Jazz and the Poetry of Langston Hughes

Jazzonia: Jazz and the Poetry of Langston Hughes

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Langston Hughes has been called the 'Poet Laureate of black America,' but his work reaches beyond the boundaries of race. Inspired by the rhythm and romance of jazz in 1920s' New York, Hughes introduced the language of jazz into his poems and changed the sound of modern poetry.

Hughes came to Manhattan to study engineering at Columbia University, but dropped out to pursue his writing. He published his first poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" in 1921, the same year that Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake had a Broadway hit with Shuffle Along. With an all-black cast that included soon-to-be legends Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson in the chorus line, Shuffle Along wowed audiences with its ultra-hip jazz rhythms and hot dancing. These two cultural events—the publication of Langston Hughes' first poem and Sissle and Blake's Shuffle Along on Broadway—helped spark the Harlem Renaissance.

This week on Riverwalk Jazz, theater legend William Warfield joins The Jim Cullum Jazz Band in an encore presentation, combining Mr. Warfield's masterful readings of Langston Hughes' poems with musical selections by Duke Ellington and James P. Johnson.

William Warfield is best known for his role of Joe the Dock Hand in the 1951 movie version of Show Boat, in which he sang "Old Man River." He also played the title role in a Broadway production of Porgy and Bess, and has recorded Aaron Copland's settings of American folk songs.

On the Riverwalk Jazz series, Mr. Warfield frequently portrayed classic jazz figures, including King Oliver and W.C. Handy. And he brought to life theatrical works, such asShow Boat and Porgy and Bess, with his powerful narrations. Warfield was a frequent collaborator with The Jim Cullum Jazz Band on tour, known for their popular live concert presentations of Porgy and Bess.

CTRL X UP

So I use the social networking site Twitter. I was reading through all of the updates I had posted since I began and was thinking it would be cool to put some of them together all on one page with no gaps. So I did. I am going to work on it some more and post it later but what I'm going to post now is what I decided to do next: cut it up.

So I pasted it into word and cut (Control + X) and pasted (Control + V) randomly into and within the different pages of text. I made the text small enough that I was not able to even read the words I was cutting and pasting, it just cut and pasted. Anyway its a different way to do a cut up I think, and I want to try it again later with some other texts online. Here it is:

