PennSound Daily

John Ashbery's "The Skaters": digital edition and archive

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 19:36:44 EDT

Today at Jacket2, Charles Bernstein shared some very exciting news about a newly-launched project using PennSound audio. Here's the complete announcement:

It is my great pleasure to announce Robin Seguy's genetic edition of John Ashbery's great poem "The Skaters." This is the first in the newly created Text/works series, a digital library that intends to make freely accessible critical editions and analytic tools for an array of 19th to 21st century French and American poetry collections.

We are very grateful to John and David Kermani for making the typescripts, as well as the text of the poem, available.

In its current state, this edition offers:

a plain text version of the poem, with optional display of the lines and stanza numbers;

the transcription of two typescript drafts of the poem, as well as 20 poems and fragments — 18 of which are unpublished — pertaining to the first typescript's dossier. The genetic dossier is displayed, with all variants, in four formats: HTML and XML-TEI, along high-resolution image files and searchable PDFs of the original pages;

three annotated versions of the text: one showing "referential" data such as names, places, time markers, etc., the second the use of personal pronouns, and the third thematic data such as sounds, colors and weather notations throughout the text;

a full searchable index, with links to the poem lines;

a few elements of quantitative analysis, such as number of occurrences and frequencies for lexical items, etc.

Vincent Katz: New PennSound Author Page

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 15:53:54 EDT

We'd like to wish a very happy birthday to Vincent Katz, the poet, translator, art critic, Vanitas editor, and curator, who also happens to be the subject our PennSound's newest author page.

This new page brings together a handful of recordings that already existed on the site with some well-chosen selections from Katz's own archives, and starts all the way back in 1978 with his appearance on Public Access Poetry alongside Paul Schneeman. That's followed by the first of three readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in 1986 (the others are from 1992 and 2005), a 1987 Boston University reading from New York Hello! (Katz's collaboration with Rudy Burckhardt published in 1990), and a 2003 reading at Brown University. Later readings include a 2004 set at the Bruno Maria Gallery, a 2005 appearance at the Bowery Poetry Club and a 2011 reading with Anna Moschovakis at the Gloucester Writers Center. Finally, the page is rounded out video footage of a 2011 Paris symposium on "Collaboration & the Artist's Book," which also featured Bill Berkson, Shirley Jaffé, Raphael Rubinstein, Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein. Each of the aforementioned audio recordings has been segmented, which means that you have nearly 200 individual tracks for your listening pleasure. To start exploring this expansive archive, click the title above.

PoemTalk 67: on Catherine Wagner's "This Is a Fucking Poem"

Tue, 28 May 2013 02:55:42 EDT

Today we've launched the sixty-seventh episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which addresses Catherine Wagner's "This Is a Fucking Poem," from My New Job (Fence Books, 2011) and the chapbook Hole in the Ground (Slack Buddha Press, 2008). Joining host Al Filreis for this discussion is a stellar group of panelists that includes Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Laura Elrick and Rae Armantrout.

Filreis starts off his write-up of the episode on the PoemTalk blog by providing some context for the poem under discussion: "The Hole in the Ground poems form a sequence, even beginning with a poem setting out 'The Argument.' On their site, the Slack Buddha folks say mildly (but, to be sure, accurately) that these poems 'explore[...] the mores of interpersonal relationships.' The PoemTalkers say much the same thing of 'This Is a Fucking Poem' in particular, but perhaps, in the spirit of our poem, more bluntly. The fucking poem, which includes child sexualization through insectization and (self-)cannibalism or body mortification and brutal socialization ('Send her to school // ... her eyes will retract inside // ... nobody will hurtcha'), asks us right away not to 'expect too much' and then nevertheless 'go[es] into the / fucking human tunnel' headlong." 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.

PennSound Congratulates Man Booker Prize Winner Lydia Davis

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:07:24 EDT

This afternoon saw the announcements of the annual Man Booker Prize, one of Brittain's most prestigious literary awards, and we were very happy to see Lydia Davis had won this year's International Prize.

Those looking for an audio introduction to Davis' work will do well to visit her PennSound author page, which features a wide variety of readings, talks and interviews going all the way back to 1983. Those recordings include two appearances on Cross Cultural Poetics from 2006 and 2008, a 2003 reading as part of the Belladonna* series, appearances at our own Kelly Writers House from 2003 and 1999, a 1995 reading and interview (with Charles Bernstein) from SUNY-Buffalo and Segue Series reading at the Ear Inn from 1987, 1984 and 1983. You'll also find a 2009 PoemTalk Podcast on Davis' "A Position at the University," featuring David Grazian, Jessica Lowenthal and Adrian Khactu.

Paul Hoover: New Author Page

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:42:14 EDT

Our latest author page is for poet and editor Paul Hoover.

This new page is anchored by three appearances on Leonard Schwartz's Cross Cultural Poetics program. First, from episode #50, "What Dialogue Does," Hoover reads from his then-latest collection, Rehearsal in Black. Next, from episode #171 "Forms of Address II," he reads from his essay collection, Fables of Responsibility, and finally on episode #223 "Two From San Francisco," Hoover reads from and discusses his co-translation from the Vietnamese Beyond The Court Gate: Selected Poems of Nguyen Trei.

These are followed by a pair of Segue Series readings, recorded at the Ear Inn and Double Happiness (the former in January 1991, the latter in December 1999), and the page is closed out with Hoover's mini-set during the 2008 MLA Offsite Reading in San Francisco.

While this new author page is a good start at encapsulating Hoover's long career, we're excited that Hoover will be sending along some additional recordings from his collection, which we'll be adding in the near future.

New on PennSound: Burmese Poetry

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:35:47 EDT

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."

PoemTalk 66: on William Butler Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:37:29 EDT

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.

John Yau: George Mason University, 2006

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:55:58 EDT

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.

Cross Cultural Poetics: Five New Episodes

Tue, 07 May 2013 22:48:09 EDT

We're always excited when Leonard Schwartz sends us new episodes of Cross Cultural Poetics and today we've got five new programs to add to the series archives.

First, in episode #270, Catherine Wagner discusses her new City Lights collection, Nervous Device, while Mikhail Epstein discusses his work of theory and pedagogy The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (Bloomsbury). That's followed by episode #271, where Robert Kelly talks about his big new/old poem 'The Loom' and Raul Zurita reads from his Dreams for Kurosawa (while Schwartz reads Anna Deeny's translations). Program #272, "The North African Anthology," is an hour-long discussion with Pierre Joris, editor of the newly-released The University of California Book of North African Literature.

Those three episodes are followed by two that find Schwartz traveling away from his usual base of operations at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA to our own Kelly Writers House. The first program takes two looks at international poetry in translation with guests Isabel Cadenas Canon and Ed Foster and for the second, Schwartz was joined by Lila Zemborain and Anna Moschovakis — shown above with Schwartz arriving at Philadelphia's 30th St. train station — reading new work and discussing their individual poetics.

To listen to these newest episodes, click the title above and don't forget to scan through seven years' worth of programs in the Cross Cultural Poetics archives.

PennSound Podcasts: A Belladonna* Anthology

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:39:16 EDT

We wanted to close out the week by highlighting another recent addition to the PennSound Podcast series. Here's Al Filreis' write-up of the program from Jacket2's new podcasts page:

From the excitingly varied PennSound page hosting recordings from the Belladonna* reading series from 1999 to the present, PennSound podcasts now presents, for its 28th episode, an anthology of seven Belladonna* performances. The seven are: Erica Kaufman, "A Conventional Hero" and "PS 54"; Rae Armantrout, "Seconds"; Lydia Davis, "City People"; Rachel Levitsky, "In the Wee Hours"; Sharon Mesner, "Gait Signatures"; Tim Trace Peterson, "Bricky"; Jennifer Moxley, "Taking My Own Advice After Skylar."

A reading series and independent press that promotes the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, and dangerous with language, Belladonna* was founded as a reading and salon series by Rachel Levitsky at Bluestocking's Women's Bookstore on New York City's Lower East Side in 1999. In 2000, in collaboration with Boog Literature, Belladonna* began to publish commemorative "chaplets" of the readers' work. Erica Kaufman joined Levitsky as co-curator/editor in 2002. Then in 2005, the series moved its events to the downtown performance venue, Dixon Place.

This episode of PennSound podcasts is introduced by Amaris Cuchanski, edited by Nick De Fina, and produced by Al Filreis.

New PennSound Podcast Honoring Anselm Hollo

Wed, 01 May 2013 01:31:35 EDT

Anselm Hollo, the widely admired Finnish poet and translator, died on January 29, 2013. He lived in the United States from 1967 until his death. Hollo translated poetry and belles-lettres from Finnish, German, Swedish and French into English. He was one of the early translators of Allen Ginsberg into German and Finnish. Hollo taught creative writing in eighteen different institutions, among them SUNY Buffalo, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the University of Colorado at Boulder; and starting in 1985, he taught in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. PennSound's Hollo author page includes three segmented recordings of full readings dated 1991, 1999, and 2001. For the 30th episode of the PennSound podcasts series, Nick DeFina and Amaris Cuchanski have put together an anthology of Hollo recordings.

Robert Creeley at Zukofsky Centennial Conference, 2004

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:31:49 EDT

Fans of both Louis Zukofsky and Robert Creeley will be excited by this recent addition to the PennSound archives. Creeley's twenty-minute talk at the Louis Zukofsky Centennial Conference — held at Columbia University and Barnard College on September 17-19, 2004 — has been broken down into eight thematic segments, including discussions of early advocates of Zukofsky work, Creeley's experiences visiting the Zukofsky family in Brooklyn, the poet's work as "an accomplished prosodist," and Creeley's work publishing and promoting Zukofsky's poetry after his death.

Click the title above to listen to these segmented tracks on our Robert Creeley author page. You can also visit our homepage for the Louis Zukofsky Centennial Conference to view other talks from the event by Norman Finkelstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Bob Perelman, Alan Golding, and Mark Scroggins, among others.

Norman Finkelstein: Poets Meeting at Corpus Christi College, 2013

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:32:26 EDT

Our latest addition to the site finds poet Norman Finkelstein traveling to the UK, at the invitation of Richard Berengarten, to appear at the Poets Meeting at Corpus Christi College.

Recorded on February 26, 2013, the fifty-minute recording features students singing, a lavish introduction by Berengarten and a lengthy Q&A session at its close. Finkelstein reads four poems: "Scribe," "Forevertron," "Advertising" and "Tour."

You can listen to this recording, as well as a number of other readings, talks and interviews spanning the past decade on PennSound's Norman Finkelstein author page. Click the title above to start exploring.

Pattie McCarthy and Jena Osman: Whenever We Feel Like It, 2013

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 20:59:46 EDT

The amazing Whenever We Feel Like It series — organized by Michelle Taransky and Emily Pettit at our own Kelly Writers House and other venues throughout Philadelphia — is back with a newly-added reading from this past winter.

A potent duo of Philadelphian poets, Pattie McCarthy and Jena Osman were the featured readers for the series' latest event, which took place on January 23, 2013. The evening's readers were introduced by Taransky, who stressed that both women serve as "teachers, mothers and friends" to many members of the city's poetry community.

You can listen to this reading and many others spanning the past four years on PennSound's Whenever We Feel Like It series page.

John Tranter in Philadelphia, 2013

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 18:19:47 EDT

Poet and Jacket Magazine founder John Tranter was in Philadelphia recently and paid a busy visit to the Kelly Writers House, as detailed by Al Filreis in a recent PennSound Podcast post on Jacket2: "[Tranter] participated in the recording of an episode of PoemTalk (about a poem by Ray DiPalma — to be released later), and then took time to record a conversation with Al Filreis about the founding of Jacket and various related topics. This recording is episode #31 in the PennSound podcast series. During the discussion Filreis asked Tranter to read a few recent poems; three poems can be heard in the whole recording, but have also been segmented." You can listen to the complete conversation and the individual poem tracks in Jacket2's newly-revamped Podcasts section by clicking the title above.

PoemTalk 65: Lisa Robertson's 'The Weather'

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 20:39:31 EDT

Today we launched the latest PoemTalk Podcast — number sixty-five in the series — which focuses on the "Monday" section of Lisa Robertson's The Weather. This time around, host Al Filreis is joined by a stellar panel that includes Michelle Taransky, Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Kristen Gallagher.

Filreis begins his write-up of the episode on the PoemTalk blog by discussing the origins of The Weather — "The book-length project, organized as such by days of a/the/every week, was in part stimulated by the poet-researcher's experience during a six-month Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellowship at Cambridge University: as a non-local, she found herself listening to late-night weather and shipping reports on the British radio, discerning there and elsewhere a specifically localized language that seemed abstract and was yet radically precise" — before moving on to discuss "the way in which a poetics can derive from meteorology and its importance in contemporary culture and history" as well as the way in which "the language of the poem brings together pastoral poetry, meteorological prose, Anglo-centric subjectivity, the Wordsworthian problem of sincerity, and the cloudy concept of the universal." 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.

Bill Berkson: New Session Recorded at UPenn, 2013

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:55:35 EDT

Last week the legendary Bill Berkson was in town and stopped by the UPenn campus for a brief recording session for PennSound. Steve McLaughlin (shown at left with Berkson) served as engineer for the set, which fits twenty poems into twenty-six minutes. Titles recorded include "Without Penalty," "A Lady at Her Writing Table," "Landscape with Calm," "For the Heart of the Second Floor," "Poetry and Sleep," "Last Lines with George," and "Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea," with Berkson kindly providing introductions to each of the poems.

You can hear the complete set, and many more recordings new and old, on our Bill Berkson author page. Click the title above to start listening.

Aaron Shurin: New Author Page

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 19:23:45 EDT

Another day and another new PennSound author page, this time for Aaron Shurin, bringing together a trio of vintage recordings of the San Francisco poet.

The most recent recording is Shurin's contribution to a November 1990 tribute reading to Robert Duncan, which comes to us courtesy of A.L. Nielsen's Incognito Lounge. This event also included sets by Jim Powell, Leslie Scalapino, David Bromige, Robert Glück and Nielsen. You'll also find a pair of Segue readings from the series' first home, the Ear Inn: one in June 1989, the other in April 1984.

M.C. Richards: New Author Page

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:48:21 EDT

We're starting this week with a very exciting new addition to the PennSound archives: a new author page for the late M.C. Richards. A poet, potter and translator, Richards' astounding life included a stint teaching at the fabled Black Mountain College (where she also participated in the first happening), an early experiment in communal living at "the Land," in Stony Point, NY (along with John Cage, David Tudor and others), and friendships with Jackson Mac Low, Charles Olson, Paul Williams, Robert Rauschenberg and Franz Kline. She devoted her later years to working with the developmentally disabled at the Camphill Village in Kimberton, PA.

Our Richards author page is anchored by a 1997 recording made at Indre Studios in Philadelphia and comes to us courtesy of a close friend, Jasper Brinton, who provided us with a little background to the session. "She made this tape essentially under some strain: she did not live to see it published to any degree; but understood its importance for her legacy," he notes. "The quality of the recording is excellent. Her voice strong. Earlier in 1991 Station Hill Press published Imagine Inventing Yellow: New and Collected Poems of M.C. Richards. The tape includes a few of these poems but also later work she saw fit to preserve."

We're very glad to be a part of that preservation process, and you can listen to the seventy-five minute recording — which includes nearly two dozen poems and plentiful fascinating asides and remarks by the author — by clicking on the title above.

A Busy Week at Jacket2

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 13:52:03 EDT

It's been an exceptionally busy week over at Jacket2, and we wanted to make sure that you didn't miss any of the newly-posted content.

We've just launched "North of Invention," a feature organized by Sarah Dowling that serves as a companion piece to a 2011 Kelly Writers House conference of the same name, offering retrospective responses to its readings and talks.

Yesterday, we published "Dancing in a Straightjacket", Yasmine Shamma's sprawling interview with the one and only Ron Padgett, which took place in April 2011, around the time his latest collection, How Long was released.

Finally, on Monday, we published "Desiring Visual Texts: A Collage and Embroidery Dialogue" between Maria Damon and Rachel Blau DuPlessis that investigates the ways in which the hands-on practice of visual arts has influenced their respective poetics. We were very glad to see the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog highlighted this article yesterday.

These three new pieces are in addition to the new PoemTalk podcast we discussed in our last PennSound Daily and new Jacket2 Commentaries by Laynie Browne, David Buuck, Jerry Rothenberg and others. To start browsing, click the title above to be taken to the Jacket2 homepage.

PoemTalk 64: Caroline Bergvall's "VIA"

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:46:45 EDT

We've just launched the sixty-fourth program in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, which focuses on Caroline Bergvall's "VIA." For this show, host Al Filreis is joined by the formidable trio of Amaris Cuchanski, David Wallace, and Laynie Browne.

Filreis begins his write-up of the episode on the PoemTalk blog with an explication of Bergvall's working methods in "VIA" and a blueprint of the ways in which the panelists will approach the work: "In the piece, Bergvall intones forty-seven English translations of the opening tercet of Dante Alighieri's Inferno (1321): 'Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita.' She arranges the translations alphabetically according to first word, from 'along' to 'when,' reciting the translator's name and date after each. Our PoemTalkers discuss the poem's pre-textual state as aural performance, the remarkable title which seems to connect every manner of issue and mode, the relative literary value and literary-historical place of individual verse translators, translation itself as inherently open, and, of course, the ur-relevance of Dante's always-interpretable infernal foray into the experience of being lost in words." 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.

Frank Samperi Tribute Reading at Beyond Baroque, 2013

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:32:26 EDT

We're starting this week off with a newly-added video of a tribute to the late Frank Samperi. Hosted by the poet's daughter, Claudia Samperi Warren, this event celebrates the impending publication of Trilogy, which collects three collections published in the early 1970s — Quadrifariam (1971), The Prefiguration (1971), and Lumen Gloriae (1973). The reading took place at Venice Beach's famed Beyond Baroque on March 10th of this year, and features performances by Conrad DiDiodato, Harry Northup, Phoebe MacAdams, S.A. Griffin, and Steve Goldman.

On PennSound's Frank Samperi author page you'll find this complete 68-minute reading, along with a 1987 Segue Series reading at the Ear Inn, and links to PDF version of four of Samperi's books at the PEPC library (the three mentioned above, along with 1998's Day, transcribed from a 1970 notebook). There are also links to Charles Bernstein's Jacket2 commentary posts announcing the availability of these books and the Samperi Blog, run by the poet's daughter.

