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About 18 years ago or maybe it was last month I read at the World Stage at Leimert Park in Los Angeles, as part of their Wednesday night poetry workshop, led by Jawanza Dumisani.  If you’re ever in LA, stop by 4344 Degnan Blvd at 7:30 p.m. and you won’t be disappointed.  The format is one I’ve never seen before — it’s an open mic workshop, where poets go on stage to read one poem, which the audience then critiques cold.  Some of the poets had copies to pass out, but not nearly enough for the 35 or 40 people in attendance, so the result is a very interesting test of the effectiveness of a poem read aloud. That lasts for about an hour, and then they turn to a featured reader (in this case myself).

Someone there is gracious enough to record the featured readings, though I’m embarrassed to say that at this point I’ve forgotten the man’s name.  He handed me a CD as I rushed out the door (I had to pitch at my softball game a few blocks over at 9:30…we beat the dreaded Los Logartos 22-8 and I struck out 6, which is pretty good for slow-pitch softball, I have to say).  Anyway, I finally got a chance to listen to the CD, and it’s probably the best audio of a reading I have, so I thought I should post it, even though I’m sure everyone’s sick of the poems from American Fractal by now.

I assumed KPFK would rather have me send listeners to their website, so I only posted a clip from this last week.  Quite the contrary, host Lois P. Jones asked if I’d post the whole thing, so it has a permanent home.  I just posted the first segment, with Peggy Dobreer.  Here’s the second, with me — about 25 minutes long. I read “Cooking Dinner,” “Playing Our Part,” “After Hopper,” “Impressionism,” and “The Body.” Talk about fractals, the theme of my book, Rattle as a rogue journal, and the importance of poetry to society.

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Since the KPFK archives only last 90 days, host Lois P. Jones asked me to make a permanent home for the show I was on last week.  Here is the first segment, with Peggy Dobeer — I thought she deserved her own page.

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Peggy Dobreer is an educator, poet, public speaker, and artisan who works and teaches in the Extension Program at Loyola Marymount University. She was a leading force in the educational vision of the Center for the Advancement of Nonviolence, from 1997-2004, and co-wrote and edited 64 Ways to Practice Nonviolence: A Curriculum and Resource Guide. Her poetry is published in Cracked Pavement and Plastic Trees, Our Gifts To Future Generations: An Anthology of Environmental Poetry, Everything About You Is Beautiful: Really Big Show Anthology (Winter 2004), WordWright’s Magazine, Tamafhyr Mountain Poetry Irregular Poetry Journal, and The Blue House. She has self-published four chapbooks: Henceforth (1999), Bravo Collection (2002), Face of Sky (2004) and B.L.A.B.B. Be Live at Beyond Baroque (2006).

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Above is a 3-minute teaser from the 25-minute interview. To listen to the whole thing, visit the KPFK archive, and click on “Poetry and Culture” at noon (Wed., July 22nd). Mine is the second segment, halfway through, following an enlightening interview with local poet Peggy Debreer.

Since it’s the first time I’ve ever heard myself on the radio I thought I’d “live-blog” the queasiness.  I didn’t feel nervous at all sitting in the sound studio and talking to Lois about poetry, but now that I’m here at my desk helplessly listening to what I said three months ago, I’ve been feeling uneasy.  I can’t even remember what might have come out of my mouth!

Anyway, here’s my commentary:

• 29:20 – First of all, I completely forgot that I was sick when we recorded this. Hear the rasp in my voice –I’m trying hard not to cough through the whole thing and sometimes failing.
• 30:10 – So tired of my own poems. I need to write some new ones…
• 32:10 – That bit about fractals and the mars rover is something that I had no idea I was going to say, and had never really thought of coherently until I heard myself saying it.  But the description of fractals as “getting lost in scale” actually works, which is neat.
• 34:02 – Are my “mhmm’s” while Lois is talking annoying everyone or just me?  Shut up Tim…
• 34:30 – Haha, I’m the Big Kahuna!
• 35:25 – I accidentally lied about the number of submissions we receive at Rattle. It’s 50 subs/day in the busy seasons, around deadlines and new issues, but it drops to 20 when we’re slow.  The interview was recorded during a busy period, so that’s all I was thinking about.  Oops!  I still feel a little guilty about that.  100 poems every day is still a lot, right?
• 36:30 – I don’t usually read “Playing Our Part,” it was nice that she asked for that.
• 42:00 – The plug for my friend Erik Campbell’s book Arguments for Stillness was edited out because we couldn’t get on the same page — I thought Lois was referring to an Elizabeth Bishop quote that we’d talked about before, not Erik’s book.  Sorry Erik!
• 43:30 – I’m sick of complaining about no respect of Rattle.  All those things are true, we are a “rogue journal” and proud of it, but I feel like a whiner going on about it.  It ties in to what I wrote on last Friday, the inanity of the game.  Who gives an f-…
• 49:50 – “the white blood cell count for society.”  Another thing I never thought of until I said it.  Interviews are fun.
• 51:10 – Sometimes when I read “The Body” I have to fight the urge to read in a southern accent…is that weird?

Well that was mostly pointless!  I enjoyed the interview, though, and commenting on it reduces the jitters.

Thanks to Lois P. Jones for being a great host, and KPFK for having me.  What did you all think?

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The above review appeared last Wednesday on WPSU, NPR’s central Pennsylvania affiliate.  The clip is from BookMark, a weekly book reviews show.  This is just, I think, the second review of the book to reach the public, and the first time my name’s ever been mentioned on the radio.

The coolest part is hearing someone else who you’ve never met read some lines of your poem out loud — and then still hearing them as they sound in your head.  Poetry works!  Here’s how Maddox ends the review:

Indeed, as Timothy Green claims in ‘Hiking Alone’, perhaps all we ever want is ‘a little darkness to climb out of.’ In American Fractal, he provides the dark, the light, and a rope of words for climbing from one insight to another.

__________

p.s. Marjorie Maddox has reviewed for Rattle in the past, but I only just discovered that she’s written a young adult book of baseball poems.  How cool is that? Looking around a little more, the poems seem to be good, too: “…all hard-pitched hope outthrown, thrown out/of luck, of heart, of the hard heat of summer/and what won’t be.” If I’d read that in 8th grade, I would have gotten into poetry sooner!