Poet Annie Guthrie joins host Brian Blanchfield for an episode of poetry off the page, of the natural world, and/or indistinct from ritual. Selections from the poets and artists Cecilia Vicuña, Hiromi Ito, Kamau Brathwaite, Amanda Ackerman, William Bronk, Shane McCrae, Kay Ryan, Yoko Tawada, Elizabeth Willis, and Alice Notley.
With musical selections by Ohia, Bob Dorough, Jeff Buckley, The Edwin Hawkins Singers, and more.
Cecilia Vicuña | from "Quipo," Precario/Precarious. Tanam Press, 1983.
Kamau Brathwaite | “Elegua,” Elegguas. Wesleyan University Press, 2010.
Kamau Brathwaite | from “21 Days,” Born to Slow Horses. Wesleyan University Press, 2005.
Shane McCrae | “Mary Massages His Feet with Perfume Worth What a Worker Makes in a Year,” The Animal Too Big to Kill. Persea Books, 2016.
Elizabeth Willis | “Golden Book of Birds,” Iowa Review, Winter 2015-2016.
Yoko Tawada | from “Reflection,” tr. Susan Bernofsky. Where Europe Begins. New Directions, 2007.
Kay Ryan | “Splitting Ice” and “Sock,” Erratic Facts. Grove Press, 2015.
William Bronk | “What There Is There,” Life Supports: New and Collected Poems. Talisman House, 1997.
Alice Notley | from The Descent of Alette. Penguin, 1996.
Hiromi Ito | from Wild Grass on the Riverbank, tr. Jeffrey Angles. Action Books, 2015.
Amanda Ackerman | “Shipping,” The Book of Feral Flora. Les Figues, 2015.
SPEEDWAY & SWAN is a fortnightly one-hour free-format radio program that presents contemporary poetry against a context of variously compatible and offbeat musical selections. Culling from the exceptional libraries of his partners, the University of Arizona Poetry Center and KXCI 91.3 Tucson Community Radio, creator and host Brian Blanchfield is joined in conversation each episode by a rotating guest co-host who brings to the hour a selection of poetry from his or her personal canon, which, along with the freshest and best from the "new shelves," they read live.
Each show also features a recorded performance from Voca, the Poetry Center's audio archive of its legendary poetry readings since 1963. SPEEDWAY & SWAN represents a partnership between the Poetry Center, which will archive the show in listenable format with an annotated playlist, and KXCI, where the show streams live.
Since 1983, KXCI 91.3 FM has been committed to connecting Tucson and Southern Arizona to one another and to the world with informative, engaging, and creative community-based radio programming.
Brian Blanchfield is a poet and writer whose two books of poetry, Not Even Then and A Several World, have won him The James Laughlin Award, a Howard Foundation fellowship, and recognition as longlist finalist for the National Book Award. A poetry editor of Fence, he teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona and runs the downtown Tucson reading series Intermezzo. Contact: speedwayandswan@gmail.com.