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AM Inspiration: Radio - The Transcendent Treasure
The best things in life are free...but actually someone has to pay for them. Museums, galleries, live music, community theater...they're all the things that enrich our communities but rely upon a mix of public funding and private donations. These collective goods tend to be taken for granted...somebody else is taking care of the donations, right? This is especially true with that intangible treasure, public radio.
Now is not a good time for public radio. NPR announced recession-related layoffs in December. When I heard that my favorite public radio station had, like many others, lost its state funding, it threw me into a panic. Where would I find out about new music? What about my favorite quirky DJs? Though it may seem like an old-fashioned medium, radio has played a starring role in the freedom movements of many countries and is an important element of civil society, educating people who can't read and uniting isolated regions. It was the net before the internet. It's hard for us to imagine how important radio broadcasts were during the two world wars. Just last month, Radio Erena, an Eritrean radio station, began broadcasting out of Paris, filling a need for independent news and cultural programming that had previously been unmet.
Though it's being hit hard by state budget shortfalls, public radio may benefit from a new iPhone app: Public Radio Player. The app, which aims to fix the dropped stream problem often experienced by those listening to radio on the web, may also help users track and contribute to the stations they listen to the most.
The Guardian's Books Blog has a wonderful post on "The ethereal world of radio poetry," that finds numerous similarities between poetry and radio.
Listening to poetry, listening to the radio, takes us outside of ourselves even when we are alone with our own thoughts. It's about transcendence, or more accurately, the precision of transcendence: through the pandemonium of syntax, beyond the confusion of our unconscious, out of the fuzzy static, comes a message "loud and clear". This clarity coming out of chaos, communicating itself to us, remaining with us, is what haunts Medbh McGuckian's Marconi's Cottage where "It is as if the sea had spoken in you / And then the words had dried."
So get to know your local public radio stations...or not-so-local ones that stream on the web. We'll miss them if they go silent.
You little box, held to me escaping
So that your valves should not break
Carried from house to house to ship from sail to train,
So that my enemies might go on talking to me,
Near my bed, to my pain
The last thing at night, the first thing in the morning,
Of their victories and of my cares,
Promise me not to go silent all of a sudden.
Tags: Media, Npr, Poetry, Public, Radio
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