright Fellowship. Her poetry focuses on social issues, especially those related to Asian American feminism and bi-cultural identity. Volumes include Dwarf Bamboo, The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty and Rhapsody in Plain Yellow. Her most famous and most-anthologized poem is "Turtle Soup," which she reads in the recording that I play today. Marilyn Chin begins her half-hour on "Bibliocracy" with the self-introductory poem, “How I Got That Name.”

Monday, December 8 - Two New Shows - Buhle, Ryan

Short-term programming changes by station management put you in the catbird seat, or the booklover-listener's seat anyway. So, NOON on Monday, an interview. Then, at 12:30, another program from the good folks at San Clemente's Casa Romantica Poetry Series, who share a recording of the night's reading. I edit slightly for length and to accomodate the FCC.

NOON - Historian (and hero) PAUL BUHLE

Paul Buhle is the hardest working man in Leftbiz, a popularizer, archivist, cultural polemicist, revisionist historian whose CV is a who’s he of the last forty years of our national story. Recently Buhle edited a comic book version of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States as A People’s History of American Empire and Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History with Harvey Pekar. His newest is Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form. A recent favorite of mine is the beautiful Wobblies: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World, featuring art by Pekar, Seth Tobocman, Sue Coe and Spain Rodriguez. Paul Buhle is Senior Lecturer at Brown University and a leading American historian --- author or editor of more than thirty books, including the three-volume Jews and American Popular Culture. He founded the iconic New Left journal Radical America as an SDS activist himself, co-edited the incredibly useful and comprehensive Encyclopedia of the American Left, and wrote the authorized biography of CLR James. Paul Buhle is a scholar and activist who I have long admired, so that it is a real honor to welcome Paul Buhle to Bibliocracy.

12:30 PM

United States Poet Laureate KAY RYAN


This program’s collaboration with the poetry series at Casa Romantica in Orange County continues, celebrating the happy coincidence that one of its recent guest readers, Kay Ryan, was just named the newest poet laureate of the United States of America. Hot damn! Recorded in springtime at the Casa’s San Clemente Poetry Series, Kay Ryan’s most recent collections are Say Uncle and The Niagara River, and she reads poems from both. Ryan has won countless awards and honors, fellowships from the Guggenheim and won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. There are Pushcarts and Best American Poetry credits and, yes, she is our nation’s newest poet laureate. And here she is, poet Kay Ryan, on Bibliocracy, reading for you. For more information on their excellent series, with readings the final Wednesday of each month in beautiful San Clemente, visit the Casa Romantica site: http://www.casaromanticareadingseries.org/.

Monday, December 1 - Two new shows!

Noon - Tin House publisher, founder Win Mc Cormack

Win McCormack is a publisher, editor and writer whose name may be less familiar than the titles of his articles, books and the magazine Tin House, which he founded. It's been an unqualified success story in the world of literary magazines, but led further to creation of a publishing house of the same name: Tin House Books. The magazine’s current issue, which arrived at my door just weeks before the election, announced “The Political Future” and included some of the most remarkable stories, poems, interviews and analysis I’ve read in its ten years of publication, with contributions from Dorothy Allison, Markos “Daily Kos” Zuniga, Francine Prose, Barry Sanders, the poet Kevin Young, playwright Wallace Shawn and many more, including McCormack’s own essay, “The End of Democracy?” and his conversation with Thomas Frank. For its (nearly) ten year anniversary, and to celebrate this exemplary issue on politics I thought it time to check in with the visionary publisher behind Tin House magazine and Tin House Books and, post-election, get his take on politics and the arts, publishing and more.

And stay tuned, for poet Brian Turner.

More Bibliocracy at 12:30

Today, in our second half-hour, I present another reading aired in collaboration with the outstanding community poetry series at Casa Romantica in Orange County. In May of this year combat veteran and poet Brian Turner read to a full house, new poems and poems from his collection, Here, Bullet, a remarkable collection built on his personal experiences in war, his scholarship and travels. Originally from Fresno, Californa, Turner has been published in Poetry Daily, Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Georgia Review, Rattle, Virginia Quarterly Review, and ZYZZYVA. His poems have also appeared in an anthology, Voices in Wartime. Turner received the Beatrice Hawley Award for his debut collection, Here, Bullet, published by Alice James Books. Brian Turner is an MFA graduate of the University of Oregon and a U.S. Army veteran. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq beginning November 2003, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In 1999 and 2000 he was with the 10th Mountain Division, deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Thanks again to Casa Romantica. http://www.casaromanticareadingseries.org/