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!

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HIKING ALONE

I shimmy out on sandstone and slate rock,
past the soft ledges where the last shrubs

grow. I’ve got my camera, unshuttered and
silent, ready to take back with me whatever

I’ve come here for—sore arms and a sunburn,
blue sky like something new. At the floor

of the canyon far below a stream flows from
nowhere to nothing, from one unseen cavern

to the next. I could think of a fish gazing up
at that quick flash of sky as it passes through

the white froth of the rapids, the silky silver
where the water pools. Oh, I am grey, I could

have him say, personified—moved, even
full of emotion. Oh, my scales are golden-

green—I could give him color just as easily
in the kind God of my imagination before

plunging him back into his comfortable
dark, this eyelet the only opening for miles.

How easy it is to paint epiphany, I think, like
the gaudy sunset now settling above the tree-

line I could call a bruise or a blush, windburn
on a woman’s cheek, though it’s only the

scattering of dust in low light, what one shakes
from a shoe, combs out of stiffened hair.

How easy, too, it would be to slip off this ledge,
to get lost out here, fall asleep on this rock and

let the cold night wake me. I could hold out
on figs and freshwater; I could chew the fibrous

bark off a Joshua tree. I could love the moon
like a mountain lion, stalk shadows, sharpen

sticks. Come morning I’d find the dirt road
and then my car at the end of it. Brush the dust

off my pants. Buckle myself back into habit
with a metal click like the sound of my one hand

clapping for joy—however briefly—at all we
ever wanted: a little darkness to climb out of.

–from American Fractal
first appeared in Confrontation

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THE SENSE OF BEING LOOKED AT

Around the corner, footsteps. A heel
clicking stone. The slosh of loose gravel

and then the no-sound itself conspicuous—
even the crickets hold their breath, hush

their rough legs while deep inside houses
women reading bedtime stories pause

to change their endings, one good wish
at a time. A car sails by with its lights off,

but Elvis on the radio still crooning after all
these years, still young—like nothing’s gone

wrong. When you turn, the trees spring back,
defensive. They point to each other all at once,

a dozen limbs like the Scarecrow’s saying,
He went that way. No, no, he went that way.

–from American Fractal
first published in Cranky

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THE MEMORY OF WATER

It can be demonstrated with thermo-
      luminescence: the salt solution
retains knowledge of what it once held,
      though nature, though logic
would tell it otherwise. Dumb as a bedpan,
      the hydrogen bond remembers
the lithium, the sodium chloride no matter
      how long distilled. There is so
little purity left in the world. Desire it,
      dilute it, strip it down till nothing
remains, onion eyes wept dry, last flake
      of the artichoke bit clean,
sour stalk swallowed whole. The homeopath
      stirs his mug, glass rod
guiding poison to balm, balm to poison,
      nothing settling, nothing
dispelled. With every loss the ache
      of a phantom limb he never
believed in. And still he finds himself
      awake at night, clutching the
cool insistence of a pillow to his chest.

–from American Fractal
First appeared in Crab Creek Review

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WHITE NOISE

Listen. How the wind whispers our secrets.
How a light rain will speak any language.

–from American Fractal
first published in Poetry Midwest

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SADDLED

Love is a horse, all sweaty suede and lean
muscle, heart bigger than its head. Love is a

dark horse, the unexpected silhouette, the anti-
man’s empty field—no shadow unattached

as darkness clings to light like a dead horse.
Look: I can make a dove with both hands. Now

a dog, a horse, an elephant. I can make love.
Love is a horse sound the throat makes when

it’s sore. I gurgle, I gag on a horse pill. But love
is an easy thing to swallow. Love is just horsing

around; it leaps like a wild horse from my chest.
Thank God love wears this simple shoe, and I can

nail it to a wall for luck. They say close only counts
in love. Lead love to the river; love might drink.

–from American Fractal
first published in Spillway

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COOKING DINNER

Spring again. Its warmer breeze. Open screen door.
Another war buds up, pliant and green,
thick spores of restlessness
like pollen in the air–you could sneeze with it;
your heart could stop beating in a moment.
____bless you, you’re whispering.
                                    ____bless you.
As if a soul could leak like steam from its
            cellular prison, as if words alone
could draw it back–white light, white light,
a sheet, a flag.
Every day more words to be wary of, that space there
in the blessing, that monotone
on the radio with its figures and dates and facts
and facts that rattle on long after
you’ve pulled the plug, glued shut
                        your ears, rattle on,
rat-tat-tat like something you won’t say
while you drown yourself in a cold water bath,
pry loose your silver fillings
because you’ve heard that story–oh yes,
you’ve heard it before,
but maybe it’s your whole body that’s
transmitting their signals this time, that subsonic
                        headache drone, your bones
the antennae, your marrow electric,
pulsing, mortar crumbling, bricks
knocked free, windows smashed, bits of glass
like blue gravel, tires and dumpsters
            on fire with looting, the whole world
coming loose, thin thread being
pulled and pulled, wound tight
                                    around your_____.
But there she is over the stove.
            Relax, she says. Just relax. She’s cooking
dinner. Egg noodles and mushroom soup.
The kitchen dizzy with steam. Her apron
stained from years of fancier meals, wasted
energy, messes not worth
                                    cleaning up.
Not coming loose, she says,
                        been loose. A grocery list
of wars, holy wars, hunger.
These pots just boil with their watching, is all.
Out on the porch the clatter of a small animal,
                        a neighbor’s cat. The faint stir
of last year’s dried-out leaves against the fence
            finally being looked at.

–from American Fractal
first published in RATTLE #22