KFAI's MinneCulture Presents

Studs Terkel in Conversation with American Poets   from WFMT and The Poetry Foundation T hat's right, you angel-headed  hipsters  who listen to  hydrogen jukeboxes , it's National Poetry Month again! To celebrate this year, we'll be airing airing several selections from the  Studs Turkel Radio Archives   over these last two weeks of April. First, we'll hear  Studs  exploring how  poetry  enables people to channel the voices of others -- featuring excerpts from interviews with  Elma Stuckey  and  John Ciardi . Then  strap in for adventure, we're travelling to Africa with  James Baldwin  and are headed on an interplanetary rocket-poem trip with  Allen Ginsberg  and other Beats. In part two of our program,  Studs delves into the realm of memory as Howard Nemerov and Gwendolyn Brooks read poems about childhood and the fleeting nature of time. Plus,  we will als...

Tuning the Body from Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening In the Middle Ages sound played a key role in the battle between Good and Evil . There were horrible sins of the tongue - idle words, boasting, flattery, lying, and blaspheming – as well as sins of the ear: eavesdropping and the seduction of devilish words. The ears were the gateway not just to the body, but also the soul. Professor David Hendy of the University of Sussex considers the importance of noise to Medieval morality. Heavenly Sounds from Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening Worshippers in the Middle Ages would have been struck not just by the visual spectacle of great churches and grand cathedrals , but also their sound. Medieval churches in the west had very different acoustics to the low-roofed, wattle and daub homes where most of their congregation lived. David explores how preachers and singers created sounds that fitted these holy spaces beautifully, from Romanesque churches, to the...

The Listening Lounge supports the work of independent producers nationwide, including the Listening Lounge's very own Todd Melby. For the past two years, Melby has been wandering around western North Dakota, documenting the stories of oilfield workers, itinerant knife sellers, food truck owners, guys that sell pickup truck stickers (James Gores, pictured) and all kinds of people who are participating in one of America's biggest oil booms. The project is called Black Gold Boom -- it's a big public media project with an interactive documentary , videos , aerial photography and more. But at the heart of it is radio . Engaging audio stories about people and their lives. Listen in to hear a few of Todd's stories. (Photo by Ben Garvin)

KFAI is community-supported radio: the programs you hear everyday are made possible by listener-members! Please show your support by visiting KFAI today! For pledge drive, we've curated a greatest-hits-style episode of favorite stories we've played over the past six months:  From our "Computer Love" episode: TI-99/4A from The Optimist What could be more fun than a Texas Instruments home computer , a dot matrix printer, and a text adventure game on a cassette drive!? Well, all of this and some poorly written BASIC programming awaits you. We join author Tom Pappalardo as he waxes nostalgic for way back when he actually understood how his computer worked.  From our "Lands of Make Believe" episode: The World Within the World from The Memory Palace A NYU PhD candidate 's studies go off the rails sending him on a lonely quest to prove the world is hollow . An idea based on ancient legends that there are entire civilizations which thrive in sub...