COVER TO COVER with Nina Serrano and Jack Foley
Wednesday, April 3, 2019, 3:00 – 4:00 p.m., KPFA 94.1 FM
(available at the KPFA website)
If the Mueller report has you down, if the internet keeps quitting on you, if the skies in sunny California are gray gray gray, try pepping up and having a cup o’ cheer with Nina Serrano and Jack Foley, KPFA’s interwoven pair.
Today’s show will feature a short segment featuring Thomas Stanton, Poet Laureate # 7 of Benicia. Mr. Stanton is, says Nina, famous locally for being “not understandable.” Stanton himself remarks that “Clarity is not my strong point.”
Another segment will be a tribute to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who turned one hundred years old on March 24, 2019. Jack will play a very rare recording of Lawrence reading “The Billy Clinton Blues” to Jack’s guitar accompaniment. Jack will also present his own musical setting of Ferlinghetti’s “Dove Sta Amore,” performed by himself and his late wife, Adelle. Jack’s present partner, in life and in work, Sangye Land, will also join him in a duet.
Here is a new poem by Nina:
Winter Song
The new year begins in gray rain and cold
Vallejo’s weeds erupting
sweater and scarves emerge
boots stomping towards
the waters of Benicia
the waters of Benicia
churning wavelets swallow the docked red rowboat
sinking into the Sacramento River
slanting nose down and tilted tail sticking up
in waters reaching out to the sea
Flowing through the straits of Carquinez
Flowing through the straits of Carquinez
It’s all water under the bridge
pulling the tides ever onward
as these days dissolve into each other
threatening not to stop
this repetitious parade of incidents and faces
each revealing the lessons I must learn
again and again never mastered
always eluding me
in the search for God
in the search for God
Questions and stories to reveal eternal mysteries
refusing to be known
except in glimpses of light and connection
sparking flashes of knowing understanding
consciousness not bothered by logic
or organized by the order of desire or the moon
Always the moon
Always the moon
calling the current away
Letting the clouds drift gently
caressing the curves of its moon face without hurry
accompanied by dots of stars
grouped in familiar patterns in the moving night sky
whether watched or just felt or assumed
While blankets and pillows cushion the fortunate
every night and every morning
some to misery are born
some to misery are born
And even all rich as kings suffer
flood, fire earthquake hurricane volcano and freeze
when hailstones drop from the sky without notice
sudden as rainbows and silent symphonies
of celestial song enrapturing and signaling dolphins and whiles
And the elusive birds of magnificent feathers
And the elusive birds of magnificent feathers
The giant stuffed bears in Port Acosta
hint at fierce struggles
while flaunting the triumph of the hunter
who does not eat his prey
I fear their glassy eyes
mammoth heads and powerful claws
The same fear as my ancestors
the hunters and the hunted in and out of caves
Oh ancestors and descendants
Oh ancestors and descendants
you journey with me through these days
You are here as I am
Each in our own reiteration of matter in our own time and dimension
The stardust in each of us is still here
Never leaves
We remain by our Mother Earth
never leaving her side
The DNA clings to the soil mixing with wishes and aspirations
of earlier and later iterations of matter
Each in our own time and dimension
And now the future sings a siren song
the future sings a siren song
that I dance to limping and halting, unsteady, unbalanced
dancing and stumbling through this new year
that begins in gray rain cold and weeds
feeling my way to spring
And this is Jack’s portrait of the great French poet/dramatist, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948):
ARTAUD
Before speaking further about culture, I must remark that the world is hungry and not concerned with culture, and that the attempt to orient toward culture thoughts turned only toward hunger is a purely artificial expedient.
What is most important, it seems to me, is not so much to defend a culture whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract, from what is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical with that of hunger.
We need to live first of all; to believe in what makes us live and that something makes us live – to believe that whatever is produced from the mysterious depths of ourselves need not forever haunt us as an exclusively digestive concern.
I mean that if it is important for us to eat first of all, it is even more important for us not to waste in the sole concern for eating our simple power of being hungry.
If confusion is the sign of the times, I see at the root of this confusion a rupture between things and words, between things and the ideas and signs that are their representation.
Not, of course, for lack of philosophical systems; their number and contradictions characterize our old French and European culture: but where can it be shown that life, our life, has ever been affected by these systems? I will not say that philosophical systems must be applied directly and immediately: but of the following alternatives, one must be true:
Either these systems are within us and permeate our being to the point of supporting life itself (and if this is the case, what use are books?), or they do not permeate us and therefore do not have the capacity to support life (and in this case what does their disappearance matter?).
He walks in the spectacle
He was so handsome, très beau, vous savez
that is everything around him
And then …et puis après…maigre…misère
Madly insisting on his
sanity and insanity
SCREAMING and insistent
that he is right
while knowing that he is in excess
and comic and wrong—
ironic, sincere,
and vastly accusatory
At once frail and full of authority
“Le mômo” qui joue le mômo pour ses amis artistiques de Paris
DON’T CURE ANYONE OF ANYTHING
CURING PEOPLE IS DEATH
DOCTORS ARE KILLERS
SCIENCE IS BLACK MAGIC
SCIENTISTS ARE BLACK MAGICIANS
WHOSE TOOLS ARE MADNESS AND ELECTRIC SHOCK
AND PAIN!
J’ai appris hier
(il faut croire que je retarde, ou peut-être n’est-ce qu’un faux bruit, l’un de ces sales ragots comme il s’en colporte entre évier et latrines à l’heure de la mise aux baquets des repas une fois de plus ingurgités),
j’ai appris hier
l’une des pratiques officielles les plus sensationnelles des écoles publiques américaines
et qui font sans doute que ce pays se croit à la tête du progrès.
Il paraît que parmi les examens ou épreuves que l’on fait subir à un enfant qui entre pour la première fois dans une école publique, aurait lieu l’épreuve dite de la liqueur séminale ou du SPERME….
mo to ho he ah
mem zi ag oh toog
mama
mama
mômo mômo mômo
et moi…toothless…addicted…mem zi ag oh toog
zi zi