It's a Program

Last week I implied that NCPR might be a tad overweight. As it turns out we're just pregnant. I returned from the Northwest to see the signs of labor pains everywhere, huddled faces in quick conference, monitors scrawled with the complex waveforms of raw audio, urgent emails dinging in the inbox, people going up the hall and back down, up and down. The contactions are coming more and more quickly as the moment nears. And you can be there for the birth tonight at 7 pm. Have a cigar--it's a program, 60 minutes in length. We are naming it Open Studio. Todd Jr. just didn't sound right.

Little Big Radio

The view from the hotel window in Portland at the NFCB conference is much closer to the ground than my post last month atop the Crowne Plaza in Seattle. And the perspective fits the players of this organization, who comprise the foot soldiers of community radio--small volunteer operations, low-power fm, native American and Spanish language broadcasters, passionate advocates for small localities. In this world, a station like NCPR looks oversized and clumsy, too little butter spread over too much toast, unable to really drill down deeply enough into any one community to serve its needs for information and cultural expression. If your aim is to learn and practice microjournalism and participatory media, this is the canteen of that laboratory.

NCPR began in this place, serving just a small part of one rural county with a largely volunteer staff. And we have been proud to succeed to the point where we could grow beyond those roots, and serve a larger region, with a fully professional staff--and rightly so. But the world turns and then turns again. And we find that we need again some of what was left behind. Irony, dammit. Back to school.

Achieve Apprehension

Each fine day I try to relax a little more, unwind that internal coil that each day of winter cranks a little tighter, that puts the hunch in the shoulders and the pale in the face. But it's just too soon. April has fooled me before, and I just know it still has something rotten up its sleeve. Sometime during the winter I erased everything off the Current Projects whiteboard and scrawled in "Achieve Satori!"--but it was pure bravado. I fear I shall never be the match of the old monk who liked his soup salty, but never added salt at the table. "Some days, salty soup--some days not so salty," he would say. Maybe by July I'll be able to just take it as it comes.

Why not the whole year?

In the 1990s I worked on a collaboration with Ukrainian poet Boris Khersonsky to produce an English translation of his poem cycle Family Archive. During an editing session in the Little Odessa neighborhood of Brooklyn, I was bemoaning the low regard for poetry in the US, saying that he was fortunate to live in a society that took poetry seriously enough to persecute its practitioners. As an actual victim of that persecution during the samizdat days of the Soviet Union, he naturally had a different view of the matter, but said he took my meaning. So we take what honor we can--in this case our own month, April, National Poetry Month. Last week after David Budbill's reading in Montgomery Vermont, I asked him, "Where is the poem sweetest?--in the mind, as it is composed--or on the page, in final shape--or on the tongue, as it is performed?" "As performed," he replied, with no hesitation. So tune in tonight for poetry at its sweetest on Readers and Writers at 7 pm. Archive audio.