PennSound Daily

We start this week with one more beloved December tradition: our good friend John Richetti performing Clement Clarke Moore's poem, "A Visit from St. Nicholas," from his ever-growing anthology, "125 Favorite Poems, Good for Memorizing."

More frequently known by its opening phrase, "'Twas the night before Christmas ...," "A Visit from St. Nicholas" was first published in Troy, New York's Sentinel on this day in 1823 with no attribution. It became wildly popular, reprinted far and wide, and its author — a professor of literature and divinity at New York City's General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, who initially sought to downplay his connection to the poem — would finally be credited in 1837, with Moore including it in a collection of his verse in 1844.

Click here to listen to Richetti's performance of the poem. You can read along on the Poetry Foundation's copy of the poem here. Many more recordings made by Richetti form the backbone of our PennSound Classics page, which is organized by author name. To start browsing, click here.

Begins jokingly proclaiming, "I'll make my Ernie Gehr film," a major preoccupation of my generation in the late 70s/early 80s, & then this very raw other thing proceeds to unfold, raw because I only had enough money (a loan from Abby Child) to do 4 shoots never having done sync & using outdated film stock from Rafik & an unfamiliar, undependable camera & trying to keep everything together & everything going wrong, yet determined to make concrete the ideas I had been abstractly developing over several years with whatever I got back from the lab no matter & so abandoning all caution to open a new area, I decided who could possibly talk better than poets? Edited in Times Square.

Fans of Hill's Money (1985) will recognize many familiar techniques at play here, with rapid-fire cuts creating a dense, rhythmic collage of sights and sounds punctuated by pregnant pauses, bursts of noise, and enigmatic, orphaned fragments of speech. It would be a mistake to judge it solely in its relationship to Money, however, since the two films differ radically in scope and spirit: while the latter is an expansive survey of the city and its scenes (including poets, dancers, and musicians), the feel here is much more intimate, between the smaller cast and the more limited visual vocabulary. At the same time it's fascinating to see hallmarks of Hills' style in a raw early state, particularly given the influence of the considerable technical challenges that Hills enumerates above. You can watch Plagiarism by clicking here.