In Memoriam: Chinua Achebe (1930-2013)

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:23:34 EDT

Today the world is mourning the death of Nigerian author Chinua Achebe at the age of 82.

While the author's name instantly conjures up the memory of Things Fall Apart — his stunningly influential 1958 literary debut — and his work as an essayist in addition to his fiction, many might not realize that Achebe also published several volumes of poetry. In 2005, he was the guest of host Leonard Schwartz on his Cross Cultural Poetics radio program, discussing and reading from his recently-published Collected Poems. The majority of this work, he explains, was written in the late 60s and early 70s during the Biafran War, and while much of his prose is written in English, his poetic expression frequently originated in his native Igbo tongue (as he demonstrates at Schwartz's request, reciting from his well-known "Dirge for Okigbo"). The author also discusses his early education, his work as a radio broadcaster and much more during this half-hour segment.

While we don't have a separate Chinua Achebe author page, you can listen to the program (Episode #64, "Language Falls Apart") by clicking here or the title above.

Stephen Motika: New Author Page

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 11:01:37 EDT

We've just created a new author page for poet, editor and Nightboat Books publisher Stephen Motika, containing a wide array of recordings spanning the last five years.

We begin with a trio of appearances on Cross Cultural Poetics that demonstrate the wide range of Motika's talents. First is 2008's episode #178, "Four Editors," where Motika discusses the work he's done with Nightboat Books. Two years later, in an episode dedicated to the press, Motika read from and discussed one of the latest books he edited for Nightboat, Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman. Finally, from a 2012 program, the poet shares selections from his debut collection, Western Practice, which addresses the life and work of maverick microtonal composer Harry Partch.

These three recordings are nicely complemented by "Queer Masculinity," a panel talk from this past March curated by Krystal Languell as part of the Belladonna* Reading Series, which also featured Brian Pietras, Mark Wunderlich, Ronaldo Wilson, and Jack Halberstam.

Adonis: New Author Page

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 12:47:54 EDT

Our latest author page is for the Syrian poet, essayist and translator Adonis and comes to us courtesy of Pierre Joris (shown at left with the poet).

This PoetsHouse-sponsored reading took place on March 7th as part of this year's AWP conference in Boston. For this event, Adonis was joined by Khaled Mattawa, whose Adonis: Selected Poems was shortlisted for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize, and after the reading, the two engaged in a lively discussion about poetry and contemporary issues.

While it's a modest start for our Adonis author page, we're glad to be able to share this recording with our listeners.

New Pope at PennSound (Courtesy of John Richetti)

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:18:17 EDT

While we're proud that PennSound is a living document of contemporary poetry in practice, we're also quite glad to be able to offer new perspectives on poetry throughout the ages, which is why it's always a treat when the legendary John Richetti visits us for a new recording session.

Recorded late last month and engineered by PoemTalk editor Steve McLaughlin, Richetti's newest session includes more than three hours of new audio and focuses on the work of Alexander Pope as both poet and translator. The first set consists of books 1, 2 and 4 of The Dunciad (1943), while the second highlights selections from Pope's translation of Homer's Illiad (published 1715-1720) — specifically, books 1, 4 and 22.

You'll find a complete listing of Richeti's recordings for PennSound — which includes work by Donne, Dryden, Herbert, Marvell, Milton, Pope, Shakespeare and Swift, in addition to a complete anthology of Restoration and 18th century verse — on the PennSound Classics homepage, along with many other inspired interpretations of work from the ancient Greeks to Walt Whitman.

Bob Perelman on William Carlos Williams' "The Sea-Elephant"

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:45:49 EDT

It's entirely possible that you missed out on English Studies in Canada's special issue "On Discreetness: Event and Sound in Poetry," coedited by Louis Cabri and Peter Quartermain, which came out in the summer of 2009, but now you no longer have to miss out on one of the issue's most exciting pieces — Bob Perelman's "A Williams Soundscript: Listening to 'The Sea-Elephant'" — since it's just been republished in Jacket2.

I first met Bob at John Ashbery's reading at Haverford College in February 2008, not long after I started working here at PennSound, and one of the first topics we discussed was his piece for the forthcoming ESC special issue and his desire for the essay to be accompanied by a number of brief excerpts and composite tracks from William Carlos Williams' two readings of "The Sea-Elephant." Eventually, I'd step in at the last minute as sound editor for the issue and put together a CD of tracks to complement the various articles, but even with footnote-esque prompts in the text to indicate when readers should listen to a particular track, this was not the ideal presentation we'd imagined. That's why, jumping forward four years, we're very glad that the essay can finally be read as it was originally intended. The Jacket2 reprint includes 50 embedded streamable MP3s, which allow readers to hear illustrative snippets of Williams without having to leave the document. It's a truly marvelous piece, and even more so when made available in this fashion, so head on over to Jacket2 right now (by clicking on the title above) to start reading.

New at Jacket2: 'M/E/A/N/I/N/G' (1986-1996)

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:05:46 EST

We've got the latest offering from Jacket2's Reissues section to close out this week and it's an exciting one: a complete ten-year archive of the influential journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G. Here's Reissues editor Danny Snelson providing a little background on the journal:

Founded in December of 1986 by editors Susan Bee and Mira Schor, M/E/A/N/I/N/G provided a timely vehicle for an expanded practice of art criticism from its locus in New York City. Reflecting on the origins of the magazine in an introduction to the final issue, the editors write: "we felt the need for an alternative to the market orientation of mainstream art magazines and the frequently exclusionary theoretical orientation of more academic journals, both of which seemed distant from the actual creative lives of a majority of thoughtful and informed working visual artists." In twenty issues published over the course of a decade, M/E/A/N/I/N/G indexes the most compelling questions of its time while offering a wide range of informative and provocative critical perspectives that remain contemporary.

You'll find the M/E/A/N/I/N/G archives in Jacket2's Reissues section, alongside Chain, Secession, Alcheringa, Combo, Zuk, and Roof. Future projects include Hills and Jimmy & Lucy's House of "K", among others.

PoemTalk 63: Laynie Browne's "Daily Sonnets"

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 12:51:29 EST

Today we launched the sixty-third program in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, which explores a selection of works from Laynie Browne's 2007 Counterpath Press book, Daily Sonnets. For this show, host Al Filreis is joined by Jessica Lowenthal, Lee Ann Brown and Sueyeun Juliette Lee.

Filreis starts his write-up of the episode with a foundational sense of Browne's poetic practice in Daily Sonnets: "From her daily life, Browne derives a sense of writing written uncunningly, not so much by repudiating the made autotelic perfection of the traditional poem — of the sonnet in particular as a (holy) form — as by implying that in reality we don't live our writing lives that way. Her unsequential sonnet sequence explores the daily influxes of the moments of which and in which the poems are composed. She makes the ordinary extraordinary. There's a conceptualism here, and Jessica, Lee Ann and Juliette discuss it: the procedural constraint was to treat the regular work of making a book of sonnets as a specific daily habit or practice." 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.

In Memoriam: Thomas McEvilley (1939-2013)

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:24:01 EST

This weekend brought the sad news of the passing of Thomas McEvilley, the noted scholar, poet, novelist, art historian, critic, and translator.

Over at Jacket2, Charles Bernstein has posted a lengthy tribute to McEvilley, which traces his career from his humble Cincinnati upbringing through his achievements in several discreet disciplines. He writes:

McEvilley is best known as a provocative and influential art critic. His art essays are collected in several books published by McPherson & Company: Art & Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (1991), Art & Discontent: Theory at the Millennium (1992), Yves the Provocateur: Yves Klein and Twentieth Century Art (2010); Art, Love, Friendship: Marina Abramovic and Ulay (2010); The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism (2012). His other books of art criticism and history are Sculpture in the Age of Doubt (Allworth Press, 1999) and The Exile's Return: Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-Modern Era (Cambridge University Press, 1994). In addition, McEvilley wrote monographs, catalog essays, and critical reviews of James Lee Byars, Carolee Schneemann, Julian Schnabel, Les Levine, Pat Steir, Antoni Tapies, Sigmar Polke, Dennis Oppenheim, Kara Walker, Nancy Spero, Thornton Dial, Leon Golub, Richard Tuttle, Agnes Martin, Joseph Beuys, Paul McCarthy, William Anastasi and many other artists.

Bernstein's commentary post also includes links to "Seventeen ancient poems, translated from Greek and Latin by Thomas McEvilley", recently published in J2, and Jerry Saltz's remembrance of the critic.

Here at PennSound, we're proud to host two sets of recordings highlighting McEvilley's work as a translator on his PennSound author page. First, there's a two-part Close Listening program with Bernstein recorded in 2006, which includes readings of Homer, Sappho, Aeschylus, and Meleajer in Greek with translations and commentary, along with a lengthy discussion between the two. That's very nicely complemented by a 2009 session of fragments from Sappho, which we announced alongside other new additions to PennSound Classics in May of that year.

photograph of Thomas McEvilley © Lawrence Schwartzwald

New at Jacket2: The Lyric Personal of Joe Ceravolo

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 15:20:02 EST

We wanted to make sure that you didn't miss a wonderful new feature on the life, work and enduring influence of Joseph Ceravolo that was published today at Jacket2. Edited by Vincent Katz, The Lyrical Personal of Joe Ceravolo" is a sprawling tribute to the late poet, bringing together materials both old and new.

John Coletti and Ron Padgett have provided poems dedicated to Ceravolo, with the later contributing a vintage review as well. There are essays by Katz, Charles North, Kimberly Lyons and Thomas Fink, a recollection by Bill Berkson, a 1965 letter from Ceravolo to David Shapiro, and rounding things out, the transcription of a panel discussion organized by Katz and Tim Trace Peterson, which also included Anselm Berrigan, Lyons and Phong Bui.

You'll find a complete table of contents and Katz's introduction here, and don't forget about PennSound's Joseph Ceravolo author page, which is home to readings from 1968 and 1978.

New at PennSound: the Koch-Dupee Poetry Series

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 13:24:23 EST

Thanks to the efforts of Danny Snelson, we're happy to add a new reading series to the archive. the Koch-Dupee Poetry Series has its home at Columbia University, and our page for the series begins with two readings from last fall.

First, from October 25th, we have Rob Fitterman and Trisha Low. That's followed by a November 30th event featuring Kristen Gallagher (who's currently posting some amazing commentaries over at Jacket2) and P. Inman.

If these two readings are any indication, we'll have some wonderful lineups to look forward to as new materials are added.

'I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women' at KWH, 2012

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:19:04 EST

While there are many exciting Ashbery-related things happening at PennSound, they're not the only wonderful new additions to our archives. To wit, here's I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women, an event organized by Laynie Browne at the Kelly Writers House last October. Here's a brief description of the evening's proceedings:

Conceptual writing is emerging as a vital 21st century literary movement and I'll Drown My Book represents the contributions of women in this defining moment. Edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, I'll Drown My Book takes its name from a poem by Bernadette Mayer, appropriating Shakespeare. The book includes work by 64 women from 10 countries, with contributors' responses to the question — What is conceptual writing? — appearing alongside their work. I'll Drown My Book offers feminist perspectives within this literary phenomenon.

For this event, Browne was joined by Lee Ann Brown, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jena Osman, Kristin Prevallet and Cecilia Vicuña. Clicking the title above will take you directly to our I'll Drown My Book event page.

John Ashbery: Recent Smith College and UMass-Amherst Readings

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:39:46 EST

In case you still haven't had your fill of John Ashbery lately — even after last week's 2013 Kelly Writers House Fellows events — then you're in luck! We have two new recordings from the poet that have just been added to our Ashbery author page.

First up, we have an hour-long video from a November 2, 2011 reading at Smith College. In his intro to that event, Michael Thurston offers a brief history of critics' attempts to make sense of Ashbery's poetry, and revels in its blithe resistance to any such efforts. He opines that "we should read him by taking seriously the root meanings of the word 'poetry,'" — namely the Greek verb poesis, "to make" — before concluding with the notion that, "The best way to understand such work might be to stop trying to understand it." In this set, Ashbery begins with poems from his then-latest collection, Planisphere, before moving on to selections from his translation of Rimbaud's Illuminations and work that would eventually be published in Quick Question. Jumping forward nearly a year, we have a new hour-long reading from UMass-Amherst, recorded on September 20, 2012, which also showcases work from Quick Question.

These recordings are the latest additions to PennSound's John Ashbery author page, where you'll find a startlingly thorough archive of the poet's work that spans sixty-two years. To start exploring, click the title above.

Ashbery KWH Fellows Audio and Video Now Posted

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 13:04:01 EST

We've now posted complete audio and video recordings from this week's 2013 Kelly Writers House Fellows events featuring John Ashbery.

Monday night's hour-long reading is available as individual MP3s, as well as audio and video recordings of the complete event, and proceeds in chronological order, starting with perennial favorites like "And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name," and "What Is Poetry," alongside contemporary work from Ashbery's lastest collection, Quick Question.

That's followed by a seventy-five minute live Q&A session with Al Filreis, conducted Tuesday afternoon at the poet's home in Chelsea and webcast to the Writers House (and viewers worldwide). Complete audio and video recordings are available, and Anna Zalokostas, the conversations's been divided into thematic segments, from "on humor in Ashbery's poems" to "on aging, forgetfulness, and looking back at early work," and "on writing that deals with institutions and bureaucracies." The talk concludes with a reading and discussion of "Just Walking Around," which Filreis sees as a keystone idea in Ashbery's observational poetics.

John Ashbery at UPenn Monday and Tuesday

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 17:25:49 EST

We wanted to make sure that you didn't miss out on John Ashbery's visit to UPenn this week as part of the 2013 Kelly Writers House Fellows program.

First up, this evening, we have a reading by the poet, which begins at 6:30PM EST. That'll be followed up tomorrow at noon when Ashbery will sit down for a Q&A session with Al Filreis. Streaming live video of both of these events can be found here on KWH-TV, and audio and video will be added to PennSound's John Ashbery author page shortly thereafter.

You can read more about Ashbery's Kelly Writers House Fellows visit here, and for a little bit of historic context, you can check out audio and video from Ashbery's first KWH Fellows visit, eleven years ago.

More New Rakosi: 1998 Naropa Panel with Heller, Penberthy, DuPlessis

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 14:06:56 EST

Just when you thought you'd already gotten all of the newly-added Carl Rakosi PennSound goodness that'd be coming your way this week, we've got something else!

Thanks to Rachel Blau DuPlessis, we're now able to share a pair of length recordings (totaling more than three hours) of a panel and discussion of the Objectivists that took place at Naropa's Summer Writing Program in 1998, which features Rakosi and DuPlessis along with Michael Heller and Jenny Penberthy.

You'll find these recordings, along with the aforementioned Nathaniel Dorsky film, 99th birthday celebration at the Kelly Writers House and more on our Carl Rakosi author page.

Carl Rakosi: New Silent Film Footage by Nathaniel Dorsky

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 10:13:00 EST

Thanks to filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky, we're able to share a stunning new silent short featuring Carl Rakosi .

Filmed during the last year of the poet's life at the Arboretum of Golden Gate Park (just blocks from his home in the Sunset District of San Francisco), this five minute film shows Rakosi strolling with his companion, Marilyn Kane, talking and writing. It's a charming document, and one we're glad to be able to share with our listeners.

You can watch the film on our Carl Rakosi author page, where you'll also find a celebration of the poet's 99th birthday at our own Kelly Writers House in 2002, a link to Rakosi's 1971 appearance on Charles Armakanian's KPFA-FM program, "Ode to Gravity," and "A Moment with the Imagination," from the St. Mark's Poetry Project compilation album, The World Record.

Sara Wintz: New Author Page

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 14:03:51 EST

Our new week kicks off with a new author page for Bay Area poet Sara Wintz, showcasing a number of videos and audio recordings of recent work.

First up, we have a pair of readings from Everyday Fashion: a brief video from the Quiet Lightning Poetry Series at San Francisco's Conservatory of Flowers recorded this past August and audio from a March reading at Small Press Traffic (thanks to Andrew Kenower's "A Voice Box"). Next, we have a similar pair of audio and video recordings of Wintz reading from Walking Across a Field We Are Focused on at This Time Now — this time from the same event at Oakland's Condensary in June 2011. Bringing the collection to a close is April 2011 reading at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the Segue Series.

PoemTalk 62: Charles Alexander's "Near or Random Acts"

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 06:23:32 EST

Yesterday we launched the sixty-second episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series — an exploration of Charles Alexander's Near or Random Acts. Joining host Al Filreis for this program are a formidable trio: poets Ron Silliman and Mark Nowak, along with filmmaker Ken Jacobs.

In his write-up of the episode, Filreis offers detailed background information on the composition of Near or Random Acts: "Reaching 35 years of age, the father of two young children, Alexander had decided to constrain his writing about daughter Nora, then 7 years old, through a 5x7 (5x7=35) structure: 5 words in a line, 7 lines in section — the numbers referring thus to the phases of life of both poet and beloved addressee. In early September his progress on the Nora poems was suddenly stopped by 'non-poetic doings' (as Al Filreis puts it in the introduction to this PoemTalk), and when Alexander returned to the series he keenly felt the need of additional constraints. The first poem in the series written after 9/11 added a third and rather severe limitation: first initials of each word in each line in the 5x7 form would now have to spell T O W E R. For instance: 'Try our waffles early riser.' A few songs later we find the dad attending to his daughter again, now at a girls' soccer game. Then, later, in 66, we reach a seven-line remembrance of a pre-9/11 raspberry-picking excursion, an idyllic late-summer outing that had been reported in an earlier section. So by this point what Ron Silliman calls 'the raspberry suite' of Near or Random Acts sections has begun and ended with that ordinary but memorable dad/daughter experience." You can read the rest of Filreis' introductory note and listen to the complete program, 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.

In Memoriam: Anselm Hollo (1934-2013)

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:02:29 EST

We're very sorry to report that beloved poet and translator Anselm Hollo has passed away.

In the poet's honor, we've gathered a number of recordings scattered throughout our archives to create a new Anselm Hollo author page. There, you'll find two readings from Boulder's Left Hand Reading Series, recorded in 2001 and 1999, along with a 1991 reading at the Naropa Institute and a brief excerpt from The Empress Hotel Poems, which was part of The World Record: Readings at the St.Mark's Poetry Project, 1969-1980. We've also included a link to a wealth of Hollo recordings that are stored at Archive.org as part of the Naropa archives.

Reactions to Hollo's passing have come quickly — including remembrances by Pierre Joris, Robert Archambeau, the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog, and our own Charles Bernstein — and without a doubt he'll be dearly missed in the poetry community.

