In a blog post today, PennSound co-director, Al Filreis highlighted one of the latest additions to our archives — a just-segmented radio appearance by Cole Swensen from this past January:

Cole Swensen was a guest on Leonard Schwartz's radio program, "Cross-Cultural Poetics," back in January. Thanks to Henry Steinberg, now PennSound offers a segmented recording of the reading and discussion. Swensen offers a reading of "A Garden Is a Start" and then takes a few minutes to talk about the style of that poem. She reads "If a Garden of Numbers" but we are also treated to her discussion of the geometry of Le Notre gardens, of gardens taking dominion over nature, of fountains as a public commodity. (The readings were from her recent book, Ours.) It's all here — available as of just yesterday. By the way, I'm happy to say that Leonard Schwartz will be here at the Writers House this fall (9/23/10) — and also a guest on PoemTalk.

This latest recording is one of many from 1993 to the present that you can listen to on Swensen's PennSound author page, including two readings from Boulder's Left Hand Reading Series and a 2007 appearance as part of UC Berkeley's Holloway Series.

For our last post before the holiday weekend, we're very proud to announce five newly-segmented recordings from Leslie Scalapino — a project undertaken by our intern-extraordinaire, Jeff Boruszak, who noticed the dearth of individual tracks available on our Scalapino author page and wanted to do something about it.

The readings begin with Scalapino's December 13, 1986 reading at the Ear Inn as part of the Segue Series, and also include her 1991 reading at Reed College, her November 13, 2007 appearance at the Kelly Writers House, and two 2008 readings: a May 3rd appearance at Tucson's The Drawing Studio and her December 6th Segue Series set at the Bowery Poetry Club.

Taken together, these five readings serve as a respectable cross-section of the late poet's writing life, with excerpts from her debut collection, Considering how exaggerated music is and her epic serial poem, Way, as well as later works such as Day Ocean State of Stars' Night's "DeLay Rose" and "'Can't' is 'Night,'" and Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows, among others. Follow the links above to be taken directly to individual readings, or to browse PennSound's Leslie Scalapino author page, click here.

With the Labor Day holiday marking the unofficial end of the summer and the start of the academic year, we imagine that many of our listeners might be coming back to PennSound after a few months of rest and relaxation, therefore before we resume our regular announcements of new additions to the site, we're taking this week to catch up on materials added during the summer months. Today, we start with a recap of June on PennSound Daily.

June began with us paying tribute to Andrei Voznesensky and Peter Orlovsky, and before the month came to a close, we'd also mark the passing of Peter Seaton. In addition to a new author page for Susan Schultz, we also unveiled new recordings from C.S. Giscombe, Patrick Durgin, Raymond Federman and Segue Series sets by Jean Day and Andrew Levy, along with Charles Bernstein and Norman Fischer in conversation on the topic "Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture" and new videos from Leslie Scalapino and Rachel Zolf. PoemTalk #33 was released, featuring Al Filreis, Nada Gordon, Kenneth Goldsmith and Steve McLaughlin discussing Sharon Mesmer's "I Accidentally Ate Some Chicken . . .," and UPenn's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing announced that Marcella Durand would be their 2010-2011 Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice.

You can read more about all of these recordings by following the links above, and scan through June's announcements (along with every other month since September 2007) on our PennSound Daily archive page. To make sure that you get the latest updates delivered automatically, click here to subscribe to the PennSound Daily newsfeed.

With the Labor Day holiday marking the unofficial end of the summer and the start of the academic year, we imagine that many of our listeners might be coming back to PennSound after a few months of rest and relaxation, therefore before we resume our regular announcements of new additions to the site, we're taking this week to catch up on materials added during the summer months. Today, we're featuring a recap of July on PennSound Daily.

We started July with a post discussing W.S. Merwin's recent appointment as US Poet Laureate, which was followed by Lyn Hejinian's remembrance of Leslie Scalapino, and our announcement of more than twenty new author pages, which highlighted work by John Giorno, Mel Nichols and Aaron Kunin, among others.

