This week's poem comes from some time spent on the Pine Ridge Reservation, helping to build a straw bale house for the Fast Wolf family as part of the Red Feather Development Group. "Southeast of Red Shirt" takes place one night as I walked into the darkness after most of our group had retired to their tents. The eerieness of open spaces is strong when you've spent most of your life in the Midwest.
This week's music, "'Round Midnight" is from Misterioso by Thelonious Monk. It features Monk on piano, Johnny Griffin on tenor sax, Ahmed Abdul Malik on bass, and Roy Haynes on drums.
Click below to listen to the episode:
Report #33
No way! You worked on the Pine Ridge Reservation! I did, too. I taught in some schools, cleaned up cemeteries, and built bunk beds for children through a group called Re-Member, for many summers. I wrote a poetry chap about it, called a thousand ghosts, that you can find on my website.
ReplyDeleteVery cool. Awesome, sad place.
-leah angstman
Propaganda Press
leah,
ReplyDeleteIt is an amazing place. There are only a few spaces on earth that have affected me the way Pine Ridge does. I read another poem from that same time in this post: http://reportfromthemountains.blogspot.com/2009/01/report-02-26-jan-2009.html
A Thousand Ghosts is a perfect title for a book of that place. -- Anyone reading this, you should check out leah's book here: http://alt-current.com/pp/pp_item.html#a_thousand_ghosts
~Marc