Newly Segmented John Ashbery: Beinecke Library, 2006

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 14:35:46 EST

In addition to the avalanche of new recordings being added to PennSound at any given time, we also regularly go back to our archives to segment complete readings into individual tracks and today we're highlighting one such project featuring the legendary John Ashbery, who'll be joining us in a few weeks as the first of 2013's Kelly Writers House Fellows.

Recorded September 20, 2006 at the Beinecke Library as part of the Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series, this forty-seven minute set is introduced by Langdon Hammer and features the poet reading contemporary material — starting with his previous collection, the National Book Award finalist Where Shall I Wander (2005), and largely consisting of poems from the then-forthcoming A Worldly Country (2007). Titles include "Ignorance of the Law is No Excuse," "Interesting People of Newfoundland," "A Kind of Chill," "Pavane pour Helen Twelvetrees," "Phantoum" and "Thrill of a Romance."

Phill Niblock: New Author Page

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 16:39:42 EST

We wanted to make sure that you didn't miss out on an important update to one of PennSound's earliest video-centric pages. For more than six years, our Phill Niblock page has been home to rare films starring Hannah Weiner and Armand Schwerner, and recently, we upgraded these videos (from ancient RealVideo files to QuickTime) and added a third film featuring Erica Hunt.

Shot in 1983, the eighteen-minute Evidence relishes negative space, beginning with stark white Helvetica lettering on a black background that persists for more than a minute before fading in the film's sole visual: the poet's face, silhouetted to near-featurelessness by a white television screen. Seen in profile, Hunt's speaking gestures are heightened — subtle shudders and nods, along with the frenetic moiré of her mouth — serving as an apt accompaniment to the narrative.

This one-third/two-third profile motif also appears in Niblock's mid-70s portrait of Weiner, where the poet's speedy delivery of her clairvoyant writings weaves in and out of live reading segments juxtaposed with domestic scenes. Meanwhile, Schwerner contends with the wind as he reads (or more accurately, preaches) from his Tablets pacing back and forth in a bright orange jacket on a hilltop, the Verrazano-Narrows bridge behind him.

You'll find all three of these marvelous poetic portraits on our Phill Niblock page, and don't forget to check out PennSound Cinema, home to a stunning array of essential filmic materials.

Sean Bonney: New Author Page

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:47:13 EST

Our newest author page — for English poet Sean Bonney — brings together a wide array of audio/visual materials from the past several years.

The collection begins with a home recording from this past summer of Bonney reading from the Letters on Harmony series (Crisis Inquiry, 2012), which is followed by two recordings from last May's Poetry and Revolution Conference in London: the talk, "Notes on Militant Poetics," and a reading from Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud (Unkant, 2011). There's video of another reading from that volume, recorded at a student occupation at the University of Cambridge from the previous fall, and two more videos — the first containing selections from The Commons (Openned, 2011) and Document: Poems, Diagrams, Manifestos (Barque Press, 2009); the second from Document and Tracts and Commentaries — recorded at Manchester's The Other Room in 2009. Finally, there's a three-part reading from The Commons that took place at Birkbeck College in March 2011.

New at Jacket2: 'Roof" Reissued

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 17:59:26 EST

In case you've missed the very exciting news from our sister site, Jacket2's latest Reissues project — as overseen by editor Danny Snelson — is a complete archive of James Sherry's germinal journal Roof. Here's Snelson's introduction to the set:

Founded in 1976 by James Sherry to anthologize writing by poets working at the Naropa Institute, Roof magazine played a key role in the development of Language poetry. Ten issues were published in New York City between the summers of 1976 and 1979. The magazine was designed by Lee Sherry in uniform white with blocks of delicately askew Antique Olive Black "press type" neatly filling the large format 8.5" by 11" dimensions. As individual poets are given larger portions in successive issues, the reader can follow Roof's transition from the magazine to the Roof Books platform still publishing great works of poetry today. The cornerstone to Sherry's Segue Foundation, Roof magazine charts "the best in language" at this crucial turning point in twentieth-century poetry. Edited by Sherry alongside associate and coeditors Tom Savage (Nos. 1-3, contributing throughout), Vicki Hudspith (Nos. 4-5), and Michael Gottlieb (Nos. 6-10). From New York City to the Bay Area and Washington DC, the magazine houses an emerging community of writers in the late '70s for a fantastic — and remarkably focused — set of poetic explorations.

You'll find the Roof archives in Jacket2's Reissues section, alongside Chain, Secession, Alcheringa, Combo, and Zuk. Future projects include M/E/A/N/I/N/G, Hills, and Jimmy & Lucy's House of "K".

Leslie Scalapino: Six New Videos

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 16:10:53 EST

We recently added a treasure trove of new videos related to the late Leslie Scalapino.

Altogether, there are six different recordings, half of which are posthumous tributes, the rest performances taking place during the poet's lifetime. In terms of the latter, we begin with a 1995 performance of the play Goya's L.A. at the New Langton Arts Center, directed by Carla Harryman; the eleven-minute film Leslie, which features a 1998 Bard College reading of "As: All Occurrence in Structure, Unseen (-Deer Night)" from The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence; and a 1998 performance of New Time, a collaboration with June Watanabe, which took place at San Francisco's Zen Center.

Following that, we have a Memorial Reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project that took place a little less than a month after the poet's death in May 2010. This nearly three-hour event includes appearances by Stacy Szymaszek, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, James Sherry, Laura Elrick, Pierre Joris, Fiona Templeton, Judith Goldman, Ann Lauterbach, Susan Bee, Rachel Levitsky, Rodrigo Toscano, Paolo Javier, and Joan Retallack among many others. That's followed by a December 2010 performance of Scalapino's Flow - Winged Crocodile / The Trains: A Noh Play in San Francisco featuring direction by Fiona Templeton and Molissa Fenley's choreography for the Oberlin Dance Collective. Finally, from February 2011, we have a two-part memorial reading and exhibition in honor of Scalapino, which took place at Reed College's Eliot Hall Chapel.

PoemTalk 61: Bill Berkson's "Signature Song"

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 18:05:46 EST

This past Wednesday, we launched the sixty-first episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, which is concerned with the poem "Signature Song" from Bill Berkson's Fugue State. For this show, host Al Filreis was joined by Marci Nelligan, David Kaufmann and Thomas Devaney (whose marvelous interview with Berkson, "The Education of Poetry," recently appeared in Jacket2).

Filreis begins his write-up of the episode, with Kaufman's assertion that "Berkson's poem 'Signature Song' is the best of the poet's 'fact poems.'" "Marci and Tom certainly did not disagree with that judgment," he continues. "Its diction and tone are mostly that of familiar factistic subgenres: the liner note, the encylopedia entry, etc. Finally, of course, it's more than merely encyclopedic, for it wanders around both historical and personal connections and interleavings, and concludes with a quiet but still jarring judgment of the 'odd' work of writing through these associations in and out of the extremity of political situations they somewhat ignore and somewhat express." You can read the rest of Filreis' introductory note and listen to the complete program, 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.

In Memoriam: Harvey Shapiro (1924-2013)

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 11:57:17 EST

We're very sad to report the passing of poet and editor Harvey Shapiro from complications of recent surgery at the age of 88. When news broke late yesterday afternoon, our own Al Filreis praised Shapiro as "a good person" who "knew everyone in the poem world," while Norman Finkelstein fondly recalled his two-day visit to the Kelly Writers House in 2005, where he and Shapiro read their poetry and took part in a panel discussion, moderated by Bob Perelman on the objectivist poets. Our Harvey Shapiro author page features complete recordings of both of these events, along with appearances from both authors at The Shape of Disclosure, a George Oppen centennial symposium at New York's Poets House in 2008.

Among many tributes to the late poet emerging in the past 24 hours, we encourage our listeners to take a look at The New York Times' obituary, which celebrates not only Shapiro's poetry, but also his nearly forty years' work for the paper, including the wonderful story of his soliciting and encouraging what would become Martin Luther King's epochal "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (which, unfortunately, he could not persuade his superiors to publish).

Gerrit Lansing on Close Listening, Plus New Massachusetts Poets Feature in Jacket2

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 15:37:16 EST

Here's a one-two punch of great new content to keep you happily occupied during the holiday lulls! First, we have a new set of Close Listening programs featuring Gerrit Lansing, recorded at the poet's house in Gloucester, MA. In the first show, Lansing reads selections from his collected poems, The Heavenly Tree / Northern Earth (North Atlantic, 2009). For the second, he and host Charles Bernstein are joined by Susan Howe for a wide ranging conversation that covers "the wild of Gloucester, the relation of the magic (and the magical) and the occult to poetic practice, Nerval, queer politics and the poetics identity, New York in the immediate postwar period, parapsychology at Harvard in the late 1940s, Gnosticism versus neo-Platonism, Jewish mysticism, and [Lansing's] connections with Henry Murray, Harry Smith, Alan Watts, Aleister Crowley, Carl Jung, and John Ashbery." You can hear these programs, along with a 1987 Segue Series reading from the Ear Inn on our newly-created Gerrit Lansing author page.

Meanwhile, over at Jacket2 Lansing is one of five poets — along with Cid Corman, Larry Eigner, Charles Olson and John Wieners — addressed in Jim Dunn and Kevin Gallagher's newly released feature, "Mass: Raw Poetry from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts," which includes articles, interviews, poems, reminiscences, and much more from an all-star roster of writers.

PoemTalk 60: Clark Coolidge's "Blues for Alice"

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 13:13:44 EST

Earlier this week, we launched the sixtieth episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, which addresses Clark Coolidge's poem "Blues for Alice." For this program, host Al Filreis was joined by a wide-ranging panel including Brian Reed, Maria Damon and Craig Dworkin to discuss the poet's "verse bebop."

"The bop was Charlie Parker's, as a model for languaged sound (by poet Clark Coolidge)," Filreis observes in his write-up of the episode, "and the template song was 'Blues for Alice' (Coolidge's poem uses the title), and among the possible Alices are Alice Coltrane, Alice Notley, and Alice in Wonderland. We speculate about Alice Coltrane and Alice in Wonderland, but as for Notley: Brian Reed finds evidence that Coolidge meant to dedicate his poem version of the standard bop dedication indeed to Notley. This leads Maria Damon to wonder about all these women dedicatees — these recipients or objects of blues syllabics — in light of such strong male performative struggles, or attempts to 'get in on the try,' managed by creative men: Coolidge and Parker, or course, but perhaps Ted Berrigan too, and surely also Jack Kerouac, whose bop-inspired babble flow is very much part of the PoemTalk conversation. The key source for Coolidge's working out of Kerouac is his important 1995 article published in American Poetry Review on Kerouac's babble flow and his improvisation generally." You can read the rest of Filreis' liner notes and listen to the complete program, 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.

Charles Bernstein and Ann Lauterbach: Segue Series at the Ear Inn, 1992

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 17:07:14 EST

In a recent post on Facebook, Charles Bernstein observed "I always say to my friend Lawrence Schwartzwald that he has time on his side. So this photo [shown at left] from twenty years ago was taken just before my reading with Ann Lauterbach. PennSound has just digitized the reading."

Recorded on January 4, 1992, this Segue reading at the series' original home, the Ear Inn, begins with Lauterbach, who starts with the poem "Opening Day" from Clamor (a poem dedicated to Bernstein) before moving on to three sections from the longform piece "Tangled Reliquary" from And, for Example. Bernstein also noted in his Facebook note that "I used a cut from Ann's reading for the Live at the Ear CD."

Bernstein's set starts in-progress with Dark City's "Locks Without Doors," which is followed by several excerpts from the libretto to the soon-to-debut opera The Subject (one of three collaborations with Ben Yarmolinsky), before concluding Dark City's title poem (in what starts as part of the live reading and segues into a home recording).

Laura Mullen Reads from "Enduring Freedom," 2012

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 10:58:46 EST

Today, we're highlighting a new recording from Laura Mullen reading selections from her latest book, Enduring Freedom (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2012). Recorded by Ross Craig in Berkeley on October 29, 2012, this session consists of fifteen poems from the book, including "Headstone," "Bride of Some Operation Names A-L," "Gown Sound," "'Special Moments During the Ceremony,'" ""Bride of the Waters," "Fugitive Bride" and "'The Couple Having a Private Moment.'"

You'll find these recordings on PennSound's Laura Mullen author page, which is also home to a 2007 session (also recorded by Ross Craig in Berkeley) featuring selections from The Tales of Horror (Kelsey Street Press, 1999), and two readings from Boulder's the Left Hand Reading Series taking place in 2001 and 1999. Click on the title above to start exploring.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Auckland Recordings, 2012

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 15:48:53 EST

Here's a very exciting new addition to our archives to get your week started out in grand fashion: a series of new recordings from the one and only Rachel Blau DuPlessis' magnum opus, Drafts, which were made during the poet's time in New Zealand this year as a distinguished visitor at the University of Auckland. Engineered by Jeanette McKerchar at the Faculty of Arts' Audio Studio in March of this year, these three sessions were initially produced for the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Center, though we're very glad to now be able to share them with our listeners.

For this special set, DuPlessis chose to focus on poems from the series not yet available in recorded form, so we jump around a little bit, starting with a March 27th session for three poems published in Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis (2004): "Draft 49: Turns," "Draft 51: Clay Songs," and "Draft 53: Eclogue." Next, from a March 16th session, we have "Draft 74: Wanderer" (originally published in 2007's Torques: Drafts 58-76) and "Draft 87: Trace Elements" (taken from 2010's Pitch: Drafts 77-95). Finally, in the first of these three sessions, on March 15th, DuPlessis read three poems not yet collected in book-form: "Draft 102: One-on-One," "Draft 103: Punctum," and "Draft 109: Wall Newspaper."

You can listen to all of these recordings on our Rachel Blau DuPlessis author page, which is also home to a stunning array of readings, talks and interviews spanning nearly thirty years.

St. Mark's Talks (1984-1986), Curated and Moderated by Charles Bernstein

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 14:00:53 EST

Last month, we brought you the very exciting series of New York Talks, curated and moderated by Charles Bernstein during the first half of 1984. Today, we're equally excited to present recordings from New York Talks' next incarnation, the St. Mark's Talks series, held at the Poetry Project from the fall of 1984 to the spring of 1986.

In a recent Jacket2 commentary post, Bernstein explains the origins of the series: "In 1985, Eileen Myles was the new director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York. She asked me to curate a lecture series, the first such program at the church. I modeled the series at the Poetry Project on my earlier series New York Talk, giving it the amusing title, given the sometimes seeming resistance to poetics at the St. Mark's at the time, St. Mark's Talks. And talk it did." "I made these recordings myself," he continues, "and we are missing some of the talks, and in some case parts of the talk ... Here is what we got."

Altogether, PennSound has preserved all or part of fifteen events in the series, which follow the same general pattern of talk followed by discussion established during New York Talks. The series began with "Politics and Language," featuring Bruce Boone, P. Inman, Erica Hunt, and Jackson Mac Low, and continued with events including David Antin's "line music counterpoint disjunction and the measure of mind," Nathaniel Mackey's "Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol," "The Tradition of Marginality," featuring Kathleen Fraser and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Barbara Guest's "Mysteriously Speaking of the Mysterious Byzantine Proposals of the Poem," and Ron Silliman's "Postmodernism: Sign for a Struggle, the Struggle for the Sign." Other participants included Steve McCaffery, Lyn Hejinian, Anne Waldman, David Bromige, Nick Piombino, Lorenzo Thomas, and Bob Perelman, among others.

Heatstrings: Recordings from Convergence on Poetics, 2012

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 14:20:50 EST

Thanks to the efforts of Aldon Nielsen and his Heatstrings archives, we're very happy to be kicking off December in grand fashion with two days' worth of recordings from the Convergence on Poetics conference at the University of Washington Bothell this past September. The conference's aims are spelled out in a brief statement on the UWB website:

Convergence on Poetics queries the current understanding and practice of poetics within writing communities and the academy. The conference consists of keynote panels, poetics postings, and author performances. All events will be scheduled singularly, so that a conversation of the whole can address, in the words of George Oppen, "the meaning / Of being numerous."

Poesis can be defined most broadly as making and poetics as a study of making. While poesis and poetics have been important for the areas of literary studies, creative writing, textual and discourse studies, among others, their larger area of concern, i.e. making, crosses multiple arts and disciplines. It is the emphasis on making, or construction, which creative arts (and other creative projects) base much of their claim for cultural significance, since in making new relations can pertain which ratiocinative approaches to knowledge formation often silence.

Nielsen's recordings consist of two dozen individual performances taking place on September 28th and 29th, and include sets by Tyrone Williams, Barrett Watten, Ron Silliman, Evie Shockley, Leonard Schwartz, Joe Milutis, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Sarah Dowling, Michael Davidson, Tisa Bryant, Lee Ann Brown, Charles Bernstein, and Nielsen himself, among others.

Films from Rudy and Jacob Burckhardt

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 13:16:06 EST

We're very proud to bring this week to a close with a trio of newly-added films from Rudy and Jacob Burckhardt.

Our Rudy Burckhardt page features two films not included in Microcinema's recently-released three-disc retrospective of the filmmaker's work (read Charles Bernstein's Jacket2 commentary on the set): Central Park in the Dark (a 1985 collaboration with Charles Ives, Christopher Sweet and Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks) and The Automotive Story (a 1954 film featuring Jane Freilicher's narration of a Kenneth Koch script and the oft-forgotten piano skills of Frank O'Hara, who navigates a score featuring Debussy, Poulenc and Scriabin). There, you'll also find a link to the transcript of a 1976 interview of Burckhardt and Edwin Denby on New York's WBAI-FM, which appeared in Jacket #21 in 2003.

We've also created a new Jacob Burckhardt page, where you'll find his 1974 film, Yaknetuma From the Lower East, which includes, as critic Bruce Bennett noted in the New York Sun, "such varied delights as noted film critic and theoretician Laleen Jayamanne performing a Sri Lankian ritual dance on a tenement rooftop after polishing off a 32-oz. beer."

PennSound has been happy to play host to work by both father and sun over the years — specifically our Edwin Denby author page, which features photographs from Rudy and recordings made by Jacob — but it's a real treat to be able to share their films with our listeners. Click on the individual links above to start watching.

PoemTalk 59: Paul Blackburn's "7th Game : 1960 Series"

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 10:00:01 EST

Today we're launching the fifty-ninth episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, in which host Al Filreis leads a discussion of Paul Blackburn's "7th Game : 1960 Series," with a panel that includes Ron Silliman, Daisy Fried and Joel Lewis.

Here, in the beginning of his write-up of the episode on the PoemTalk blog on Jacket2, Filreis provides a little background info on the poem itself, as well as useful context for the fateful game discussed therein: "Paul Blackburn performed his poem '7th Game : 1960 Series,' which had been written in 1960, on or near the first day of the 1971 baseball season, during a reading he gave at SUNY Cortland. The poem was later republished in Blackburn's Collected Poems. The New York Yankees (Blackburn's team) were heavy favorites in their series against the Pittsburgh Pirates, and vastly outscored the underdogs in the seven games. But the Pirates won on a home run by a light-hitting second baseman in the final at-bat of the final game (what we now call a 'walk off'). As Blackburn introduces the poem, the Cortland audience laughs; listeners to the audio-only recording now might be confused by this, but we think you can safely guess that Blackburn had just put on his Yankee cap." You can read more, and warm up your chilly hot stove season with a little postseason glory, here.

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. Thanks, as always, for listening!

New at Jacket2 Reissues: "Zuk" (1987-1989)

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:25:01 EST

Thanks to Jacket2 Reissues editor Danny Snelson, we're very excited to announce the launch of the Zuk archives. Here's part of his introduction to the journal:

"Edited by Claude Royet-Journoud Zuk was published monthly by Emmanuel Ponsart's Editions Spectres Familiers out of Le Revest-les-Eaux, France. The precision of Zuk is unparalleled in poetry magazines of the era: each of the twenty-four issues published between October 1987 and September 1989 featured a tightly constructed interplay of short works of poetry. In these pages, the reader may find an intimate conversation among poets in the tradition of Louis Zukofsky on both sides of the Atlantic. With just four slender pages to each issue, the magazine published works in French alongside translations of new works by poets loosely associated with Language poetry in the United States."

In addition to the twenty-four issues (available individually and in one large zip file), Snelson has assembled "selected ephemera mailed out with the magazine, including three special inserts devoted to single-author publications," and included a link to an informative interview between Royet-Journoud and Jacqueline Pluet on the magazine's history.

Zuk now joins Chain, Secession, Alcheringa, and Combo, among the journals archived in Jacket2's Reissues section. Stay tuned for forthcoming archival projects including Roof, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, Hills, and Jimmy & Lucy's House of "K" are all forthcoming.

the Threads Talk Series: Emily McVarish, "Page Space," 2012

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 13:51:15 EST

As promised in last week's PennSound Daily writeup of the Charles Bernstein-curated New York Talks series, we've got an exciting new recording from the Threads Talk series to share with you. Recorded on October 10th of this year, this latest event features a talk by "writer, designer, teacher and book artist" Emily McVarish entitled "Page Space," which ambitiously takes on an admittedly "huge topic," as guided through the perspectives of Henri LeFebvre and Johanna Drucker.

Curated by Steve Clay and Kyle Schlesinger, Threads "is devoted to the art of the book featuring poets, scholars, artists, and publishers. The objective for the series is to build on the discourse within book arts to explore and enrich relationships between various strands of book culture that are often approached in isolation, for example poetry and writing, visual and performing arts, collaboration, design, printing, independent publishing, literary history, critical theory, and material culture to name a few." While the events themselves take place in front of small audiences, we're honored to be able to share these recordings with our listeners in advance of the eventual publication of the talks in book form. You can listen to previous events featuring Alan Loney, Charles Alexander, Simon Cutts, Buzz Spector, Jerome Rothenberg, Cecilia Vicuna, Jen Bervin Kathleen Walkup, Johanna Drucker, Keith Smith and Richard Minsky on PennSound's Threads Talk Series homepage.

C.S. Giscombe on CFUR Fireside Chats, 2012

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 10:20:47 EST

Here's another exciting new addition to our archives: poet C.S. Giscombe's October 16th appearance on the fourth episode of CFUR's Fireside Chats, hosted by Geoff Dickieson and broadcast from the University of Northern British Columbia. Here's Dickieson's brief description of the program: "Cecil Giscombe discusses his views on art, poetry, culture and society as well as reading from his book Prairie Style. The musical intro and outro are Nat King Cole's version of the classic folk song "Nature Boy" which is mentioned by Cecil in the interview." It's a fascinating discussion with a charming and effusive author, guided by a thoughtful interviewer, and a great addition to our site.

You can listen to this show on our C.S. Giscombe author page, which is also home to a wide variety of recordings spanning two decades, including interviews (on Cross Cultural Poetics, PhillyTalks, and the CBC) and a number of readings (from the Heatstrings archives, A Voice Box, the Line Reading Series, the Segue Series at Double Happiness, and many other venues).

New York Talks (1984) Curated and Moderated by Charles Bernstein

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:00:57 EST

We have a very exciting new addition to announce today: five events from the New York Talks series, curated and moderated by our own Charles Bernstein at 300 Bowery (the home of the Segue Foundation and James Sherry) during the first half of 1984.

The five talks collected here follow the same pattern — one not dissimilar from the more recent Threads Talk Series (from which we'll have a new recording shortly) — beginning with the featured speaker's presentation, which is followed by a long discursive interaction with the audience members.

The featured talkers are all quite stellar, beginning with Bruce Andrews' "Rewriting Society: Poetics, the Self, Ideology" on January 31st, which is followed by Susan Howe's "My Emily Dickinson" on February 24th, Alan Davies' "If Words Had Meaning" on March 27th, Madeline Gins and Arakawa's "Blank and Other Relatives of Indeterminacy" on April 22nd, and finally, Johanna Drucker's "On Writing as the Visual Representation of Language" on June 5th. The audiences — which include, at various times, Erica Hunt, Doug Lang, Abigail Child, Ted Greenwald, Lydia Davis, Michael Gottlieb, Susan Bee, Hannah Weiner, Mitch Highfill and Steve Benson among many others — are not too shabby, either.

You can listen to complete recordings of all five events, which altogether total more than eleven hours of audio, on the New York Talks series page we've put together.

A Blast from PennSound's Post-Election Past

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 14:35:54 EST

Four years ago at this time, as American celebrated the election of President Barack Obama, we ran a special PennSound Daily playlist of presidential poems, and today we're revisiting that post as we look to four more years under the current administration.

Our original list consisted of a dozen poems, from a wide array of poets, which "remember, critique, lampoon and sympathetically address presidents past including Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, William McKinley and both George H.W. and George W. Bush," and we've added a few newer additions to the PennSound archives

Walter Lowenfels — "Mr. President" (12:23): MP3

Paul Blackburn — "The Assassination of President McKinley" (3:04): MP3

Kathy Acker — "President Bush" (5:15): MP3

CAConrad — "Dear Mister President there was Egg Shell under Your Desk Last Night in My Dream!" (3:26): MP3

Gary Sullivan — "That a Hamster Could be President" (0:20): MP3

Jaap Blonk — "What the President Will Say and Do" (1:30): MP3

Tracie Morris — "My Great Grand Aunt Meets a Bush Supporter" (2:01): MP3

Ed Dorn — "Paralyzing Affability: an Analysis of the Reagan Voice" (0:28): MP3

President of the United Hearts — from The Big Melt (16:39): MP3

Tina Darragh — "Bill Clinton Plane Ride Dream" (2:07): MP3

Brendan Downing — "GWB" (1:41): MP3 and "GWB" (1:12): MP3

Brian Boyles — "Ulysses Clinton" (1:10): MP3

Kaia Sand — "The President Probably Talks" (1:35): MP3

Mac Wellman — "President Hayes" (1:38): MP3

In Memoriam: Anne-Marie Albiach (1937-2012)

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 12:26:08 EST

We received word yesterday of the passing of French poet Anne-Marie Albiach after a long illness.

Over at Jacket2, Charles Bernstein has posted a brief biographical note and tribute to the poet, including his own appraisal of her work, written in conjunction with the publication of the collection Figured Image: "Anne-Marie Albiach's words are never alone on the page, having each other for company, just as they find here ideal companionship in Keith Waldrop's translation. In Figurations de l'Image, Albiach pursues her rigorous investigation into the possibilities of measure, the perceptible, luminescence, vulnerability, memory, contour, ardor, breath, oscillation, remonstration, trajectory, disparity, abstraction, antecedence, disparity, refraction, trace, tapestry, rehearsal, reverberation, and the irreparable. In these poems, the figures refute image as they bank, relapse, surge, palsy, recollect. Albiach scores space to twine time, abjures rhyme to make blank shimmer in the mark."

Meanwhile, on Facebook, Patrick Durgin notes that "One of the first pages to go up on PennSound was the Kenning anthology (audio CD), which, thanks to the efforts of Jonathan Skinner, featured [a] recording by Anne-Marie Albiach." You can hear that seven minute recording, which includes selections from ETAT (ENIGME IX) and MEZZA VOCE (Esquisse: << le froid >> ), and was recorded by Skinner in the poet's mother's apartment during the summers of 2000 and 2001 here.

New at Jacket2: a Major Interview with Bruce Andrews

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:33:45 EDT

Update: due to Hurricane Sandy, the Andrews symposium has been postponed until Friday, December 7th. More information on the event can be found here.

Just in time for Friday's symposium on his life and work at Fordham University, Jacket2 has just released "The Contextualizing Capacity of the Writing Itself," a new comprehensive interview with the author.

The interview was conducted by Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich in the poet's New York City apartment on September 27th, 2010, and as Andrews notes, "Dennis did the painstaking transcription of this interview; I massaged it a teeny bit mostly deleting a few 'you know's and 'so's & adding a few commas & dashes to capture something of the rhythm, but keeping it as loose & informal as it was, rather than trying to jazz it up or make it more official or impressive." Reflecting on the day, he recalls, "This was a lovely afternoon for me; many thanks to Dennis for all his enthusiasm during his month in the USA as a self-identified 'fan boy' — the breath of fresh air still reverberates!"

You can read the interview in its entirety here. Also on Jacket2, Charles Bernstein recently posted a new commentary with all the details of this week's Andrews symposium at Fordham (which he'll moderate) along with links to a newly-compiled online archive of works by and about the poet.

New at Jacket2: Richard Swigg on Oppen and Levertov

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 11:11:11 EDT

Earlier this week, we marked what would have been Denise Levertov's eighty-ninth birthday with a selection of PennSound resources related to the poet. Today, we'd like to add something else to that already-impresive list: a new essay on the poet that's just been posted at Jacket2.

Written by Richard Swigg (the architect of PennSound's William Carlos Williams and George Oppen author pages), "The Test of Belief: Or, Why George Oppen Quarrelled with Denise Levertov" is a fascinating document of the ideological correspondence between these two titans of 20th century poetry.

"There are fruitful literary quarrels and their opposite," Swigg begins. "For while the big, personal rift that opened up between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov exemplifies the latter — when he complained that the subjugation of her poetry to the cause of political activism was creatively damaging — George Oppen's earlier argument with Levertov was markedly beneficial. It was the means by which he defined a poetic way forward in the 1960s, having known long before, as a Communist social worker during the Depression, the necessity of not politicizing his art."

You can read the article in full at Jacket2, where, in addition to the PoemTalk and Reissues materials that we've discussed here over the past month, you'll also find a wealth of newly added content, including Sandra Alland's feature on "New Scottish Poets," Jason Morris' meditations on Clark Coolidge's The Crystal Text and Louis Armand's philosophical exploration of "Poetry and the Unpoetic."

Happy Birthday, Denise Levertov!

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 12:28:42 EDT

Had she lived, the poet Denise Levertov would have turned eighty-nine today, and while she's a poet we very much admire, we unfortunately don't have permission to share her work through PennSound, but that doesn't mean that we don't have a wealth of materials related to the poet in our archives.

Chief among these is this 2010 event at Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room as part of their Oral History Initiatives program, in which Mark Pawlak (poet and editor of Hanging Loose, who befriended Levertov at MIT in 1969), Dick Lourie (founding editor of Hanging Loose Press and a member of Levertov's very first writing workshop in 1965) and Donna Hollenberg (author of the first full-length biography of Levertov) discuss their relationships to the poet and engage with audience questions. You can listen to these recordings by clicking the title above.

PennSound co-director Al Filreis catalogues our other Levertov-centric recordings in a Jacket2 commentary post. These include discussions of the poet by Robert Creeley and Albert Gelpi, along with recordings of John Wieners and Ken Irby reading Levertov's poetry.

While we'd still very much like to bring you recordings of Levertov herself, these assembled recordings nonetheless make a fitting tribute to the poet on her birthday.

Wagner, Hinton, Shockley, Russo, Nielsen: Poetry in Performance at the NPF 80s Conference

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 09:48:26 EDT

We wanted to make sure that you didn't miss out on this marvelous recording from this summer's NPF conference on Poetry in the 1980s, which comes to us via Aldon Nielsen's Heatstrings Archives.

Here's Nielsen describing the event in one of several blog dispatches from the conference: "Poet friend Laura Hinton contacted me in advance of the National Poetry Foundation conference at the University of Maine to invite me to join the company she was assembling for a late night poetry performance. I was glad to be part of this dear company, which in the end included Linda Russo, Evie Shockley and Catherine Wagner." "We only had time to talk our way through the performance in advance back at the hotel," he continues, "but things went well that night and we had an appreciative audience, who also appreciated the free drinks we provided. I may do that at all my readings in the future. I certainly wish I could have these poets with me at every reading in the future."

Wagner begins the reading with "A Well Is A Mine" and "Capitulation to the Total Poem." She's followed by Hinton's "Paris in the Springtime" and three pieces by Shockley ("Duck,Duck-Redux," "Post White," "You Can Say That Again Billy" and "Miles's Muse") and Russo's "American Heritage Syntax," before returning for four more pieces ("Clairvoyage Le Royale [Shared Death Experience]," "Despuis," "Postcards Never Sent" and "My French Swimming Pool"). Next up is Nielsen, with four pieces ("Redevelopment," "Translations From the Rubic I," "Nannie Burroughs Avenue" and "Evacuation Routes E and D"), before Hinton brings the event to a close with "Geothermal Jardhiti" and "South Fork Palouse River."

You can see more photos from the event and read its complete program on the Heatstrings blog, and be sure to check out our Heatstrings archive page for many more fantastic recordings spanning several decades, which Nielsen's been kind enough to share with us.

PoemTalk 58: Bernadette Mayer's "The Tragic Condition of the Statue of Liberty"

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 18:15:18 EDT

Yesterday we launched the fifty-eighth episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, which is concerned with Bernadette Mayer's "The Tragic Condition of the Statue of Liberty." For this program, host Al Filreis is joined by a stellar panel including Anne Waldman, Julia Bloch and Jacket2 interviews editor Katie L. Price.

In his write-up of the episode on the PoemTalk blog on Jacket2, Filreis begins by exploring the poem's provenance and inspiration: "Most of us who have read Bernadette Mayer's poem, "The Tragic Condition of the Statue of Liberty," encountered it in Andrei Codrescu's anthology American Poetry since 1970: Up Late (1987), where it was joined by her "Laundry & School Epigrams" (written in the same spirit) and eight of her other poems. PennSound's recording of "The Tragic Condition" comes from an Ear Inn reading that took place in October of 1988. . . As we note from the start, the poem's subtitle is "A Collaboration with Emma Lazarus" and it begins by appropriating lines 10 through 14 of the famous Lazarus sonnet, "The New Colossus" — lines spoken by the giant statue, the "Mother of Exiles" that now stands in the harbor of New York, Mayer's own beloved wretched town."

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. Thanks, as always, for listening!

Lyn Hejinian PoemTalk Transcript Posted on Jacket2

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 15:21:31 EDT

Over at Jacket2, we've just posted a new transcript of PoemTalk #15 on Lyn Hejinian's "constant change figures."

For this episode, host was joined by frequent panelists Bob Perelman and Thomas Devaney, along with Tom Mandel, who was visiting from Delaware. You can read our original PennSound Daily write-up of the program here, and you'll find the February 2005 recording of Hejinian's reading at the Kelly Writers House (from which the poem under discussion was taken) on our Lyn Hejinian author page. To start reading, click the title above.

Dennis Barone: Alumni Visitor Reading Series, 2003

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 17:35:07 EDT

Today we're highlighting a recently-added reading from poet and prose writer Dennis Barone.

Barone, a professor at the University of Saint Joseph in Connecticut, read at Kelly Writers House in the spring of 2003, as part of the Alumni Visitor Reading Series (he earned his Ph.D. from the university in 1984). His set is introduced by Gil Ott, who shares his recollections of Barone as "one of a very small band of intellectually adventurous writers," when poetry was "not so widely appreciated as it is today in Philadelphia," and cites the importance of his work as publisher of Tamarisk.

The forty-three minute set is segmented into a dozen tracks, which include the titles "Greeting," "Savoir Faire," "Let Us Suppose," "The Tyrants' Textbook" and "The Craftsmanship of Macaroni Manufacture," along with an excerpt from his novella, Temple of the Rat. You'll find this recording on our Dennis Barone author page, which also includes the poet's appearances as part of MLA Offsite Reading in 2004 and 2006, a 1991 Segue Series reading at the Ear Inn, and the single poem "Metronome," taken from a 2004 reading at the Buttonwood Tree in Middletown, CT.

'Poems for the Millennium' Vol. 3 Reading at Harvard, 2009

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 17:06:44 EDT

As poetry fans and scholars, we're very glad that the marvelous Poems for the Millennium series exists, and as poetry media archivists, we're even happier when we can share recordings from events related to the series with our listeners.

Today, we have a new two-hour video recording of a 2009 event at Harvard University, "Reconfiguring Romanticism: A Reading and Discussion of Experimental Poetics," held in conjunction with the launch of the series' third volume, on "Romantic and Postromantic poetry," edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey Robinson. At this event, the editors read selections from the anthology and, at the urging of host Patrick Pritchett, they consider whether "Romanticism [is] the original experimental poetry." They're joined by local readers William Corbett, Keith Waldrop and Gerritt Lansing, along with critical respondents Sonia Hofkosh and Virginia Jackson from nearby Tufts University.

You'll find this video on our Poems for the Millennium series homepage, along with launch events for volume three at the Kelly Writers House and the Bowery Poetry Club, and a 1998 celebration of the series first two volumes (also at the Writers House), all of which feature all-star rosters of poets and scholars.

John Matthias: New Author Page

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:19:26 EDT

Our latest author page, for poet, scholar and translator, John Matthias, is home to a wealth of recent audio and video recordings.