Many of our July updates concerned massive updates to some of our most popular series, including A Voice Box, the Segue Series at the Bowery Poetry Club, POG Sound, Cross Cultural Poetics and LA Lit. We also said goodbye to long-time PennSound intern Rebekah Caton (with a new author page) and wished John Ashbery a happy birthday, as well as unveiling a wonderful panel discussion of Denise Levertov from the Woodberry Poetry Room's Oral History Initiative. Finally, we released PoemTalk #34, for which Al Filreis was joined by three all-star PoemTalkers — Charles Bernstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Bob Perelman — to discuss Charles Olson's "Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]."

You can read more about all of these recordings by following the links above, and scan through July's announcements (along with every other month since September 2007) on our PennSound Daily archive page. To make sure that you get the latest updates delivered automatically, click here to subscribe to the PennSound Daily newsfeed.

With the Labor Day holiday marking the unofficial end of the summer and the start of the academic year, we imagine that many of our listeners might be coming back to PennSound after a few months of rest and relaxation, therefore before we resume our regular announcements of new additions to the site, we're taking this week to catch up on materials added during the summer months. Today, we're featuring a recap of August on PennSound Daily.

We began the month with an exciting announcement from our sister-site, the Electronic Poetry Center — the availability of downloadable versions of four early books by Leslie Scalapino — and before the month ended, we'd also celebrate a new EPC author page for John Wieners. August saw the release of new recordings from Stephen Ratcliffe, Basil Bunting, Robert Creeley and Dmitry Golynko, as well as from the Whenever We Feel Like It Reading Series and the Key West Literary Seminars, and we also posted newly-segmented recordings from Brenda Iijima, Steve McCaffery and Noah Eli Gordon. Finally, we launched PoemTalk #35, a discussion of Bruce Andrews' poem, "Center," and announced the addition of dozens of new videos to our YouTube page.

You can read more about all of these recordings by following the links above, and scan through August's announcements (along with every other month since September 2007) on our PennSound Daily archive page. To make sure that you get the latest updates delivered automatically, click here to subscribe to the PennSound Daily newsfeed.

Thanks to series co-organizer, Steve Clay, we're starting this week off with a new recording from the marvelous Threads Talk Series, featuring the equally marvelous Jerome Rothenberg. Titled "From the Voice to the Book, from the Book to the Voice: a Dialectic," Rothenberg's talk was recorded on May 7, 2010 in New York City.

Reflecting upon his more than one hundred published books, Rothenberg asks "How can I see myself as separated from books? If I'm a poet of the voice, I'm also a poet of the book, and that's what the written part of tonight's experience will be touching on." His formal presentation is followed by a discussion of a number of the book projects he's undertaken as both author and editor, which were selected by Clay, starting with his 1960 debut, White Sun Black Sun.

Previous installments in the Threads Talk Series have included presentations by Alan Loney, Charles Alexander, Simon Cutts and Buzz Spector, and feature the same fruitful dynamic between author presentation and conversation with an intimate audience of friends and colleagues. Organized 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."

Today we're particularly happy to announce the addition of a new recording from two of our favorite homegrown poets: CAConrad and Frank Sherlock.

Recorded February 3, 2010 at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art, this launch event for their recently published collaboration, The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School, 2010), brought together the two poets, along with artist Zoe Strauss (who took the cover photograph) and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, who provided "a Rachel Rap [...] a little rhymed oration" to introduce the reading. While this intro wasn't recorded, we've provided a link where listeners can read her praise for the collection: "This is class-smart mojo / this is lowdown smart ass sense of woe / and weakness, in Blake's sense, and of / exhilaration at seeing, at putting out / statement, no clout / but the art of telling / what needs to be told, / no fake, all bold / that we are lucky / to have."

