PennSound Daily

Leonard Schwartz's highly-regarded radio program Cross Cultural Poetics is back with seven new episodes which aired between last November and the first weeks of 2015 on Evergreen State University's KAOS-FM. Here's a rundown of the shows:

Episode #308, "Alejandra Pizarnik," showcases Yvette Siegert's translations of the titular Argentine poet that appear in the recent Ugly Duckling Presse collection, Diana's Tree, while episode #309, "Essay Stanzas," features Thomas Meyer reading from his recent book of the same name, published by The Song Cave. In Episode #310, "Pier Paolo Pasolini," Stephen Sartarelli shares his translations of the legendary Italian director and author, available in a new edition from the University of Chicago Press, and the show brought 2014 to a close with Episode #311, "Book of Travels," in which Puerto Rican poet Lourdes Vazquez reads from her book Samandar: Book of Travels (Editions TSE=TSE).

Twenty-fifteen gets off to an ambitious start with Episode #312, "New York School Painters and Poets: Neon in Daylight," focusing on the exciting new book of the same name published by Rizzoli, with interviews with editor Allison Powers and author Jenni Quilter. Finally, we have two episodes (#313 and 314) dedicated to Jennifer Scappettone's new book, Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice, with the first program taking us right up to Marinetti, from whom she draws her title, and the second picking up with Pound and taking us right up to Venice as contemporary ecological imperative.

To start listening, click the title above to visit PennSound's Cross Cultural Poetics series page. [above: Leonard Schwartz in Beijing, photo by Yolanda Castro]

Thanks to a pair of recordings sent our way by Richard Swigg, we've just created a new author page for poet and translator Naomi Replansky, whose writing career — as celebrated in 2012's Collected Poems (Black Sparrow Press/Godine) — spans nearly eighty years.

The first of the two readings you'll find there was recorded for Lilith in 2009 and five of its seven selections — "In the Woods," "Jealous," "Gray Hairs," "Epitaph: 1945," and "I Met My Solitude" — were taken from The Dangerous World: New and Selected Poems, 1934-1994 (Another Chicago Press), while the remaining two ("Complaint of the Ignorant Wizard" and "Housing Storage") come from her 1952 debut, Ring Song (Scribners).

That's followed by a more comprehensive reading at New York's Poets House, recorded on July 10, 2012, whose sixteen tracks include early work from Ring Song and poems from The Dangerous World spanning the intervening years, as well as a trio of newer, unpublished pieces: "Death and Exile," "Catalogue," and "About Not Writing."

You can listen to both sets on PennSound's Naomi Replansky author page, and stay tuned for at least one more recording of the poet in the near future.

Here's a wonderful reading by Rosmarie Waldrop, taken from her recent visit to our own Kelly Writers House last fall. You'll find both audio and video recordings of this forty-minute reading, recorded on November 6, 2014, on our Rosmarie Waldrop author page.

As Waldrop explains in her brief introduction, her reading consists of three different sequences. The first and longest of these sequences — taken from her latest collection, Driven to Abstraction (New Directions, 2010) — was written in memory of John Cage, and takes its name from a quote by the composer: "Music Is an Oversimplification of the Situation We Are In." That's followed by a more recent sequence "Otherwise Smooth," before Waldrop concludes the reading with poems from "In Pieces," an homage to Robert Creeley.