PennSound Daily

Today, we're closing out an exciting week with new recordings by two of our favorite local-grown poets — the always-dynamic duo of CAConrad and Frank Sherlock — taken from the archives of A Voice Box. Recorded September 11, 2009 at Small Press Traffic, the two poets were invited to discuss "Class/Warfare," which each approaches through a combination of poetry and conversation in lengthy individual sets.

Conrad's set starts with a discussion of Philadelphia locales and his plans for performance art involving the Liberty Bell and dark chocolate before moving on to his poetry — first, a number of poems from (Soma)tic Midge (including, in honor of the day, "from the womb not the anus WHITE asbestos snowfall on 911"), followed by two newer "(Soma)tic Poetry Exercises," along with the poems composed by these methods. Next comes a series of poems from The Book of Frank, and he concludes the set with readings from his other new book, Advanced Elvis Course.

Sherlock begins with two selections from his latest collection, Over Here — "This Could Be a Day of Historical Interest" and "Spring Diet of Flowers at Night" — before moving on to his post-Katrina collaboration with Brett Evans, Ready-to-Eat Individual. Next comes "Wounds in an Imaginary Nature Show," which the poet dedicates to the Bay Area poets (in particular, David Buuck and Juliana Spahr) who came to his aid several years back when he was struck with a life-threatening case of meningitis. This leads to a discussion of torture both international and domestic, governmental and personal — "they try to spread democracy," Sherlock avers, "but all they spread's perversion" — which leads into the poem "XOXO." He continues with shorter poems from Over Here ("Ouch Ouch," "Baby Baby") and another excerpt from Ready-to-Eat Individual, before concluding with the title poem, "Over Here."

Speaking of Conrad, we recently posted another new recording from the poet: his October 2009 appearance on the Joe Milutis Poetry Show, which runs nearly two hours long. You can hear this, along with recordings from the Segue Series, and a PennSound-produced Studio 111 Session on his PennSound author page. Sherlock's Studio 111 Session, as well as readings at the Bowery Poetry Club, the Kelly Writers House and other locales, can be found on his PennSound author page, and stay tuned for The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems, a collaboration between the two poets and longtime friends, coming out this January from Factory School.

All of us at PennSound send the heartiest of congratulations to Keith Waldrop, who won the National Book Award in Poetry this week for his collection, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy.

The National Book Foundation's citation hails Waldrop, noting: "If transcendental immanence were possible, it would be because Keith Waldrop had invented it; he's the only one who could — and in Transcendental Studieshe has. These three linked series achieve a fusion arcing from the Romantic to the Postmodern that demonstrates language's capacity to go to extremes — and to haul daily lived experience right along with it: life imitates language, and when language becomes these poems, life itself gets more various, more volatile, more vital." You can read more about the award and Waldrop on The National Book Foundation's website, and if you haven't already checked out Waldrop's PennSound author page — including the new Kelly Writers House reading and Close Listening programs we mentioned earlier this week — then you'll definitely want to do so now.

Of course, Waldrop's win means that two excellent collections by writers near and dear to both PennSound and our many listeners — Rae Armantrout's Versed and Ann Lauterbach's Or to Begin Again — did not win. Nevertheless, we congratulate them on being part of a particularly exciting and broad-minded list of finalists, and reiterate our wish that all three could have won. While we're issuing fantasy proclaimations for prestigeous literary awards, could we get a Nobel Prize in Literature for John Ashbery as well?

This month at the Kelly Writers House got off to a great start with a visit from Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, which yielded a number of new PennSound recordings.

First and foremost, we have the evening reading on November 4th by the husband and wife pair, which starts (after introductions by Jessica Lowenthal and Sarah Dowling) with a set by Rosmarie, who starts off with the prose poem series, "Lawn of Excluded Middle," from her 2006 collection, Curves to the Apple before moving on to a new sequence of prose poems, "Time Ravel." After a hearty round of applause, she warns the audience, "you're actually not quite rid of me yet," and brings up Keith for a joint reading from their collaborative experiment in the renga form, "Light Travels." After another introduction by Dowling, we have Keith's set which is drawn exclusivly from his 2005 Omnidawn collection, The Real Subject: Queries and Conjectures of Jacob Delafon, with Sample Poems. We've just uploaded the audio from this reading, and should have the video up and running in short order.

The next day, the pair sat down with Charles Bernstein to record individual two-part Close Listening programs, including intimate conversations — in which they discuss their compositional practices, influences and poetic development — and reading segments. Rosmarie chose "Holderlin Hybrids," from her 2004 New Directions collection, Blindsight, for her set, while Keith took the opportunity to read a broad retrospective of his work, sharing selections from A Windmill Near Cavalry (1968), Windfall Losses (1977), The Garden of Effort (1975), The Ruins of Providence (1983), A Ceremony Somewhere Else (1984), Hegel's Family (1989), The Locality Principle (1995) and The House Seen From Nowhere (2002).

You can hear these Close Listening programs, segmented recordings from the Kelly Writers House readings and much, much more by visiting PennSound's individual author pages for Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop.