As we get closer to the end of the Segue Series' spring season of readings at the Bowery Poetry Club (which will end on May 22nd), we thought we'd spend this week catching up on the four readings that had taken place in the month since our last update. Today, we're highlighting the April 10th reading featuring Laura Jaramillo and Eileen Myles.

The first reader of the afternoon was Laura Jaramillo, whose set started with her reading the majority of her most-recent publication, the chapbook, Civilian Nest (Love Among the Ruins, 2010), before wrapping up with a brief selection from a lengthy manuscript-in-progress, Midtown East / Material Girl. We've segmented this recording, and put together a new PennSound author page for Jaramillo, where you'll also find her March Emergency Series reading at the Kelly Writers House, which also featured Laura Elrick and Laura Neuman.

Eileen Myles is next, and after a loving introduction that paid tribute to the poet's badass status, she began by reading a handful of new poems, including "Your Name," "Mitten," "The Weather," "November 11th," "2008 (for Emma)," "The Nervous Entertainment (for Cathy [Opie])," "Driving at Night" and "My Box." The second part of the set was devoted to selections from Myles' soon-to-be-released book, The Inferno: a Poet's Novel. Readings from The Inferno also serve as a conclusion to Myles' 2007 Segue Series set, which is one of many recordings, interviews and videos you'll find on her PennSound author page, along with a marvelous Close Listening reading and conversation with Charles Bernstein.

Our week of new Segue Series readings continues with these April 17th sets at the Bowery Poetry Club by Tim Shaner and current Segue co-organizer Chris Alexander (who stepped in at the last minute for Bob Perelman, who was under the weather).

Shaner is introduced by his Wig co-editor (and current Segue co-organizer), Kristen Gallagher, who notes that "Tim is not well known, but a highly interesting writer, and so I'm hoping that this reading and its subsequent recording will maybe get him some attention." His set consists of a generous selection from his forthcoming anti-novel, I Hate Fiction, largely written during his time at SUNY-Buffalo pursuing his doctorate.

Next up is Alexander, who also reads from a soon-to-be-released manuscript, Panda, which draws inspiration from the protagonist of the 2008 film, Kung Fu Panda. Described by Gallagher as "a web junkie and also a theorist of what reading and writing mean in the new media world we're living in," she traces Alexander's compositional methods for the Panda project as a response to internet reactions to the film (which he still hasn't seen), boundaries of cultural property, the 2008 Panzhihua earthquake and more, concluding "this is a book that spans the last couple of years of panda discourse [...] and there's a lot more in it than Kung Fu Panda)

The third of four new Segue Series readings just added to the site features Rob Fitterman and John Yau, and was recorded on April 24th at the Bowery Poetry Club.

Rob Fitterman is introduced as "a wild ride through everything" by host, Kristen Gallagher, who then enumerates what "everything" entails: "war, shopping carts, pop music, junk language from the web, sales pitches, corporate language, Oliver Wendell Holmes, miniature golf courses," and more. She concludes by mentioning his latest work, Rob's Word Shop, where customers can buy individual letters and words from a daily menu, then have their conversations with the poet transcribed and turned into a new book. After fielding questions from prospective letter-buyers, he shifts gears to deliver a set consisting of selections from a harrowing, new manuscript-in-progress, The Holocaust Museum, including the titles, "Propaganda," "Boycotts," "The Science of Race," "Gypsies," "Uniforms," "Shoes," "Zyklon B Containers," "Mass Graves," "American Soldiers" and "Liberation."

Yau is up next, and is introduced by Chris Alexander through a series of simple, declarative statements: "John Yau wants to draw you outside your own habits. John Yau believes our job as poets might be to use every word that exists. John Yau understands there is no standard English, only a multitude of tongues we speak under the same name. . . ." Yau's set starts with "Variation on Tristan Tzara's Recipe to Make a Dadaist Poem," which appears in the just-released Esopus Magazine as part of "The Suzanne Bocanegra Recipe Card Library." He follows that up with "A Bungler Draped in Bangles Does Not a Burgler Make," "100 Poems," "On the Way to Mt. Rushmore" and "Chinese Nightengale."

This week's final new Segue Series reading from the Bowery Poetry Club was recorded this past Saturday, May 1st, and features the stellar combination of Alice Notley and Alicia Cohen.

Cohen is up first, starting with several newer poems — including "Pascale on February 23, 2010," "Tiger" and "The Sun is Always Setting" — before moving on to selections from her latest book, Debts and Obligations: "Cleaved," "Second Lithuanian Bear Boy," "Vertigo," "Riddle Poem," "The Histories," "Debt and Obligation," "California," "Tourmaline Beach," "The Limits of Knowing" and "Starry Yes."

Next comes the legendary Alice Notley, who Chris Alexander praises in his introduction for "remain[ing] in the conditional, testing the conditions she can't rest in, starting over with a new line, writing across genres, across modes, across voices, across eras, crossing out the old mind and rewriting it." She starts her set by reading from a new, "incomplete, imperfect manuscript," Voices — described as "a fiction" taking place a long time ago in a galaxy far away — which she feels compelled to read. After a lengthy, breathtaking performance, she brings the afternoon to a close, with "At Poe's Grave" from her latest book, Reason and Other Women.

If you've enjoyed these recordings, be sure to check out our Segue Series at the Bowery Poetry Club homepage, as well as our pages for the series' previous incarnations at the Ear Inn and Double Happiness, which altogether house hundreds of recordings spanning the past thirty-three years, and if you're in New York City, don't forget that Segue readings are held every Saturday afternoon at the Bowery Poetry Club. For more info, including a reading schedule, check out the Segue Foundation homepage.

Though the semester is over, we have one more PennSound Daily write-up from our marvelous apprentice, Jeff Boruszak, concerning a project he headed up from start to finish:

We're very glad to kick off a new week with an exciting addition to the PennSound archives. Poet Tony Towle — once described by John Ashbery as "the best kept secret of the New York School" — has graciously provided us with several recordings of readings from the 70s and 80s, and now segmented , these files are available on Towle's author page.

A total of seven readings have been added. Moving backwards chronologically, they are: a 1986 reading at the Blue Mountain Gallery in SoHo; a reading at the Folio Bookstore in Washington D.C. in 1976; two more readings from '76 in New York, one at Chumley's, and one at Dr. Generoisty's; a 1975 reading at Chumley's; a 1974 reading at Dr. Generosity's; and, finally, a 1973 reading at the Katonah Public Library.

Among these recordings are early readings of several poems, each changing between readings and final publications. Examples include "Starry Night," "Portraits," "Idyllic Scene," and "Australia." Also of note is a twenty-three minute recording of Towle reading his long poem, "Autobiography" at Chumley's on January 4, 1975.

We're extremely grateful to Tony Towle for providing these recordings. While you're perusing these new additions, be sure to check out the other recordings on Towle's PennSound author page, including a Segue Series Reading at the Ear Inn from 1979, and a 2002 radio broadcast from WKCR-FM in New York. Thanks for listening!

Over the past several months, we've released a number of fascinating recordings surrounding poet Robert Grenier, including audio, video and scanned images from his visit to the Kelly Writers House last fall, PoemTalk #30 in which Grenier discusses two of his favorite poems by William Carlos Williams, PoemTalk #31, concerning poet's classic Sentences, and a fall 2009 conversation between Grenier, Al Filreis, Ron Silliman and Bob Perelman largely focused on the poet's time at Harvard from 1959-1964. Earlier this week, we added a second conversation from this past March — featuring Grenier, Filreis, Charles Bernstein and Michael Waltuch — which serves as a continuation of that earlier interview.

Filreis discussed this recording in a recent blog post, observing, "Part 2 goes back a bit into the early 60s but then moves forward, covering 1965 to athe early and mid 1970s. If last time the central topic was Harvard, this time the central topic, as it emerged, was New England: New England in the specific biographical sense (Bob G.'s wanderings there, especially on trips shooting outward from Harvard) but also in the meta-geographical sense — New England as a haunt, a crucial (it would seem now, in Grenier's way of thinking) ghostly presence in his thinking and in his writerly development." He concludes, "It's a long recording (2 hours and 11 minutes) but I hope you'll find listening to it rewarding."

You can listen to this conversation and all of the recordings mentioned above on PennSound's Robert Grenier author page, where you'll also find several additional recordings spanning the past thirty-two years. Clicking on the title above to start listening.

We bring this week to a close by highlighting an exciting new author page for poet and scholar, Maggie Nelson, that went up last week. Bringing together a number of recordings that already existed in the PennSound archives, which we've segmented into more than thirty individual files, this new page offers a broad survey of Nelson's work over the past five years.