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Minutaie Confetti

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It's been so long since I've read LOTR I couldn't remember the woman from the Utah Humanities council afterward. I need a break, but...seriously what? It's April! The trees already blossomed! No good. Oh h put my finger on it. Must be many things.I just saw a confederate flag sticker on an old beater in the exits, we need th me the chills. Sigur Rós! test. Found out I had 3 more days AFTER she had already handed it to me. Stupid. I should have gone to class.Back from vegan dinner night with UVUAAC friends. Delicious lasagna, garlic bread and espresso cupcakes! disguised as a muffin. At the stupid hypnotist show. Have you ever wanted to tell someone off for doing or saying something you imagined them doing but that they never did? Ok I admit it: I eat salad for the toppings. drop soup didn't last me until bed time. I need a snack.11:15 PM Apr 14th from webIt's time to reassess our priorities and what we value most in our lives. I'm a support tech and it seems we don't go a week without some server issue. We get flooded with calls, but no explanations. :{ Holy Smokes! It's vigilantes that call themselves "minutemen"? Are you effing kidding me? I had no idea. It's sofrom the computer for a while. This kind of eat blog I forgot to eat a dinner that was!) A half a foot of snow? Really? I mean, REALLY? It's beautiful beautiful outside. The days are getting longer! Summer i including parcels near Zion I really REALLY already prepared for me. Oops. It sounds like it's raining outside...but it's only melting. I think I just fell in lovGurus cafe listening to Dylan and eating delicious food. Beautiful day.Skipping class. It seems like a good night to skip cl Google Faces Antitrust Investigation for Agreement to Digitize Millions of Books OnlineI wish sleep were truly optional. Fo. I really don't want to do this anymore. Besides, I don't even know that I can in the amount of time I've given myself. 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Rhat ad is so ridiculous it see Some Catching up on @PowerShift09 tweets. What is wrong with some of these Republicans? Good grief EARTH DAY! Give the earth some love todayVery bad. Laaaame.Okay Some phones are cool like that. CDC: Swine flu made in USA  I've found it' faster as an application than firefox, but there times awkward. Or maybe I am I glad I saw Andrew Bird for free last summer & cheap this year! Save The Frogs Day is on my birthday! I am totally having a Frog-day party.  Note to self: Take.No, girl with the handbills (one of which is now soggily plastered to my car window), I do NOT want to know old friends! Just took sy on the number of intense classes in the Fall. Or, learn some discipline and give up social networking. The first time I saw that commercial I was completely speechless. Seriously, wow. I call that hairdo "the guess. I have a feeling my birthday is going to be overridden by final papers. This week is not going to be much fun. The rain! It he cheapest and most essential element of my salad? Croutons! Humbug! Crappy weather, crappy steamer and muffin from the crappy library cafe, crappy morning. Improv Everywhere gets me every year! Dear Winter, It's April. You are not welcome here. Get out of my life. Dustin Hof op is in such bad shape I've resorted to doing all of my internet time at the library. Piece of trash computer. I need a mac. Population and Policy: me from being alive. Damn it. Sitting outside enjoying the blustery day.. Had a damn good week. I'm feeling pretty excited about life. Hope it lasts.  Thanks for coming to speak to us today. I definitely feel the grass roots gaining momentum and your example is invaluable. "Hamburgers are the Hummers of food" At work on a federal holiday. Watching Into the Wild. Emile Hirsch! Tnighter: FAIL. $#!% Oh. my. goshms nobody would take it seriously. Too bad that's probably not the case. Six Word Memoirs On Love & Heartbreak: Just that? Did anybody see Joaquin Phoenix on Dave last night? Performance art or not, that was one crazy interview. I hope it's an act. He's brilliant. Presidential about civil disobedience on radiowest with Doug Sunkist, Pretzels, Miniature Tigers, Simone de Bouvoir, Sartre, etc. I'm in it for the long haul. I hope so too. :) I wish I could hem out, it's important stuff. Tim DeChristopher's arraignment is this morning. Go to the ng anything, I'm thinking ean gasoline is the most nauseating smellingEcosystem. Just got an email from Jim Matheson. Said he supports the development of Utah's energy resources, including the 77 leases Salazar withdrew.Was introduced to an effing genius today. Beat photographer WILLIAM KLEIN. Locked myself out of my car. Damn. At least it's nice o them with. and get it this week. Protest Puts Spotlight on Congress' Power Plant. Wishing I was in DC. Good ANYTHING done I really need to get my car fix NECESSARY. I am willing to pay a just flipped a U~ey. What a weird thing to spell out. My lapt in the Room jasonint Admin Sell-Off of Public Land Charged for Disrupting #'s at the same time. Or multiples close I can a me!"I've gone to the zoo and had an expensive one. Boy am ABSOLUTELY and the Maytals are coming to the Twilight Concert Series!!!! Sometimes introverted people trying to become friends is Jeapordy on Jay Leno. A: The Economy. Bush: "What is, Not My Problem?" A: Global Warming. Bush 200th b-day to our old friend Abe. Happy 100th birthday to the NAACP & 200th birthday to Darwin. Almost 8 million views in just over a week? "Is this real life?" Everglades Cl Pat Shea will be talking monumentally hehouselu pessimistic finished watching "The Haunting" on TV for Friday the 