In celebration of our recently-launched Stanley Burnshaw author page, PennSound co-director, Al Filreis has assembled a mini-feature on Jacket2, which is anchored by a retrospective essay, "Stanley Burnshaw: the Poet in the World," written by Robert Zaller, a poet, critic, historian and activist, as well as the executor of the Burnshaw Estate.

In addition to that essay, you'll also find Filreis' announcement of the new PennSound Burnshaw page, and a commentary on Burnshaw's role as a "nuanced commie critic," which includes a PDF copy of an interview with the poet by Filreis and Harvey Teres, which was first published in The Wallace Stevens Journal in 1989.

You can read all of the aforementioned pieces by clicking the title above, and click here to visit PennSound's Stanley Burnshaw author page.

Following last week's announcement of Robert and Bobbie Creeley's late-60s Placitas phone log, we're very happy to unveil two new recordings from the pioneering Black Mountain poet.

First up, we have an hour-long recording of the poet responding to written interview questions by Martin Duberman, which comes to us courtesy of Jeff Davis and the North Carolina Division of Archives and History. Recorded in the late 1960s, and focusing largely on Creeley's involvement with Black Mountain College, this recording serves as a wonderful, personal document of his early years and his development as a poet.

Our second new recording is a November 13, 2003 recording at Yale's Beinecke Library and begins with a warm and intimate introduction by Richard Deming, a former student of Creeley's at SUNY-Buffalo. In his opening comments, the poet shares his feelings as one of the few survivors of the Black Mountain era, and discusses his experiences as a Harvard undergrad and an American Field Service ambulance driver during World War II, all leading up to his first poem — his "first terrific poem" — "Return." He continues with more "classic poems of my terrific youth," in a wide-ranging reading nearly an hour long.

You can hear both of these recordings and a great many more spanning half a century on PennSound's Robert Creeley author page.

We're closing this week out with a new video addition: painter Amy Sillman's new short film, Triscuits, produced earlier this year. Combining text and stop-motion and puppet-like manipulations of the artist's drawings and paintings, in Triscuits we meet Sillman's eerie figures — their viscerality tempered by a cartoonish line — that the narrator encounters during "this residency at a university." "I was scrawling crossed-out or illegible messages and rebuses to people who had died or gone away," she tells us, before attending a bizarre faculty party, where much of the film's action takes place.

Triscuits is the latest addition to our PennSound Cinema homepage, where you can find a wide variety of videos and short films from artists and poets alike. Additionally, Charles Bernstein recently posted Sillman's Some Problems in Philosophy on Jacket2.

We've just created a new author page for the late Dmitri Prigov, hailed by Ron Silliman as "Russia's leading conceptualist poet" at the time of his passing in 2007.

Our new Prigov page is anchored by two recordings: a brief video of him reading his "37th Alphabet Poem" at Dickinson College in 2004, and a lengthy recording of the poet reading Azbuki (Alphabets) issued by Germany's S Press in November 1989.

We've also included a link to several Prigov poems appearing in Jacket #36 as part of Peter and Tatyana Golub's feature on New Russian Poetry. Translated by Chris Mattison and Philip Metres, the works include excerpts from Internal Reckonings, Incredible Events. Difficult Childhood or 20 Dreadful Tales and Dialogues, along with "Seven New Stories About Stalin." Mattison also translated Prigov's Fifty Drops of Blood (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004).

Eric Baus has posted yet another wonderful "Notes on PennSound" commentary for Jacket2, entitled "Crosswalks & Intersections". He explains the rationale behind his selections as follows:

While I was listening to the following recordings, I kept thinking about how my friend Noah Eli Gordon used to love finding yield-to-pedestrian crosswalks when we both lived in Western Massachusetts, and how much he enjoyed simply being able to walk across the street without worrying about being crushed by a huge SUV. (We had both grown up in different parts of the sprawling Midwest where cars never stopped for pedestrians.) I don't want to dwell too much on this personal association, but listening to each of these recordings recreated some version of that feeling of being struck by a small moment of unexpected freedom in the immediate environment. It's not that these recordings are full of unequivocal happiness or unchecked optimism (there's plenty of complication, violence, distress, and danger hovering around them all), but that they temporarily create spaces for the listener to experience the interplay of phenomena, a listening-feeling that acknowledges complexity and flux but doesn't make one feel a sensory overload (though I love recordings that do that too).

As always, his choices are fascinatingly varied, including recordings from Kevin Killian, Lorine Niedecker, Josephine Foo and Amina Cain, with lengthy explanations for each. You can read the full piece, and all of Baus' previous "Notes on PennSound" commentaries on Jacket2 — clicking on the title above will take you directly there.

