Posts in Category: Interviews

African-American folk poetry: gandy dancers

7 April, 2009 by Dave Bonta - 2 Comments - Posted in Documentary, Interviews, Performance Poetry
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Excerpt of a film by Barry Dornfeld and Maggie Holtzberg-Call

Gandy dancers were the guys who straightened track. A YouTube preview from a full-length documentary (not embeddable) on Folkstreams.net.

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Cassandra, Iraq by C. K. Williams

26 March, 2009 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Interviews, Performance Poetry
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C. K. Williams talks about the language of politics and the Iraq war, and reads his poem “Cassandra, Iraq” in a video from Big Think.

http://youtu.be/UQn2Y1Z9XHA

Here’s another interview with Williams in which he addresses more general concerns, also concluding with a reading of “Cassandra, Iraq.” This one was directed and produced by Mel Stuart for the Academy of American Poets.

Interview with Mairead Byrne

26 February, 2009 by Dave Bonta - Leave a comment - Posted in Interviews
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I’ve been reading Mairead Byrne’s cryptic, quirky blog Heaven for some three years now, so I was excited to come across this gem of an interview on YouTube — perhaps the most perfect interview with a poet ever captured on video. The title, “The Poet’s View,” appears to be a reference to a DVD of the same name produced by the Academy of American Poets, which includes portraits of John Ashbery, Louise Glück, Anthony Hecht, Kay Ryan, and W. S. Merwin.

The video appears on Byrne’s own YouTube channel. The interviewer isn’t credited.