To listen to the radio late at night is to listen to a world that bends, often into the world of poetry – or so I think, at least. It’s one of the reasons why I became a host, donning my headphones like a crown or contemporary ushanka and plugging in my microphone amongst the low-grade ratchet-like perma-ring of crickets and spiraling silly string hoots of owls. And there are great examples out there of radio and poetry intersecting though the contemporary ages, too: we can point to the poem “The Long Night Through” by David Craig Austin, where “late night AM radio warn[ed] that homosexuals who wait tables inject sperm into avocados”; we can look to “Insomnia with FM Radio and The Confederate Flag, 1974” by Lisa Russ Spaar, where “the deejay of the college’s late night radio program playing all of Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil to no one she has ever known … the music a complicated forest where any path to freedom is marked by prison bars of blues, and by stars you’ve got to inhabit the deepest dark to see”; we can look to “Late Night Talk Radio, Albuquerque” by Stefi Weisburd, too, where “I know I’m waking up, having no memory of being abducted by sleep, emerging from a cleansing static, as if from a prayer” – that’s what’s there.
Joe Milutis, quoting Allen Weiss, described radio as an art “guided by the serendipity of a fata morgana, the bewildering aleatory process of recuperating and re-channeling the lost voice.”
And he’s more or less right. It’s the half-remembered dream. It’s midnight. The age hovers somewhere between nine and fifteen. The parents are driving, and the landscape is an evening shoreline blue cross-cut with a desk lamp glow of green. The radio is playing. It’s nearing one, and maybe the program coming from the speakers is “Blues After Hours,” a Boston-based program hosted by Eric Jackson, or maybe the radio features something else – a recording of Albert Murray reading, perhaps, or perhaps we are dealing with something else altogether. Piano keys drifted up like coffee steam, both coming from the seemingly same place.
There is a lack of pressure in that time slot, that late night slot that turns otherwise benign televisions into room-filling ghosts, and it’s one of the reasons why I wanted it. (I am a woman of pluralities. Deal with it, Reductive Patriarchy, who – don’t ask me why – once struck me as being the imagistic equivalent of William F. Buckley trying to take over David Duchovny’s role in The X-Files (though how dare we stop the analogy there?)) The station manager encouraged experiments at that hour, and I invited everyone I could in. A singer named Nellie Lambeth came to the porch, sang some songs, and left. One local fisherman came on and told us about the time he told his assistant about The Red Hand Of Ulster, the associative implication being that one of the two should recreate the eponymous deed before they reached the shore, and it certainly wasn’t going to be the fisherman, so …
Sometimes I imagined that the microphone was a small little sun and my porch was filled with orbiting little moons. A few weeks ago, I sent an email to the station manager asking him if I could do a few episodes of my show in the Cornell Ornithological Labs. You’re lucky I let you do your show from your own porch, he replied. Plus: don’t you have enough nature here?
And it’s true. I did. Great Harbor Cove was a one hour drive outside of Anchorage, Alaska, was a giant “C” of water with an initial enclosure of five mountains and a further ‘parents poking their heads into their child’s bedroom to make sure their child is still sleeping’ enclosure of four more mountains outside of that, all of it covered in deep green forestry, some perpendicularly aligned with the roads that sat outside the harbor and ran through the town, some that did not. Come evening, ducks would wander around the shut shops and yellowing light (the ’-ing’ of the verb being crucial here, as the coloration of the lights was much more noticeably active rather than set and still), and they would regularly pass deer moving their way through the grass. The water in the harbor seemed to thrive in color, rhythm, sound – by any metric, it was a welcome sight.
My bedtime reading was “Krapp’s Last Tape” by Sam Beckett, which only makes sense if my preoccupation concerned “recuperating and re-channeling the lost voice.” I wondered what the boat Beckett described at the end of the play was like. The boyfriend suddenly muttered something like, “Oh no. Not the croissants,” and then rolled over, silent and asleep again. I wondered how the culture would shift if children asked for boats instead of tree houses or forts.