Some transmissions don't need a melody. The word, spoken into a microphone, carries its own frequency. On BVA, poetry is not a break from the music, it is music. A different instrument. The same frequency.
Transmission 02: High Wind Warning
November 9, 2023
"The revolution will not be televised."
Gil Scott-Heron's defining poem, recorded in 1970. A statement of purpose disguised as a list of things that won't happen. The Operator lets it play in full. No introduction. No commentary. The words do the work.
Transmission 03: The Valley Finds Its Voice
November 23, 2023
Gil Scott-Heron returns. "I'm New Here", a late-career meditation from the album of the same name, recorded shortly before his death. The wisdom of having survived. A different register than "The Revolution" but the same voice, the same commitment.
Transmission 05: The Longest Night
December 21, 2023
"I think I'll send these doctor bills, airmail, special, to Whitey on the moon."
Gil Scott-Heron appears for the third time, more than almost any other artist on BVA. "Whitey on the Moon" from 1970: a poem about Neil Armstrong, about money, about who pays for the view and who pays for everything else. Fifty-three years later, it has not aged. It has ripened.
Then poetry becomes the centerpiece. Yusef Komunyakaa's "Anodyne", the Pulitzer winner's meditation on loving the body you were born into, runs for nearly four minutes. "This sack of dung and joy." A ghost humming through the bones. A compass needle floating inside nighttime, always pointing toward West Africa. The Operator does not introduce it. He lets it land.
Transmission 06: The First Thaw
January 4, 2024
The Operator reads twice. First, a parable about a country discovered under the left shoulder, a hill slippery with blood and a secret wound on the red slope of the heart. Then Larry Levis's "The Poem You Asked For", the poem that would not eat, that drank all the water and said it was going over to your place.
Transmission 07: Sketches of the Valley
January 18, 2024
Jim Harrison, mid-sketchbook: "You wonder whether God lit the wrong end of the cigarette, tossed it aside, but no, we were magnificent once." Poetry as a sketch, the same as any record.
Transmission 08: When the Revolution Comes
February 1, 2024
The Last Poets, Harlem's forebears of hip-hop, ask what happens when the revolution comes. Noname's "Self," a quiet, precise refusal. The spoken word runs through the transmission like a pulse: analysis, critique, anger, hope, delivered at the speed of thought.
Transmission 10: Sleepwalking Through the Mekong
February 29, 2024
A different voice this time: a Balm-bred drummer turned tourist guide, reporting from the Mekong Delta. He tells of Thích Quảng Đức, the monk who burned himself in Saigon in 1963, and reads Thích Nhất Hạnh's words to Martin Luther King: to burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. Then a Hồ Chí Minh prison poem, read in translation: "after sorrow comes joy." The spoken word as protest, as transmission, as the thing that outlasts the flame.