Altogether, there are three full-length videos featuring Matthias, beginning with a 2007 reading at UC Berkeley as part of the Lunch Poems Series. That's followed by a 2010 performance of "Automystifstical Plaice" (Matthias' "Ballet Mécanique Spread-Spectrum Ecstasy, with voices," that traces the collaboration between actress Hedy Lamarr and avant-garde composer George Antheil) and a 2011 reading (with Joyelle McSweeney) at the University of Chicago's Poem Present Reading and Lecture Series.

On the audio side of the spectrum, we have lengthy 2010 reading at Notre Dame's London Centre that offers a survey of several of Matthias' more recent publications, including Trigons (Shearsman, 2010), An Unofficial Roy Fisher (Shearsman, 2010), Kedging (Salt, 2007) and Carcanet's 2010 volume Five American Poets.

John Ashbery: Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1989-1990

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 10:26:33 EDT

We're off to an early start today with some very exciting new additions to our already-encyclopedic John Ashbery author page — namely, recordings of the poet's complete series of Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1989 and 1990.

Later revised and published under the title Other Traditions, Ashbery's six lectures explore the work of relatively-unknown poets who, for him, are more than mere inspirations, but rather serve as "a poetic jump-start for times when the batteries have run down." You'll find all six talks — "John Clare: 'Grey Openings Where the Light Looks Through,'" "Olives and Anchovies: The Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes," "'The Unthronged Oracle:' Laura Riding," "The Bachelor Machines of Raymond Roussel," "David Schubert: 'This Is the Book That No One Knows,'" and "'Why Must You Know:' The Poetry of John Wheelwright" — on our Ashbery author page, along with an amazing wealth of readings, lectures, interviews and radio programs spanning more than sixty years.

We're grateful to John Ashbery and David Kermani, along with Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room (specifically Christina Davis), for their help in making these marvelous recordings available. Click on the title above to start listening.

Rae Armantrout at the University of Alabama, 2012

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 14:50:17 EDT

We'll get this week off to a quick start with more of what we left you with last week — namely more Rae Armantrout.

After we posted last week's entry on Armantrout's September 11th reading at Penn State University (which came to us courtesy of Aldon Nielsen), we got an e-mail from Aaron Beasley offering us audio from Armantrout's reading the evening before at the University of Alabama's Bama Theater in Tuscaloosa, "attended by students and faculty of UA, including Hank Lazer," and we were very happy to accept.

This thirty-six minute recording starts with "Scumble" from Versed before seguing into poems from Money Shot, followed by more recent work from the forthcoming Just Saying, and the sequence-in-progress The Matter, following a sequence similar to the Penn State reading. This recording, and many more spanning five decades, are available on our Rae Armantrout author page.

Rae Armantrout at Penn State, 2012

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 12:04:14 EDT

Last week, poet Rae Armantrout gave a reading at Penn State University, and thanks to the marvelous Aldon Nielsen and his Heatstrings archives, we're able to present a recording of that event to you.

Armantrout's set includes generous selections from her last book, Money Shot (Wesleyan, 2011) — including "Working Models," "Bubble Wrap," "Answer," "Money Talks" and "Long Green" — but what's even more exciting (and something we've come to expect from Armantrout readings over the years) is the sneak preview of two forthcoming collections. First, we have a dozen poems from Just Saying (Wesleyan, 2013) followed by fifteen poems from The Matter, a current sequence-in-progress.

You can hear this set, both segmented MP3s and a complete recording, on our Rae Armantrout author page, which is home to dozens of recordings from the late 1970s to the present. Click on the title above to start listening.

New at Jacket2 Reissues: 'Chain' (12 issues 1994-2005)

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 13:49:33 EDT

Exciting things are afoot over at Jacket2, where Reissues editor Danny Snelson has just unveiled the newest addition to our archives — the complete twelve-issue run of the esteemed journal, Chain. Here's Snelson's bibliographical history of the journal:

Edited by Jena Osman and Juliana Spahr, Chain was founded at the State University of New York, Buffalo in 1994. Chain was uniformly released from 1994 until 2005 in perfect bound 6" by 9" format with 1,000 copies printed per issue. Twelve issues were published with each issue organized around a special topic: 1. Gender and Editing; 2. Documentary; 3. Hybrid Genres/Mixed Media (second volume); 4. Procedures; 5. Different Languages; 6. Letters; 7. Memoir/Antimemoir; 8. Comics; 9. Dialogue; 10. Translucinación; 11. Public Forms; and 12. Facts.

You can browse the Chain archives at Jacket2's Reissues homepage, where you'll also find the journals Secession, Alcheringa, and Combo, while scans of ROOF, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, Zuk, Hills, and Jimmy & Lucy's House of "K" are all forthcoming.

In Memoriam: Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (1946-2012)

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 00:18:49 EDT

We're saddened to pass along the news, first broken over Facebook several hours ago by Alexander Skidan and Mikhail Iossel, of the passing of Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko.

Our own Charles Bernstein offered this remembrance on his Jacket2 blog: "It was with great sadness that I heard this heartbreaking news. From when I first met Arkadii in the 1980s, to his semester-long stay with his wife Xena in Buffalo in the early 1990s, to Susan, Felix and my visit to St. Petersburg in 2001, to his recent visit to New York and to Penn two years ago, I have felt a deep kinship with Arkadii, a poetic and personal affinity that goes beyond any national or linguistic borders. A great companion in life and poetry has left the earth but not the world."

Another tribute on Jacket2 comes from new commentator Jacob Edmond, who observes "Arkadii's writing was — is — an education in itself, always making me think again. But he taught me in other ways too. He looked after me very generously when, at the age of 22, I first met him in St Petersburg in 2000 and proposed, rather naively, to write about his work. His passing is a great loss. My thoughts are with Zina, Ostap, the rest of the family, and his many friends."

Earlier this summer, Jerry Rothenberg shared Dragomoshchenko's poem, "Paper Dreams" (dedicated to Rothenberg) and offered high praise for the poet — "[His] freedom as a poet resided squarely in the heart of his poetry — its language & form serving as the conduits for thoughts & realities previously obscured... That his poetry is remarkable on its own terms should be evident" — before sharing Marjorie Perloff's appraisal: "For Dragomoshchenko, language is not the always already used and appropriated, the pre-formed and prefixed that American poets feel they must wrestle with. On the contrary, Dragomoshchenko insists that 'language cannot be appropriated because it is perpetually incomplete' ... and, in an aphorism reminiscent of Rimbaud's 'Je est un autre,' 'poetry is always somewhere else.'"

Finally, we'd like to draw your attention to PennSound's Arkadii Dragomoshchenko author page, which is home to a wide array of audio and video recordings, including several — a two-part Close Listening program and a Segue Series event at the Bowery Poetry Club — from the 2010 visit to the states mentioned above, along with a 1990 Segue Series set, a 2007 recording from the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, and two films by Dragomoshchenko on Sergei Kurekhin.

Listen to a Lost Segue Series Reading by Kirschenbaum and Kiely

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 16:01:54 EDT

We recently heard from Boog City editor David Kirschenbaum, who was kind enough to pass along a Segue recording that was missing from our archives. "Over 12 years ago, on April 8, 2000, Aaron Kiely and I read in the Segue series, housed at Double Happiness then," he wrote. "At the time the recording equipment was down, but I did what I usually did at readings, recorded it on my trusty portable cassette recorder. I listened to it once or twice after that and eventually just put it in a drawer in my apartment."

A recent e-mail from PennSound reminded him that this reading wasn't archived on our Segue Series at Double Happiness homepage and with the help of poet and public radio producer Sean Cole, he was able to get the recording digitized and into our hands. Kiely's set is introduced by Kristin Prevallet, while Prageeta Sharma does the honors for Kirschenbaum. You can hear this vintage Segue set here, or by clicking the title above.

And speaking of Segue, don't forget that the venerable series will be returning in just a few weeks with a new home base, the Zinc Bar. You can peruse the fall and winter schedules on the Segue Foundation website, and stay tuned for recordings here on PennSound.

Jason Zuzga: New Author Page

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 15:52:13 EDT

We're starting off this new week by highlighting our newest author page for poet Jason Zuzga, which brings together recordings of four Philadelphia-area readings between 2006 and 2011.

The most recent of these is a September 2011 reading as part of the Principal Hand Presents series. That's followed by Zuzga's March 2007 appearance at Robin's Bookstore as part of EOAGH's Queering Language launch reading. One month earlier, Zuzga appeared on Live at the Writers House Episode #63, and this segmented set includes the poems "Making Butter," "City Life," "Sea Horse," "Diet" and "Documentary." Finally, we have a 2006 appearance, also at the Kelly Writers House, as part of the Emergency Reading Series, which features a twenty-six minute reading as well as a twenty-minute conversation with the other poets sharing that evening's bill, Kate Greenstreet and Noah Eli Gordon.

To start listening to these recordings, click on the title above to be taken to our new Jason Zuzga author page.

Happy Birthday, John Cage!

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 23:40:50 EDT

PennSound and Jacket2 would like to join the worldwide chorus of well-wishers celebrating what would have been John Cage's 100th birthday, and we've got recordings and texts, both old and new, for you to enjoy.

First, here's a short PennSound playlist of Cage-related resources, which includes everything from Cage's own writings, poetry and performance inspired by Cage, excerpts from conversations and interviews in which poets discuss Cage's influence on their work, and even full-length lectures by noted Cage scholars:

Jerry Rothenberg reads Cage's "Lecture on Nothing" (2:10): MP3

Marjorie Perloff's talk, "Watchman, Spy and Dead Man: Frank O' Hara, Jasper Johns, and John Cage in the Sixties" (1:01:24): MP3

Perloff discusses "The Poetics of Indeterminacy" and John Cage (15:02): MP3

Chris Funkhouser discusses John Cage and Jackson Mac Low's poetry (1:28): MP3

Bruce Andrews discusses John Cage (1:47): MP3

Joan Retallack's lecture, "John Cage's Anarchic Harmony: A Poethical Wager" (55:16): MP3

Danny Snelson discusses Cage's Cartridge Music (5:21): MP3

Anne Waldman reads from "Pieces of an Hour (Dear John Cage...)" (5:45): MP3

Jackson Mac Low and Ann Tardos perform "Phoneme Dance; in Memoriam John Cage" (5:05): MP3

Ron Silliman on John Cage's influence (2:57): MP3

Meanwhile, over at Jacket2, we have two very exciting new articles which approach Cage and his work from different angles. Jena Osman frames the online "textual instrument" NewsReader through Cage's I-VI in "Playing the World", while in "Hidden harmonies in John Cage's 'Empty Words,'" Dawn Akemi Sueoka ably balances mycology and linguistics as she explores Cage's deconstruction of Henry David Thoreau's journals.

PoemTalk 57: on Gregory Djanikian's "Armenian Pastoral, 1915"

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 12:23:31 EDT

Today we're launching the fifty-seventh episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, in which the poem up for discussion is Gregory Djanikian's "Armenian Pastoral, 1915," taken from his 2007 collection, So I Will Till the Ground. For this program, host Al Filreis is joined by Peter Balakian, John Timpane and Jamie-Lee Josselyn.

In his write-up of the episode on the PoemTalk blog on Jacket2, Filreis begins by giving a little background on the poem itself and the event that yielded the recording to which the panel is responding: "When Gregory Djanikian's book, So I Will Till the Ground, was published in 2007, it was celebrated at the Kelly Writers House. (Later a Writers House podcast was released to give a sense of the event.) Al Filreis gave an introduction as did one of Djanikian's students, Sam Donsky. Djanikian read the hilarious 'Immigrant Picnic,' a poem from the part of the book dealing with the life of the poet's family after the genocide left many of his forebears dead and dispersed the rest to places like Alexandria, Egypt, where our poet was born. Most of the book, indeed, deals with the effects many decades later of the Armenian genocide (or 'Meds Yeghern,' the great calamity). But the first poems in So I Will Till attempt to represent mass killing. Among them is a poem Djanikian also read that night in 2007: 'Armenian Pastoral,' the poem we discuss in this episode of PoemTalk. It is more focused on the linguistic capacities of traumatic memory than any other poem in a book that is nonetheless full of consciousness about the relationship between genocide and naming." You can read the rest of Filreis' program summary, and listen to the podcast, here.

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. Thanks, as always, for listening!

An Exclusive Clip from Matt Wolf's 'I Remember: a Film About Joe Brainard'

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 12:36:40 EDT

While we've unveiled some wonderful videos over the past two weeks, our last new addition might be the most exciting yet.

Filmmaker Matt Wolf (who directed the much-lauded Wild Combination, a documentary on the life of avant-pop cellist Arthur Russell) is back with an exciting new project — I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard — a haunting and gorgeous meditation that deftly intertwines both imagery and audio to create a compelling tribute to the artist and author. We're very glad to see Brainard commemorated in such grand fashion, and happier still that Wolf was was kind enough to share an exclusive clip with PennSound. In it, longtime friend, collaborator and confidante Ron Padgett discusses Brainard's early development as a visual artist and his ability to work confidently in a wide variety of media and forms, never becoming complacent in one style.

On the special page we've put together for this video, you'll also find the film's trailer, a brief synopsis of the documentary and a link to the film's website, where you can find more information. While you're checking it out, don't forget about our main Joe Brainard author page, where you'll find a half dozen or so recordings from the 70s and 80s, including the readings from I Remember that form the backbone of Wolf's film.

Michelle Taransky: Two GChat Poems, 2012

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 17:43:50 EDT

After last week's announcements of new videos from John Wieners, James Schuyler and Lee Ann Brown, we'll keep the poetic/visual delights coming this week.

First up, we have a fascinating video short from Michelle Taransky, who offers a preview of her new collection, Sorry Was in the Woods (forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2013) with Two GChat Poems, recorded this past June. Here, she shares the poems "A Thought the Same as the Bough" and "After the Timber the," reading and typing simultaneously, and aside from being a novel presentation, it sets up several fascinating juxtapositions — between text and voice, but between the poem's visceral, organic subject matter and the disembodied technological presentation.

You can watch this short film on our Michelle Taransky author page, where you'll also find a startling array of readings, talks, introductions, panels and much, much more.

'Dome Poem NC,' a Film by Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn, 2011

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 12:30:54 EDT

Since we've been been focusing on exciting new video additions this week on PennSound Daily, there's no harm in finishing with one more. The marvelous Lee Ann Brown, who's been making fruitful use of her time in North Carolina with both the French Broad Institute (of Time and the River) and a book-length project The Spirit of Black Mountain College (co-edited by Rand Brandes) has channeled the latter into Dome Poem NC — a short film, "lecture demo and call for work," made with husband Tony Torn and inspired by R. Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes. Blending text, images, music and live action scenes, Dome Poem NC includes poems by Brown ("Geodesic Dome"), along with Erin O'Neal ("Ephemeralization"), Cheryl J Fish ("Pleasure Dome/Supine Dome"), Timothy Dyke ("Symmetry to Mound and Minds Are Bumps") and Leah Souffrant ("My Long Short Talk on Black Mountain Which Is Invisible") and invites viewers to consider what their own geodesic dome poems might be.

You'll find Dome Poem NC on PennSound's Lee Ann Brown author page, which is home to a wide variety of readings, performances, talks and films from 1988 to the present. To start watching, click the title above.

James Schuyler Reading in San Francisco, 1989

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 12:49:09 EDT

Our week of new video additions continues with the second of two new videos that we recently received from Kush and his Cloud House Poetry Archives. Once again, we've got a legendary poet reading in the Bay Area, and in this case our new video of James Schuyler reading at the San Francisco Art Institute in February 1989 augments an audio recording of the same set that's been available on our site for three years. Here's our original write-up of the event, from an October 2009 PennSound Daily entry announcing six new Schuyler recordings:

[Schuyler's November 1989 reading with John Ashbery at the 92nd Street Y] is nicely complemented by a reading several months earlier at the San Francisco Art Institute at the invitation of Bill Berkson, who celebrates the recent publication of Schuyler's Selected Poems by noting that "the appearance of virtually every one of Mr. Schuyler's books, and indeed of any poem of his in a big or little magazine, has constituted, for the poets of my generation, something on the order of an epiphany. One anticipates his poems the way one anticipates, with whatever degree of eagerness or need, the break of a new day in one's life, because Schuyler's poems are primarily accounts of what there is to be lived on particular days, and no one else does this quite the way he does in poetry." While there's quite a bit of overlap between this set and the previous one, a few standout poems unique to this reading include "February," "Light Blue Above," "Today" and "Light from Canada."

As was the case with Monday's John Wieners video — according to Charles Bernstein's recent Jacket2 commentary post — this is the only video of Schuyler available on the web, and we're equally glad to Kush that we can share it with our listeners. You'll find it on our Cloud House Poetry Archives page, as well as on our James Schuyler author page, and don't forget about "A Schuyler of Urgent Concern," the David Kaufmann-organized Jacket2 feature on the poet which we first wrote about at the start of last month.

John Wieners Reading in San Francisco, 1990

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 18:20:55 EDT

Today we're highlighting one of two new videos that come to us courtesy of Kush and his Cloud House Poetry Archives: a 1990 reading at the Poetry Center at the San Francisco State University by the legendary John Wieners.

This landmark fifty-minute recording begins with introductions by Robert Gluck and Kevin Killian, with the latter giving a rollicking encapsulation of Wieners' poetic career from his Bay Area roots to the present, observing that this is the poet's first reading there in fifteen years. Wieners' loose and intimate half-hour set, delivered in a hushed voice leaving the audience in rapt attention, includes both poems and the script of a radio play. Afterwards, he's joined by Killian for a twenty-minute interview.

As Charles Bernstein notes in a recent Jacket2 commentary post, this recording is the only video document of Wieners available on the web, and we're honored and ecstatic to be able to host it. You'll find it on our homepage for the Cloud House Poetry Archives, as well as our John Wieners author page, which is home to a dozen recordings of the poet, from his 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference set up to his final public reading at the Guggenheim Museum in 1999.

Marjorie Perloff on "The Waste Land," Norway, 2012

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 12:21:55 EDT

PennSound Daily is back after a brief hiatus (during which I moved from Ohio to Michigan), and we're starting again in the same way that we left things off a few weeks ago — with a recording from Marjorie Perloff's barnstorming summer tour of Norway.

Recorded five days after her "Modernism, Christianity, and Apocalypse" conference talk at the University of Bergen in Norway, "To Change Your Life: Wittgenstein on Christianity," this seventy-two minute presentation on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land was given (also in Bergen) for the avant-garde group Audiatur, nicely complementing their biennial Audiatur Wasteland festival, held this past April — a multi-day tribute and deconstruction of Eliot's modernist masterpiece.

