PennSound Daily

In the early 60's the poet Lee Harwood heard for the first time, in a London cafe, a poem by Tristan Tzara. An "immediate convert" to Dada, Lee tracked down a few of Tzara's then difficult to find poems and translated them; he eventually also tracked down Tzara himself and met him in Paris. "Chanson Tzara" — with text, translation, and narration by Harwood, and sound and realization by Alexander Baker — is a sound work created around that encounter.

This twenty-seven minute audio composition is an ambitious and fully-dimensional tribute to both Tzara and the chaotic spirit of Dada made contemporary, starting with a hectic sound collage of found samples, ring modulated radio noise, music, and text-to-speech voice generation, which eventually gives way to a touching and elegiac voiceover by Harwood that weaves together memories, translations, and the young poet's conversation with Tzara.

You can listen to this newly-added recording on PennSound's Lee Harwood author page, which is also home to his contribution to the Rockdrill series, The Chart Table, Lee Harwood: Poems 1965–2002, and a 2008 reading as part of the Shearsman Reading Series at Swedenborg Hall in London.

This week saw the launch of a new "First Readings" commentary series at Jacket2, curated by (from left to right) Craig Dworkin, Brian Reed, and Al Filreis.

The series organizers frame their investigation as follows: "What do you do when you first read a new or unfamiliar poem? What are the processes and procedures that precede a settled 'take' or a considered evaluation or an elaborated critical argument? To be frank, we're often confounded when faced with a new work, and we doubt we're alone. What are other readers doing when they open the book? In a short response (500 to 1,000 words), we ask colleagues to describe in detail how they read a poem and what they read for. We're interested in learning about the thought processes and activities on the very first encounter — including the ones that don't work out or seem in any way to pay off: the false leads and blind alleys. We're quite familiar with final products — the review or the essay — but we hope here in this series to be flies on the wall during initial readings."

The series begins with five considerations of Rae Armantrout's poem, "Spin," beginning with Jennifer Ashton's. Responses by Dee Morris, Stephen Burt, and Katie Price will be added shortly.

This weekend brought the sad news that Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles' unofficial poet laureate and a major force in that city's aesthetic scene, had passed away after a long illness at the age of 67.

PennSound's Wanda Coleman author page, while modest, is nonetheless home to a body of recordings that demonstrates the breadth of her talents. The most recent is a fifteen-minute set from a 2008 benefit for poet Will Alexander in Los Angeles, and we also have a few poetic selections from albums released by Coleman: Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like the Rivers (Rhino, 2000) and Jazzspeak: A World Collection (New Alliance Records, 1991). Finally, thanks to David Buuck, we have recordings from the conference Expanding the Repertoire: Continuity and Change in African-American Writing, held at Small Press Traffic in April 2000.