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From "Down To Write You This Poem Sat" at the Oakville Gallery

Contemporary
  1. Charles Bernstein, "Phone Poem" (2011) (1:30): MP3
  2. Caroline Bergvall, "Love song: 'The Not Tale (funeral)' from Shorter Caucer Tales (2006): MP3
  3. Christian Bôk, excerpt from Eunoia, from Chapter "I" for Dick Higgins (2009) (1:38):  MP3
  4. Tonya Foster, Nocturne II (0:40) (2010) MP3
  5. Ted Greenwald, "The Pears are the Pears" (2005) (0:29): MP3
  6. Susan Howe, Thorow, III (3:13) (1998):  MP3
  7. Tan Lin, "¼ : 1 foot" (2005) (1:16): MP3
  8. Steve McCaffery, "Cappuccino" (1995) (2:35): MP3
  9. Tracie Morris, From "Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful" (2002) (3:40): MP3
  10. Julie Patton, "Scribbling thru the Times" (2016) (5:12): MP3
  11. Tom Raworth, "Errory" (c. 1975) (2:08): MP3
  12. Jerome Rothenberg, from "The First Horse Song of Frank Mitchell: 4-Voice Version" (c. 1975) (3:30): MP3
  13. Cecilia Vicuna, "When This Language Disappeared" (2009) (1:30): MP3
Historical
  1. Guillaume Apollinaire, "Le Pont Mirabeau" (1913) (1:14): MP3
  2. Amiri Baraka, "Black Dada Nihilismus" (1964) (4:02):  MP3
  3. Louise Bennett, "Colonization in Reverse" (1983) (1:09): MP3
  4. Sterling Brown, "Old Lem " (c. 1950s) (2:06):  MP3
  5. John Clare, "Vowelless Letter" (1849) performed by Charles Bernstein (2:54): MP3
  6. Velimir Khlebnikov, "Incantation by Laughter" (1910), tr. and performed by Bernstein (:28)  MP3
  7. Harry Partch, from Barstow (part 1), performed by Bernstein (1968) (1:11): MP3
  8. Leslie Scalapino, "Can’t’ is ‘Night’" (2007) (3:19): MP3
  9. Kurt Schwitters, "Ur Sonata: Largo" performed by Ernst Scwhitter (1922-1932) ( (3:12): MP3
  10. Gertrude Stein, If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1934-35) (3:42): MP3
  11. William Carlos Willliams, "The Defective Record" (1942) (0:28): MP3
  12. Hannah Weiner, from Clairvoyant Journal, performed by Weiner, Sharon Mattlin & Rochelle Kraut (2001) (6:12): MP3

Selected by Charles Bernstein (read more about his choices here)

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Kerouac's "Mexico City Blues" at the Knitting Factory, 1988 (dir. Bittencourt and Katz)

Posted 2/19/2021

Back in November, we announced the addition of Hanuman Presents!, Vivien Bittencourt and Vincent Katz's film celebrating the influential press co-founded by Raymond Foye and Francesco Clemente. Today we're back with another stunning film from the pair, documenting a group reading of Jack Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, which took place at the Knitting Factory on December 4, 1988.

The line-up for this event is nothing short of astounding, with appearances by Barbara Barg, Charles Bernstein, Lee Ann Brown, Maggie Dubris, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Hell, Bob Holman, Lita Hornick, Vicki Hudspith, Vincent Katz, Rochelle Kraut, Gerard Malanga, Judith Malina, Eileen Myles, Simon Pettet, Hanon Reznikov, Bob Rosenthal, Jerome Rothenberg, Tom Savage, Elio Schneeman, Michael Scholnick, Carl Solomon, Steven Taylor, David Trinidad, Lewis Warsh, Hal Willner, and Nina Zivancevic, while Mark Ettinger, Dennis Mitcheltree, Charlie Morrow, and Samir Safwat, among others, provided an improvised score for the proceedings. Interviews with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure round out the film, which was produced and directed by Bittencourt and Katz, and edited by Henry Hills and Oliver Katz. Running just over thirty minutes, this short film is both a fitting tribute to Kerouac's iconic voice and the generations of poets he inspired, as well as a remarkable time capsule for the downtown cultural scene in the late 1980s. You can start watching here. 



PoemTalk #157: on Kevin Killian's "Is It All Over My Face?"

Posted 2/17/2021

Today we released episode #157 in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which addresses Kevin Killian's poem "Is It All Over My Face?," taken from his 2008 book, Action Kylie, which "was a favorite poem to share with his audiences." For this show, host Al Filreis convened a virtual panel including (from left to right) Eric Sneathen, Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, and Trisha Low.

"Killian is adept at working several narrative registers — time, kind of story (high, low; gossipy, aesthetic), and tone — all at once," Filreis notes in his PoemTalk blog post announcing the new episode. "A good deal of the PoemTalkers' effort in this discussion is directed at describing those various times: 1992, the date of Arthur Russell's death; 1978, when Killian is studying in Long Island; Lou Harrison's death in 2003; June 2004, when the speaker nearly perishes himself; the present of the poem's writing, looking back on all this; the audience-implicated present of the poem's mesmerizing Queering Language performance in 2007." He continues, "There's a genius with which this New Narrative poem — along with the almost set-piece digressions and gossipy annotations and wisecracks offered extra-textually by the performer — manages these separate yet overlapping moments," before concluding: "Such genius enables the crucial convergence of themes: the gay sexual chain of witness back to Whitman; the flora of Long Island and generally the importance of place and documentation; the death of Arthur Russell from AIDS; Allen Ginsberg's doggerel and his overall 'obviosity'; pop music, beloved unironically; the speaker's (Killian's) 'own premature death.'"

You can learn more about this latest program, read Dalachinsky's poem (and watch him perform it), and listen to the podcast here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.


Two Launch Events for Ariel Resnikoff's "Unnatural Bird Migrator"

Posted 2/15/2021

We recently added not one, but two recordings of launch events for Ariel Resnikoff's debut poetry collection, Unnatural Bird Migrator, which took place over the last few months. 

Both video and audio recordings are available for the earlier of the two events, which took place over Zoom on December 20th of last year. For this event, hosted by Elæ — founder and creative director for The Operating System, the book's publisher — Resnikoff was joined by poets erica kaufman and Tyrone Williams, who offered up brief sets to start off the reading. 

The latter launch reading, hosted by Stephen Ross of Concordia University's Center for Expanded Poetics, was introduced and moderated by Charles Bernstein with an opening performance by Adeena Karasick. Audio from this ninety-minute event, which took place this January 12th, is available in MP3 format. You can listen to both recordings, along with a wide array of readings, podcasts, interviews, and more from 2015 to the present on PennSound's Ariel Resnikoff author page. You can learn more about Unnatural Bird Migrator, and read its back-cover blurbs (including appraisals from kaufman, Williams, Bernstein, and Karasick) by clicking here.



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