#ds106radio: Poetry, Death of Open Web, some Tunes

Brian Lamb has posted a recording of our awesome radio show of Saturday (March 5, 2011) with himself, GNA DrGarcía and myself. OMG, was it fun! Thanks to GNA and Brian for the opportunity, I really enjoyed it and weren’t it for them I’d never have done it. Nicest thing was that after my reading a few poems live (with my ludicrous accent), DrGarcia and Brian Lamb felt like reading their own poetry preferences. So, the radio hour turned into a shared poetry “performance”, and I discovered a few very beautiful verses. I enjoyed tremendously the great sharing allure of radio!

My co-hosts were great at playing the game with nonchalance –it was morning in the Pacific while early afternoon here in Puerto Rico. We discussed a bit the idea of the death of the Open Web and its closing on itself (I could not resist the temptation to talk about Lamb’s and Jim Groom‘s paper Never Mind the Edupunks; or, the Great Web 2.0 Swindle, plus the added specter of the giant editorial groups’ allegiances with LMS providers) vs. the “trends” of decentralization spinning from logging and tweeting and projects like Khan University. Beautiful freewheeling talk emerged from there, even though I hadn’t given them any time to reflect!!

In a few words, my first experience with live radio was awesome and I really don’t know what words to use to thank appropriately my two friends. Blessed is #ds106radio!

Here, after the show recording (courtesy of Brian) I’m going to copy the poems we read, and some links. Enjoy!

Cafe Sabado by blamb

I began reading my all-time rockstar poet Sappho, the Greek poetess of 600BC. I feel constantly in awe at her extraordinary modernity. She thinks, writes and act with our sensibility, in a lyric concise style we find almost contemporary… but from a time tunnel of 2,500 years. The poem I read regards the moon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho

The sinking moon has left the sky,
The Pleiades have also gone.
Midnight comes–and goes, the hours fly
And solitary still, I lie.
Turn to me, dear one, turn thy face,
And unveil for me in thine eyes, their grace.
In doubt I am, I have two minds,
I know not what to do.
Now Love, the ineluctible, with bitter sweetness
Fills me, overwhelms me, and shakes my being.
From The Poems of Sappho, translated by Edwin Marion Cox [1925])

Likewise, Giuseppe Ungaretti‘s poem I chose next was about the moon, and was written roughly 2,500 years after Sappho’s.

Prelude
Magic moon, you are so consumed
that, breaking the silence,
you put on the old ilexes of the rise,
a slippery veil.

I chose to close with another poet I love, Arthur Rimbaud and his poem Sensation, reminding how Rimbaud is also a love of Patti Smith‘s, my beloved rock chanteuse.

Sensation

On the blue summer evenings, I shall go down the paths,
Getting pricked by the corn, crushing the short grass:
In a dream I shall feel its coolness on my feet.
I shall let the wind bathe my bare head.

I shall not speak, I shall think about nothing:
But endless love will mount in my soul;
And I shall travel far, very far, like a gipsy,
Through the countryside – as happy as if I were with a woman.

Arthur Rimbaud
March 1870.

(As translated by Oliver Bernard: Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems (1962))

GNA’s choice was Anne Sexton‘s The Nude Swim, which takes place in Capri.

The Nude Swim

On the southwest side of Capri
we found a little unknown grotto
where no people were and we
entered it completely
and let our bodies lose all
their loneliness.

All the fish in us
had escaped for a minute.
The real fish did not mind.
We did not disturb their personal life.
We calmly trailed over them
and under them, shedding
air bubbles, little white
balloons that drifted up
into the sun by the boat
where the Italian boatman slept
with his hat over his face.

Water so clear you could
read a book through it.
Water so buoyant you could
float on your elbow.
I lay on it as on a divan.
I lay on it just like
Matisse’s Red Odalisque.
Water was my strange flower,
one must picture a woman
without a toga or a scarf
on a couch as deep as a tomb.

The walls of that grotto
were everycolor blue and
you said, “Look! Your eyes
are seacolor. Look! Your eyes
are skycolor.” And my eyes
shut down as if they were
suddenly ashamed.

Last was Brian’s reading, the poem Connoisseur of Chaos, by Wallace Stevens.

I

A. A violent order is a disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)

II

If all the green of spring was blue, and it is;
If all the flowers of South Africa were bright
On the tables of Connecticut, and they are;
If Englishmen lived without tea in Ceylon,
and they do;
And if it all went on in an orderly way,
And it does; a law of inherent opposites,
Of essential unity, is as pleasant as port,
As pleasant as the brush-strokes of a bough,
An upper, particular bough in, say, Marchand.

III

After all the pretty contrast of life and death
Proves that these opposite things partake of one,
At least that was the theory, when bishops’ books
Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so . And yet relation appears,
A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.

IV

A. Well, an old order is a violent one.
This proves nothing. Just one more truth, one more
Element in the immense disorder of truths.
B. It is April as I write. The wind
Is blowing after days of constant rain.
All this, of course, will come to summer soon.
But suppose the disorder of truths should ever come
To an order, most Plantagenet, most fixed. . . .
A great disorder is an order. Now, A
And B are not like statuary, posed
For a vista in the Louvre. They are things chalked
On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see.

V

The pensive man . . . He sees the eagle float
For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.

Hope to do this again! But I learned that the power of radio is great, and that through the magic of Papaya Boradcaster (I’ve also got a copy on my phone) one can manage a broadcast live from whatever location in the world!! I’m just going to need a little bit of a push to start doing it, like DrGarcia does. Of course, in our program, Brian’s managed all the tech wizardry that allowed us to have so much fun: thanks again!

Read also my post on Love Poems

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About Antonio Vantaggiato

Professor, web2.0 enthusiast, and didactic chef.
This entry was posted in abierto, literature, poesia and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to #ds106radio: Poetry, Death of Open Web, some Tunes

  1. antoniovantaggiato says:

    Yeah Brian, as I was saying to Jim, let's rock some more poetry. Poetry & engineerin' rule!

  2. antoniovantaggiato says:

    Yeah, thanks to your being the deus ex machina of the whole operation! So, for next one are you joining us? We'll have a nice foursome, and perhaps you can pour some Whitman into the mixture!

  3. Jim Groom says:

    Why am i not surprised that you are right in the middle with those maniacs, you've been amazing as of late, and I am thrilled to see it, and now look forward to listening to it.

  4. Brian says:

    Many thanks for doing this show, your vision seemed to come together quite well. I enjoyed the hour with you, GNA, and the #ds106 community immensely. Let's do it again!

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