PennSound Daily

One of the newest additions to the PennSound archives is a special compilation of Burmese poets curated by our own Charles Bernstein. While more recordings will be added in time, the page presently features two recordings of poet Zeyar Lynn — a new Close Listening program recorded on May 6th and a set of three poems ("My History Is Not Mine," "Slightly Lopsided but a More Accurate Portrait," and "Big Sister Have You Been to Laiza") recorded the day before — along with a new Close Listening program with Khin Aung Aye and James Byrne, also recorded on May 6th.

Bernstein recently posted a Jacket2 commentary on these recordings as well as the anthology, Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets, edited by ko ko thett and James Byrne, which was just released by North Illinois University Press. "The presiding spirit of the anthology," Bernstein writes, " is Zeyar Lynn, who spoke at a May 5 PEN event and the next day on Close Listening with great lucidity about the situation of contemporary Burmese poetry. As I heard Zeyar Lynn speak I felt an uncannily immediate engagement with his views; we are in the same conversation. Of course, this is partly because Zeyar Lynn is so conversant with the expanded field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. But this itself is possible because we share a common set of readings and literary traditions, as well as a very divergent set."

Yesterday saw the sixty-sixth episode of PoemTalk Podcast, which shifts gears after several recent episodes focusing on contemporary poets with a discussion of William Butler Yeats' beloved early poem, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." For this program, host Al Filreis is joined by a panel that includes Taije Silverman, Max McKenna, and John Timpane.

Filreis starts off his write-up of the episode on the PoemTalk blog with a little context for the poem: "Yeats's father had read Walden aloud to him; Thoreau's pastoral simplification had been alluring for him as a teen, when he fantasized living on an uninhabited island in Lough Gill (near Sligo) — Innisfree. In the poem, the speaker, now longing for an orginary Ireland 'while I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey' of the city (presumably London), expresses his desire to build a small cabin on the isle and, like Thoreau, to plant rows of beans and 'have some peace there.' The romantic torque generated by such Irish/English splitting produces at the same time a brilliant but makeshift, extra-cultural — one might almost say, dramatically dislocated — prosody. The striking sound made by this poem is a topic that draws special attention from our three talkers." You can read the rest of his introduction on Jacket2.


PoemTalk is a co-production of PennSound, the Kelly Writers House, Jacket2 and the Poetry Foundation. 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.

Fans of poet John Yau will be excited to check out this newly-added recording of the poet reading at George Mason University on September 29, 2006.

Yau's set draws heavily from his most-recently published book at the time — the 2005 Saturnaila Books collaboration with Thomas Nozkowski, Ing Grish — starting with some general comments on the collection before moving on to the poems "Even Now," "Diaspora," and the title poem. Other titles included in the reading are "Andalusia," "Conversation After Midnight," "In the Kingdom of Poetry," and "Revised Guide to the Ruins of a New City."

This reading is just one of many that you'll find on John Yau's PennSound author page from a 1977 appearance on Public Access Poetry to a 2010 Segue Series appearance at the Bowery Poetry Club. Click the title above to start exploring.