While her first two collections (Shiner and The Latest Winter) are not represented here, there are selections from her last four creative books, starting with the linked volumes, Jane: a Murder and The Red Parts — the former a book of poems, the latter a memoir, both of which address the death of Nelson's aunt at the hands of a Michigan serial killer in 1969 and the subsequent reopening of the case thirty-five years later — which factors heavily into Part A of the poet's 2007 appearance on LA-Lit, as well as one of two 2008 recordings from the Key West Literary Seminar. In addition to reading several excerpts from her memoir, Nelson shares a dozen poems from Jane: a Murder, including "The Light of the Mind (Four Dreams)," "First Photos," "Spirit," "Crank Calls" and "The Gift."

Nelson's next collection, 2007's Something Bright, Then Holes, is showcased in both recordings as well: on LA-Lit, she reads four poems, including an early version of "Morning Prayers," "Thanksgiving" and the title poem, while at KWLS, she reads "The Mute Story of November" and "A Halo Over the Hospital," which serves as an emotional center of the book. Finally, Nelson's most recent offering, Bluets — a brilliant cross-genre rumination on the color blue and much, much more — is represented by eight of its brief, numbered sections.

We couldn't be more happy to have Maggie Nelson as part of our roster of poets, and look forward to adding more recordings in the future. To listen to all of the readings mentioned above, along with a very interesting LA-Lit interview and Robert Richardson's KWLS introduction, click on this entry's headline.

Though the academic year has come to a close here at UPenn, that doesn't mean that we still don't have a number of wonderful recordings from the spring semester to share with our listeners, and this week, we'll be highlighting recently-added readings from the Kelly Writers House.

First up, we have a reading by poet Ted Greenwald, recorded April 1, 2010. The poet is introduced by his old friend (and Segue Series co-founder), Charles Bernstein, who tells the audience, "I am a great admirer of Ted Greenwald's work — he brings common American spoken English into the hightest realms of beauty."

Greenwald's set begins with "Going Into School That Day," the opening poem of his 2008 Cuneiform Press collection, 3, described by Steven Zultanski as "a long poem on love and memory, in which the next word is either a new word, or the previous word, or the previous word in a new place." He concludes with another long poem, "Anyway," and takes a few questions from the audience before wrapping up You can read the latter poem, along with a selection of other texts on Greenwald's page at the Electronic Poetry Center, including his most recent publication, the e-book, Permanent Record.

On Greenwald's PennSound author page, you'll find a wide variety of recordings, starting in 1979 with an appearance on In the American Tree (hosted by Alan Bernheimer) and the single poem, "Whiff," from The World Record: Readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, 1969-1980. Next up we have a pair of Segue Series readings at the Ear Inn in 1981 and 1987, with the former yielding a track ("from You Bet") on the 1995 compilation, Live at the Ear Inn, and there's one last Segue Series reading (this time at the Bowery Poetry Club) in 2008 as well as a 2005 Close Listening reading and conversation with Bernstein, recorded at New York City's Clocktower Studio.

This week on PennSound Daily, we're highlighting newly-added recordings from the spring semester at the Kelly Writers House. Today's event is an April 13th staging of Bob Perelman's play, The Alps, produced by Sarah Arkebauer and Michelle Taransky.

First produced in San Francisco at Studio Eremos in 1980 (alongside Kit Robinson's Collateral), and published in Hills #9 in 1983, the play is described in the original program as "a psychological fairy tale of desire, fame, love, and power. A 98-pound weakling of a narrator eventually tames the overdeveloped plot, which includes the rise and fall of a literary pedant, a student with no use for books, scenes of pastoral love, Freud's problematic sex life, and cameos by father time and the man on the street." While the original staging featured poet/actors including Bernheimer, Robinson Carla Harryman, and Stephen Rodefer, for this production, the cast consists of Jason Zuzga (Time), Violette Carb (Teacher), Katie Price (Pedestrian), Sarah Dowling (Narrator), Rivka Fogel (Woman), Max McKenna (Man), Marshall Bright (Student) and Chris Milione (Freud), along with Julia Bloch and Fogel as a chorus of Devils.

Listeners eager to read the text of the play should definitely check out The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985, where The Alps appears alongside contributions from Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Robert Duncan, Ron Padgett, Bruce Andrews, Kathy Acker and many, many more. For more on Perelman, aside from his PennSound author page, a good starting place is the Kristen Gallagher-edited Perelman feature in Jacket #39.