13th. What a strange, hokey movie. Why did I watch is. Energy Solutions r times like these & for people ck to those who are braving the cold outside As if he weren't hot enough already. Good grief. Taupe. What does that even mean? I try to tolerate W tax like that. Trent Harris' Delightful Water Universe opens tonight at The Tower. Check out his KUER interview: Laughing to myself at a girl in cutoffs and high heels. Toots ed & registered. I got a citation downtown yesterday and now I'm paranoid. I've seen like 10 cops since then! It looks like that airplane estern Soundscape Archive:It sounds like I have Pop Rocks in my lungs. Let's teach our babies how to hunt! Just got off work, M. Ward. sunroof, blue sky, beautiful morning. David Frum: Why Rush is Wrong. Sitting outside in the sunshine with the dog. Tr dinner date with work friends and birthday party with some and forth is fi UN Talks on Climate, Plans by US Raise Qualms  Summer! Rescue The Elephant ying to make fresh brewed raspberry iced tea with black tea + red raspberry herb tea. I can't keep buyi Yes. Skittle factory spontaneously combusts into a rock concert? Hare Krishna Festival Draws 15,000 Re-reading Camus before my tea! Raspberry even! Today ng it in the bottle. Too expensive. So Michael Steele is a fan of P. Diddy, but also Sinatra and the "Pack Rats". Oh, and he thinks the planet is cooling. Salazar defends ending oil industry tax breaks, higher royalties on fed Who doesn't? Anyone just love lettuce? It finally happened. I got pulled over for expired registration. Why does everything cost so much $$$? It seems the egg eral oil and gas. Tempted to walk around campus barefoot. Is that even allowed? The only way I'm going to get this paper written today is by reminding myself that spring break weather will be even warme but it's just hungry for some breakfast. Still not very comfortable I guess. Those be wrong. Oh! ... Now to study for that final...which is what'll sink r. I can wait. Did I get The fact that you see this as 'tying up' land shows how limited your un hits home for me. Really Energy Solutions? A 'Global Nuclear Renaissance'derstanding of anything outside of capitalism is. Reading Wallace Stegner's 1969 Wilderness Letter on Wilderness Society's website. Mmmm creamy tomato basil soup. How I love Flour Girls & Dough Boys. Disappointing myself so far this sebut that doesn't make up for it being 15 stinking degrees outside. I hate wint this weekend? No, no I didn't. Will I ever learn? Vincent Chin?" tonight in class."Gosh. Was it something he said?" Women's aversion to Limbaugh doesn't bode well for the GOP (Deseret News) But other than that, the show was incredible. I liked Will Dailey, and Josh never ceases to amaze. Can't wait for the new record!I don't understand how paying $10 to see a show is worth it if you're too wasted to care and just end up annoying everyone around you. JOSHUA JAMES is playing tonight Eesh. “We’re gonna need a bigger boat”. I fear that President Obama's first term could be eaten by...   and I have nowhere to be. Headed to lunch then down to Provo. Then maybe to a park to read. ACK! I'm so EXCITED! I'll have to come up! I need some food. Still it ea taste it. Sitting at home chatting with my sis after a group fman as Lenny Bruce directed by Bob Fosse. seems especially hostile. I'm seeking refuge at Gurus I think is my ball & chain. Preventing I would be delighted if the rain hadn't turned into snow. Rain, sun, back about ne with me. Snow is for crazies deciding whether or not to go to Holi and/or Greg Laswell. Also, listening f Promises". Lincoln! I can't believe I forSecretary Salazar Upholds Delisting of Gray Wolves in Part of Yellowstone heroes. Preparing for tomorrow rom a Conservative Voice. (from Economistgot Lincoln. Happy uin is even watching the Oscars. Awkward.My mom got a Scoodle (Scottie-Poodle) to Tap Project Radio UVU library's new screens showing which computers are free are genius, but the screen just says "Need Computer?" Haha, yes. I NEED COMPUTER. Interior.com)  er.Saw a documentary called "Who Killed last nights performance of Mother Courage. It was much more fun to see with an audience behind me. Toilet Paper and Other Moral Choices - Soft Is Rough on Forests Enjoying the resonance of andrew bird in my brain. Incredible show. Now I'm totally exhausted but it was sooo worth it. Brilliant. Magical. I would rather go to breakfast and spend the day outside. Instead I'm headed to school. At least I have awesome classes.I think it's time for some salsa fresca. Can't believe how did that time go? The internet sucked it away into outer space.If I were Angie I'd be a little creeped out too!  I can't stop thinking about the documentary I saw last nigh? My professor is holding class on Blackboard from Bolivia. gorgeous today has are some pretty funny tricks my body has been playing on me all night. Hilarious, really.Who says I can't write a killer 10 page paper in one night? They'd been. Blue sky, choice clouds, crisp mountains, shimmering lake...it even smells like Spring mester. Hoping to be better, but all I can think about is summer. Too much of a good thing I guess.The full moon looks really beautiful this morning,  outside! Would you rather 10,000 NPO's have to shut their doors and us loose tens of thousands of jobs?  The Hives t. It's called ": Foucault in Anthropology, Bongo on Sexuality in Beat Generation, and Halfbreed in Race & Minority Relations. Going through photos from Thinking I need to find myself a boyfriend. One that feels the same way about live music as I do. Or, you know, just a friend. The Reality Behind "Clean Coal"puppy yesterday. I'm obsessed with him Coffee. Just heard that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has 