This talk is made available in both audio and video formats and on PennSound's Marjorie Perloff author page, where you'll also find a wide variety of recordings from 1989 to the present.

Marjorie Perloff: "To Change Your Life: Wittgenstein on Christianity," 2012

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 19:38:20 EDT

Here's a newly-added talk by the inimitable Marjorie Perloff: "To Change Your Life: Wittgenstein on Christianity," is part of "Modernism, Christianity, and Apocalypse," a conference organized at the University of Bergen in Norway earlier this month. Here's Perloff's abstract of the presentation:

In a 1946 notebook entry reproduced in Culture and Value, Wittgenstein writes, "Christianity says, I believe, that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life." As early as 1916, in the midst of World War I, Wittgenstein regarded this changing of one's individual life as his crucial aim, even as he rejected theory, doctrine, or metalanguage of whatever kind. Again, he remarked, "Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened & will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life." I shall argue here that this view of Christian belief as personal transformation, not uncharacteristic of the Vienna of Wittgenstein's youth, signifies for an understanding of MODERNISM in the shadow of World War I.

You can listen to the complete recording on PennSound's Marjorie Perloff author page, along with many other lectures, interviews and symposia.

PoemTalk 56: Two By Reznikoff

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 11:26:55 EDT

Today sees the launch of the fifty-sixth episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, in which two poems from Charles Reznikoff are discussed: the first, "Salmon and red wine" from Inscriptions; the second "During the Second World War I was going home one night," from the series By the Well of Living and Seeing. For this program, host Al Filreis is joined by Peter Cole, Michelle Taransky and Henry Steinberg.

"One poem is something of an ars poetica," Filreis tells us in his write-up of the episode on the PoemTalk blog on Jacket2, "even though, as Peter points out, its status as metapoetry makes it an unusual effort at statement for Reznikoff, who wrote more often as he did in our second poem, which tells of — and apparently means — only what it is and tends to resist larger conclusion." You can read the rest of that program summary here, where you'll also links to the recordings from PennSound's Reznikoff author page and bibliographic contexts for both poems.

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. Thanks, as always, for listening!

"Syntax as Music": Johnson, Levi Strauss and Palmer on Zukofsky

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 17:01:37 EDT

Here's another recently-added recording from the archives of David Levi Strauss that very nicely complements the newly-segmented Louis Zukofsky reading that we highlighted in last Friday's PennSound Daily.

Recorded on April 22, 1988 at SPD, "Syntax as Music," is a nearly two-hour-long presentation on Zukofsky's life and work featuring Levi Strauss, Ronald Johnson and Michael Palmer, who read from the poet's collected writings, share their own appraisals of his work — in the process providing a broad contextualization of contemporary critical responses to it as well — before engaging their audience in a Q&A session. This fascinating document now joins the other recordings of critical symposia and discussions of Zukofsky's work catalogued in Friday's entry.

Louis Zukofsky: Buffalo '68 Reading Now Segmented

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 09:48:34 EDT

On March 4, 1968, poet Louis Zukofsky gave a fifty-minute reading at Buffalo's Albright-Knox Gallery as part of the Buffalo Festival of the Arts. While this recording has been part of PennSound's archives since we launched our Zukofsky author page in November 2008, it's only recently been segmented, and we wanted to draw our listeners' attention to it.

The evening begins with a brief introduction from Robert Creeley, who praises Zukofsky's "decisive books" for "the particular use and eminence he has in the context of American poetry," along with the way in which the poet embraces "being in his life, specifically for all that that life encompasses — either his years or moments or days or hands or feet or eyes — in a way so articulate that this sounds continually in the works that he has thus given birth to." Zukofsky begins his set with a excerpt from "A" – 12, continuing with "Catullus 63," "Song 5," "Song 24," "Song 15" and "Song 27," before returning to "A" for his final selections: that poem's 11th and 19th sections in their entirety, along with the second half of section 9.

Of course, this reading is but one of many recordings that you'll find on PennSound's Louis Zukofsky author page, including more than twenty readings, several scholarly events and discussions of Zukofsky's work and a modest collection of other poets reading his work. To start exploring, click on the title above.

Jorge Santiago Perednik: "Poetarzan" Video

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 19:13:50 EDT

Earlier this year, we noted the passing of the influential Argentinian poet, critic, translator and publisher, Jorge Santiago Perednik (1952–2011). Today, we'd like to highlight a new video of the poet that was recently added to his PennSound author page.

Shot by Ernesto Livon-Grosman, this brief video showcases Perednik reading his poem, "Poetarzan." Over at Jacket2, you'll find a recent commentary post by Charles Bernstein, which announces the video, and provides a recording of Bernstein reading Molly Wiegel's translation of the poem, along with the English-language text of it. Bernstein's also included links to earlier posts on Wiegel's translation of Perednik's The Shock of the Lenders and Other Poems (Action Books, 2012), including the translator's introduction to that volume.

Fans of Perednik's poetry will also want to check out the two recordings housed on his PennSound author page: a 1994 reading at SUNY–Buffalo and a 1998 recording from the Radio Reading Project.

Tan Lin: Two New PowerPoint Videos

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 18:02:33 EDT

We're starting this week by highlighting two of the latest additions to the PennSound archives — a pair of new PowerPoint videos by poet Tan Lin, which Charles Bernstein recently highlighted on his Jacket2 blog.

First up we have the forty-minute Bibliographic Sound Track, a stark and silent textual catalogue. That's followed by The Ph.D Sound, a fifteen minute video that mines much of the same visual material, though the sprawling and glitchy soundtrack by dj Mosco produces a very different effect for viewers. Both films were produced for Artists Space earlier this year. Video projections of the work were screened at Ludlow 38/Mini Goethe Institute on March 31, 2012 and will be shown at Artists Space on July 24, 2012.

If you enjoy these pieces, you'll also want to check out our earlier collection of three flash videos by Lin: Eleven Minute Painting (2002), Dub Version (2002) and Disco Eats Itself (Broken Disco Parameter) (2007). You'll find links to these films plus a number of readings and radio appearances on our main Tan Lin author page.

Close Listening: Matvei Yankelevich

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 16:51:43 EDT

We wanted to make sure that you didn't miss out on poet, translator and Ugly Duckling Presse editor Matvei Yankelevich's recent appearance on Charles Bernstein's Close Listening.

Recorded in New York City on June 8th of this year, Yankelevich's ninety-minute appearance is split into two programs. In the first, Yankelevich reads recent work, including selections from his 2012 United Artists collection, Alpha Donut and the new poem, "Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt." This is followed by a second program: an hour-long conversation with Bernstein that encompasses a wide array of topics, including ekphrasis, Yankelevich's Russian and American identity, the connections between samizdat and small press publishing, the origins of Ugly Duckling Presse, his design aesthetics, and much more.

PennSound's Matvei Yankelevich author page, you'll find this program along with a wide variety of other recordings, including appearances on Cross Cultural Poetics, LA Lit, Radio Poetique and A Voice Box, and readings from the Segue Series at the Bowery Poetry Club, the St. Mark's Poetry Project and more.

PoemTalk 55: on Jennifer Moxley's "The Atrophy of Private Life"

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 13:36:24 EDT

This week we released the fifty-fifth episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, which addresses Jennifer Moxley's "The Atrophy of Private Life." For this program, host Al Filreis was joined by a geographically diverse panel that included Cathy Eisenhower (from Washington, DC), Christopher Schmidt (from New York) and Jacket2's interviews editor, Katie Price (from Philadelphia). You can read Filreis' full write-up of the episode on the PoemTalk blog on Jacket2, but here's a brief tease that includes the panelists' reasons for selecting this particular poem and the opening of their conversation:

We took up [Moxley's 2007 volume] The Line because it would seem to enable us to talk about the situation or state of the poetic line — the poetic unit of language, the aesthetic or politico-aesthetic lineage — and we chose "The Atrophy of Private Life" within that book because the meta-poetic sense of "the line" would have to be at best implicit and we wanted to push ourselves to consider a possible critique of the sorry or depressed state of contemporary private life as itself a kind of line (as in ideological line) in such a way that the three senses of "line" — (1) poetic unit, (2) aesthetic lineage, where a poet fits or doesn't fit, and (3) political stance — might converge unevenly and uneasily yet revealingly.

Private life is becoming emaciated and "the sets of relations are very limited" (notes Cathy), and so aptly we are in "a house strewn with fashion magazines." The piece contends, seemingly straight out, that the destruction of the poetical has been mostly caused by the fabulously rich. The poet unmasks American bounty as actual impoverishment. Is Moxley really suggesting these things directly? Cathy says yes — and also no. "There's a lot of switching going on — with 'meaning' and 'money.'" If those two terms were "flipped," adds Cathy, "I'm not sure it would matter that much."

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. Thanks, as always, for listening!

Robert Duncan: Six Recordings from the Early 1980s

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 12:23:03 EDT

One of our most fruitful summer projects has been making our way through the archives of David Levi Strauss, which have already yielded a number of fascinating recordings, including last month's discovery of Charles Olson's infamous reading at the 1965 Berkeley Conference. Today, we're highlighting a half-dozen new recordings of Robert Duncan that have come from David's collection.

While, not surprisingly, the lectures and reading presented here cover a broad array of topics — from Walt Whitman to Emily Dickinson, Olson's Projective Verse to Robert Browning's thorny narrative epic, Sordello — they do occupy a relatively narrow chronological and geographic frame, having been recorded during the early 80s in the Bay Area. We start with two lectures at the Zen Center from February and March 1980 and what appears to be a companion talk labelled "Beginning with Sordello..." from later in the month of March. Next there's a March 1981 reading at Intersection for the Arts that includes "The Dignities," "The First," "Stimmung," "Enthralled" and "Blood's Domain," among other titles. From the summer of 1981, we have a pair of three-part lectures at the New College of San Francisco, starting with Walt Whitman and continuing with Emily Dickinson. Finally, from February 1982, also at the New College, there's a nearly two-and-a-half hour lecture "On Olson and Projective Verse."

Ashbery and Padgett Discuss O'Hara, Woodberry Poetry Room, 2011

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 14:36:38 EDT

We'll keep our focus on the New York School during this holiday-shortened week, highlighting a stellar recent addition to the PennSound archives from Harvard University's Woodberry Poetry Room.

Recorded on April 5, 2011 as part of the Woodberry's marvelous Oral History Initiative, this recording (presented as both MP3 audio and streaming video) features two New York School legends, John Ashbery and Ron Padgett discussing their friend and equally legendary colleague Frank O'Hara. Padgett begins the event, offering brief introductory comments on his discovery of O'Hara's work and his first meeting with the poet, before serving as Ashbery's interlocutor for the remainder of the evening. Given the Cambridge setting, the discussion starts with the circumstances of Ashbery and O'Hara's early friendship as Harvard undergraduates bonding over poetry. From there, Padgett and Ashbery aim to trace a chronology of the latter's relationship with the poet, leading up to his tragic and premature death in 1966.

This new conversation is only the latest addition to the PennSound archives from the Woodberry Poetry Room — along with a number of readings (from Wallace Stevens, Pierre Joris, Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley and Ashbery), we've also been honored to host two previous Oral History Initiative events devoted to Denise Levertov and Charles Olson.

New on Jacket2: A Schuyler of Urgent Concern

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 18:06:36 EDT

We wanted to draw your attention to a massive and ambitious new feature on the much-neglected New York School poet James Schuyler that we posted on Jacket2 this weekend. Organized by David Kaufmann, "A Schuyler of Urgent Concern" includes contributions from Bill Berkson, Ken Bolton, William Corbett, Maude Emerson, Andrew Epstein, Nathan Kernan, John Koethe, Marit MacArthur, David Mikics, Stephen Paul Miller, Charles North and Ron Padgett, along with Kaufmann and Schuyler himself. The range of materials gathered here is quite impressive, from substantive critical (re)appraisals to poetic personal remembrances, journal entries, brief considerations of the poet's work, and even a birthday collage poem that Schuyler sent to Berkson in the 1960s.

To start exploring this wonderful new feature, click here to visit its introduction / table of contents page, and to dig even deeper, don't forget our own James Schuyler author page or Pam Brown's earlier Jacket feature on Schuyler from issue #29 (2006).

Gary Barwin: Selected Works 1994-2012 and J2 Interview

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 13:24:45 EDT

This week comes to a close with a one-two punch from Canadian poet, composer and sonic provocateur Gary Barwin, with new content posted on both PennSound and Jacket2.

First, we're very happy to unveil Barwin's Selected Works 1994-2012: a career-spanning collection of twenty-one tracks organized by the poet that includes collaborations with arraymusic, The Fires of Tonawanda, Laura Pin, Kalvos Komposer Kombat Ensemble, Geof Huth and Gregory Betts, along with a number of solo tracks. From the eerie woodwind percolations of "Psalm" to the blooming vocoder hymn "Future Moons," the deconstructed vocal fugue, "Semi-colon" or the skewed and funky "Dance inside the Huthmouth," there's something here for every listener here. We're very happy to be able to present these wonderful recordings, and hope to be able to add a few videos in the near future.

Meanwhile, over at Jacket2, we've just released the latest installment of a.rawlings' Sound, poetry feature: "'R's Nova: Where does the [unintelligible] come from?", a 2011 conversation at the Niagara Artists Centre, St. Catherine's, Ontario, between Jaap Blonk, Barwin and Gregory Betts, which is augmented with several video excerpts from the interview. This is the penultimate installment of rawlings' ambitous feature, which has also included conversations between Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl and Cris Costa, Maja Jantar and Oana Avasilichioaei, and Leevi Lehto and Carmel Purkis.

PoemTalk 54: on Ron Silliman's "You"

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 07:12:28 EDT

Today, we release the fifty-fourth episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series: a discussion of two sections from Ron Silliman's "You." Host Al Filreis — who was ably replaced for this program by Michelle Taransky — has written-up of the new show, which also featured Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Bob Perelman and Frank Sherlock, on the PoemTalk blog on Jacket2. Here's how he begins:

It's 1995. January 1. Ron Silliman, who had carefully planned this daily year-long writing project, begins to write the first of what will be 52 sections of a series going under a title "You." He worries about the War in Chechnya, and writes a sentence on that, and about acid rain, and that gets a sentence. He remembers his dreams. He overhears intellectual coffeeshop talk. It's cold outside.

This would be the 25th book of The Alphabet; in the Alabama edition of this major assemblage, twenty-five years in the making, "You" begins on p. 903, a long way in. Fifty-two sections, one for every week of 1995, each consisting of seven daily prose paragraphs, typically one, two or three sentences each. You write what you see, what you overhear, what news local (floods) or world (wars) occurs to you or impresses you, what you remember, what you know or think you know during these days. In one sense, "You" is the diary in New Sentences of a year. And it happens to have been a crucial annum for Silliman, who moved from San Francisco to Philadelphia. In section XVII (by our count, this would have been early May), "You" marks the poet's final week as a resident of the Bay Area. Certain birds (will you miss them?) wake him. Floppy disks might need to be copied (to secure files?) but aren't. Would Philly be a haven for you, such a bookish person? "Last chance to buy books." (Are there no good bookstores where you're going?) "To the question, 'Is your house lined with books,' I reply. 'No — stacked.'" Would the move from a region and a community that had productively tolerated — and also specifically encouraged — the emergence of a poetic style thwart or disorient the maker of these sentences? Section XVIII, dedicated to "Bob and Francie" (that would be Bob Perelman and Francie Shaw), locates Bay Area friends who'd gone East ahead of you. Despite such indications of continuity and familiarity — and despite the year-long project that must go on — you find a new landscape ("A cloudless sky but for the power plant. An old small town at the center of this development.") and a certain new anxiety over aesthetic belonging. Can a so-called "language poet" thrive in "P=H=I=L=A=D=E=L=P=H=I=A"?

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. Thanks, as always, for listening!

Phillipe Beck: New Author Page

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 13:57:39 EDT

We continue our recent focus on international content — which includes new postings on Haroldo de Campos, François Sarhan's poetry videos and last week's new Cross Cultural Poetics programs — with a new PennSound author page for French poet and philosopher Philippe Beck.

Beck's page is anchored by two videos from a reading that took place at New York's Empire State College on April 20, 2011. First up is a forty-eight minute bilingual reading from Poésies didactiques (Didactic Poetry, published by Théâtre typographique in 2001) with Nicola Martinez providing English translations of Beck's poetry. This is followed by a half-hour English-language discussion of Beck's writing and inspirations, featuring both poet and translator.

To watch both of these videos, click on the title above to be taken to our Philippe Beck author page.

Cross Cultural Poetics: Six New Programs

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 13:45:48 EDT

We're bringing this week to a close with a new addition to our already-venerable Cross Cultural Poetics series page: the six most-recent programs from Leonard Schwartz's radio juggernaut, which serve as a fine representation of the show's imaginative breadth.

First up, is episode #252, "Autoimmunity," where Rodrigo Toscano and Eleni Stecopoulos read from their latest books (Deck of Deeds and Armies of Compassion, respectively). They're followed by episode #253, "Celan/Bronk," which begins with Pierre Joris discussing his translation of Paul Celan's The Meridian: Final Version — Drafts — Materials, followed by Schwartz reading selections from William Bronk's Bursts of Light: the collected later poems and composer Jonathon Newell, who discusses his recent piece, "String Quartet for Ballet Inspired by Poems by William Bronk." The full hour of episode #254, "Commonwealth," is devoted to political philospher Michael Hardt, who discusses Commonwealth, the final book in his and Antonio Negri's trilogy that also includes Empire and Multitude.

We shift back to the musical mode for episode #255, "Butterfly/Borges," in which Peter Kazaras discusses his recent staging of Madama Butterfly with the Seattle Opera, followed by Suzanne Jill Levine, translator of Jorge Luis Borges' Poems of The Night. Next, in episode #256, "California," Stephen Motika discusses Western Practice, his new book inspired by maverick American composer Harry Partch, while Gillian Conoley reads from her chapbook, An Oh A Sky A Fabric An Undertow. Finally, in episode #257, "The Page," Paul Vangelisti discusses his work on Piercing The Page: Selected Poems of Antonio Porta, and Murat Nemet-Nejat reads from his new collection, The Spiritual Life of Replicants.

You can listen to all of these programs (and the previous 251) on PennSound's Cross Cultural Poetics series page.

