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From "Down To Write You This Poem Sat" at the Oakville Gallery

Contemporary
  1. Charles Bernstein, "Phone Poem" (2011) (1:30): MP3
  2. Caroline Bergvall, "Love song: 'The Not Tale (funeral)' from Shorter Caucer Tales (2006): MP3
  3. Christian Bôk, excerpt from Eunoia, from Chapter "I" for Dick Higgins (2009) (1:38):  MP3
  4. Tonya Foster, Nocturne II (0:40) (2010) MP3
  5. Ted Greenwald, "The Pears are the Pears" (2005) (0:29): MP3
  6. Susan Howe, Thorow, III (3:13) (1998):  MP3
  7. Tan Lin, "¼ : 1 foot" (2005) (1:16): MP3
  8. Steve McCaffery, "Cappuccino" (1995) (2:35): MP3
  9. Tracie Morris, From "Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful" (2002) (3:40): MP3
  10. Julie Patton, "Scribbling thru the Times" (2016) (5:12): MP3
  11. Tom Raworth, "Errory" (c. 1975) (2:08): MP3
  12. Jerome Rothenberg, from "The First Horse Song of Frank Mitchell: 4-Voice Version" (c. 1975) (3:30): MP3
  13. Cecilia Vicuna, "When This Language Disappeared" (2009) (1:30): MP3
Historical
  1. Guillaume Apollinaire, "Le Pont Mirabeau" (1913) (1:14): MP3
  2. Amiri Baraka, "Black Dada Nihilismus" (1964) (4:02):  MP3
  3. Louise Bennett, "Colonization in Reverse" (1983) (1:09): MP3
  4. Sterling Brown, "Old Lem " (c. 1950s) (2:06):  MP3
  5. John Clare, "Vowelless Letter" (1849) performed by Charles Bernstein (2:54): MP3
  6. Velimir Khlebnikov, "Incantation by Laughter" (1910), tr. and performed by Bernstein (:28)  MP3
  7. Harry Partch, from Barstow (part 1), performed by Bernstein (1968) (1:11): MP3
  8. Leslie Scalapino, "Can’t’ is ‘Night’" (2007) (3:19): MP3
  9. Kurt Schwitters, "Ur Sonata: Largo" performed by Ernst Scwhitter (1922-1932) ( (3:12): MP3
  10. Gertrude Stein, If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1934-35) (3:42): MP3
  11. William Carlos Willliams, "The Defective Record" (1942) (0:28): MP3
  12. Hannah Weiner, from Clairvoyant Journal, performed by Weiner, Sharon Mattlin & Rochelle Kraut (2001) (6:12): MP3

Selected by Charles Bernstein (read more about his choices here)

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PoemTalk #156: on Steve Dalachinsky's "with shelter gone"

Posted 1/25/2021

Today we release the latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series — that's #166 if you're keeping track — which addresses Steve Dalachinsky's poem "with shelter gone," taken from a 2008 reading at the Bowery Poetry Club. For this program host Al Filreis convened a virtual panel including Bonny Finberg, Julien Poirier, and Jake Marmer, who just happened to host the reading from which the recording under discussion was taken. Dalachinsky's death last September can't help but cast a shadow over the proceedings, particularly given that all three panelists knew him well, however that sense of loss is counterbalanced with happy memories stirred by the immediacy and intimacy of the poet's voice.

Filreis' PoemTalk blog post announcing the new episode begins by acknowledging those complex emotions, which turn this "poem about what one feels and ponders in the midsummer heat in a Brooklyn apartment where the fruitflies are not merely irritating but serve as harbingers of bodily fragility and decay" into a "pre-elegy" that replicates the process of "winding back" which becomes a refrain as the poem unfolds. "Time, here, is that which can be wound back, such that as readers or witnesses to its performance we are no longer suffocating from the city heat," he observes. "Rather, we begin to feel the breezy thrills and spills of old Coney Island, overhearing the music of youth ('you're my coney island baby'), and moving eastward to the edges of the borough — out to cafés of Russian immigrants ... and, in a sense, running the whole complex, intertwined story of Beat despondency and ecstasy, and similarly of jazz, of Jewish Brooklyn, of Russian Jewish immigration — a story run backwards to the eastern limit of that moment just prior to the invention of the cultural convergences one hears here and in most if not all of Dalachinsky’s performances."

