“I want a literature that is not made from literature,” writes Bhanu Kapil in her book, Ban en Banlieue. Poet and musician Maggie Golston joins host Brian Blanchfield to read selections of poetry that might answer that call: Kapil, Alice Oswald, Miles Champion, CA Conrad. And also poetry determinedly (if not singularly) voiced: Amiri Baraka, Alice Notley, Gillian Conoley. Featured Voca performance from 2011 by Roger Bonair-Agard. Musical selections by J. Hines and the Boys, Cannonball Adderley Quintet, Blossom Dearie, Elliott Smith, Shearwater, Youth and Valor, and others.
Gillian Conoley | “Experiments in Patience III,” Peace. Omnidawn, 2014.
Devin Johnston | “Telephone,” Far-Fetched. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
Alice Oswald | from Dart. Faber and Faber, 2002.
CA Conrad | “Nail It Like This and You Will Always Fall Out of the Black Sky,” EcoDeviance. Wave Books, 2014.
Alice Notley | “Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice,” How Spring Comes. Toothpaste Press, 1981.
Miles Champion | “Glass Table Shoe,” How to Laugh. Adventures in Poetry, 2015.
Amiri Baraka | “Leadbelly Gives an Autograph” from Black Magic Poetry 1961-1967. Bobbs-Merrill, 1969.
Roger Bonair-Agard | “In a Time of Polio,” voca recording from April 2011, The University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Bhanu Kapil | from “Autosacrifice,” Ban en Banlieue. Nightboat Books, 2014.
Adam Zagajewski | “Try To Praise the Mutilated World,” (tr. Claire Cavanagh) Without End: New and Selected Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
The FCC made me do it: Apologies to Bhanu Kapil, for substituting a word in the first sentence of the excerpt we read from Ban en Banlieue. I said “soot” and that’s not the word she wrote. “Ban is a mixture of dog shit and bitumen (ash)…” The book surmounts censor.
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.