3:00 PM - 4:00 PM PST First Wednesday of the Month
Nina Serrano and Jack Foley inhabit a world in which poetry—one of the earliest of humankind’s attempts to represent itself—happens daily, hourly, minutely. Expect songs, dances, funny stories—all in service to the goddess, Poesia.
Nina Serrano and Jack Foley offering their service to the goddess, Poesia. William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand”; “Damn braces; Bless relaxes.” Tongue’s tales and cunning concatenations with KPFA’s interwoven pair.
Jack’s guest is Lola Haskins. Her new book is Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare. Part Two. She has published fourteen books—the outliers being a poetry advice book, an exploration of fifteen Florida cemeteries, and a book of prose-poem fables about women, illustrated by Maggie Taylor.
Nina Serrano and Jack Foley offering their service to the goddess, Poesia. William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand”; “Damn braces; Bless relaxes.” Tongue’s tales and cunning concatenations with KPFA’s interwoven pair.
Today’s show is the third in a series of shows presenting excerpts from Jack’s book, Visions & Affiliations: California Poetry from 1940 to 2005. In Jack Foley’s Unmanageable Masterpiece (Monongahela Books, 2019), Dana Gioia and Peter Whitfield write: “In 2011 a tiny press in Berkeley published Visions & Affiliations, an eccentric 1300-page chronology of post-war California literature in two massive paperbound folio volumes. With no commercial distribution or publicity, the book sold about two hundred copies and soon vanished from sight—but not from the memory of the small audience that read it. Some of them considered the elaborate time-line the first adequate account of California’s complex and contradictory literary life. Others recognized Foley’s radical innovation in changing how literary history could be written. A few even considered these strange and sprawling yet compulsively readable tomes an oddball masterpiece.”
Nina Serrano and Jack Foley offering their service to the goddess, Poesia. William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand”; “Damn braces; Bless relaxes.” Tongue’s tales and cunning concatenations with KPFA’s interwoven pair.
Wikipedia: The name WEDNESDAY continues Middle English Wednesdei. Old English still had wōdnesdæg, which would be continued as Wodnesday (but Old Frisian has an attested wednesdei)…The name is a calque [a word or phrase borrowed from another language] of the Latin dies Mercurii “day of Mercury,” reflecting the fact that the Germanic god Woden (Wodanaz or Odin) during the Roman era was interpreted as “Germanic Mercury.” A first Wednesday—Odin’s or Mercury’s Day—is still another excuse for the highly … Continued
Nina Serrano and Jack Foley offering their service to the goddess, Poesia. William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand”; “Damn braces; Bless relaxes.” Tongue’s tales and cunning concatenations with KPFA’s interwoven pair.
Today’s show is another round with that spectacular, sparkling, sparring pair of roustabouts, Nina Serrano and Jack Foley, all awhirl with rigmarole and wordly wisecracks. They’ve been around for many a year, roundly producing round ups of poetry and opinion, song and snappy patter, honey sweet and sour sober. Expect the unexpected. Not even they will know what passes for news on the Trumpfront and many another. If a president is impeached will he be impaired? Round and round it goes, and where it stops nobody knows.
et a comfortable chair, my old paisano,
Comes Giacomo Foley and Nina Serrano
They’ll fill you with nonsense and crazy wisdom
They’ll point out our president really is dumb
They’ll sing and they’ll laugh, they’ll cry, Ay, Caramba!
Jack Foley will tap and Nina will rhumba
Nina Serrano and Jack Foley offering their service to the goddess, Poesia. William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand”; “Damn braces; Bless relaxes.” Tongue’s tales and cunning concatenations with KPFA’s interwoven pair.