photos in provo

Here's a few photos from the day I walked around downtown Provo trying to get the feel for shooting with a film camera and trying to keep the beat photographers in mind. I'm not terribly happy with them, but I figured I aught to post a few anyway.

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some mystery. it's right here.

So I think I figured out why I was having such a hard time with creating something for the beat show, and for creating in general. That feeling of inauthenticity and disconnectedness, of trying to hard but not hard enough, and of a shallow result that didn't say anything or was too contrived. 

It was because I was trying to mimick the effects, rather than be inspired by the roots.

This is the same problem that made the Beatnik. So now that I've realized this I've tried to come up with a few things that will hopefully help me with Beat-ness (because who doesn't want to have that Beat sensibility?) and with authentic creativity in general. Here are the things I've come up with so far that I haven't done before:

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• Read through ALL of the material. Books, poems, letters, articles, anything I've been given and anything else I can find. Thoroughly. Thoughtfully. Many times.
• Write. Write and write and write. What I think, feel, reactions, inner musings, physical experiences, big questions, silly stories, notes, things that are "out there", etc.
• Listen to and watch music, readings, films, performances, etc. Think about it.
• Talk to other people. Have conversations. Have adventures.

It all comes down to time invested, effort invested, and a heightened consciousness of the world and myself through a sensibility that gets to the roots of things. Not letting things fly by me with a simple nod before I move on to the next thing. I need to spend time. I need to spend effort. The answer is with me, not with anything or anyone else.

This summer I plan to continue this blog. I will hopeuflly post much more of my own work along with thoughts, conversations, etc. I essentially want to go over everything we talked about in class all over again but in more depth and see what more I can reap from it. I'm looking forward to continuing this class with myself here and with friends.

this is the ticking time bomb in my brain. maybe when it goes off I'll get a poem.

WTFIWWMIHMLWCIDARDWFTMDTEDMMDFAEDDDFSBASSBPAHSBFSBLSBSSHSFHWAFMTDTRIMHIOTLWOBMIANMITFWIDNWTHIAGTOWMTSFS.

You know?

stumped? stunted? stunned? stay tuned.

Beat Nite tonight. I love these people. I don't want this class to end. 

I was really excited to see so many people show up. I wish I had finished something to share with them. I have been trying to put together something of a cut up but for all of the times I started over I couldn't create something adequte. I'll keep working on it and post it here before next week, even if I still don't feel like it works.

What I keep struggling with is creating something original and personal but in the beat mentality and with the vision we've been learning about. I wanted to do some photography but the photos I took seemed mediocre and uninteresting. I wanted to put some beat-ish music together in a montage with some photos but when I put it together with some Beat photography it had no me in it, and when I put it with my photos it had hardly any beat in it. I am actually pretty upset that I wasn't able to be creative the way I wanted to be and synthesize my new knowledge of the Beat mentality with my personal creativity and expression. I want so badly to express myself but have little practice doing so and the whole thing seems so inadequte to me. Maybe I should try poetry. I used to write poetry. I'm going to write a poem.

NYT article on outsider artists

Communicating Across Barriers Few Could Imagine

Ricco/Maresca Gallery

Judith Scott, who had Down syndrome and spent much of her life institutionalized, began creating yarn sculptures like this untitled one from the late 1980s at the Creative Growth Art Center in the Bay Area. More Photos >

By KATE TAYLOR

Published: April 16, 2009

JUDITH SCOTT couldn’t hear or speak, yet she found a language with which to describe her inner world. Hawkins Bolden couldn’t see, yet his statues stare at you with haunted eyes. And both Royal Robertson and Ike Morgan, isolated by mental illness, communicated through paintings what they couldn’t express any other way.

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Multimedia

Slide Show

Voices From Outside the Art World

Darin Murano

Scott Ogden, whose film about the four artists is screening on Saturdays at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery. More Photos »

These four artists, whose lives and work are the subject of a new documentary, “Make,” which is screening on Saturday evenings at 6 through May 2 at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery in Chelsea, belong to a category that some call outsider or self-taught artists, although these are terms that the film studiously avoids. Certainly all of them lived and made their art outside mainstream society, and Mr. Morgan, who is still living, continues to do so. But, as Frank Maresca, one of the owners of the gallery, which is also showing a group exhibition of the four artists, said, it is not their disabilities or their harrowing stories that make their work interesting.

