Poems on the Radio

As a segue into actual content for this blog, I'd like to celebrate my rediscovery (and the continuing existence) of Prosody, a Pittsburgh radio program devoted to work by contemporary poets and writers. Hosts Ellen Placey Wadey and Jan Beatty are both Pittsburgh area writers, with some of Beatty's poetry in particular focusing on local neighborhoods, people, and images. The show is the only one of its kind in Western Pennsylvania to allow poets and writers air time for their own work. Wadey and Beatty (heh) follow up the readings with interviews.

Poetry and prose on the radio! It would be nice to see more of this kind of thing, as a way of side-stepping the page-held-in-front-of-face debacle at readings. And conveniently for us shy (?) writers, there's no need to change out of pajamas to spark the spoken-literature revolution. Both Wadey and Beatty have done their fair share of teaching writing in the Pittsburgh area, as well, and not just at the university level. Wadey has taught at the Young Writers Workshop, a summer program for teenagers hosted by the University of Pittsburgh, and Beatty, in addition to having taught all over the United States, has given workshops on poetry and spoken-word at local high schools and the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts. (I was lucky enough to have both of them as teachers in these capacities.)

Prosody airs at 7 pm EST on Tuesdays, on NPR-member station WYEP-FM. You can access WYEP's live webstream here:
http://www.wyep.org/stream/