Charles Bernstein recently added a new recording to PennSound's author page for Peter Seaton, who passed away last May: a two-part, two-hour interview with filmmaker, Henry Hills, which took place on March 17, 1985.

Seaton was also a part of the Bernstein-edited "Language Sampler," published in The Paris Review #86 (Winter 1982) — appearing alongside Diane Ward, Ron Silliman, Bruce Andrews, Tina Darragh, Carla Harryman, Susan Howe, Alan Bernheimer, Robert Grenier, Lyn Hejinian and Hannah Weiner, among others. This influential portfolio of Language Poetics, long out of print, was recently made available at Eclipse, alongside two other exciting releases from UPenn poets: Bob Perelman's 7 Works (The Figures, 1978), and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Vol. 4, which joins Eclipse's holdings of the first three volumes and supplements. Interested readers might also wish to check out Little Orphan Anagram (a 1997 collaboration between Bernstein and Susan Bee), now available at Artists' Books Online.

Today, we're unveiling the thirty-sixth episode in the PoemTalk podcast series. Titled "Writing Through Imagism," this program finds host, Al Filreis taking the show on the road (for only the second time in its three-year history) to Chicago, where he sat down with poet and editor Judith Goldman, Poetry's senior editor Don Share and David Pavelich (poet, editor and bibliographer at the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library, where this episode was recorded). They discussed two interrelated poems: H.D.'s "Sea Poppies" and Jennifer Scappettone's "Vase Poppies," composed by writing through H.D.'s original.

The program begins with Filreis asking Pavelich to discuss potential reasons for writing through another's poem, and he sees two key possibilties — critique and homage — both of which are present in Scappettone's work. For Goldman, "Vase Poppies" critiques the "containedness [...] the spareness" of H.D.'s poem, and plays with its "cadences and sonic patterns." There's also an anachronistic tension present, with Scappettone's language seeming, perhaps, more dated than that of "Sea Poppies" ("paleo-pines" versus "conch shells, for example), as well as shift from H.D.'s natural, outdoorsy focus, versus an interior setting full of household materiality (making it, Share believes, more true to her own contemporary existence). Pavelich flips this notion on its head, seeing Scappettone criticizing the anti-Victorian H.D. for being more Victorian than she might realize.

Filreis then states his "problem with H.D.": "I love the poetry and every time I read it, I can't help but think that there's another reading which is entirely programmatic, self-conscious and polemical," and he believes that Scappettone sees this as well and thus is critiquing "the programmatic quality of it for being under the surface." For Pavelich, H.D. is fully conscious of this dynamic and is writing a dual-faceted, meta-poetic work that serves two purposes, two audiences — not unlike, Filreis asserts, Harriet Monroe's Imagism-centric editorial ethos for Poetry, presenting work which could satisfy an international cosmopolitan readership of cutting edge contemporary verse as well as "the blue-haired ladies in St. Louis." Goldman also praises this "Janus-facedness": "it can be a nature poem and at the same time an agenda-based ideological poem that's quite self-reflexive, where the poppy is a stand-in for the poem and what poetry should be." The panelists then take note of a further geographical shift from H.D.'s Atlantic shore to Scappettone's California, and consider several semantic consequences of this shift.

Scappettone's own description of the poem's intentions, namely "to schmaltz-ify, to be indelicate, H.D. and Imagism, and more generally its piety that veers into preciousness; to open the poem to different scenarios tainted by class, gender, the nation-state," are then brought into the discussion. "What happens to Imagism when politics and economics and social ideas get to enter it?" Filreis asks, believing that, as Scappettone asserts, readers need to face these implications. Bringing the program to a close, Pavelich begins by wondering how readers would approach "Vase Poppies" without knowing of "Sea Poppies" or the connection between the two, whether its concerns would still come through as clearly. Goldman sees H.D.'s poem as emblematic of an imagistic "gold standard," which "Vase Poppies" attempts to undo, as well as echoes of Pound. Share finds it curious that we continue to question the effects and outcomes of modernism in the present day and has modernist work still has great force, despite "all the newness of our vocabulary and technology." Finally, Filreis brings the conversation full-circle to the action of writing through another's work, finding "the ultimate form of respect" — an intimate, attentive, embodied engagement with the original work.