Since technical issues prevent us from running the last Kelly Writers House recording we'd planned on highlighting this week, instead, we bring you this pair of recordings from the Cincinnati Public Library's "Poetry in the Garden" series, which feature a number of PennSound poets.

First up, we have Norman Finkelstein's reading from April 20th, showcasing new material, including the poems, "Welcome," "Invitation," "Appointment" and "Tour."

That's followed by an April 27th group reading, organized by Dana Ward and PennSound managing editor, Michael S. Hennessey, which serves as a snapshot of the diverse array of writers at work in the Queen City. For this event, the poets proceeded in a round-robin fashion, with each reader following his set by introducing the next poet and reading a favorite poem by that author. Therefore, Ward started things off by introducing Hennessey and reading his poem, "[begin by erasing my name]." After his set, Hennessey introduced Aryanil Mukherjee and read Mukherjee's poem, "Meaning Eyes." Mukherjee followed his set by introducing Kristi Maxwell (co-curator of the Bon Mot/ley Reading Series) and reading her poem, "Log of Dead Birds." Next up was Pat Clifford, who was introduced by Maxwell (reading from his chapbook, The Embrace) and who, in turn, introduced L.A. Howe and shared an excerpt from her long poem, "Voices of the Zombie Apocalypse." Once finished, Howe brought the evening full-circle, introducing Ward and reading from his latest book, Typing "Wild Speech" before he concluded the evening with a set of new poems.

To listen to both of these events, click on the title above, and don't forget to check out the individual author pages for the poets whose names are linked, where you'll find a number of additional readings and discussions.

Today, we release the thirty-second episode of the PoemTalk Podcast Series: a discussion of Susan Howe's reading of Emily Dickinson's "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—" in her classic volume, My Emily Dickinson, making use of recordings from Charles Bernstein's LINEbreak series. Joining host Al Filreis was joined by a formidable trio of poets: Jennifer Scappettone, Marcella Durand and Jessica Lowenthal.

The panel starts by discussing the complexity of Dickinson's central conceit, with Durand pointing out the narrator's "disembodiment and objectification" — the life separated from the I — and Lowenthal adds the gun's strange anthropomorphism, including its genderedness. Filreis then asks why this poem is so important to Howe, who returns to it repeatedly in My Emily Dickinson. Scappettone offers that "[Howe] regards herself as a poet of war, but she's a woman, and throughout My Emily Dickinson, the problem of a woman enduring war in paralysis is central, so she's interested in presenting the way in which war enters the minutiae of domestic existence — this is a poem of civil war, so it's literally about a cloven, domestic scene and in that way it's sort of a metonym for a much larger conflict, and it would be a metonym for the larger conflicts that are also reflected in Susan Howe's own poetry."

After playing a clip from the LINEbreak program addressing the issue of slavery, the panelists consider the binaries of "slavery/liberty, freedom/unfreedom," in Filreis' terms, with the host asking, "why does she seem to have to get into slavery in order, then, to discover herself at liberty inside confounds." Durand focus on the historical context — a time in which "wilderness was being transformed into civilization," such that "there is this linkage between this idea of dominion over the land and sovereignty in this fracturing moment that Dickinson was inserting herself within" — as well as the "ugliness," the unspeakable issues, that she chose to address. They next focus on the variant final line, which substitues "art to die" for "power to die," imbuing the poet, the artist with considerable power, and after discussing the implications of that shift, Scappettone brings up the constraints of marriage, which serves as a segue to another excerpt of Howe, talking about love in Dickinson's work.

For Durand, love is "intertwined with faith," which ties to the poet's continual questioning of god and faith throughout her poems. "Is the binding force applied to the poem the relationship of the gun and owner?" Filreis asks. Scappetone finds love elusive in the poem, with another relationship taking precedence: "it seems almost as if love is what brings the owner and the gun together, but also the predator and the prey." Likewise, she sees a more divisive focus, observing, "it's almost as if highlighting these conflicts over and over again within love, one resists the kind of universalizing, flattening influence of love in its contemporary arrangements." Durand focuses on binaries as well, but sees a subversion of that setup, by eschewing the polarities for the sake of the intermediary means, the destructive force of the gun "she's the action, she's the verb, she's the intermediary between slave owner and slave." Bringing the discussion to a close, Lowenthal marvels at the amount of interpretive work Howe has done and yet how much there still is to do, a sentiment with which Durand concurs, noting that Howe is "the supreme poet-historian, because she doesn't interpret it for you, instead she draws it into poetry and lets you also participate in assembling all the fragments that history is." Scappettone lauds the book for "bring[ing] back a sort of feminine lamentation over at-large societal conflicts." Filreis wraps things up by noting that thought he teaches a lot of Dickinson, he typically doesn't teach this poem because "it's too complicated, it really requires a week in the classroom, and also, I like to teach the Dickinson where the binarism is there and gets messed up and changed, and here there's not a binarism, there's a triarism [...] love gets triangulated and so does destruction and so does colonization." In lieu of the typical "gathering paradise" segment, Filreis asks the panelists to name "something about poetry or poetics today that just really presses your button, that you're willing to complain about."