The recording, which features Conrad and Sherlock reading the book in its entirety, serves as forty-two minute whirlwind tour of the city itself — capturing its broad vistas, its idiosyncratic details, the full sensory overload — as well as a testament to the time-tested friendship between the two poets. You'll find copies on our author pages for both CAConrad and Frank Sherlock, and there you'll find numerous additional recordings, including other selections from this collection and readings from Conrad's Deviant Propulsion, The Book of Frank, Advance Elvis Course and (Soma)tic Midge, as well as Sherlock's Over Here, Ready-to-Eat Individual and Don't Forget Me in the Dimension You Choose to Live.

For today's PennSound Daily, we hand the reins over to Thomas Devaney, who invited L.S. Asekoff to read at UPenn this summer:

We're wrapping up this week with a new author page for the beloved poet, teacher, and longtime director of the Brooklyn College MFA Program, L.S. Asekoff. The reading was recorded in June 2010 at Fisher Bennett Hall at the University of Pennsylvania. Asekoff was visiting my MLA (Master of Liberal Arts) creative writing seminar.

For many of the poems Asekoff offers candid and thoughtful introductions, which is apt as the poems cover, what he describes as "a whole landscape of references." Introducing the politically-charged "Empathy" Asekoff comments that the poem explores "the reach and limits of imagination and of empathy." The mystery of Asekoff's monologues and dramatic projections lay not only in their fugitive language, but also their menacingly measured cadences.

Reading from his new collection, The Gate of Horn (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2010), each Asekoff poem is a world unto itself, and often a lost one. The poem "Ghost Warrior" begins "Any time I walk into a place like this / I know I'm on the wrong side of the moon." Partly channeling scholar Raul Hilberg Asekoff closes his reading on the deeply haunting "The Keeper of Records."

Our new week starts off with two new tracks from Rachel Zolf, taken from a reading at New York City's Zinc Bar on April 11, 2010.

These two poems — "Jews In Space (a lunacy)" and "L'amiral cherche une maison a louer" — both come from Zolf's latest book, Neighbour Procedure (Coach House, 2010). For "Jews in Space (a lunacy)," which is based on a real-life dialogue between "two women, age 50-65, partially clad in the locker room of the downtown Hebrew Y," Zolf is joined by Rob Fitterman. "L'amiral cherche une maison a louer" is "inspired by Dadaist painter Marcel Janco emigrating to Israel and taking over a former Palestinian village in 1953 to turn it into a Dada artist colony for Jews," its title taken from a famous collaborative sound poem written by Janco, Tzara and others.

You can listen to both of these tracks on PennSound's Rachel Zolf author page, where you'll also find a number of readings, discussions, interviews, talks and videos from 2006 to the present.

In a blog post earlier this evening, Al Filreis gives us the lowdown on PennSound's latest author page:

Victor Coleman, born 1944 in Toronto, worked for the Toronto Star, Oxford University Press and then did a stint as the linotype operator for Coach House Press. Then for ten years he was the editor in chief at Coach House. And he's done a thousand other things. The other day who should step into the Writers House here in Philly but Andrew Whiteman, the Canadian songwriter and musician, longtime Toronto guy (and now in Montreal). Most people know Andrew from his band, Broken Social Scene. Anyway, Andrew is a fan of PoemTalk, he says, and spends a good deal of time listening to PennSound and Ubuweb recordings. He had with him some recordings of Victor Coleman, whom he thinks should be better known in the U.S. and generally. Well, thanks Andrew, and now we indeed have a new PennSound author page for Victor Coleman. So far we have segmented recordings of three readings, two from 1980 and one from this year.

Thanks to Andrew, we'll be adding more Coleman recordings in the near future, however the three recordings mentioned above include 130 individual tracks, which is more than enough to serve as a thorough introduction to our listeners. We're also very happy to direct readers to the homepage for Andrew's main band Apostle of Hustle, where links for UbuWeb, Silliman's Blog and Jacket Magazine (as well as PennSound) happily coexist alongside those for David Byrne's website, Adbusters and Z.Vex guitar pedals — diverse influences which are all evident on the band's marvelous recent record, Eats Darkness.