Many Thanks to Jeff Boruszak!

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 20:40:32 EDT

Now that I've finally made it home (after an unexpected day-long layover in Atlanta), I wanted to take the time to thank Jeff Boruszak for his wonderful PennSound Daily contributions in my absence. Jeff's been an indispensable member of the PennSound team since he started as my apprentice during the Spring 2010 semester, and since then he's worked for us continuously as a summer intern, workstudy and whatever other titles we've come up with. Though Jeff will be leaving the temperate confines of Philadelphia this August to begin doctoral studies at UT Austin, we're very glad that he'll maintain his affiliation with the site (which frankly wouldn't be the same without him).

In addition to being a tireless digitizer and editor of poetry audio, Jeff's also a talented young poet, and I wholeheartedly suggest that you check out his recent recording as part of the Principal Hand Presents Reading Series, which include the epic techno-litany "[[WIKI]]," the meta-masturbatory "Poem for a Poet's Poet," the twin-poems "Weather" and "Whether," the Pound-channelling "Imitating Through Canto III," "#twitterpoem" and a non-rhyming limerick written at the tender age of sixteen.

PennSound Radio Turns 0.5

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 13:12:24 EDT

This weekend marks the six month anniversary of PennSound Radio. It's been wonderful working with PennSound Radio's Director Steve McLaughlin (also the Podcast Editor at Jacket2, as well as the coordinator for the Principal Hand Presents Reading Series) over this time, and I'd like to mark our anniversary with the announcement of a new permanent program in our rotation. "NewAtPennSound" will consist of a constantly rotating selection of the newest material to be added to our archive. NewAtPennSound can be heard at noon every day of the week. And afterwards be sure to stay for our current featured program, "Allen Ginsberg Reading at Naropa" at 1:00 PM — these fabulous recordings are not in our PennSound archive, so tune in and be sure not to miss them! We've been constantly expanding our selection of material these past few months, so both newcomers and faithful listeners will have something new to hear.

To listen to PennSound Radio, you can either use iTunes by clicking on the "LISTEN NOW" button on the PennSound Radio page, or download the free TuneIn app on your smartphone or tablet, and take the programs with you wherever you go. Since the start of PennSound Radio, we've also launched a Facebook page, a Twitter Account, and a Tumblr, through which you can follow PennSound Radio's programming and keep up with our latest developments. We have more new programs and exciting features in the works, so be sure to listen in and follow us! Thanks for tuning in!

— Jeff Boruszak

New Full-Book Readings by Lisa Samuels and Lewis Warsh

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 10:50:31 EDT

Today we're happy to release two new sets of recordings, both two-disc CD releases, and both complete readings of books.

First is Lisa Samuels' Tomorrowland (Shearsman Books, 2009). The CD comes to us from Deep Surface Productions, and was released just this year. The recordings themselves are the sections of the book-length poem, with soundscapes overlaid. From Lisa Samuels in the jacket copy:

For the soundscapes I improvised piano and voice as well as playing instruments in alternate ways: the viola with a glass fountain pen, the thumb piano with a viola bow, the ukelele for drumming and fretting and as a resonant chamber for voice. Tim Page recorded everything, adding background vocals, guitar chords, violin and bass notes. Our last recording was an audio walk in the city, playing bridges, grates, and leaves.

Second is perennial favorite Lewis Warsh (shown at left), reading The Origin of the World (Creative Arts Book Company, 2001). The CD itself comes from a live reading of the poem at the Parkside Lounge in New York City, on March 26, 2002. It was read as part of The Long Poem Project, and the CD itself is produced in a collaboration between Deerhead Records and Ugly Duckling Presse (whose Matvei Yankelevich is also featured this week in the newest installment of PennSound co-founder Charles Bernstein's long-running series Close Listening).

There have been a number of CDs uploaded into our archive in the past year, and we love making these professionally produced recordings available to you. Other recent releases include: Michael McClure's I Like Your Eyes Liberty, There's a Word!, and Love Lion; Cynthia Genser's Chinas Comidas; and Wilmar Silva's Musicacha. And of course, this is on top classics such as the Rockdrill Recordings, and LP's like The World Record and Allen Ginsberg singing The Songs of Innocence and Experience. Keep your eyes peeled in the future for even more of these fantastic productions.

— Jeff Boruszak

CAConrad: Litter Reading Series and After-Dinner Poems (with Frank Sherlock), 2012

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 16:12:58 EDT

While I'm traveling with my partner Jennifer this week, I wanted to file one last PennSound Daily post before the Harriet-feted Jeff Boruszak takes over.

No trip that begins with a 7:00 AM flight gets off to a gentle or auspicious start, and while our exhaustion was compounded by having to kill five hours before we could get into our hotel room, we were excited at the prospect of seeing CAConrad read in the East Village as part of the Litter reading series later that evening. A quick nap, a little more caffeine and were were on our way!

This was the second-ever event for the Litter reading series, and the bill also included novelist Michael Cunningham, poets Stephanie Gray and Chad Frisbee and Mongolian activist/poet Byambakhuu Mike Darinchuluun. In this twenty-five minute set, Conrad read primarily from his latest book, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, sharing both his somatic exercises and the resulting poems while bathed in the light of a mirror ball (turned on at his request), before closing with selections from The Book of Frank.

The Litter event isn't the only new Conrad-centric recording up on the site today. Earlier this spring while I was visiting Philadelphia, I had the pleasure of a wonderful dinner with both Conrad and Frank Sherlock. Afterwards, warmed by good food and a lot of red wine, I set up my portable recorder and invited both poets to read a few pieces for PennSound. Conrad chose to read his recent chapbook, MUGGED into Poetry, while Frank shared a few rousing recent poems inspired by the Occupy movement: "Great Meetings in History (Zizek Remix)" and "Love Letter, November 15."

To listen to all of the recordings mentioned above, click on the poets' names.

Charles Olson at the Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 12:57:28 EDT

Once again, I'm happy to turn the PennSound Daily reins over to the indispensable Jeff Boruszak, who tells us about the latest rare treasure he's unearthed. Stay tuned for more posts from Jeff next week, as I've asked him to cover for me while I'll be traveling:

As we end the week, we're proud to announce a new recording found in the collection of tapes sent to us by David Levi Strauss — the legendary reading given by Charles Olson at the Berkeley Poetry Conference on the night of July 23, 1965. A transcript of this reading was subsequently created by Zoe Brown, and published under the title "Charles Olson Reading at Berkeley" by Coyote Press in 1966.

Fueled by a bottle of liquor given to him by audience member Lew Welch, Olson delivers an explosive reading over the course of three-plus hours. Part performance, part address, part conversation, part autobiography, and part drunken rant, this is without a doubt one of Olson's great readings. Ostensibly, he reads from the following poems: "The Ring of" from In Cold Hell In Thicket; "An Ode on the Nativity" from In Cold Hell in Thicket (and as Olson notes, this is the first public reading of the poem — he previously hated it, but at Robert Creeley's insistence re-read it that morning and changed his mind); parts of Letters 5, 2, 9, and 10 from The Maximus Poems; and finally "On first Looking out through Juan de la Cosa's Eyes" from The Maximus Poems.

The recording also features a who's who of poets at the time interacting with Olson — besides Welch, Olson is introduced by Robert Duncan (who leaves halfway through the lengthy reading), and talks to Allen Ginsberg , Ed Sanders, and Robert Creeley, among others (most often responding to their repeated requests to continue reading poems). Olson talks about everything from his life in Worcester, Massachusetts, to his travels in Rome, presidents, politics, writing, publishing, performance, how many women he's had in bed with him at one time, and the different terms for "cod" in Portuguese and Italian.

Despite his constant attempts to continue the reading, Olson is eventually told that the building the reading is held in will close in 20 minutes — the recording continues for another 30 minutes and cuts out after Olson has declared the reading over, but continues to read poems and tell stories.

As Duncan says at the beginning of his introduction, "The man I am introducing tonight is a visibly large man." The spirit of this — of everything large about Olson, whether it be The Maximus Poems, his Projective Verse, his personality, or his profound effect on poetry in the past half-century, is contained in this monumental reading that is so expansive it defies adequate summation in the PennSound Daily. So take the time this weekend to listen to one of PennSound's true jewels.

Poetry Videos by Francois Sarhan, 2012

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 10:42:01 EDT

Today, we're highlighting four new author pages for contemporary French poets, each anchored by an intimate video reading filmed this year in Paris by "composer and occasional author, encyclopedist, movie maker, stage director and performer," François Sarhan.

First up, we have Marie-Louise Chapelle sharing selections from Pronouncé second (Flammarion, 2010). Next is Anne Portugal, reading from la formule flirt (P.O.L., 2010). She's followed by Jacques Roubaud, who reads excerpts from his recent collection, La forme d'une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le coeur des humains: Cent cinquante poèmes, 1991-1998 (Éditions Gallimard). Finally, Claude Royet-Journoud brings things to a close with "A la ressemblance des bêtes" from Théorie des prépositions (P.O.L.), "Kardia" and "Asservissement de l'air à son vacarme."

Charles Bernstein, who was responsible for bringing these recordings to the site, recently announced these films on Jacket2, and what's particularly wonderful here is that it marks the PennSound début for three of the four poets (Chapelle, Roubaud and Portugal). You can watch these videos on the individual authors' pages by clicking their names above.

Jerome Rothenberg: "Poems and Poetics" at Jacket2

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 12:29:34 EDT

We couldn't be happier to formally announce today that the legendary Jerome Rothenberg has joined Jacket2's roster of commentators, migrating his wonderful "Poems and Poetics" blog from Blogger to our site.

Al Filreis made the announcement today on his own J2 commentary page, and Jerry's most recent post — "From America a Prophecy: Anthology as Collage (Dekanawideh, Whitman, Pound, Stein)" — is front and center on the Jacket2 homepage. You'll find a number of earlier recent entries on his "Poems and Poetics" commentary home, and the complete four-year archive of Blogger posts has been crosslinked there as well.

From his earliest publications as poet, translator and anthologist more than half a century ago, Jerry Rothenberg has redefined the way in which the world thinks about poetry and poetics, and so we're immensely proud to be able to share his latest writings with our readers.

Haroldo de Campos: New Author Page

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 19:39:31 EDT

We're closing the week out with a new author page for poesia concreta pioneer, Haroldo de Campos, which is anchored by a 2002 video from the Guggenheim Museum celebrating his life and work. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Brazil: Body and Soul, this January 12, 2002 event featured both performances and discussion of de Campos' work by a wide variety of poets, translators and critics.

The video begins with introductory comments by Pablo Helguera and organizer Sergio Bessa, who are followed by a staging of de Campos' 1950 poem/play "Auto do Possesso (Act of the Possessed)," translated by Odile Cisneros and directed by Cynthia Croot. Craig Dworkin is next, reading his translation of "Signantia quasi coelum / signância quase céu," follwed by a brief set by Cisneros, who reads her translations. The performances conclude with Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein reading Bessa's translation of "Finismundo," after which Perloff and Bernstein take part in a panel discussion moderated by Bessa.

On our Haroldo de Campos author page, you'll also find a link to Bernstein's 2003 essay "De Campos Thou Art Translated (Knot)", first published in the Poetry Society of America's Crosscurrents.

Michael S. Hennessey: PIPIRL Reading, 2012

Wed, 30 May 2012 12:38:31 EDT

I'm very happy to welcome Jeff Boruszak back to PennSound Daily, as well as quite flattered, since he's written up the latest addition to my own PennSound author page:

Hopefully you enjoyed Monday's extraordinary announcement of the recovery and release of Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman's "Memorial Day" — to follow it up I'd like to highlight the man who made this recording available: Michael S. Hennessey, Editor of PennSound and (with Julia Bloch) Jacket2, and the usual author of these dailies that you read week in and week out.

One of the newest additions to the site is a recording of Mike's from just last week, from the Post-Internet People Reading in Real Life Series in Cincinnati (where for the past few years Mike has been tirelessly recording events). The reading itself consists of a series of new poems, all written in the past year — one so new, as Mike notes, that it was finished before the car ride to the event. These poems: "Suspended," "Dearest Infernal," "My New Mode is Absence," "When They'll Find Out," "Disappear," "Reply Witheld," "Try Listening Low," "Any Day of the Week," "All Beset," "Delete But Don't Forget," and "Out of Time / Without" are a superb blend of musicality, technologies old and new, and a roving camera taking snapshots of both images and language.

On Mike's author page you'll also find a number of creative and critical recordings, including his first PoemTalk appearance earlier this year (on Tom Raworth's "Errory"), his presentation at Poetry in 1960 - A Symposium (on A New Folder edited by Daisy Aldan), readings from a number of Cincinnati events, and appearances on some of PennSound's longest running, most extensive, and most robust series: MLA Offsite, Bon Mot/ley, and Cross Cultural Poetics. I also have to highlight the earliest recording of Mike that we have — a 2008 reading at the Chapterhouse Cafe in Philadelphia. I was actually at this reading (my second in Philly) long before I knew Mike, and when I knew of PennSound only as "this really cool website I found out about in my Charles Bernstein class last semester."

I can say with the utmost confidence that PennSound would not be what it is if not for Mike's endless efforts over the past several years. We have him to thank not just for "Memorial Day," but for a majority of our site. Thank you Mike, and to our readers, thanks for listening!

Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman, "Memorial Day," 1971

Mon, 28 May 2012 20:12:23 EDT

Today at PennSound we're marking the Memorial Day holiday in a distinctly poetic way, by unveiling a long lost recording of Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman's "Memorial Day" from a May 5, 1971 reading at the Saint Mark's Poetry Project.

This new addition to the PennSound archives is notable not only because "Memorial Day" is a landmark collaboration between two of the New York School's finest poets, but also due to the rarity of the recording. Berrigan and Waldman only read the poem together and in its entirety once — in fact, "Memorial Day" was composed specifically for their joint reading in the spring of 1971 — and while the event was recorded, it would seem that the tape had been missing for several decades, presumably lost forever.

To honor this occasion, I've posted a brief essay, "Recovering 'Memorial Day,'" at Jacket2, which is both a rumination on the poem itself and a retelling of its being lost and found again in the reel-to-reel tape collection of Robert Creeley. To listen to the recording directly, you can click on the title above.

Poetry Communities and the Individual Talent, 2012

Fri, 25 May 2012 15:58:28 EDT

Here's something to keep you happily-occupied all weekend long: complete audio and video coverage of last month's Poetry Communities and the Individual Talent conference at the Kelly Writers House.

Organized by Katie. Price and Jonathan Fedors, Poetry Communities and the Individual Talent "brings together prominent and emerging scholars in the field of 20th and 21st century poetry and poetics to discuss the role that community plays in how poetry is received, circulated, and understood." The two-day conference included a wide array panels, including "Revising Historical Trajectories," "Theory and Practice of Community," "Resisting Communities," "Othering Self-Construction," "Complicating Post-War Reputations" and "Communities of Print Culture." Participants included Adeena Karasick, Al Filreis, Craig Dworkin, Charles Bernstein, Sarah Dowling and Bob Perelman, among many others. Also included on our Poetry Communities and the Individual Talent page is a link to the conference blog, where you'll find more information on the participants and proceedings.

PoemTalk 53: on Joan Retallack's "Not a Cage"

Wed, 23 May 2012 00:00:28 EDT

Today, we release the fifty-third episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series. Here's the opening of host Al Filreis' write-up of the new show from the PoemTalk blog on Jacket2:

One day Joan Retallack decided it was time to discard some books and journals from her personal library. Among them were Martin Buber's I and Thou; a collection of short stories by David Kranes (Utah Press, 1979) called Hunters in the Snow; a 1974 volume of poems by Richard Howard; a published interview with Rita Dove; 1981 issues of The Socialist Review and Georgia Review; an issue of the Chicago Review that included an important line of Dante; books of poetry by Maxine Kumin, Ai, Burt Hatlen and Thomas McGrath; a 1988 number of Gargoyle magazine in which was published a poem by Angel Gonzalez beginning "The most obscure things have already been said"; Nuns and Soldiers by Iris Murdoch; Explanation and Understanding by Georg Henrik von Wright (Cornell, 1971); and others. This act of elimination, which on the contrary turned out to be a recycling and an archiving, produced a poem she came to call "Not a Cage," after John Cage. Here is what the poet wrote to a colleague about this work:

All the language in it is from books I was culling from the library. I made lists of sentences and phrases from beginnings and endings of books. I was culling a lot, so there were many more beginnings and endings on [my] yellow pad than ultimately went into the poem. I didn't change any words or orders of words within the units I drew from the books, but did decide the length of each. The poem was composed with a combination of chance and intuitive composition on my part. "Not a cage" was a phrase that happened to be at one of the critical sites in one of the books.

Retallack deemed the compositional process to be Cagean, surely, from the start, and yet she found "Not a cage" (in a poem by Richard Howard) using the procedure. All the talkers this time — Danny Snelson, Jena Osman, and Jonathan Monroe — took this to be remarkable and instructive and (differently) pleasurable.

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. Thanks, as always, for listening!

Cy Press Reading Series: Debrah Morkun and Catherine Wagner, 2012

Mon, 21 May 2012 00:08:55 EDT

The latest addition to the PennSound archives comes from Cincinnati's Cy Press Reading Series, organized by Dana Ward and features one local poet (Catherine Wagner) and one who's making her way across the country on a reading tour (Philadelphia's Debrah Morkun).

Morkun kicked things off, reading from a number of sources — including her two collections, Projection Machine (2010) and The Ida Pingala (2011), the chapbook, Hera Calf Memory Tapes (2011) — to create a seamless set. We've created a new PennSound author page for Morkun, where you'll find this reading along with 2011 sets from the Whenever We Feel Like It series and Live at the Writers House.

Wagner was up next, with a twenty-five minute set drawn exclusively from her forthcoming collection (and City Lights debut) Nervous Device, and aside from a brief 2011 recording from Alan Golding's House during the Louisville Conference, this is the first preview PennSound listeners will get of this new material. Of course, there are a wide variety of readings and discussions going back as far as 2005 on Wagner's PennSound author page that await your rapt attention.

Finally, don't forget to check out PennSound's Cy Press series page, where you'll find three previous readings from Stephanie Young, Brandon Brown, Arlo Quint, John Coletti, cris cheek and Thom Donovan.

Ray DiPalma: KWH Reading and Studio 111 Session, 2012

Fri, 18 May 2012 16:16:09 EDT

To close out the week, we're turning the PennSound Daily reins over to the inimitable Jeff Boruszak, who tells us about one of his latest projects for the site:

Last month, Ray DiPalma visited Philadelphia over the course of two days, and we are happy to announce that 66 new recordings from his visit are now available on PennSound.