“All of these people were born with a gift,” Mr. Maresca said, “and it was through their situations that the gift grew the way that it did.”

Their situations were extreme, to say the least. Ms. Scott — who is the most established of the four, having had museum shows and been the subject of a book, as well as another film — was born with severe Down syndrome in 1943. Her twin sister, Joyce, was developmentally normal, and as children they were inseparable. But when they were 7, their parents sent Judith to an institution, where she remained for 35 years, so isolated that for a long time her sister didn’t know if she was alive.

In the 1980s Joyce Scott located her sister, moved her to the Bay Area, where Joyce lived, and enrolled her in a workshop for artists with disabilities called the Creative Growth Art Center. There, after showing no interest in the paints that were offered her, Judith suddenly, with no prompting, began to create strange, cocoonlike sculptures by wrapping found objects in layers and layers of multicolored yarn. She continued making these, in many variations, until she died in 2005.

A psychologist interviewed in “Make” speculates that the sculptures, which sometimes take on anthropomorphic shapes, represent memories of her childhood bond to her sister. That no one knows for sure lends her work — as with all the exhibition — an air of mystery.

To Mr. Bolden, who was blind from the age of 7 or 8 as the result of an accident, the tribal-looking sculptures that he created out of old pots, discarded kitchen equipment, pieces of carpet and other detritus found around his Memphis neighborhood were scarecrows to keep birds away from his vegetable garden.

“I think it brought him a really intense joy to scare the birds,” one of the filmmakers, Scott Ogden, said of Mr. Bolden, who was over 90 when he died in 2005. But as for whether he considered these figures art, Mr. Ogden said, “I think he didn’t even understand the question.”

Mr. Robertson, who lived in extreme poverty in Baldwin, La., and died in 1997, didn’t consider his paintings, depicting alien landings and apocalyptic disasters, art either, but a form of prophecy.

Only Mr. Morgan, whose colorful, impressionistic paintings are based on pictures in books or album covers, thinks of his work as art. Yet he also sees it as a job, the only one he had in the 25 years he spent in the Austin State Hospital being treated for schizophrenia. (He was released several years ago.) “It’s given him a sense of purpose,” Mr. Ogden said. “He spends every waking minute making art.”

For Mr. Ogden, 35, an artist who lives in Brooklyn and shows his work at Ricco/Maresca while supporting himself primarily as an art handler, “Make” is the product of a more than decade-long obsession. He was a student at the University of Texas at Austin when he encountered the work of Mr. Bolden, Mr. Robertson and Mr. Morgan at the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, Tex. “I just got blown away,” said Mr. Ogden, who with his baby face and few days’ stubble looks as if he should be in an indie rock band. “This stuff looked so different from what I was seeing in art school.”

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NYT article on Lichtenstein

In Sketches and Collages: Lichtenstein’s Workaday Musings

By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO

Published: April 17, 200

When Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) began making paintings of cartoon and comic book imagery in the 1960s, he rarely kept the preliminary drawings and collages in which he worked out composition and colors. He was happy to let them fall on the floor, where they were swept out with the trash. So it is entirely possible that Lichtenstein would not have approved of the present exhibition at the Katonah Museum of Art. The show presents 65 of the artist’s later preliminary sketches, drawings and collages, from the 1970s through the ’90s, most of which were in the studio at the time of his death and are now in private collections.

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HIS OWN DEVISING “Collage for Still Life With Reclining Nude” (1997) by Roy Lichtenstein.

“Lichtenstein in Process” is a fascinating and engrossing show providing a rare glimpse of the pop artist’s private working methods and creative process. Swift in execution, small in format and considerably more intimate than his finished paintings, Lichtenstein’s sketches, drawings and collages show the artist planning and arranging, experimenting with sources and compositional structures in search of something fresh, new and entirely his own. His finished pictures are not as simple or straightforward as they might look.

Take for instance “Interior With Exterior (Still Waters)” (1991), showing a pool and patio seen through a sliding glass door. The central source image is drawn from an architecture catalog into which the artist has collaged elements of a painting by the American abstract artist Clifford Still as well as, on the far wall, a parody of Lichtenstein’s own 1962 parody of Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington. Here we have paintings within paintings.