You can learn more about this latest program, read Dalachinsky's poem (and watch him perform it), and listen to the podcast here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.


Al Filreis: "What Is Poetry?"

Posted 1/22/2021

"Someone at my university who edits and publishes a newsletter asked me if I would write 500 words on what makes poetry distinctive," PennSound co-founder Al Filreis writes in a new Jacket2 commentary post. "I balked at such a task. But then decided to produce the statement." Particularly at the end of this week, when poetry was given a prominent and inspiring place in the midst of one of our nation's most significant political rituals (which, as one might expect, subsequently elicited a lot of petty griping) this sort of perspective — even if offered begrudgingly ("for or better or worse, here it is") — might be exactly what we all need.

"Whenever poetry becomes a topic movingly discussed by many people for whom it is not a daily — indeed, not even a monthly — thing," Filreis begins, "I realize once again what draws me to it ever and always. In a poem, how you say what you say is as important as, sometimes more important than, what you say. Is that a radical view? After all, content is central to communicating. But what about times when communication has broken down?" He then turns to the example of Allen Ginsberg's iconic poem "Howl," and specifically, "the riveting performance Ginsberg gave before a huge, engaged, at times ecstatic audience in Chicago in 1959" that you can hear here. "How Ginsberg says 'Howl' is as important as what he says, for sure. Words about crying out can themselves cry out." "So that is poetry," he affirms. "A form of saying. Not so much the things being said."

Later, he turns to the example of Erica Hunt, who'll be joining us shortly as the first of this year's Kelly Writers House Fellows: "Whenever I read — or, better, hear recited — [Hunt's] poem 'Reader we were meant to meet,' I think about how and why I cannot help but listen, cannot turn away from hearing, must attend. Because the poet is not just talking to me, but about me — about why I am necessary 'even in the failure to communicate.'" "Poems I admire require my involvement in the project of 'toppl[ing] distinctions' between who gets to talk and who is being asked to listen," Filreis tells us, "And that and only that kind of engagement — the convergence of writer and reader, of speech-maker and audience, of the talker and the silent, of the poet as subject and the reader normally supposed to be an object — will 'ease doubt.'"

Certainly, this feels pertinent to our present moment; however what we've offered here is just a small taste of Filreis' mini-essay, which merits reading in full. You can do so by clicking here.


Congratulations to San Francisco's New Poet Laureate, Tongo Eisen-Martin

Posted 1/21/2021

Today we're catching up with last week's news that Tongo Eisen-Martin has been named San Francisco's eighth poet laureate. Mayor London Breed offered these hopeful words while making the announcement: "I've had the pleasure of working with Tongo when he was teaching artist at the African American Arts and Culture complex, and I've seen his remarkable ability to spur creativity in youth and inspire them to find their own voice." Breed continued, "His work on racial justice and equity, along with his commitment to promoting social and cultural change, comes at such a critical time for our city and our country."

In his introductory comments, Eisen-Martin acknowledged San Francisco's long and thriving poetic history, while striving for even greater outreach and inclusivity: "As deep into the various communities of the city as our poets have already brought the craft, I want to push even further into places where poetry has not yet permeated. Give poetry even more of a mass personality; as mass participation has always been the staple of what could be described as San Francisco futurism."

We recently added an October 2019 reading by Eisen-Martin (along with Eric Dolan and Fego Navarro) from the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive's reading series, organized by Cole Solinger. Listen in to that set, along with readings by Trisha Low, Elaine Kahn, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, Ocean Escalanti, Vasiliki Kitsigianis Ioannou, and Jheyda McGarrell, by clicking here.




Want to read more? Visit the PennSound Daily archive.