All around the city, or at least as far as the station’s signal can reach, WSUM/FM 91.7 host Paul Alan Baker knows a lot of radio dials flee from his program at 1 p.m. on Thursdays.
The student-run station has its rock and its hip-hop, some heavy metal and some jazz. But once a week the station has poetry and spoken word in all its forms, some as contemporary as hip-hop music, some so avant-garde it seems to be nonsense.
“I’m this big break in the day when I can just hear people turning their radios off,” joked Baker. “People just have the music on all day as background and then all of a sudden this weird, experimental poetry comes on and they think, ‘What the hell?’ ”
Baker is the host of “Wordsalad,” an hour that features authors reading from their own works.