First up is DiPalma's April 2nd reading at the Kelly Writers House. After an introduction from PennSound co-founder Charles Bernstein, DiPalma gave a lengthy reading from a number of his most recent works. After opening with a poem from the "An August Daybook" section of The Ancient Use of Stone: Journals and Daybooks 1998-2008 (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2009), DiPalma read excerpts from Further Apocrypha (Pie in the Sky Press, 2009), Caper (ML & NLF, 2006), and Pensieri (Echo Park Press, 2009), before returning to more excerpts from his daybooks. The latter three titles were all issued in limited runs (as DiPalma mentions, Further Apocrypha was issued in a single edition of 40 copies), and we couldn't be more pleased to make these poems available online.

Following the reading, there was a short Question and Answer session with UPenn students and friends of the Kelly Writers House, where DiPalma discussed, among other topics, the genre of the daybook, Samuel Beckett, and his robust and unique reading style. Alongside these segmented recordings, there is a complete audio recording of the event, over an hour in length, and a video recording made possible by KWH-TV reruns.

The next day, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ray DiPalma in Studio 111 at 3808 Walnut for a recording session. There, DiPalma read excerpts from two sequences from a recent and yet-unpublished manuscript: Instrumentaria and Aurora. It is with the utmost excitement that we make these wonderful poems available.

Of course, while listening to the plethora of new material on DiPalma's author page, don't forget to browse the recordings that we already had for your perusal — including a late nineties visit to the Kelly Writers House, a number of appearances at the Segue Series, and a reading at the Anthology Film Archives dating back to 1977. As always, thanks for listening!

Cloud House Poetry Archives: New Videos of Rich, Cassady, Scalapino, Retallack

Wed, 16 May 2012 08:43:05 EDT

On Monday, we promised to discuss more exciting video additions to the PennSound archives, and so today we're very happy to present some of the latest recordings to appear as part of our partnership with San Francisco's legendary Kush and his Cloud House Poetry Archives: a pair of 2006 recordings from Adrienne Rich and Carolyn Cassady, along with more recent sets from Leslie Scalapino and Joan Retallack.

Those still reeling from the recent death of Adrienne Rich (who would've turned 83 today) will relish this video of a brief reading by the poet at the San Francisco State University from the ceremony honoring Rich's 2004 volume, The School Among the Ruins, winner of the Poetry Center Book Award. While Rich's set draws largely from that volume, current political events prompted her to begin with two older poems, "Deportations" and "And Now."

From the same year, we also have a video of Carolyn Cassady's December 30th appearance at San Francisco's Beat Museum, during which she gives a small talk honoring Neurotica publisher Jay Landesman, reads poetry from her friends, and takes part in a brief Q&A session. Also in attendance at this event are Cassady's three children Cathleen, Jami and John Allen Cassady, along with Al Hinkle and several other friends of the family from their Beat Generation years.

Next, we jump ahead four years for another marvelous and poignant video from the Bay Area — namely Leslie Scalapino's last public reading, recorded on March 20, 2010 at San Francisco's Small Press Traffic, just two months before her passing on May 28th of that year. Scalapino's legacy is honored in our last new video — Joan Retallack's May 27, 2011 talk at Small Press Traffic, the inaugural Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics.

On PennSound's Cloud House Poetry Archives homepage, you'll find all of these recordings, along with a number of other historic videos including tributes to Larry Eigner and Ed Dorn, as well as readings by Charles Bernstein, Robin Blaser and Jack Hirschman. To start viewing these wonderful documents, click on the title above.

New "Public Access Poetry" Videos on PennSound

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:56:07 EDT

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.

"Gertrude Stein's War Years: Setting the Record Straight" on Jacket2

Thu, 10 May 2012 18:17:28 EDT

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.

New Segue Series Readings from the Bowery Poetry Club

Tue, 08 May 2012 01:49:02 EDT

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.

PoemTalk 52: on Cole Swensen's "If a Garden of Numbers"

Thu, 03 May 2012 17:12:04 EDT

Today, we release the fifty-second episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series. Here's the opening of host Al Filreis' write-up of the new show from the PoemTalk blog on Jacket2:

Cole Swensen's book Ours is a sequence of poems — or is perhaps best described as a poetic project. Andre Le Nôtre (1613-1700) was the principal gardener of King Louis XIV; he designed and led the construction of the park of the Palace of Versailles. The poems in Swensen's book indicate a range of interests in Le Nôtre's work and beyond, but his Gardens of the Chateau de Vaux-le-Vicomte are of special interest, and they are the topic of the poem we chose to discuss, "If a Garden of Numbers." The poem, and our talk about it, raised a number of compelling questions. Are historical research and the lyric compatible? (Yes, we agreed. But what are the varieties of integrating the two? And how does a scholarly methodology knowingly bespeak what was once super-elite art — namely, Le Nôtre's?) Can the hyper-rational garden be truly "ours," ever? (The master landscape designer's name is a pun on that possessive form of liberalism's favorite pronoun from the French Revolution onward. This pun is a key to understanding Swensen's poem and indeed the whole book.) If — to quote Swensen channeling Louis XIV — "it was an age that felt that nature could be corrected," does such an urge extend to the formalities of poetry? If Le Nôtre "couldn't stand views that end," what effect should that have on a poetics? The idea that the garden includes everything you can see from the garden has some kind of political valence: progressive if what's beyond the garden can and must be welcomed in, if natural emigration is really possible (by virtue of its design, notwithstanding the exclusivity of its original patron); conservative if Le Nôtre's act of inclusion colonizes nature beyond its border. If the latter, then is form as a kind of artifice inherently conservative? Le Nôtre's "jar in Tennessee" problem means that form takes dominion everywhere, even if the slovenly wilderness grows up all around it. One needn't beat it back. One need only place the form in its midst. Finally: If art is an idea as distinct from nature, and if the "real exceeds the ideal," then can a poem of ideas about nature be aligned with the real? We're back to hyper-rationality. These gardens are beautifully excessive, and so — Swensen seems to contend, but arguably — they get at humanity because indeed they produce a version of reality rather than (merely) ideality. Subjectivity is affirmed. Every slight shift in perspective matters a great deal. The garden (the poem too?) is a way of making nature account for the mind.

Ann Seaton, Michelle Taransky, and Gregory Djanikian joined Al Filreis for this discussion. We went hard at all the questions enumerated above, expressing doubts about the progressive claim implicit in the pun on "ours." We pondered the aesthetics and ethics of the garden that includes everything one can see from the garden. Annie offered a political reading, and the others responded, both agreeing and pressing back. Fortunately for us and for PoemTalk listeners, Cole Swensen was interviewed about this work by Leonard Schwartz for one of his "Cross-Cultural Poetics" shows, and so our varying interpretations can benefit from a rich context of resources and responses.

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. Thanks, as always, for listening!

Caroline Bergvall: Charles Bernstein Class Visit, 2012

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 23:41:20 EDT

Here's one of the latest additions to the PennSound archives: a ninety-minute recording of Caroline Bergvall's visit to Charles Bernstein's experimental writing seminar on "constraints and collaborations" last Monday.

Bergvall begins by briefly discussing the role of transcription in her recent collection, Meddle English. "I engage with exercises of transcription in this book and otherwise ... it's a form of thinking about documents that I find very interesting. Some of the documents in this book ... deal with transcription and deal with a way of rethinking documents, and from then what are you going to do with those documents, how are you going to address your approach to the documents?" Specifically, she discusses the role of failure and restriction in her writing, as well as her experiments with film and recorded sound, focusing on "off-page environments" — "there's the textual impact, there's the methods used and there are the methods used when you move into other environments, whether there's sound recordings, whether there's sight, whether it's a live reading . . ." and so forth. After her opening explication, she opens the floor to questions from the students and others present, leading into a long and fascinating exchange.

You can hear this recording and many others on PennSound's Caroline Bergvall author page, and keep an eye on Jacket2, where a new discussion between Bergvall and Rozalie Hirs will close out a.rawlings' "Sound, Poetry" feature in the near future.

David Buuck: New Author Page

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 10:05:38 EDT

Our latest author page is for Bay Area poet, editor and somatic provocateur David Buuck, and is anchored by a quartet of new recordings that come to us courtesy of the marvelous Andrew Kenower of A Voice Box fame.

Our most recent addition is a 2011 set at Condensery, and this is joined by a 2010 set at Erin Morill's house and two readings from 2009 — one as part of The (New) Reading Series and the other at Books & Bookshelves. These four recordings, totaling two hours of new materials, are joined by two full-length Segue Series sets recorded at the Bowery Poetry Club in 2005 and earlier this year, as well as the 2004 MLA Offsite Reading in Philadelphia.

In our PennSound Daily announcement of last February's Segue set, we directed our listeners to check out Thom Donovan's Jacket2 commentary on the reading and it's also worth mentioning Donovan's essay, "Somatic Poetics" (also at J2), in which Buuck's work is discussed. We couldn't be happier to have Buuck's work as part of the PennSound archives, and look forward to further additions in the future.

Cross Cultural Poetics: Nine New Programs, 2012

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:59:18 EDT

We're starting this week off in grand fashion with nine new shows from Leonard Schwartz's groundbreaking radio program, Cross Cultural Poetics, including a landmark 250th episode.

We begin with Episode #243, "Zaher/Foster," broadcast on January 5, 2012, which features Maged Zaher discussing his collection Portrait of the Poet As an Engineer and Talisman House founder Ed Foster talking about the newest releases from his press. Next, from January 12th, we have Episode #244, "Dhompa/Schultz," with Tsering Wangmo Dhompa and Susan Schultz reading from their latest books, my rice tastes like the lake and Memory Cards 2010-2011, respectively.

January 17th brings us Episode #245, "In Translation," where Andrea Lingenfelter reads her translations of Zhai Yongming and Raul Zurita reads Daniel Borzutsky's translations of his own work, and translation also features into the following week's episode, "Locomotrix," where Jennifer Scappettone read her translations of Amelia Rosselli alongside Schwartz's conversation with Vit Horejs, director of the Czek Marionette Theater.

February's lone program, Episode #247, "Burning City," showcases Jed Rasula, who discusses the new anthology he coedited with Tim Conley, Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity. In March, Schwartz returned with Joseph Donahue (who read from his latest, Dissolves) and Seattle Opera Orchestra conductor Gary Thor Wedow (who discussed their recent staging of Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice) in Episode #248, "Of Voice." Two more dynamic pairings followed — playwright Jim Findley and poet Mike Basinski in Episode #249, "What the Plants Said/Trailers, and poet Charles Alexander and essayist Christopher Merrill in Episode #250, "Water and Tree" — before our new additions close with Episode #251, "Paris Views," in which Michael Joyce reads from and discusses his recent book of the same name.

You'll find hundreds of previous episodes from the series on our Cross Cultural Poetics homepage, and don't forget to keep an eye on on Jacket2, where Schwartz has been posting commentaries on shows from the Cross Cultural Poetics archives since the start of the year.

Heatstrings: Louisville Conference Reading at Alan Golding's House, 2012

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 02:08:01 EDT

Thanks to Aldon Nielsen, we're able to bring you a recording of this year's reading at Alan Golding's house, traditionally held in conjunction with the University of Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture After 1900 (which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year).

Recorded on February 25th, the informal and intimate reading includes brief sets by Norman Finkelstein (reading the work of Paul Bray), Joseph Donahue, Alan Golding (reading the work of Ed Dorn), Aldon Nielsen, Peter O'Leary, Jennifer Ruppert, Mark Scroggins, Laura Richardson and Tyrone Williams, before concluding with Finkelstein reading his own work.

You'll find segmented MP3s for this event on our Heatstrings archive homepage, along with a special sub-page for the annual readings at Golding's house. On the latter, you'll also find sets from the previous two years, which also include sets by cris cheek, Pat Clifford, Michael Davidson, Carla Harryman, Michael Heller, Cathy Wagner and Barrett Watten, among many others.

Ron Silliman: Kelly Writers House Fellows Programs, 2012

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 15:26:09 EDT

We're starting off this new week with recordings from Ron Silliman's recent tenure as one of 2012's Kelly Writers House Fellows. We're proud to be able to bring our listeners both audio and video footage from these intimate events, recorded this past March 19th and 20th.

First up, we have Silliman's Monday night reading, which featured excerpts from Ketjak and Ketjak 2's shadow text, "Carnival of Affect," along with a fifteen-minute Q&A session with the audience. As with all Kelly Writers House Fellows visits, the reading was preceded with lavish introductions from Al Filreis, Rivky Mondal and Jamie-Lee Josselyn.

The following morning, Filreis and Silliman convened for a ninety-minute conversation, which touched upon a wide variety of topics, including the role of spontaneity and obsessiveness, embodiment and disembodiment within his writing, radical pedagogy, and the influence of Pound, Williams, Stein, Marx, Cage, Eigner, Grenier and Silliman's grandmother.

Silliman was the second of this year's Kelly Writers House Fellows, following Karen Finley's February appearance, and preceding John Barth's visit later this month. You can watch and listen to the events mentioned above (all of which have been segmented into individual audio tracks) by clicking on this entry's title, and for more information on the Kelly Writers House Fellows program (including how you can see the Barth events in person or live via KWH-TV), click here.

Jerry Rothenberg Eightieth Birthday Tribute Video

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 12:52:00 EDT

Thanks to the extraordinary director and producer Colin Still (of Optic Nerve/Rockdrill Recordings/No More to Say & Nothing to Weep For: An Elegy for Allen Ginsberg 1926-1997 fame), we're very glad to be able to bring our listeners complete video coverage of the equally extraordinary Jerry Rothenberg's Eightieth Birthday Tribute, co-orgainzed by Charles Bernstein (to whom we wish a very happy birthday) and Pierre Joris at the CUNY Graduate Center last December.

Broken into four segments, the evening's event featured papers on and celebrations of Rothenberg's work by an all-star cast that included Ammiel Alcalay, Bruce Andrews, Mónica de la Torre, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Al Filreis, Michael Heller, Susan Howe, Rochelle Owens, George Economou, Carolee Schneeman, Anne Tardos, Lee Ann Brown, Anne Waldman and David Antin (whose tribute was read by Bernstein), among many others. Rothenberg closed out the evening himself with a reading.

In addition to the aforementioned videos, on the special page we've put together for this event, you'll also find links to Bernstein's announcement of the celebration on Jacket2, along with full texts of the tributes offered by Antin, Filreis, Robert Kelly, Jeffrey Robinson, George Quasha, Mark Weiss and Ernesto Livon-Grosman.

Larry Eigner: "around new sound daily means Selected Poems" (S Press, 1974)

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:34:10 EDT

One of our newest additions is a 1974 cassette by Larry Eigner, issued by Germany's S Press under the title around new sound daily means Selected Poems.

Al Filreis has more information on the recording's history over on Jacket2:

On July 1 and again on July 11 in 1974, Michael Koehler recorded Larry Eigner reading twenty-seven of his poems in Swampscott, Massachusetts. The recordings were later released by S Press, as tape number 37 in their series, under the title Larry Eigner: around new / sound daily / means: Selected Poems. A number of university libraries — and of course individuals — own copies of the recording; but it is fairly rare at this point. Among the libraries with a copy is the special collections archive at the University of Connecticut, where the tape was apparently part of the materials Cid Corman gave them to form the Corman Papers there. I located the Eigner recording in the Corman finding aid, asked the UConn librarians to copy it for us at PennSound. (Many thanks for Melissa Watterworth Batt, curator of Literary, Natural History and Rare Books Collections there.) Soon after, with permission from Richard Eigner, Larry's brother and the executor of the poet's literary estate, we digitized, uploaded and then segmented the recording into individual poems. They are now available for both streaming and downloading at PennSound's Eigner page. We wish of course to acknowledge S Press for having made this recording available originally.

In Memoriam: Adrianne Rich (1929-2012)

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:04:12 EDT

It's a very sad day in the world of poetry, as the Los Angeles Times reports that Adrienne Rich has died at the age of 82 from complications of long-term rheumatoid arthritis.

It would be difficult to list all of the accolades that Rich accumulated in the more than sixty years since her debut collection, A Change of World, was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1950, but they include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1952), the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1960), the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award (1970), the National Book Award (for Diving into the Wreck, 1974), the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1986), admission to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991), the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (1992), the Frost Medal (1992), a Academy of American Poets Fellowship (1992), a MacArthur Fellowship (colloquially known as the "genius grant," 1994), the Wallace Stevens Award (1996), the National Medal of Arts (1997), and the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award (2010). Among these, it is perhaps the penultimate honor that is the most important, as Rich refused it, citing the government's hostile policies towards culture. "I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House," she stated, "because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration . . . The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate. A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored."

This impassioned gesture serves as one very public and high-profile culmination of the process of radicalization that began in the early 1960s, as Rich, along with the nation at large, underwent tremendous cultural, political and social transformation. These preoccupations — the rights of women, the civil rights movement, stopping the war in Vietnam (and others since), ending poverty, and championing queer identity — were freely espoused in a number of celebrated volumes, including Leaflets, The Will to Change, Diving into the Wreck, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far and An Atlas of the Difficult World, and also in a prodigious body of non-fiction writing, where Rich found a second life as a groundbreaking feminist theorist. Rich's deeply-held beliefs only grew stronger in the new millennium, where she faced troubling political times with a strong faith in poetry's remediative powers. Writing in The Guardian in 2006, she evoked Shelley's oft-quoted appraisal of poets as "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," observing "I'm both a poet and one of the 'everybodies' of my country. I live with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion and social antagonism huddling together on the faultline of an empire." These sentiments were explored masterfully in later volumes such as Fox, The School Among the Ruins, Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth and her latest collection, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, and while Rich is often hailed as an exemplary feminist poet, or queer poet, or political poet, perhaps now we can all agree that we've lost an extraordinary (but otherwise adjective-less) poet.

You can listen to a variety of recordings spanning four decades on PennSound's Adrienne Rich author page, which is anchored by audio from the poet's 2005 visit to UPenn as a Kelly Writers House Fellow. In addition to the segmented tracks from her reading and morning conversation with Al Filreis, you'll also find a 2000 reading from SUNY-Buffalo, a 1985 set from Cornell University and an unidentified recording from 1974. Rich was also the subject of the second episode of the PoemTalk Podcast series, as well as PennSound Podcast #11.