UpNorth Concert Hall: Spoken Word Performance

This Giving Voice segment was recorded live before a studio audience in the Winston Room of the St. Lawrence University Student Center in Canton NY. Host Dale Hobson leads a poetry jam with readings by poets Robert Strong, Helen Condon, Peggy Mooers, Mary Beth Kikel, and Jacalyn Gniewek. The theme is poetry about the arts and the creative process.

Performed in Malone, NY by Irate Primates for UpNorth Music. December 7, 2006

Performed in Malone, NY by Irate Primates for UpNorth Music. December 7, 2006

Performed in Malone, NY by Irate Primates for UpNorth Music. December 7, 2006

Paul Willcott of Saranac Lake reads his original Adirondack holiday story set in a down-at-heels former cure cottage and monastery occupied by a lonesome ex-professor. His grumpy solitude is troubled by ghosts, runaways, and a variety of everyday neighborhood angels.

Paul Willcott of Saranac Lake reads his original Adirondack holiday story set in a down-at-heels former cure cottage and monastery occupied by a lonesome ex-professor. His grumpy solitude is troubled by ghosts, runaways, and a variety of everyday neighborhood angels.

Keene Valley storyteller Karen Glass weaves stories about women around music by Dan Duggan in her collection, Phoebe's Garden and Other Stories of Strong Women, newly out from Esperance Studios in Red Creek, NY. Her story "Esther, a girl with a dream," features Dan Duggan playing the traditional tune Inishere.

The Mayhem Poets dropped by the NCPR studio February 3, 2005, in advance of their Community Performance Series gig for the following night at SUNY Potsdam. Their work is wholly original and dynamically entertaining. Combining hip-hop rhythms and theatrical rhymes, this group makes poetry accessible and exciting.

Burlington City Hall's Contois Auditorium was packed to listen to nine poets with regional connections read poems of war and peace. Some of the best-known names in US poetry participated. Readers included Galway Kinnell, Grace Paley, David Budbill, Jody Gladding, David Hinton, Major Jackson, Diane Swan and Martha Zweig. A music interlude was provided by cellist John Dunlop, and a display of photos of Iraq by John Preston Smith was featured in the lobby. NCPR Online recorded the entire evening for the UpNorth Concert Hall.

Writer Roger Mitchell spent years away from the North Country... the Midwest, England and the Everglades. Now he's back, living in Jay and writing about the Adirondacks, history, farming and family. His new book, Delicate Bait, won the 2002 Akron Poety Prize. Our experiences and place in the world feature prominently in Mitchell's poems. Todd Moe spoke with him at his home in Jay.

Poet laureate Billy Collins came to the Thousand Islands to read his poetry, take audience questions, and sign books in the century-old Clayton Opera House. About 200 people gathered in the bunting-decked hall to attend the reading, presented here in full, exclusively from NCPR Online.

Canton poet and publisher Albert Glover dropped by the NCPR studio to read a few sonnets from his collection Relax Yr Face, Glover Publishing 1998. We hear, in order, Mental, Nocturnal, Proposal, Maternal, Matinal and Cardinal.

The Shenandoah Shakespeare Express returns to Canton each year. They brought their not-your-father's-Shakespeare approach to the Bard into the NCPR studio. We hear Allison Glenzer deliver the famous "All the world's a stage" speech, and J.C. Long, Allison Glenzer and Sasha Olnick with a ditty from As You Like It.

Steven F. White is a poet and translator teaching at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. During August 2001, he performed a selection of twenty years of his poems and translations in the NCPR studio, where they have been mixed into a rich brew of poetry, music, chant and ambient sound called Transversions.

Dale Hobson, NCPR Webnaut from Potsdam, New York, reading Dam Builders and Vow before a rowdy crowd at Martha And Ev's annual barn party, February 2001.

Ray Fadden (Tehanetorens), Mohawk Elder and educator of Onchiota NY, tells the traditional story "How Hermit Thrush Got His Song."