Season 3, Episode 5 the Folklife Today Podcast is ready for listening! Find it at this page on the Library’s website, or on Stitcher, iTunes, or your usual podcatcher.

In this episode, which we release at the close of National Poetry Month, John Fenn and I, along with several guests, look at some of the poetic treasures and poetry projects of the American Folklife Center. As usual, I’ll use this blog post to direct you to fuller audio and video of the items we mentioned in the podcast, and to give you more background on the topic.

But first:

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Our first visit in the episode is with Anne Holmes, a colleague from the Library’s Literary Initiatives Division, whose web page you can find here. In it, we discuss our first Native American Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, and her signature project, “Living Nations, Living Words.”

“Living Nations, Living Words” was inspired by Harjo’s visit to the American Folklife Center to hear some of the recordings we safeguard of Native American speech and music. Harjo was inspired to curate a poetry collection consisting of audio recordings of Native American poets reading their own works, and to place them in a geographic context via a Story Map. We’re proud to say that the collection is part of the American Folklife Center archive.

You can find the “Living Nations, Living Words” project homepage at this link.

You can explore the “Living Nations, Living Words” StoryMap at this link.

You can browse the “Living Nations, Living Words” collection at this link.

In the podcast, we also hear one of the poems from this collection, M.L. Smoker’s moving reading of her own poem “The Book of the Missing, Murdered and Indigenous – Chapter 1.” You can find that poem’s page at this link.

Our second guest on the podcast is our own folklife specialist Michelle Stefano, who coordinated a poetry slam in our Summer Jams series back in June, 2019.  Michelle tells us about the poetry organization Split This Rock, which you can find on the web here.

We also talk about some of Langston Hughes’s connections to the American Folklife Center, which you can read about at this blog post.

Of course, we also discuss the poetry slam itself, which was titled Rhyming the Archive, and which is online as a video at this link.

Also as part of that segment, we hear Marjan Naderi’s poem “The Lessons My Mother Taught Me While Cooking Dinner.” Find Marjan Naderi’s web page here.

The third guest to visit us is Kerry Ward of the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project. Kerry introduces VHP and discusses VHP’s November, 2019, Occupational Poetry Panel, which brought together four Veteran poets to perform their work, with our own John Fenn as moderator. The entire panel is online as a video, which you can find at this link.

The poetic highlight of that segment is the fisher poet Meezie Hermansen’s poem “Tools of the Trade.” Dr. Hermansen is a veterinarian when she isn’t fishing or performing poetry, and her professional veterinary page can be found here.

Meezie Hermansen also has an entry at the fisher poets archive “In the Tote,” which you can access here.

The final segment of the podcast is about a cowboy poem in our collections, “Colorado Morton’s Last Ride,” also known more simply as “Colorado Morton’s Ride.” We tell the fascinating story of how this poem came to be written by the Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Leonard Bacon and the masterful Montana horse-wrangler Rivers Browne. It involves a Major-General in the India Staff Corps of the British Army, a Public Information Officer for the Farm Security Administration during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, two Library of Congress folklorists, and a grad school nervous breakdown!  Because this segment was based on a previous blog post, you can find links to the full audio, the collection, and all manner of other goodies at that one link–which is here!

There’s also a bonus episode containing the full audio of the poem at this link.

And a bonus blog post with Bacon and Browne’s original text of the poem, at this link.

As always, thanks for listening, thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next time!