PoemTalk is a co-production of PennSound, the Kelly Writers House and the Poetry Foundation. If you're interested in more information on the series or want to hear the previous thirty-one episodes, please visit the PoemTalk blog, and don't forget that you can subscribe to the series through the iTunes music store. For our next program, Al Filreis is joined by Julia Bloch, Stacy Szymaszek and Michelle Taransky to discuss the work of another Howe — this time, Fanny Howe's poem, "One Night in Balthazar." Stay tuned for future programs in the series which will address poems by Charles Olson, Sharon Mesmer, Bruce Andrews, Jena Osman and Norman Fischer. Thanks, as always, for listening!

We recently posted a trio of new recordings from Denver-based poet (and former PennSound staffer) Eric Baus, whose author page was first launched last summer.

First up, we have a brief set from the Dikeou Gallery, recorded November 6, 2009, which begins with a series of poems preoccupied with the term, "ur-mane": "Eggshell Plums," "Negative Moon," "Urned Braid" and "Variant Aquarium." He follows these up with poems from his latest collection, Tuned Droves, including "The Sudden Sun," "Organs of the Projector," "The Wires Lead to a Hive," "A Second Silhouette," "I Know the Letters This Way" and the title poem.

Next, there's a January 28, 2010 reading from the University of Denver showcasing the following titles, among others: "The Worm's First Film," "Burning Clouds," "Stupid Moon," "Please Send Dust," "The Sound of Fire," "The Sound of the Sound of These," "Deer Tone," "Lamb Cone," "Glass Ear," "Glass Deer," "A Red Dress" and "Votive Scores." This is followed by another 2010 recording, from a March 4th appearance at the University of Colorado as part of the Boulder Small Press. Festival, where Baus reads the series, "The Continuous Corner," then closes with "Orange Water."

On Baus' PennSound author page, you'll find a number of readings from 2004 to the present , recorded in Chicago, Cincinnati and Northampton, MA, along with several Colorado locales. Interested listeners should also check out Baus' blog, To The Sound and his recent feature on Elective Affinities.

All of us at PennSound are tremendously sad to report the death last evening of Leslie Scalapino — a daring cross-genre author, long-time publisher of innovative works through O Books, and a figure of great influence and admiration in the world of contemporary poetics. Her husband, Tom, has asked us to share the following statement:

"Scalapino makes everything take place in real time, in the light and air and night where all of us live, everything happening at once."

— Philip Whalen

Leslie Scalapino passed away on May 28, 2010 in Berkeley, California. She was born in Santa Barbara in 1944 and raised in Berkeley, California. After Berkeley High School, she attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon and received her B.A. in Literature in 1966. She received her M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, after which she began to focus on writing poetry. Leslie Scalapino lived with Tom White, her husband and friend of 35 years, in Oakland, California.

In childhood, she traveled with her father Robert Scalapino, founder of UC Berkeley's Institute for Asian Studies, her mother Dee Scalapino, known for her love of music, and her two sisters, Diane and Lynne, throughout Asia, Africa and Europe. She and Tom continued these travels including trips to Tibet, Bhutan, Japan, India, Yemen, Mongolia, Libya and elsewhere. Her writing was intensely influenced by these travels. She published her first book O and Other Poems in 1976, and since then has published thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre fiction, plays, essays, and collaborations. Scalapino's most recent publications include a collaboration with artist Kiki Smith, The Animal is in the World like Water in Water (Granary Books), and Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows (Starcherone Books), and her selected poems It's go in horizontal / Selected Poems 1974-2006 (UC Press) was published in 2008. In 1988, her long poem way received the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her plays have been performed in San Francisco at New Langton Arts, The Lab, Venue 9, and Forum; in New York by The Eye and Ear Theater and at Barnard College; and in Los Angeles at Beyond Baroque.

