PennSound Daily

One of our latest author pages is for poet, editor, and former Queens Poet Laureate Paolo Javier. It brings together seven readings spanning the past eight years, the most recent of which, recorded this past June 1st, features Javier and Listening Center (David Mason) reading "My Aspiring Villain" from Court of the Dragon at Mason's Bed-Stuy Studio in Brooklyn.

Moving backwards from there, we have Javier's set as part of the 2013 Oh! Sandy: A Remembrance event hosted by Phong Bui at Brooklyn's Industry City, and a 2012 reading with Charles Bernstein at the Artist's Institute in New York on January 7, 2012. They're followed by a March 2011 set at Dia Art Foundation, New York:Chelsea alongside John Ashbery, and the 2008 MLA Offsite Reading at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Finally, our earliest recording comes from the November 2007 launch event for War & Peace Volume 3, hosted by Thom Donovan.

To listen to any and all of these recordings, click the title above to visit PennSound's Paolo Javier author page.

Last month we announced a new author page for Brooklyn-based poet and Wall Street Journal editor Michael Ruby, with a pair of recordings. We've recently expanded that collection with several new recordings.

First, from the Greetings Series at Brooklyn's Unnameable Books, we have a November 6, 2014 performance from Close Your Eyes (2013) featuring accompaniment from Jed Shahar on alto saxophone, mini-cassette recorder and delay pedal; Dan Veksler on samples, bells and whistles with delay, and percussion; and Jeffrey Joe Nelson on drum, stones, jangling keys and African thumb piano.

That's followed by a November 25, 2013 recording of Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep (2012), part of the trilogy Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices, which is segmented into seventy individual sections and followed by a four-and-a-half minute spoken note on the text. Finally, we have a compendium of nearly all of the poems from Compulsive Words (2012), recorded by David Kumin in Brooklyn between 2008–2011. The thirty-five poems in this set include "Dreams of Europe," "Fleeing Memories," "Stuck in Transition," "Dim Lessons," "Old Woldinorum," and "Dance of the Chance Automata," among others.

You can listen to these sets, along with the previously-announced 2014 recording of all of Ruby's latest, American Songbook (2013) and a 2004 set from Radio Poetique's Poetic Brooklyn on PennSound's Michael Ruby author page.

We've just released the milestone ninetieth episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, featuring second-time subject Gertrude Stein, whose "How She Bowed to Her Brother" is the work under consideration. This time around, host Al Filreis is joined by a panel including Julia Bloch, Sarah Dowling and Maxe Crandall.

Filreis begins his write-up on the PoemTalk blog by glossing upon the text's unique construction: "Stein here experimented with the period as a punctuation mark, using it sometimes as one would a comma and at other times when conventionally no punctuation at all would appear. So the reading (aloud — but also, we think, it's the case with silent reading) is typified by frequent disruptive pauses and stops, adding to the already strong effect of fragmentation." From there, he moves into the panelists' varied responses to the work, and you can read this, and more, on Jacket2.


PoemTalk is a co-production of PennSound, the Kelly Writers House, Jacket2 and the Poetry Foundation. If you're interested in more information on the series or want to hear our archives of previous episodes, please visit the PoemTalk blog, and don't forget that you can subscribe to the series through the iTunes music store.