PennSound Daily

This last full month of programming at the Writers House has been a busy one, and no day was busier than Friday, April 11th, when we played host to "The Motion of Light", a day-long "Celebrat[ion] of Samuel R. Delaney's Performative Poetics." As part of the proceedings, our own Charles Bernstein joined Delaney for a conversation as part of his radio series, Close Listening, which is now available for your listening pleasure. Here's Bernstein's write-up of the program for Jacket2:

"Samuel R. Delany talks with Charles Bernstein about genres, sex, and dyslexia in this wide-ranging conversation with the polymathic author. Delany addresses the role of fantasy and the bounds of imagination in his works and rebuts assumptions about the nature of genre writing.

Samuel R. Delany, Chip Delany to his friends, is an American author, professor, and literary critic. His work includes fiction, memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society. After winning four Nebula awards and two Hugo awards over the course of his career, Delany was inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002. Since January 2001, he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. For a short time before that he was a core faculty member of the UB Poetics Program."

You can listen to this thirty-eight minute program on PennSound's Samuel R. Delaney author page, which is also home to a pair of readings from the SUNY-Buffalo, a 2007 Kelly Writers House celebration of Hart Crane, and a recording of Delaney's 1967 radio drama, The Star-Pit.

In anticipation of Rae Armantrout's April 28–29 visit as the last of this year's Kelly Writers House Fellows (following Buzz Bissinger and T.C. Boyle), we've segmented several vintage recordings from the poet.

First up, we have a Segue Series reading from its original home, the Ear Inn, recorded on April 14, 1979, when Armantrout read alongside Bernard Welt. Her twenty-four minute set, originally broken into two segments, is now available as thirty-three individual tracks, including the poems, "Natural History," "You Float," "Signs," "Generation," "Textron," "Vice," "Xenophobia," "Anti-Short Story," and "Special Theory of Relativity."

Next, there's Armantrout's half-hour reading from January 16, 1983 — she delivered a talk on "Silence" on the same day, though the location is unknown — which includes thirty poems, many overlapping with the aforementioned Segue recording. Some titles unique to this set: "Dark," "Postcards," "Admission," "Compound," "Secretly," "Precedence," "Round," "Atmospheric," and "The Music."

You'll find these recordings and a great many more on PennSound's Rae Armantrout author page. For more information on the poet's upcoming Fellows visit, click here.

For the last month or so, Amy Catanzano has been writing a fascinating series of Jacket2 commentaries on "Quantum Poetics" that are well worth your attention, and today we're highlighting something else new and wonderful from Catanzano — a group of new recordings from Lynn Book, made at Wake Forest University last November. Here's Catanzano's description of the events:

Transmedia artist Lynn Book performed Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate (1922) in the Charlotte and Philip Hanes Arts Gallery at Wake Forest University in North Carolina on November 5, 2013. This performance marks the rare occasion of a woman publicly performing Schwitters' sound poem, first performed by Book in 1984 at Chicago Filmmakers and more recently at Roulette in New York, though never recorded until now. She is an associate teaching professor and associate director at Wake Forest teaching interdisciplinary creativity and developing projects for the Program of Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship. She is also a graduate advisor for Transart Institute, an international program in contemporary arts practice. Her performance of the Ursonate was part of the Letterforming exhibition, curated by Hanes Art Gallery Director Paul Bright and Assistant Director Marcus Keely. Book's performance was first introduced by Paul Bright, who discusses dada and Schwitters' stake in hybridity as an artist. Amy Catanzano, who serves as poet-in-residence, an assistant professor, and director of the Creative Writing Program at Wake Forest, then discusses the Ursonate in relation to historical and contemporary movements in poetry and introduces Lynn Book to the audience. Lynn Book's Performance Art students participated in parts of the performance from the audience. The Letterforming exhibition and this performance was sponsored by Wake Forest's Humanities Institute, Department of English, Program in Interdisciplinary Studies, Writing Program, and Interdisciplinary Performance and the Liberal Arts Center.

In addition to Book's performance, we also have two recordings from Book and Catanzano's interview by David Ford for NPR News and Triad Arts on 88.5 WFDD-FM several days earlier: a formal twelve-minute segment that appeared on the radio and a post-interview conversation running twice as long. To listen to all of these fascinating recordings, click on the title above.