All About Poetry from 2007

featuring Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Randy Newman, and Gillian Welch

Garrison Keillor Tonight

From Garrison:

Up at 4 a.m. to work on the novel, everyone else in this little white house is asleep, and then at 7:30 a brisk half-hour walk through the woods. Got eight solo shows starting the 31st and I don't want to limp onto stage and feel the audience pity the old man. This tour is my defense against dementia, to do 90 minutes without a script, with a long News from LW and some long poems and some stand-up and audience singing. It’s sort of unique and people who like it really like it a lot though maybe the spouses they drag along aren’t so pleased. Small theaters so the old man is in close touch with the crowd.

Join us during his birthday week for a series of solo shows. Ticket info.

Listen to the May 5, 2007, show

This week on A Prairie Home Companion — a special springtime poetry show with Allen Ginsberg reading the words of Walt Whitman, Meryl Streep reading the words of Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, and Billy Collins and Rita Dove reading their own words. The poetic Randy Newman is on, along with Gillian Welch, Greg Brown, and Bob Dorough. Plus, the story of another Bob: a younger, struggling artist with an iffy sense of meter and a tendency to slouch. Join us Saturday for all this and more on a special poetry home companion. Listen to the show.

About our guests:

“Billy Collins writes lovely poems,” John Updike has said. He does indeed. His broad popular appeal combined with high critical claim led Collins to be twice appointed United States Poet Laureate and to be named New York State Poet Laureate 2004–2006. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, Harper's and many other magazines, and he’s the recipient of numerous poetry prizes, including the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award for humor in poetry. Collins has been a writer-in-residence at Sarah Lawrence College and a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College, City University of New York. Currently, he hosts a podcast on his Facebook page and has a forthcoming book due in September.

Gillian Welch grew up in Los Angeles, where her musical parents wrote for the Carol Burnett Show. She discovered alternative music and bluegrass while attending the University of California at Santa Cruz. In the early ’90s, she met David Rawlings at the Berklee College of music in Boston, and they have written songs, recorded, and performed as a duo in the years since. Welch sang with Emmylou Harris and Alison Krauss on the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou, an album that triggered a revival in traditional American folk music. After a long hiatus, Gillian and David Rawlings return with a new album, Woodland, due on August 23rd.

Poet Louis Jenkins, a longtime resident of Duluth, Minnesota, had his work published in many literary magazines and anthologies. His poetry collections include An Almost Human Gesture,All Tangled Up With the Living, Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Poems, Just Above Water, and The Winter Road, which was nominated for the 2001 Minnesota Book Award for poetry. Two of his prose poems were included in The Best American Poetry (1999).

At the opening festivities for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Andrew Young read text written by Rita Dove, for the premiere of "UMOJA-Each One of Us Counts," composer Alvin Singleton's work for symphony and narrator. It was not the first time that Dove’s work had been heard by the nation or the world. In 1993, Dove was named Poet Laureate of the United States, the youngest person and the first African-American to receive this honor. Six years previous to that, Dove received the Pulitzer Prize for Thomas and Beulah, a collection of interrelated poems loosely based on the lives of her grandparents. Since 1989, she has been on the faculty of the University of Virginia, where she is Commonwealth Professor of English.

50th Anniversary Tour

Garrison enthralled audiences by picking a poem from the past to share. And since his wife, Jenny, was in the audience, he chose to share her favorite poem — “A Summer Night.” Will he share this again during the final 50th Anniversary shows in September or choose another classic such as “The Finn Who Wouldn’t Take a Sauna”? Join us to find out.

Listen to Garrison’s reading of the poem from the Summer Love CD. Listen

From our store:

Celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the show with this tasteful hat featuring the Writer’s Almanac logo embroidered across the front. Hat is brushed cotton and adjustable; one size fits most. Get the hat.

For 25 years, Garrison Keillor has been highlighting poetry and the written word as well as pertinent literary and historical dates in a 5-minute radio segment and podcast. This brand-new T-shirt commemorates that history, with the Writer’s Almanac logo emblazoned across the chest along and “25th Anniversary” on the sleeve. This lightweight, fitted poly/cotton blend tee is available in sizes S – XXL. Get the shirt.

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