Today we're showcasing a new author page for Kristi Maxwell, who — along with her partner and Bon Mot/ley Reading Series co-curator, Michael Rerick — was a major fixture in Cincinnati's poetry scene prior to their departure for Tucson, Arizona this past August. Before they left, I invited them to stop by to record some poems, and these sessions form the heart of our new author pages for both (we'll be highlighting Michael's page later this week).

Kristi's session begins with an excerpt from "Correspondence Game" (taken from her chess-obsessed 2008 collection, Realm Sixty-Four), which "follows two characters, Maelzel and Schumburger, who are the inventors who refurbish the Turk, the first chess-playing automaton." That's followed by selections from her manuscript, PLAN/K, and three poems from her series, "Cape Rut / Apt Curves / Acute Traps," (the language of which is generated through the card game, "Royalty") that fit together well, given their shared clever use of shifty recursive wordplay. She concludes with two titles from her latest book, Hush Sessions: a lengthy reading from "Log of Dead Birds" and its introductory poem, "the Impulse."

You can hear all of these poems, as well as Maxwell's set from this past spring's Poetry in the Garden event at the Cincinnati Public Library by clicking on the title above.

We're terribly sad to share the news — as reported by UbuWeb and Silliman's Blog — of the passing of poet Michael Gizzi.

Gizzi's work was widely praised by some of the most respected names in the world of contemporary poetics. John Ashbery hailed his poetry as "[r]azor sharp but also rich and generously compelling . . . [it] lambastes as it celebrates, bringing us finally to a place of poignant irresolution." In his Brooklyn Rail review of Gizzi's latest collection, New Depths of Deadpan, John Yau praised his ear for "American vernacular," insisting that readers interested in knowing "how weird, interesting, scary, and odd America is" acquaint themselves with Gizzi's poetry. Finally, Ron Silliman cited Gizzi's "genius" as "not just the degree to which [he] can make great complexity appear breath-takingly simple, but rather the great sense of humanity in whose service he does this."

We direct those looking to connect with Gizzi's work to our Michael Gizzi author page, where you can listen to a pair of Segue Series Readings — a 1999 set at the Ear Inn, and a 2004 recording from the Bowery Poetry Club — as well as the 2000 album, Cured in the Going Bebop, which features twenty individual tracks. Another marvelous and revealing resource is Stan Mir's lengthy 2006 interview with Gizzi and Craig Watson, published in the latest issue of Jacket.

At this difficult time, our thoughts go out to Gizzi's family (including his brother Peter and sister-in-law, Elizabeth Willis) and friends, as well as those who admired his work. Undoubtedly, a great many people will be paying tribute to Michael in the coming days and weeks as news of his death spreads throughout the poetry community.

Earlier this week, we unveiled a new author page for Kristi Maxwell, and today, we're very happy announce a new author page for her partner and Bon Mot/ley Reading Series co-founder, Michael Rerick. This page is similarly anchored by a new Satellite Studios Session recorded especially for PennSound just before the two left Cincinnati for the warmer climes of Tucson, Arizona this past August.

Michael's set begins with a lengthy excerpt from his manuscript, The Switch Yards, followed by three poems that serve as variations on a common theme, and share a common title: "how to fight the middle class." The remainder of his set is dedicated to his 2009 Marsh Hawk Press collection, In Ways Impossible to Fold, showcasing five selections each from two of that book's poetic series — "Scupltures" and "Preservation/Excavations" — which ably demonstrate a precise attention to both setting and materiality that's present in much of Rerick's work.

In addition to these fourteen tracks, you can visit PennSound's page for the Bon Mot/ley Reading Series, where you can hear Rerick's introductions from eight events recorded between July 2009 and this past May. While our local poetry community is sad to have lost both Kristi and Michael to Tucson, we're very glad that their work can be shared with wider audiences. To start listening, click on the title above.