Episode Details

Where is a poem? 

For 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.

In 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.

They 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?

Rich 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.

The 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.

Highlights

Along the way, Rich and Scott explore:

• Why Rich considers his voice a musical instrument
• How the Beat tradition continues to reverberate through contemporary poetry
• Poetry as an antidote to distraction and disposable attention
• The role of movement, gesture, and memory in live performance
• How rhythm helps a writer recognize what belongs
• The discipline hidden beneath apparent spontaneity
• Letting go of beautiful language that does not serve the work
• How emotion and imagination can transform autobiography into art
• The influence of Los Angeles on Rich’s creative identity
• Why poems change when placed in conversation with other poems
• Community, collaboration, and the making of Beat Not Beat
• The artistic partnership between Rich and drummer Butch Norton

Performance Featured in this Episode:

• Live and Die in L.A., a spoken word poem

Used with permission

About Rich Ferguson

Rich Ferguson is a poet, performer, drummer, novelist, and former California Beat Poet Laureate. His books include 8th & Agony, Everything Is Radiant Between the Hates, Somewhere a Playground, and the novel New Jersey Me. He served as lead editor of Beat Not Beat: An Anthology of California Poets Screaming Through the Post-Beat Scene.

With Kathleen Florence, Rich created Poet Film Stage, an ensemble performance project bringing poetry into conversation with theater, movement, film, music, and silence. His spoken-word performances and films frequently feature musical collaborators, including drummer Butch Norton, who was also a guest on The Sum of All Wisdom.

Explore Rich’s Work

Rich Ferguson: http://rich-ferguson.com/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@fuzzydoodah

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fergiebeat/

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