PennSound Daily

Today brings the sad news that Larry Fagin — a New York School mainstay and editor of Adventures in Poetry and Sal Mimeo — passed away after a long battle with cancer at the age of 79 on May 27th.

Kyle Schlesinger penned a lovely tribute on the Cuneiform Press website, where he details the start of their two-decade friendship: "Larry was the first real poet I ever met. I must have been 19 or so. It was a memorable spring day on the Lower East Side, kids zipping around Tompkins Square Park, birds, and the smell of soft earth was in the air. My friend Luisa Giugliano had hired Larry as a private tutor, as so many poets of our generation had. Larry taught out of his living room, providing long lists of paintings to look at, books to read, movies to watch. We met outside his apartment on East 12th Street between First and Avenue A. He looked so cool with his elbow propped on the building, holding his breezy hair in his hand, and spoke enthusiastically about something called the 'internet' where you could buy any record you wanted."

He continues, describing a recording that you can hear on Fagin's PennSound author page: "We read together just once, at the Bowery Poetry Club just before Christmas in 2008. Larry thought it would be fun to do the shortest reading ever, so we agreed to each keep our sets to ten minutes or less. The audience was a little bewildered, but it was a sweet and modestly refreshing occasion in its own way." In addition to that Segue Series reading, you'll also find an undated recording from the St. Mark's Poetry Project and a 1974 reading in Bolinas, plus a link to video from a 2014 event from Dia's Readings in Contemporary Poetry series.

Those looking to learn more about him might start with Chadwick Moore's 2011 New York Times profile. We send our condolences to Fagin's friends, family, colleagues, and students.

One of our latest series pages is for "Poetry in Conversation," hosted at the Centre for Stories in Northbridge, Western Australia, the aim of which is "to tell good stories in the hope of strengthening connections between people and encouraging a more inclusive and informed community."

The series' host is Robert Wood, who's also curated some terrific Oceania-centric critical work for Jacket2. We're able to present five events in total that took place between February and May of this year, which includes four solo conversations with Sampurna Chattarji, Siobhan Hodge, Jeremy Balius, and James Quinton, and a Westerly Reading event showcasing the work of Amy Hilhorst, Chris Arnold, and Wood himself.

For those interested in more Australian PennSound content, don't forget to check out our Australian Poets audio anthology (curated by Pam Brown in conjunction with the Jacket2 feature, "Fifty-One Contemporary Poets from Australia") and our series page for the School of Life: Melbourne reading series (also curated by Wood).

Earlier this spring a trio of formidable Canadian poets — Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, and Colin Browne — set out on a tour of the US. Their Philadelphia stop included a reading at the Penn Book Center on March 15th, which we are very happy to make available in both audio and video format.

In addition to that recording, Marlatt and Browne — both being somewhat less represented in the PennSound archives than Wah — were invited to stop by our Wexler Studio at the Kelly Writers House to record brief sets of their work, and when the trio visited New York a week earlier, PennSound co-director Charles Bernstein also invited the pair to record episodes for his long-running radio series Close Listening (n.b. Wah recorded a fantastic set of programs for the series in 2010).

These three sets of recordings form the basis for new author pages for both Marlatt and Colin Browne, which you can visit by clicking on each linked name. Wah's contrbutions can be found on his PennSound author page.