Paris on the Potomac, Van the Man on Enlighten Radio

 

Paris on the Potomac with Karen Valentine, John Case

Talk radio with a Twist

All Day Radio:

It's Van Morrison Day

Enlighten Radio Podcasts: The World Series of America: The Polls Are Open

Enlighten Radio Podcasts: The World Series of America: The Polls Are Open:   Enlighten Radio Presents The World Series of America: The Polls Are Open Its Over. We Just Don't Know It Yet.     Mondays 7:...

N.C. Wyeth: The War Letter.

 

Cease Fire, Everywhere

This painting depicts Wyeth's parents on their Needham, Massachusetts, property, with the Charles River in the background. The artist first created the scene in oil on canvas in 1932 and titled the painting Spring-1918. He based his compelling portrait on memories and family letters dating from World War I, especially the dark moments when the elder Wyeths worried about their sons who served abroad. The twisted tree trunks and barren ground evoke a war-ravaged land.

from the Brandywine Conservancy of Art

Labor Beat Radio: AI and Jobs: 10 AM Eastern: May 7, 2024

 

The Winners and Losers Program, previews "The Return of John Brown"

LIVE Podcast 

March 29, 2024

7:30 AM Eastern

Special Guest: Playwriter and poet Gene Bruskin

Today's Poetry Show: The Haiban, via the Poetry Foundtion

The Poetry show starts at 9:30 this morning instead of 10 AM. http://player.enlightenradio.org 

Japanese poet Matsuo Basho created this poetic form in which a poet combines prose and haiku to create a prose poem. The prose poem typically describes a setting, scene, or moment in an objective manner and follows the standard formal considerations of haiku.

Time Traveler’s Haibun: 1989 

BY MAUREEN THORSON

In the grassy space between the wings of the elementary school and the trailers housing the fifth grade’s overflow classrooms, girls flip their hair in imitation of Cindy Crawford, sing Iko Iko. None of you know what it means or where the song comes from.

It’s honor-roll season, a time of outings to TCBY and Outback Steakhouse. Your mother warns you against filling up on bread, but it’s hard to resist the little brown loaves brought warm to the table with soft butter – a luxury that cannot be imagined at home, with its always-refrigerated margarine and Pepperidge Farm sandwich loaves.

Everyone knows what’s popular but nobody knows how to act. At ten, you lack any context. The world swims before you, and it constantly stings. Its favorite barb: “everybody knows that.”

Beyond the grassy space of girls is more grass, a quarter-mile loop of track, a church with a painfully white spire, a fence, and a neighborhood maybe a little less nice than yours, crammed between the school and busy Great Neck Road. The fence is of chain link, instead of wooden slats. That’s how you know about the niceness – that and the something hard, like a grain of sand, you feel in your mother’s voice, when she takes you to the school’s Spring Fling, where you win another goldfish. They always die, but you’re getting better. Now, it takes a while.

Loblollies shiver
In May heat. The world’s ending.
The world’s a mirage.
 

Maureen Thorson, "Time Traveler's Haibun: 1989." Copyright © 2019 by Maureen Thorson. Used by permission of the author for PoetryNow.

Source: PoetryNow (2019)

Poetry Show starts at Noon Today -- Featuring William Stafford

 

Once in the 40’s

William Stafford
1914 –1993

We were alone one night on a long
road in Montana. This was in winter, a big
night, far to the stars. We had hitched,
my wife and I, and left our ride at
a crossing to go on. Tired and cold—but
brave—we trudged along. This, we said,
was our life, watched over, allowed to go
where we wanted. We said we’d come back some time
when we got rich. We’d leave the others and find
a night like this, whatever we had to give,
and no matter how far, to be so happy again.