PennSound Daily

Today we released the eighty-fifth program in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which addresses James Schuyler's poem "February." For this program, host Al Filreis was joined by a panel of Bernadette Mayer, Julia Bloch, and Erica Kaufman.

Filreis' his write-up on the PoemTalk blog begins with some discussion of the poem and the recording's provenance — it's Schuyler's first public reading ever, a 1988 event at the Dia Art Foundation — then moves on to the panelists' initial impressions: "Bernadette is astonished by the emphatic use of color, feeling it almost to be a knowing rule or constraint, and she herself derived from admiration of this very poem several color-poem experiments of her own. Julia then catalogues the coloration of what is otherwise typically a drab time of year in New York. And Erica is delighted to assert that this is a 'New York poem.' 'Listening to him read,' Erica added, 'heightened my sense of one thing he does in his poems that I just love: the feeling you get that you're getting access to something that's pretty private. You're watching a private reading of his own space, but that space he's describing is also a space that's physical and somewhat public." You can read more about the program on Jacket2.


PoemTalk is a co-production of PennSound, the Kelly Writers House, Jacket2 and the Poetry Founddation. If you're interested in more information on the series or want to hear our archives of previous episodes, please visit the PoemTalk blog, and don't forget that you can subscribe to the series through the iTunes music store.

Earlier this month, Bill Berkson visited the Kelly Writers House for a reading, and also stopped by Charles Bernstein's undergraduate seminar, where he recorded a two-part Close Listening program.

Unlike the typical Close Listening setup, with one reading segment and one conversation segment, this program consists of just two conversation segments, each running approximately thirty-five minutes — the first featuring Berkson and Bernstein in conversation, while for the second Berkson fields questions from Bernstein's students. Bernstein recently wrote-up the new show in a Jacket2 commentary post, which includes photos from the event (including the photo at left taken by Thomas Devaney) and this description of the show: "Bill Berkson discusses unprincipled poetry, vulgar beauty, the poetics of surface, the emergence of the New American Poetry, the trap of being too serious, and the possibilities of the unexpected."

Berkson's reading from the same day will be posted in the near future, but we didn't want to sit on this wonderful program any longer. You can listen to it, along with recordings going back to the early 1970s on PennSound's Bill Berkson author page.

Jacket2 Reissues editor Danny Snelson is back with another amazing archival project. This time, it's Reality Studios, edited by Ken Edwards, which ran from 1978–1988. Here's how Snelson introduces the journal:

"Over the course of its ten-year span, Reality Studios introduced a vital new interface between the various permutations around the British Poetry Revival in the UK and emergent strands of Language writing in the US. Edited by Ken Edwards and published in London, the magazine followed Alembic (1973–78) and immediately preceded Edwards' Reality Street press, which continues publishing experimental poetry and prose to this day."

Full volumes are available for download or browsing, along with a ZIP file of the entire run. The index to each issue attempts to retain the formatting of the contents as printed in the magazine, including original pagination. Each PDF is fully searchable and bookmarked for easy navigation to individual pieces within the magazine.