Participation Type
Performance
Presentation #1 Title
Song of the Ancient Boar: Poetry on Nature, Roots, Rootlessness and Song
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
The poems in this session sing of people and places. Birthing Spaces delves into the process of artistic fermentation. Fanning the Hive is an ode to a friend across thirty years and 500 miles, a bee keeper who derives fortitude from watching creatures who know just how to care. Borderlines chronicles Kline's Eastern European family's choices to assimilate, yet hold fast to a smattering of deeply held traditions.
In Kudzu, Kline probes her own late arrival in the mountains, comparing herself with the invasive plant which seeks to cover and destroy what is native and fine. Can a self-conscious urban migrant to Appalachia be baptised in mountain rivers and immersed in local music to the point where she feels at one with her new home? Is being accepted a right or a privilege?
Song of the Ancient Boar, an homage to old world medicine sown in a foreign land, is sung as well as read. Kline, a singer, teacher, folklorist and oral historian, explores the transformation of some of the oldest songs in the English language, weathered on leaky, creaky ships and brought to grow and change in Appalachian forests. She posits that, just as ancient songs have kept us company in hard and lonely times, the singers have in turn nourished and affected this aural literature. She then calls upon traditional arts, the curry of ancient and altered, powerful medicine reinvented on this soil, to reverberate again, and transport us from modern day grief to heal Appalachia's children.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Carrie Nobel Kline is a music maker and folklorist. She and her partner Michael Kline weave mountain stories and folklore with spine-tingling harmonies on voices and guitars. Carrie is a staunch advocate for Appalachian culture in public schools, a performer, a writer and an oral historian. She believes in the resiliency of mountain culture and its power to save the land and people. The Klines operate Talking Across the Lines, a folklife documentary enterprise with a podcast.
Song of the Ancient Boar: Poetry on Nature, Roots, Rootlessness and Song
The poems in this session sing of people and places. Birthing Spaces delves into the process of artistic fermentation. Fanning the Hive is an ode to a friend across thirty years and 500 miles, a bee keeper who derives fortitude from watching creatures who know just how to care. Borderlines chronicles Kline's Eastern European family's choices to assimilate, yet hold fast to a smattering of deeply held traditions.
In Kudzu, Kline probes her own late arrival in the mountains, comparing herself with the invasive plant which seeks to cover and destroy what is native and fine. Can a self-conscious urban migrant to Appalachia be baptised in mountain rivers and immersed in local music to the point where she feels at one with her new home? Is being accepted a right or a privilege?
Song of the Ancient Boar, an homage to old world medicine sown in a foreign land, is sung as well as read. Kline, a singer, teacher, folklorist and oral historian, explores the transformation of some of the oldest songs in the English language, weathered on leaky, creaky ships and brought to grow and change in Appalachian forests. She posits that, just as ancient songs have kept us company in hard and lonely times, the singers have in turn nourished and affected this aural literature. She then calls upon traditional arts, the curry of ancient and altered, powerful medicine reinvented on this soil, to reverberate again, and transport us from modern day grief to heal Appalachia's children.
