This morning's jazz: Herbie Mann.
1. I think it was on Sunday. Bill Davie's song "Radio On" kept playing in my head, to my great pleasure. The song got me thinking about other radio songs, songs like Van Morrison's "Caravan", Elvis Costello's "Radio, Radio", Wall of Voodoo's "Mexican Radio", Steely Dan's "FM", The Buggles "Video Killed the Radio Star", Velvet Underground's "Rock and Roll" -- please, if you are reading this, fill in the blanks I've left. There are a ton of radio songs out there. I had to hear a particular one of them, though, so I plugged in the earbuds, went to YouTube, and found "Roadrunner" by The Modern Lovers and listened to it three or four times, loving its power and drive and its feel for being alive, driving at night, in touch with the modern world, with modern loneliness when it's cold, these things and so much more, all with the radio on.
I had meant to write about this experience on Monday morning, but my blog post was occupied with other things; then, in the afternoon today, I tuned in to Billy Collins' live broadcast. Willa Bauman was in the virtual audience. So was Bill Davie. Billy Collins read poems out a couple of anthologies and, as if to inspire me to do that forgotten writing about radios, he read Charles Bukowski's poem, "A Radio with Guts".
Bukowski tells a story in the first person about a guy in a second floor flat who day after day got drunk and threw his radio through the window and, every time, the radio sat on the roof and kept playing. It was a "magic radio", a "radio with guts". I won't give away the rest of the poem -- you can find it by doing a quick internet search -- but as Billy Collins read it and I knew Bill Davie was listening, in my mind I heard that radio with guts on the roof playing "Caravan" or "Rock and Roll" or "Roadrunner" and thought how Charles Bukowski could have done what Bill Davie did and called his poem, "Radio On".
2. So, an array of teaching memories flashed in my mind as the Billy Collins broadcast got underway. To set a mood for his broadcast, it opened with his empty chair at his desk and we heard a recording of Glenn Gould playing one of the tracks from The Goldberg Variations. The music transported me back to teaching WR 122. I used to burn each of my students a copy of Glenn Gould's 1982 recording of The Goldberg Variations and built a writing assignment around their listening to this recording and, apart from the writing assignment, tried to persuade students to think of developing ideas in their writing as doing something similar to what Bach did: explore their ideas copiously, in great variation, focused not on how little might be written about the idea, but how much, to explore the variations and many possibilities.
Did my attempts to help students understand writing in terms of music help my students? I'll never know. I do know, however, that I loved the writing they did in response to The Goldberg Variations and loved hearing from many students that listening to the recording sweetened their previously sour assumptions about classical music.
I enjoyed very much being in the virtual room with Bill and Willa. Bill was a student of mine at Whitworth in 1977 and again in 1983 and, while I won't detail them here, a rush of memories came back to me connected to those years in Spokane.
Willa was a student in Margaret B's and my team taught course in Working Class Literature and Composition. I can't pinpoint the year, but it seems like it was about eleven years ago. Another rush of memories -- not only that course, but Debbie's friendship with Willa's mom and dad and stopping by to have a cup of coffee and visit with them at their booth at Eugene's Saturday Market, Dana's Cheesecake. I remember Willa's brilliance as a student, but, even more, I remember the day in class when she spoke forcefully about her love of The Wire. I remember thinking at the time, "I've got to look into this show" and, eventually, I did and it made a lasting impact on me. Willa was the spark.
3. Billy Collins read a poem entitled, "Say This", written by Lucia Perillo. It's a short poem exploring the miniscule predatory activity in the world of reptiles, birds, and insects. I had never heard of Lucia Perillo and when Billy Collins' broadcast ended, I read more about her. After graduating from college, Lucia Perillo worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and later as a seasonal worker for the Mt. Ranier National Park.
She also began writing poetry. It became her vocation. She taught creative writing and continued to write poetry, fiction, and essays. In 2000, she was awarded MacArthur Fellowship Grant.
In the late 1980s, Lucia Perillo found out she suffered from multiple sclerosis. Much of her writing, then, to quote the Washington Post, "unflinchingly dissect[ed] mortality".
Lucia Perillo died in October, 2016 in Olympia, WA. Billy Collins didn't mention anything about her life or death when he read the poem (no problem) and discovering that she'd died at 58 years of age shocked me.
Soon my mind made a jump. I think it had to do with Lucia Perillo having lived in Washington State. I suddenly had a vague recollection of another poet I used to read back in 1985-6 whose name I couldn't quite remember and who, if I remember correctly, was a family friend of a couple I used to house sit and dog sit for in Eugene.
I did some poking around on the World Wide Web and her name came back to me: Carol Jane Bangs. She lives in Port Townsend. New Directions published her collection, The Bones of the Earth, in 1983 and I discovered it on a book shelf at the home where I was house and dog sitting. I remembered enjoying that book and now I'm going to order it and read it again and see what I think after not having read it for so long.
These Billy Collins broadcasts only last about twenty-five minutes. I've listened to three of them live. They are helping reawaken me to poets and poems I had forgotten about, introducing me to works I've never heard of, and renewing my excitement not just for poems, but for the world of poetry.
It all goes back to 1977. Bill Davie was a student in the Writing I course I taught at Whitworth. We became friends. He started giving online performances from home back in April. He decided to read poems along with performing his songs. He mentioned during one of his Tuesday evening concerts that Billy Collins was broadcasting daily during the week.
I checked it out.
My world grows larger.
It turns out that Christopher Marlowe, back in 1589-90, described the Vizio room these days in this one line from The Jew of Malta: "Infinite riches in a little room."
Here's a limerick by Stu:
Small steps can sure set the pace.
Giant leaps help settle the case.
When the Eagle has landed,
The whole country banded.
To see men at Tranquility Base.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon on July 21, 1969.
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