It’s been awhile since I’ve cooked up a book mixtape so let’s let this national poetry month playlist I worked up for my biweekly radio show on KABF stand in for my usual book music. The relation between the poems and song selection is fairly arbitrary. In some cases there is an obvious connection, in others, not. Overall, I like the juxtapositions.
Playlist:
The Plague – Mountain Goats
Loud Prayer – Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lust for Life – Girls
Alien vs Predator – Michael Robbins
Doctor (Five Discs Cover) – Atlas Sound
On the Subject of Doctors – James Tate
Tragedy – Shoes
My Shoe – Charles Simic
Paralyzed – Gang of Four
Poem about People – Robert Pinsky
The Crow – Dessa
Felix the Crow – Kay Ryan
Basic Space (diskJokke remix) – The xx
Space Station – Tom Sleigh
Behind the Bank – Oneohtrix Point Never
My Life at Home During Banking Hours – David Berman
Leaky Lifeboat (For Gregory Corso) – Sonic Youth
Poem Rocket – Allen Ginsberg
Sea Bells on Sunday – connect_icut/Sunday Morning – Wallace Stevens (mashup)
Allen Tate Hole – a recording of Allen Tate’s Oct. 12, 1971 poetry reading at Boylston Hall, Harvard University rerecorded through the soundhole of a 1961 D28 Martin “Dreadnaught” Acoustic Guitar (tuned to open G).
The Anthologist mixtape