{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Sum of All Wisdom: Conversations on Music, Makers, Meaning & More","title":"If It Isn’t Singing, Take It Out: Rich Ferguson on poetry, rhythm, and the embodied word","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4315,"description":"Where is a poem? \nFor poet, drummer, novelist, and performer Rich Ferguson, poetry lives in the breath, the body, and the beat. It moves through voice and gesture, enters into conversation with music and silence, and gathers new meaning from the people and places surrounding it.\nIn this conversation, Rich joins Scott Catey to explore the deep musicality of language and the entwining of music and poetry. He explains how cadence becomes an editing tool, why memorizing a poem is a physical process, and how years of preparation make spontaneity possible. As Rich puts it: if a passage doesn’t sing, it doesn’t belong in the poem.\nThey also discuss the continuing legacy of Beat poetry and its power to awaken attention. At a time when art is increasingly encountered through scrolling, fragments, and disposable moments, what can poetry and other artistic forms do to slow us down and return us to direct experience?\nRich describes Poet Film Stage, the multidisciplinary performance series he created with poet, playwright, and director Kathleen Florence. Combining poetry, theater, movement, music, and carefully placed silence, Poet Film Stage transforms a traditional reading into a collective journey. No single poem or performer is the destination; meaning emerges from the relationships among them.\nThe conversation culminates in Rich’s performance of “Live and Die in LA,” a propulsive spoken-word portrait of the city he once fled, but ultimately learned to love. Moving through music, violence, racial history, celebrity, incarceration, reinvention, and the accumulated ghosts of Los Angeles, the poem becomes both love letter and reckoning—a city carried in the blood and breath of the poet.\n \nHighlights\nAlong the way, Rich and Scott explore:\nWhy Rich considers his voice a musical instrument\nHow the Beat tradition continues to reverberate through contemporary poetry\nPoetry as an antidote to distraction and disposable attention\nThe role of movement, gesture, and memory in live...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/WxYkrFS9xG0iifivgXJ8ULNXdp4ij1PBeHoIXb0qWXE/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8wYjZh/Zjk1NjhmNzU4ZmJi/ZWJmMjI0YWViNmU3/YjEwOS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}