On the basis of the artworks in this show, it seems that Lichtenstein was largely preoccupied during his final decades with two themes: interiors and nudes. Among the more interesting nudes here is “Beach Scene With Star Fish” (1995), a large, expansive beach scene filled with prancing, nude female comic book characters. The composition, based on Picasso’s “Bathers With Beach Ball” (1928), once again combines art historical imagery and cartoons with all sorts of visual odds and ends of the artist’s own devising.

Three raw pencil sketches, a more detailed colored sketch and a painted and printed collage on board (also preparatory) show the gradual evolution of this image. Especially noticeable is the way in which the artist oscillates back and forth with the placement of a beachside shed, along with a reversing of figures in the composition to get the right sense of balance and proportion.

What is really fascinating about these preparatory sketches, drawings and collages is that they reveal not just the inner workings of the artist’s mind but the way in which he actively sought to hide or remove any trace of his hand in the final work. In each successive stage the composition becomes increasingly stylized and mechanical, eventually taking on the appearance of commercial printing. They are meticulously handmade imitations of mass prints.

Lichtenstein often described himself and other pop artists as making “industrial paintings.” But it wasn’t always so, for he spent the first decade of his career in Ohio making Cubist and Expressionist paintings. He began teaching in upstate New York in the late 1950s and in 1960, then moved to Rutgers University in New Jersey where, influenced by his colleague Allan Kaprow, he began painting using cartoons and commercial printing techniques. His first one-man show, at the Castelli Gallery in 1962 in New York, was a sell-out.

One of the criticisms often leveled at Lichtenstein’s work is that it lacks originally. This is only partly true, for while most of his best-known artworks are studious copies of comic-book panels, he largely stopped this in 1965. And even though he continued to incorporate elements of comic imagery into his work for the rest of his career, the source imagery is increasingly transformed.

This transformation is especially visible in his paintings based on art historical sources. “Landscape With Scholar’s Rock” (1996), one of a series of Chinese-style landscapes, takes its inspiration from books on the gardens of China and Japan along with Chinese landscape painting. But the end result is something altogether different — the artist’s use of bold colors and large black Benday dots make the final image look like a faded ink-jet reproduction.

It is worth remembering that the works in this show are not finished and most probably were never meant for public display. They are the workaday musings of a great artist. Still, the exhibition does include one grouping of sketches and collages paired with a finished painting, “Interior With Nude Leaving” (1997), enabling viewers to see the culmination of the process. Made the year that he died, the title suggests that somehow the artist knew it was time to depart.

“Lichtenstein in Process,” Katonah Museum of Art, Route 22 at Jay Street, through Jun. 28. Information: (914) 232-9555 or katonahmuseum.org.

a farmer a poet an academic a critic

So I don't know if Wendell Berry particularly expresses a Beat-like mentality about the environment, but I ran across this the other day and the poems kind of struck me as perhaps being related. I don't have any knowledge of his entire repoitoire but I'm going to look him up and see if there is any Beat-ness to his work as a whole. In any case, I'm posting the story that got me interested in checking him out:

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'Wild Blessings': Wendell Berry's Passions, Reframed

by Elizabeth Kramer

 Listen Now

Actors Theatre of Louisville

 

“I have hope. I've devoted a lot of time in my life to discovering the grounds for having hope. But that doesn't mean that I'm optimistic.”

Wendell Berry

 

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Pam Spaulding

Wendell Berry has been compared to nature writers like Thoreau and Emerson.

 

 

Weekend Edition Saturday,March 28, 2009 · 

Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-based agrarian philosopher, has been described as our era's heir to Emerson and Thoreau — a writer concerned with the importance of community, and with the lessons we can learn from the natural world.

Now, the Actors Theatre of Louisville is putting his ideas on stage.

There were plenty of ideas to choose from: Since the 1960s, Berry has published eight novels, dozens of short stories, and numerous essays with environmental themes.

But Wild Blessings, the theater piece premiering this weekend at the Humana Festival of New American Plays, is drawn exclusively from Berry's poems.

Plenty of playwrights write in verse — but not every poem would work on a stage. Even Berry himself had his doubts when the Actors Theater came calling.

"I didn't know what to think," he says. "I still don't know what to think. ... After I see it I guess I'll have an idea."

Not to worry, says Adrien-Alice Hansel, who helped put Wild Blessings together. She says Berry's poems worked perfectly as fodder for a play.