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-five episodes, please visit the PoemTalk blog, and don't forget that you can subscribe to the series through the iTunes music store. Stay tuned for future programs in the series which will address poems by Jena Osman, Norman Fischer, Ethridge Knight, Joan Retallack, Susan Schultz and Ezra Pound. Thanks, as always, for listening!

Last April, we announced a new reading by Tenney Nathanson at Simon Fraser University, and not long thereafter, we created a new author page for his co-reader that evening, Sarah Vap. Today, we're very happy to unveil newly-segmented tracks from that set for your listening pleasure.

Recorded March 18, 2010, Vap's set begins with a poem she "almost always start[s] [her] poetry readings with," "Everything Offered Happens" (from 2007's Dummy Fire). She continues with a number of poems scattered throughout her three collections, including her latest, Faulkner's Rosary (which will be released tomorrow), such as "Who Knows How Long This Way," "More You Never Get to Know," "Second Daughter," "Kunst Historic Museum," "Breathing Loaf of Wild Animal," and "Breast-Feeding Across America." Altogether, there are fifteen tracks from Vap's twenty minute set.

On PennSound's Sarah Vap author page, you'll find the aforementioned reading, as well as her 2009 appearance on episode #183 of Leonard Schwartz's radio program, Cross Cultural Poetics, where she discusses the Olympia issue of locuspoint, and reads from her own work.

Our latest author page is a long-overdue home for our sundry recordings of germinal Language Poetry figure, Ray DiPalma.

Our most recent recording is an April 27, 1999 recording from the Kelly Writers House. From there, we jump back two decades for a pair of Segue Series readings at the Ear Inn: the first from 1980, the second recorded on February 17, 1979. These three recordings, which have been on PennSound for the past few years are now joined by two new additions from 1977 — an April 3rd solo set at Anthology Film Archives and a November 10th reading, also at the Ear Inn, alongside Bruce Andrews and Michael Lally.

We've also added a link to our page for readings from the collaborative text LEGEND recorded at Andrews' NYC apartment on March 10, 1981, featuring Andrews, DiPalma, Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman. That page also contains links to the complete text of LEGEND at Eclipse.

Recorded March 13, 2010, this panel from the Tucson Festival of Books celebrates three authors with books that had just been published by Chax Press — Tenney Nathanson (Ghost Snow Falls Through the Void [Globalization]), Barbara Henning (Cities and Memory) and Charles Bernstein (Umbra) — and is introduced by Chax founder, Charles Alexander.

Nathanson starts things off with a number of sections from Ghost Snow Falls Through the Void (Globalization), and is followed by Henning, who shares several selections from the "Twirling the Spirit Flies Off Like a Falcon" sequence in Cities and Memory. Bernstein brings the reading to a close, beginning with his translation of Carlos Drumond de Andrade's "In the Middle of the Way" (from Umbra) before reading from All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems, including "Of Time and the Line" (originally published in Rough Trades), "Johnny Cake Hollow" and "This Poem Intentionally Left Blank" (from With Strings) and "Let's Just Say" (from Girly Man). He switches back to Umbra for translations of Victor Hugo's "Tomorrow" and Guillaume Apollinaire's "Le Pont Mirabeau," then concludes with "All the Whiskey in Heaven."

These sets are followed by a brief discussion period featuring Alexander and the readers, and you can download or stream individual sets from the authors and also watch video footage of the complete reading on the special page we've constructed for this performance.

I was browsing through the latest issue of Zen Monster recently, and was very happy to see PennSound mentioned alongside one of my favorite anecdotes concerning a one of my favorite recording from our archives. The specific passage comes from editor Brian Unger's interview with Alice Notley where they're discussing Bolinas in the early 1970s:

Unger: How long did you stay there?

Notley: Just a few months. And I think [Philip Whalen] was there just a few months. It was all these people like pretending they were giong back to nature and raising goats and we'd have a poetry reading and your kids could be there and make a lot of noise . . .

Unger: Was it very hippy?

Notley: Yeah. And you could heckle. You'd get heckled. Bill Brown heckled me.

Unger: For what?

