PennSound Daily

Today we're highlighting yet another new author page featuring another fantastic poet — this time, it's Stacy Szymaszek, author of the just-released collection, Hyperglossia, and Artistic Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery. A little less than a month ago, we highlighted Szymaszek's recent Segue Series reading with Patrick Durgin, and since then we've worked with the poet to gather together from the PennSound archives and elsewhere to create a broad retrospective of Szymaszek's work.

Moving backwards from that May 30th reading, we have Szymaszek's contribution to "The Shape of Discourse: George Oppen Centennial Symposium," organized by Poets House, then no less than four recordings dating from 2007. First, we have her appearance on Cross-Cultural Poetics' program on Litmus Press, during which she read from Emptied of All Ships, followed by short performances as part of the kari edwards Memorial Reading at Zinc Bar and the "Queering Language" Launch Reading at Philadelphia's Robin's Books, as well as a reading as part of the Just Buffalo Small Press Reading Series at Rust Belt Books.

Next, there's a January 15, 2006 Segue Series Reading (also at the Bowery Poetry Club), featuring the poems "Shift at Oars," "Radio Silence," "Emptied of All Ships" and a lengthy excerpt from "Hyperglossia," and finally, our earliest reading, dating from April 2003 as part of the Discrete Series in Chicago, features selections from Pasolini Poems, as well as "A Walk With a Cup of Jasmine Tea" and "Roman Evening," before concluding with "Some Mariners."

We at PennSound have a tremendous appreciation for Stacy Szymaszek's work — both as a poet and at the Poetry Project — and so are very happy to be able to share this modest survey of her work with our listeners and her fans throughout the world. From her earliest chapbooks through to Hyperglossia, and looking forward to a new project inspired by New York City's modern potter's field, Hart's Island, you'll be sure to find something you'll love on PennSound's Stacy Szymaszek author page.

As the summer slowly unfolds, our astounding army of interns — Rebekah Caton, Rebekah Larsen and Anna Zalokostas — continue to process tapes at an impressive clip, resulting in a slew of new recordings and new author pages, including our new Tina Darragh page, which we launched today.

Bringing together thirty years' worth of recordings, our Darragh page brings together a number of recordings that were already available on PennSound, along with a few new additions. We begin with a trio of Segue Series readings, including sets at the Bowery Poetry Club in 2009, 2007 along with a vintage reading at the Ear Inn in 1987. There's also a 2001 recording from the Lytle Shaw-curated Line Reading Series at New York City's Drawing Center, and a 1998 appearance on the fourth episode of PhillyTalks alongside Jena Osman, which is available as fourteen individual files (alongside a PDF transcription of the program). Finally, we've added a link to Charles Bernstein's miniature video portrait of Darragh, shot in 2006.

To this already-ample body of work, we've added two new additions. First, there's Darragh's 1994 reading at SUNY Buffalo as part of the Wednesdays @ 4Plus series, which includes the poems, "Scale Sliding," "A Pefect One of Those" and "The Adverb Fan," all three of which, in varying ways, "juxtapos[e] narrative explorations with dictionary transcriptions." We've also added the 1979 Widemouth Tapes release, Xa, which also features Doug Lang, and have also created a Doug Lang author page to house his half of that recording and a 1978 Segue Series Reading at the Ear Inn. Xa contains a number of poems which were eventually published in the 1981 Sun and Moon collection, on the corner   to   off the corner, which interested listeners can read in its entirety at Eclipse.

We're proud to be able to present a career-spanning selection of recordings from this influential poet, and encourage you to click on the title above to start exploring.

We're closing out the week with a just-completed author page for poet Laura Elrick, who's currently at Naropa University as part of the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Over the years, we've accumulated a number of recordings featuring Elrick, and are glad to have finally brought them together in one place, together with a number of additional recordings provided by the poet.

Most recently, we have "Stalk," a compelling 22-minute video/poem commissioned for the Positions Colloquium at Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing last August, which traces the motions of an anonymous figure dressed in the manner of a Guantanamo Bay detainee as it filters through daytime street traffic in Manhattan, accompanied by excerpts from Department of Defense interrogation logs.

This is followed by an appearance on Ceptuetics Radio in April of the same year, in which she shares five multivocal audio pieces distilled from the text of her 2005 collection, Fantasies in Permeable Structures and chats with host Kareem Estefan about "constraint, chronologies and positioning the subject in permeable structures." Elrick also reads from that volume as part of her 2004 appearance on tangentradio, hosted by Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff, while the poet's 2005 appearance on Cross-Cultural Poetics, hosted by Leonard Schwartz, showcases readings from from her earlier collection, Skincerity.

Finally, our archive is rounded out by a pair of pieces taken from the second issue of the online journal, textsound — "Zoon" and "Spool" — and Elrick's contribution to the Segue Series' 2006 Eco Panel at the Bowery Poetry Club, which also featured Ed Roberson, Jill Magi and Karen Anderson. We've also included a link to video of a wonderful performance of Hannah Weiner's "Romeo and Juliet" by Elrick, Kaplan Harris and Rodrigo Toscano, staged as part of the 2007 celebration of Hannah Weiner's Open House, edited by Patrick Durgin. We're happy to have formally added Elrick to our roster of poets, and look forward to adding new material from her in the future.