cosmic dream radio

www.luminouswork.org/podcast.what on earth was I thinking?“Rowing in Eden” from the anthology A Convergence of Birds, feels like a Cornell box. It plays childishly on a strange ledge over a vista of time, longing, and lyricism.There are two french words in the text which I pronounce very badly: lilas and pensée: lilacs and pansies. Memory and thought are the rooms on the either side of ours on the eighth floor. Outside our window we’ll watch ballet on the tip of an obelisk. Cornell loved ballet, particularly Swan Lake. He made a box for his favorite ballerina in honor of her performance as the Swan which included feathers from her costume. I imagine Reece knows a lot about Cornell’s pleasures and influences. They surely determine the sights and inhabitants of this Hotel Eden. A 2003 New Yorker article says of Cornell: “…it was the larksome Cubist poet Apollinaire…whom he placed high among modern poets,” explaining why Apollinaire is the name of the bellhop who takes us to our room. “Frighteningly well read…he [Cornell] had a particular affection for Emily Dickinson and Rimbaud…and wanted to emulate them.” Who is the well-dressed American poet sitting in the French Garden? Emily could be the woman in white rowing to the Hotel de l’Etoile. Or is that one of Cornell’s fées, the enchanting wan “fairy” girls he would momentarily fall for as he flâneured New York City? Like this woman in white, Cornell might have preferred the Hotel de l’Etoile to the Hotel Eden, too. He made multiple boxes with that label, boxes spare (here or here), and celestial (here, here, here, here). Orpheus sings there from the place in his heart where Eurydice is lost. Cornell knew love as mostly fantasy, too. And his art was better for it.Link to the The New Yorker article is below. It very much gives a sense of New York in the 40’s and 50’s and how it engaged Cornell’s imagination— a magical place of pie shops, poetry books, diners, and ballet which became the little mystery reliquaries that are his boxes. “Rowing in Eden” encapsulates Cornell’s imaginative imagery in a box that is a sheet of paper (or the three and a half minutes you will spend listening to me read it to you). It is not made from cut-outs and trinkets, but with words.related linksRead the poem on this blog.Here’s the book I read from.New Yorker article on Joseph Cornell.

www.luminouswork.org/podcast.If you are alone at cliff’s edge, beaten by a harsh salt wind, the ruins of the 11th century behind you, a steep rocky drop to the sea before you—I can think of no better company than Rilke, who, in just such a position, heard:“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels? ”That’s the first line of his first elegy written at Duino Castle in Italy in 1910.All ten elegies were published in 1923.Today I will read for you the ninth one.read my entire essay hereThe book I’m reading from.

www.luminouswork.org/podcast.I like this poem. Usually, I dislike or am bored with the products of my creativity soon after completing them. Very few things become stand-alone worlds even I enter breathlessly because they speak beyond what I can intend. This poem is like that for me. It was a love poem. "I do not want to move you like the sun: but like the moon" I wrote, imagining the lover a planet I would alter but not drive. I imagine walking around a whole continent. I want to be old calling birds home. In this poem I am at an edge and avoid it I triangulate: a bird, the ocean, the moon.essay continued here.

Learn more at www.luminouswork.org/podcast.What a weekend. Piles of logs from two fallen trees piled up behind the house, a broken well line, a boiler on the fritz, grass knee high, and bugs everywhere. The bugs are bad because of the rain. There's been a lot of rain. The basement floor is wet.Why do I have such trouble with Adrienne Rich? In college they told me she was the great contemporary poet (this was in the 90's) and I wanted to care because I aspired to be a poet and I am a woman and I wanted that territory charted. But I only marked a few things as resonant. Her potted plants make an escape for the wild. "Song" with its first-line refrain: "You're wondering if I'm lonely..." which I should do but hadn't the energy to do justice to this one night I had alone in my upstairs room.So I randomly thumbed through and read things into a mike, trying to get used to my new auditing software (Cubase, in case you care). "Corpse-Plant". Something about desire. Delete them both. I felt too tired. Flip again. This one starts with driving and mutilated deer. I've tried to write about that, too, these wild, meek creatures, invasive and vulnerable to our gas-powered speed machines. Deer symbolizing something gentle, feminine that wreaks destructiveness without violence toward us. Deer are nature's perverse revenge. Softly invading from the wilderness-unbalanced. Destroying wilderness and gardens, carrying disease.Rich's poem is not about that. Focus. Read. Without much energy. But the poem catches. It doesn't need my effort it's its own lightbeam traveling steadily ahead, powered by one of those etudes by Franz Lizst.I lose it a bit in the middle (my fault, not the poems) and don't do justice the last stanza. But since we're mistrusting theatricality, this is utterly devoid of it. It's read by a tired woman who wants very much a connection with an ancestress (there are not many in the written record) and with these non-self-selected words does the best she can do.

A new poem by me literally recorded beneath the boughs of a giant oak that fell right over my study.  Learn more at www.luminouswork.org/podcast.

Alain Bosquet's 7 part poem translated from the French by Jean Malaquais.  Bosquet was born in Odessa.  In this poem he returns to his homeland to find his poetic voice.   I'm trying to do that, too.   Learn more at www.luminouswork.org/podcast.

Trees that depend on cold to seed and fruit are "migrating" to more northern climes: with our help and on their own. If that isn't mythology, what is? Let's go there: into a lyric, liturgical mythology of polar bears, forests, and blistering-hot Christmas Eves. Includes an intro.

A valentine's day edition of cosmic dream radio with desire, descent, grief, song. Excerpts of poet Gregory Orr's lyric sequence _Orpheus & Eurydice_, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2001.

The three of swords tarot card inspires a song. Replete with hart hearts, night-riding knights, pens that pin, and clouds. You can download and share just the song from the podcast webpage!

"When love is in excess, it brings a woman no honor"?? --Medea, Circe, and Ariadne weigh in.

It's ben a long time since I've released a cosmic dream radio episode! I explain why and do penance with a straight-up reading of Eliot's beautiful poem.

A house/trance rendering of Mark Strand's poem THE END. But I'll read it to you first.

a song sad about love and art. with fireworks and an inside groove.

a poem sandwiched between two slices of pop-esque. How'd it get so dark? more info at www.luminouswork.org/podcast

I make an "Audio Intro" all professional like and then ruin it by sounding like a young college radio host. Love me anyway.

a radio poem with three-head harmony! cerberus is tired of being beaten, sedated, and dragged around. he wants someone to play. are you the kind of girl he's looking for?more at: www.luminouswork.org/cosmic-dream-radio/2015/3/26/the-kind-of-girl

a radio poem about love and failure when they're basically the same thing.. "True love has not, as far as I know, been compared by the poets to a bulldog. But it has the same sort of grip."--Rebecca West. more at: www.luminouswork.org/cosmic-dream-radio/2015/4/7/we-limit-ourselves-to-the-piano-forte

a broadcast for the aliens from this stupid small-town planet earth. with lame songs and barbecue sauce. more at: www.luminouswork.org/cosmic-dream-radio/2015/4/6/its-getting-hot-here