Notley: I don't know. He just heckled me. I was reading. I gave the first reading at the Bolinas Library with Joanne Kyger and Bill Brown heckled me. Apparently it's recorded. You can get the recording on Penn Sound of him heckling me. I behaved with great aplomb, but Ted got really incensed and told Bob Creeley.

Unger: Did you say Bill Brown?

Notley: Bill Brown. He's in Phil's poems. Ted told Bob Creeley that since he was an elder of the town he should do something about this because people should not be allowed just to heckle. And so Bob found Bill Brown and they took acid together, and they went down to the water and picked up these ducks and petted the ducks and talked to the ducks and then Bob said to Bill, "You know, I think you should apologize to Alice for heckling her at the reading." So then I met him at the bar, one of the two bars. Smiley's or Scowley's, and we had this kind of John Wayne moment when he said, "Well, I'm really sorry that I heckled you." And I said "It's okay." We shook hands. And that's the story.

You can listen to Notley's complete set from that day (December 2, 1971) on our Alice Notley author page. — Brown's intrusion comes between tracks 14 and 15. We first announced this reading on PennSound Daily in March 2008, and I singled those tracks as a highlight of the recording: "[Notley's] maturity and self-possession are especially evident in the way she handles a heckler in the crowd — shaming him ('Is that all over with yet?,' she asks) and waiting out the disruption before starting 'Sonnet 5' a second time." To listen to this, and many other wonderful recordings of Notley from the intervening four decades, click on the title above.

It's been a little less than a month since news broke of the passing of poet Michael Gizzi, and in that intervening time, Steve Evans was kind enough to approach us with two tapes from a memorable visit by Gizzi to Brown University in the fall of 1997. Today, we're very proud to share those recordings with our listeners.

Gizzi's two-day visit to Providence took place on October 22-23, 1997, beginning with a reading at Brown where he read the poetic sequence, "No Both" in its entirety. "I remembered today that there had been a subtitle to this which I'd dropped, which was 'journal of a psychothymic state,'" his introduction begins, noting "these poems were written in the spring of 1992 between March and April," marking the twentieth anniversary of his father's death: "it was springtime and I was thinking a lot about people like Williams and so forth, and spring as I say, actually, it ended up being a kind of journal of my own mania and trying to chart that." "I'm not sure what 'no both' means," he concludes, "but I'd be happy to discuss it with anyone afterwards."

The following day, at the home of Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, Gizzi read the sequence, "We See," and taken together, these two readings run to nearly two hours and constitute the entirety of his collection, No Both, co-published that year by The Figures and Hard Press. Many thanks are due to Evans for sharing these wonderful recordings with us (as well as the photo you see above), as well as to Jeff Boruszak for painstakingly segmenting the readings into nearly eighty tracks.

In Gizzi's memory, we welcome our listeners to browse through the recordings on our Michael Gizzi author page, including this latest addition, and also draw your attention to Gizzi's obituary and guestbook in The Berkshire Eagle, containing many wonderful memories from former students, which Lee Ann Brown was kind enough to share over Facebook yesterday.

We couldn't be happier to close out this week with a number of new recordings from the marvelous Eileen Myles, related to the recent release of her latest book, Inferno (a Poet's Novel).

Eileen was in Philadelphia last week for a pair of events on the UPenn campus. First up was a lunchtime event at the Kelly Writers House as part of the new FEMINISM/S series. After a lengthy opening discussion of Inferno — which touches upon questions of genre preference and her previous work in fiction and nonfiction, as well as the influence of experimental film — she shares a lengthy excerpt from the novel. This hour-long event ends with a twenty-minute question and answer period.

Later that evening, Myles gave a longer reading from Inferno at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art, an event preceded by a lavish and loving introduction by CAConrad, recently published in essay form as "Eileen Myles: Clothed in Nature With an Open Ear" in a Rattapallax feature on the poet.

In addition to these two very exciting recordings, we're also very happy to announce that we've segmented Myles' 1998 Segue Series Reading at the Ear Inn, featuring poems from School of Fish, Skies and on my way, among other collections. You can hear all three of these recordings, as well as a variety of additional readings and interviews from 1977 to the present on Eileen Myles author page, which is anchored by a wonderful Close Listening reading and conversation with Charles Bernstein, recorded in the spring of 2009.