"He actually writes in a lot of different voices," Hansel says. "He has poems that are invocations of the natural world. He has poems that are funny. He has poems that are angry. And some of his poems have a really strong sense of voice and sense of character."

One such character is the "Mad Farmer," a man Berry describes as "a little extravagant" in his willingness to go against the grain. Thumbing through the script, he reads one of the adapted poems — one that, to him, sums up how he and the Mad Farmer both see the world.

To be sane in a mad time,
is bad for the brain, worse 
for the heart. The world 
is a holy vision had we clarity 
to see it; a clarity that men 
depend on men to make.

Wild Blessings weaves Berry's poems together with original music by composer Malcom Dalglish, who speaks and plays instruments onstage. Four actors, who also play instruments, present Berry's characters and life.

The arc of the play mirrors Berry's own migration: Born in 1934, he moved away from Kentucky in the late '50s to live in California and New York. Ultimately, though, he returned to his home state, where since the '60s he's been living the kind of agrarian life he writes about.

For playgoers, "the journey of the evening is [about] being a young person in the city and struggling against urban life, and then falling in love and moving back to home, which happens to be Kentucky," says Marc Masterson, artistic director at the Actor's Theatre.

Masterson, who collaborated with Hansel on Wild Blessings, says they organized the poems by themes like work, politics and economics. And though some were published decades ago, the poems feel surprisingly current. One in particular — about a stock market crash — feels particularly timely:

When I hear the stock market has fallen, 
I say, "Long live gravity! Long live 
stupidity, error and greed in the palaces 
of fantasy capitalism!" I think 
an economy should be based on thrift, 
on taking care of things, not on theft, 
usury, seduction, waste, and ruin. 
My purpose is a language that can make us whole, 
Though mortal, ignorant, and small. 
The world is whole beyond human knowing.

When Berry considers the current state of affairs against the work he's produced over nearly half a century, he seems reflective.

"I have hope," Berry says. "I've devoted a lot of time in my life to discovering the grounds for having hope. But that doesn't mean that I'm optimistic."

Actors Theatre may have reason to be, though: The company has already fielded calls about Wild Blessings from other theaters, both in the U.S. and abroad.

brittany, meet regina.

I don't remember exactly at what point in the semester this happened, but one day after school as I was driving home I decided to listen to a musician who I hadn't listened to for a very long time. Her name is Regina Spektor. As I was driving it dawned on me: Regina is so Beat. 

This occurred to me somewhat slowly, and I realized that all this time I had known about her I had intentionally avoided the majority of her repoitoire because it was weird. I hadn't made room for it. I hadn't even listened to any of the songs all the way to the end.

So, I was completely blown away by this realization. I immediately made the connection between learning about the Beat sensibility and (1) deciding to give her stranger songs another chance, and (2) being blown away by them.

So I've compiled a playlist of some of her songs that I've been really digging. I've listened to all of the songs of hers that I could find at least a handful of times now, and I hope I'm right in my feeling that she is pretty Beat. Below the playlist I've also included some of her biography (which I've abbreviated) from Wikipedia.  

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Regina Spektor (Cyrillic: Регина Спектор; born February 18, 1980) is a Soviet-born Jewish-American singer-songwriter and pianist. Her music is associated with the anti-folk scene centered on New York City's East Village.

Early life

Spektor was born in Moscow, USSR (now Russia), to a musical Jewish family. She learned how to play piano by practicing on a Petrof upright that was given to her mother by her grandfather. She was also exposed to the music of rock and roll bands such as The Beatles, Queen, and The Moody Blues by her father, who obtained such recordings in Eastern Europe and traded cassettes with friends in the Soviet Union. The family left the Soviet Union in 1989, when Regina was nine, during the period of Perestroika, when Soviet citizens were permitted to emigrate. Regina had to leave her piano behind. The seriousness of her piano studies led her parents to consider not leaving the USSR, but they finally decided to emigrate, due to the ethnic and political discrimination which Jews faced.

Traveling first to Austria and then Italy, the family settled in the Bronx, New York, where Spektor graduated from the SAR Academy, a Jewish day middle school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. She then attended high school for two years at the Frisch School, a yeshiva in Paramus, New Jersey, but transferred to a public school, Fair Lawn High School, in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, where she finished the last two years of her high school education

Beginnings as a songwriter

In New York, Spektor studied classical piano with Sonia Vargas, a professor at the Manhattan School of Music, until she was 17; Spektor's father had met Vargas through her husband, violinist Samuel Marder. Although the family had been unable to bring their piano from Russia, Spektor found a piano on which to play in the basement of her synagogue, and also practiced on tabletops and other hard surfaces.