In 1986, Scalapino founded O Books as a publishing outlet for young and emerging poets, as well as prominent, innovative writers, and the list of nearly 100 titles includes authors such as Ted Berrigan, Robert Grenier, Fanny Howe, Tom Raworth, Norma Cole, Will Alexander, Alice Notley, Norman Fischer, Laura Moriarty, Michael McClure, Judith Goldman and many others. Scalapino is also the editor of four editions of O anthologies, as well as the periodicals Enough (with Rick London) and War and Peace (with Judith Goldman).

Scalapino taught writing at various institutions, including 16 years in the MFA program at Bard College, Mills College, the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts in San Francisco, San Francisco State University, UC San Diego, and the Naropa Institute.

Of her own writing, Scalapino says "my sense of a practice of writing and of action, the apprehension itself that 'one is not oneself for even an instant' — should not be,' is to be participation in/is a social act. That is, the nature of this practice that's to be 'social act' is it is without formation or custom." Her writing, unbound by a single format, her collaborations with artists and other writers, her teaching, and publishing are evidence of this sense of her own practice, social acts that were her practice. Her generosity and fiercely engaged intelligence were everywhere evident to those who had the fortune to know her.

Scalapino has three books forthcoming in 2010. A book of two plays published in one volume, Flow-Winged Crocodile and A Pair / Actions Are Erased / Appear will come out in June 2010 from Chax Press; a new prose work, The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihredals Zoom will be released this summer by Post-Apollo Press; and a revised and expanded collection of her essays and plays, How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (originally published by Potes & Poets) will be published in the fall by Litmus Press.

Her play Flow-Winged Crocodile will be performed in New York at Poets House on June 19th at 7pm and June 20th at 2pm by the performance group The Relationship, directed by Fiona Templeton and with Katie Brown, Stephanie Silver, and Julie Troost. Dance by Molissa Fenley, music by Joan Jeanrenaud, and projected drawings by Eve Biddle. This production is co-sponsored by Belladonna* and the Poetry Project.

There will be a memorial event for Scalapino at St. Mark's Poetry Project on Monday, June 21st.

A Zen Buddhist funeral ceremony will be conducted by Abbott Norman Fischer in about a month with the arrangements in a subsequent announcement. Tom requests that in lieu of flowers, Leslie's friends consider a charitable donation in her memory to: Poets in Need, PO Box 5411, Berkeley, CA 94705; Reed College for the Leslie Scalapino Scholarship, 3203 Southeast Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, OR 97202-8199; The AYCO Charitable Foundation, PO Box 15203, Albany, NY 12212-5203 for the Leslie Scalapino-O Books Fund to support innovative works of poetry, prose and art; or to a charitable organization of their choice. Condolence cards may be sent to Tom & Leslie's home address, 5744 Presley Way, Oakland, California 94618-1633.

        to make my mind be actions outside only. which they are. that collapses in

grey-red bars. actions are life per se only without it.

        (so) events are minute — even (voluptuous)

                    • Leslie Scalapino

---

Scalapino was one of the first poets to be featured on PennSound, with her hour-long reading of way (from Kenning) showcased in 2004, several months prior to our official launch. Not long thereafter, we added two 1991 recordings (from Naropa and Reed College) and a 1986 excerpt from the "bum series" of way taken from the Live at the Ear CD. Our Scalapino author page has grown exponentially since then, with Segue Series readings at the Ear Inn in 1984 and 1986 and the Bowery Poetry Club in 2006 and 2008, appearances on Cross-Cultural Poetics in 2004 and 2005, and a pair of intimate readings and conversations with Charles Bernstein (on LINEbreak in 1996 and Close Listening in 2007). Her visit to our own Kelly Writers House in the fall of 2007 was a memorable experience for everyone in attendance (myself included), and especially for the UPenn students who participated in a lengthy discussion with Scalapino after the reading concluded. Our most recent additions are a 2008 reading that comes to us through POG Sound and a brief 1996 reading in Hoboken, courtesy of Chris Funkhouser.

While these recordings are no substitute for Scalapino's presence, we hope that they might offer listeners a chance to reconnect with her work and her voice in this upsetting time. Those looking to learn more about Scalapino can start with her Electronic Poetry Center author page as well as this 2004 feature on the poet's work in How2. Other resources include her Poetry Foundation profile, as well as the O Books website, and undoubtedly, Ron Silliman's blog will be a central nexus for remembrances and tributes in the coming days and weeks.