Judith Arcana on radio and poetry

Joining us for a Q&A this month is Portland writer Judith Arcana, who hosts the radio show “Poetry and Everything” on KBOO community radio (90.7 FM in Portland) on the fourth Monday of the month at 10:00 p.m. Arcana’s work has been published by a range of presses, from Doubleday to Shameless Hussy. Her books include Here from Somewhere Else (recipient of the summer 2015 Editors Choice Poetry Chapbook Award by Turtle Island Quarterly), Soon To Be a Major Motion Picture (winner of Minerva Rising’s inaugural prose chapbook contest), What If Your Mother (a book of poems about reproductive justice and motherhood), and Grace Paley’s Life Stories (a literary biography of Grace Paley).

What inspired you to start the radio show “Poetry and Everything”?
I can’t claim this as inspiration. When Barbara LaMorticella stopped doing her show (after many years and much poetry), I was offered this once-a-month gig. KBOO also has poets Patrick Bocarde and Walt Curtis on the air, and Turiya Autry’s performance/poetry show. KBOO is serious about supporting and encouraging poetry and poets.

What appeals to you about radio as a medium for poetry?
This seems an obvious connection to me: Poetry “works” both on the page and in performance. Poetry’s elements—lyricism, alliteration, rhyme, rhythm and more—can be perfect for radio, just as the elements of music and theater can be. The fact that literary language can be exciting in other ways—e.g., in silent reading or with visual impact on the page—doesn’t lessen the excitement of radio as a platform for verse.

Poetry is both a written and an aural form that sometimes is dense and complex. Does this create challenges on the radio show, when you hear a poem just once, sometimes for the first time?
I’ve never thought of density and complexity as “challenges” except in relation to responsibility, by which I mean that when we perform poetry for an audience we are responsible to that audience: We’ve got to do a good job, like any other performer. Also, on the most practical level, the show is available online after it first airs, so that anybody anywhere can listen anytime—as many times as they like—for as long as the Net lasts and people have access to it.

For you, how do the pleasures of reading and hearing poetry differ from those of writing poetry?
Writing poetry is part of my job, so to speak: Writing is my work. I make art with words, in poetry and prose, just as if I were a sculptor who sometimes works in stone, sometimes in clay. As a sculptor I would see, and maybe touch, other people’s work, examining their craft and methods. And, when lucky, I could be swept away by its skill, or power, or poignant effects. That’s what reading, or being in another writer’s listening audience, is like for me. I learn from my colleagues and all who’ve come before me—and I want to be touched, even transported, by their writing. (It’s also true that, sometimes, while I’m working—again, when lucky—I am indeed transported; I’m living inside the work, in a trance, with no sense of time passing.)

What are the biggest misconceptions people commonly have about poetry?
I don’t know, but your question makes me think about this: In the United States (though rarely if ever elsewhere), people often say poetry is “difficult,” and say they “don't understand” it. Many consider poetry esoteric. But poetry is so various, and always growing more various (rap! spoken word!), that this “misconception” makes me sad. What a loss!

Is there such a thing as good poetry and bad poetry? Why or why not?
We all make judgements about the art we take in—e.g., six of us see a movie and four think it’s “good” while two think it’s “bad.” Some of us are more knowledgeable than others about various arts (or anything, really—carpentry, driving a car, whatever), and those knowledgeable folks —if they’re not being jerks about it, can educate those of us who don't know as much as they do. I remember—with enormous pleasure—an art history teacher who, in 1966, taught me about the standards medieval and renaissance painters had set for themselves, their goals, and the techniques they used—including what they, the artists, thought was “good” and “bad.” Often, when people don’t like something, they say it’s “bad,” but what they really mean is, they don’t like it.

I’ve heard you read funny poems before, but I seldom see humorous poems in print. Is there a bias against humorous poetry, or do I just need to read more widely?
I don't know if there’s a bias, per se, but—with the exception of Shakespeare—people in the United States do tend to think that funny poetry is less valuable or important than serious poetry. I’m currently having an experience that’s been surprising me: I had some cancer in the past few years, and naturally assumed I’d write about that. Turns out that not only have I written almost nothing about it, most of what I have written is funny. I sure didn’t set out to have that happen, but there it is.

As we start a new year and a new U.S. presidency, what role do you hope poetry will play in public life in 2017?
I hope it will play the same role it always has: Poetry has the capacity to move us, to make us feel and think and act. All over the world, for countless centuries, people have named their babies with poetry, buried their dead with poetry, and marched into battle with the words of poets in their minds or on their lips. Poetry can speak fiercely to and for us—indeed, it can be so powerful that poets have been banished, tortured, imprisoned and killed for the impact of their work.

I guess we’re lucky that, here in the United States, the people who have the power to banish, torture, imprison and kill us don’t take poetry seriously. One of the frequently brandished “proofs” that poetry has no such power is the careless misuse of W.H. Auden's words—quoting only the phrase “poetry makes nothing happen”—while ignoring the rest of the stanza in which that line appears; it ends with “[poetry] survives,/A way of happening, a mouth.” (And this folly always reminds me of the similar, and excessively frequent, quoting of Frost to say the opposite of what he’s saying: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” and so forth—but now I’m way off the subject!)

What can we expect from you in 2017, either on the radio show or as a writer?
I’ve got a poetry collection coming out this year from Flowstone, the new imprint of Oregon’s Left Fork Books. The title is Announcements from the Planetarium. Also, I’m hoping to be able to put in more time on a prose nonfiction book I began a couple years ago. It’s kinda/sorta memoir, but I’m not yet sure about the form.

On the KBOO show, of course, I’ll offer the work of—and conversation with—more poets. The January 2017 show, in keeping with Oregon's annual celebration of William Stafford in his birthday month, will focus on his work and other poems that reflect his in various ways. Two fine performers from Portland’s theater community are the readers: James Dixon and Kathleen Worley.