PennSound Daily

Last fall, we were tremendously proud to be able to partner with the fine folks at the St. Mark's Poetry Project to make thirty-one episodes of the groundbreaking television program Public Access Poetry available to audiences worldwide (you can read the original PennSound Daily announcement from September 30th here). Today, we're just as proud to announce the launch of a second set of videos, which now completes the restoration project begun in 2009. To refresh your memory, here's a brief description and history of the program:

Even if you were watching the innovation called cable TV in 1977 and 1978, what are the chances that you saw a show titled Public Access Poetry? Produced by Poetry Project stalwarts Greg Masters, Gary Lenhart, David Herz, Didi Susan Dubelyew, Daniel Krakauer, Bob Rosenthal and Rochelle Kraut, PAP programs featured half-hour readings by a wide range of poets and performers who could roughly be categorized as "downtown," more often than not linked in one way or another with the Poetry Project. The cable TV series lasted two seasons (one live, the other recorded for later airing) and was produced with little-to-no broadcasting experience by the PAP personnel.

This new batch of programs includes performances from a number of PennSound authors, including Michael Lally, Eileen Myles, Charles Bernstein, Hannah Weiner, Tony Towle, Jim Brodey, Bob Holman, Alice Notley and Simon Pettet, among others, and while those poets are already represented to varying degrees within our archives, the real treat here is getting to put a face (as well as a voice) to a name for some important downtown poets of the era, who are making their first appearance through PAP: Tom Savage, Bob Rosenthal, Greg Masters, Rochelle Kraut, Bob Heman, Barbara Barg, Michael Scholnick and Gary Lenhart to name a few.

You can watch the first set of PAP videos here, and you'll find the new additions discussed above here. We'll be back on Wedneday with news of even more exciting videos added to our archives.

Wednesday morning got off to an energetic start over at Jacket2, with the launch of a fascinating new feature by Charles Bernstein entitled "Gertrude Stein's War Years: Setting the Record Straight."

"Over the past several years," Bernstein begins, "Gertrude Stein's war time record has been subjected to a stream of misinterpretations, distortions, and disinformation in the mainstream press. Most of these articles are written by authors who are hostile to Stein's literary works and who admit to their inability (and unwillingness) to read her work, including the works by Stein that directly address the issue at hand." In an effort to address this problem, Bernstein has assembled a dossier containing "key documents ... that refute the sensational tabloid accounts of Stein's activities, views, and affiliations during the war years, when she and Alice B. Toklas lived in Bilignin, France (near Lyon and Geneva)." "Stein's connection to the Vichy government is complex," he concludes, "and these complexities are fully explored in the essays and articles linked here."

Inside, you'll find a wide array of materials that do exactly that, starting with Edward Burns' "Gertrude Stein: A Complex Itinerary, 1940-1944, originally a talk delivered at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art last month in conjunction with the exhibit, "The Steins Collect." From Burns and Ulla E. Dydo (editor of PennSound's Gertrude Stein author page), we have both a 1987 letter to The Nation, written in response to Natalie Robin's article, "The Defiling of Writers," and an appendix from their co-edited The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder that details Stein's experience in Europe between September 1942 and September 1944. Joan Retallack contributes the "Stein and History" section from her introduction to the "Poets for the Millennium" edition, Gertrude Stein: Selections, along with a new commentary. Bernstein debunks Steinian disinformation while invoking Spike Jones, Donald Duck and the Marx Brothers in "Gertrude Stein Taunts Hitler in 1934 and 1945,", and finally, Marjorie Perloff offers a pointed response to Alan Dershowitz's recent Huffington Post article on Stein.

In addition to these substantive texts, Bernstein has also gathered links to additional writings on the controversy from Douglas Messerli and Renate Stendhal, along with an authoritative list of a dozen articles, both old and new, denouncing Stein.

Here's a great way to start the week off — a handful of newly added recordings from the Segue Series, recorded at the Bowery Poetry Club this spring.

First up, from March 24th, we have sets from Rodney Koneke and John Godfrey. They were followed on March 31st by the dynamic pairing of Laura Elrick and Carla Harryman.

Jumping ahead to April 7th we have sets from Katie Degentesh and Brian Kim Stefans, and we've also added audio from a non-Segue event at the BPC featuring Anne Tardos and Norman Fischer, which was recorded on April 11th. Finally, from this past Saturday, May 5th, we have two fantastic readings from Tao Lin and Mathew Timmons.

You can listen to all of these recordings and many more on PennSound's Segue Series at the Bowery Poetry Club homepage, and stay tuned as we'll continue to add recordings from this spring's Segue events in the near future. As always, we're grateful to the series organizers as well as the BPC's tech staff for making it possible for us to share these wonderful recordings with our listeners.