Spektor was originally interested only in classical music, but later became interested in hip hop, rock and punk as well. Although she had always made up songs around the house, Spektor first became interested in more formal songwriting during a visit to Israel with the Nesiya Institute in her teenage years when she attracted attention from the other children on the trip for the songs she made up while hiking and realized she had an aptitude for songwriting.

Following this trip, she was exposed to the work of Joni Mitchell, Ani DiFranco, and other singer-songwriters, which encouraged her belief that she could create her own songs. She wrote her first a cappella songs around age sixteen and her first songs for voice and piano when she was nearly eighteen.

Spektor completed the four-year studio composition program of the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College within three years, graduating with honors in 2001. Around this time, she also worked briefly at a butterfly farm in Luck, Wisconsin, and studied in Tottenham, England for one semester.

She gradually achieved recognition through performances in the anti-folk scene in downtown New York City, most importantly at the East Village's Sidewalk Cafe, but also at the Living Room, Tonic, Fez, the Knitting Factory, and CB's Gallery. She sold self-produced CDs at her performances during this period: 11:11 (2001) and Songs (2002).

Style

Spektor has said that she has created a great number of songs, but that she rarely writes any of them down. She has also stated that she never aspired to write songs herself, but songs seem to just flow to her. Spektor's songs are not usually autobiographical, but rather are based on scenarios and characters drawn from her imagination. Her songs show influences from folk, punk, rock, Jewish, Russian, hip hop, jazz, and classical music. Spektor's musical style has drawn many comparisons to fellow singer-pianists Tori Amos and Fiona Apple, as well as the vocal stylings of Björk. Spektor has said that she works hard to ensure that each of her songs has its own musical style, rather than trying to develop a distinctive style for her music as a whole.

Spektor possesses a broad vocal range and uses the full extent of it. She also explores a variety of different and somewhat unorthodox vocal techniques, such as verses composed entirely of buzzing noises made with the lips and beatbox-style flourishes in the middle of ballads, and also makes use of such unusual musical techniques as using a drum stick to tap rhythms on the body of the piano or chair. Part of her style also results from the exaggeration of certain aspects of vocalization, most notably the glottal stop, which is prominent in the single "Fidelity". She also uses a strong New York accent on some words, which she has said is due to her love of New York and its culture.

Her lyrics are equally eclectic, often taking the form of abstract narratives or first-person character studies, similar to short stories or vignettes put to song. Spektor usually sings in English, though she sometimes includes a few words or verses of Latin, Russian, French, and other languages in her songs. Some of Spektor's lyrics include literary allusions, such as to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in "Poor Little Rich Boy", The Little Prince in "Baobabs", Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood in "Paris", Ezra Pound and William Shakespeare in "Pound of Flesh", Shakespeare's Hamlet in "The Virgin Queen", Boris Pasternak in "Après Moi", Samson and Delilah in "Samson", and Oedipus the King in "Oedipus", Billie Holiday in "Lady" and Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome in "2.99 cent blues". She alludes to The Beatles and Paul McCartney in the song "Edit". She also used a line from Joni Mitchell's California in her song "The Devil Came to Bethlehem". Recurring themes and topics in Spektor's lyrics include love, death, religion (particularly Biblical and Jewish references), city life (particularly New York references), and certain key phrases have been known to recur in different songs by Spektor, such as references to gravediggers, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the name "Marry Ann". Spektor's use of satire is evident in "Wasteside," which refers to the classic satirical novel by the Soviet authors Ilf and Petrov The Twelve Chairs, and describes the town in which people are born, get their hair cut, and then are sent to the cemetery.

In Spektor's early albums, many of her tracks had a very dry vocal production, with very little reverb or delay added. However, Spektor's more recent albums, particularly Begin to Hope, have put more emphasis into song production and have relied more on traditional pop and rock instruments.^[  Spektor says the records that most impact her are those of "bands whose music is really involved", specifically naming The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday, Radiohead, Tom Waits, and Frédéric Chopin as primary influences.