While the news has been known unofficially for a few weeks, the official announcement of the 2011 Pew Fellowships in the Arts came out earlier today, and we couldn't be happier that two wonderful and deserving Philadelphia poets — CAConrad and Pattie McCarthy — are among the recipients.

The citation for CAConrad begins with a simple truth: "People who hear CAConrad read tend to fall in love with him." It continues: "Living and working in Philadelphia for 25 years, the charismatic, self-taught poet's work falls between poetics, performance, and pedagogy. Conrad's most visionary works are writings he calls '(Soma)tic poetry,' instructions and recipes that invite the reader-listener into deeply embodied experiences. 'The aim of (Soma)tic poetry and poetics is the realization of two things about my work,' writes Conrad. 'One: Everything around me has the potential to spur new modes of thought and imaginative output. Two: The most vital ingredient to bringing humane, sustainable changes to our world is creativity. Poetry and other art disciplines are forms of courage.'" You can listen to a wide variety of recordings on PennSound's CAConrad author page, including readings, talks and interviews.

The Pew committee's praise for Pattie McCarthy begins with the acknowledgment that she "has established herself as a serious and ambitious young poet with a strong sense of language and tradition," citing her three collections, bk of (h)rs (2002); Verso (2004); and Table Alphabetical of Hard Words (2010), which they hail as "an intimate book-length poem sequence concerned with etymology and history." "Speaking to her ongoing experiments with language and narrative, McCarthy says, 'I strive to create work that actively involves the reader, that is skeptical and inquiring, equal parts intellectual and emotional acuity.'" So that our listeners can better celebrate McCarthy's achievement, we've put together a brand new Pattie McCarthy author page, bringing together a number of recordings that were already part of our archives, including a 2004 Segue Series set at the Bowery Poetry Club.

We're closing this week out by highlighting new PennSound author pages for two mainstays of the Bay Area poetry scene — Alli Warren and Brandon Brown.

Our Alli Warren author page starts with a half-hour Segue Series set, recorded at the Bowery Poetry Club this past April 16th. You'll also find two readings that come to us courtesy of Andrew Kenower's A Voice Box — a July 16, 2009 event at Books and Bookshelves and a June 2, 2007 reading at Pegasus Books with Suzanne Stein.

Our new page for Brandon Brown also features a Segue Series reading from this past spring at the Bowery Poetry Club — this one dating from March 26th. From A Voice Box, we have an April 24, 2010 reading at The Compound, and the collection is rounded out by a September 26, 2009 reading as part of the Cy Press Reading Series.

You can also listen to a variety of recordings from The (New) Reading Series at the sadly now-defunct 21 Grand — which Warren and Brown both curated — on our A Voice Box series page.

Charles Bernstein recently posted a new "Biographical Sketch" of poet Peter Seaton — who passed away last May — drawing together remembrances from both poet Nick Piombino and Seaton's brother, Thom. He also reports that "with the help of Steve McLaughlin, am slowly making available all Peter's published works, and an unpublished ms, at the Seaton EPC page.

Three of Seaton's books — Agreement, Crisis Intervention and The Son Master — are already available on Eclipse, and you can listen to a half-dozen classic Segue Series readings from the Ear Inn, along with Seaton's May 1985 interview of Henry Hills and a forty-five minute recording from the Segue offices in the fall of that year on PennSound's Peter Seaton author page.

We recently posted six new episodes from the much-beloved radio series, Cross Cultural Poetics, hosted by Leonard Schwartz and broadcast from the studios of Evergreen State University's KAOS-FM.

First up is Episode #233: The New Black (April 7, 2011), a full-length program dedicated to poet Evie Shockley's latest book, The New Black. That's followed by Episode #234: Redemptive Forms (April 14, 2011), featuring Michael Boughn, co-editor of Robert Duncan?s newly published The H.D. Book, reading from that volume, along with Chilean poet Raul Zurita, who reads from his book, Inre, and Schwartz's tribute to the late Akilah Oliver.

As you might expect, Episode #235: Kaan/Caws (April 21, 2011) includes Cihan Kaan reading from and discussing his short story collection, Halal Pork, and Mary Ann Caws sharing work from her translation of Rene Char's Furor and Mystery and other Poems, while Episode #236: Barry/Bellen (April 28, 2011) showcases playwright and actor Raymond Barry (who talks about his new work Awake in a World That Encourages Sleep at the Theater for The New City) and Martine Bellen discussing her latest collection, Ghosts!.

In Episode #237: Northwest (May 12th, 2011) poets Susan Gevirtz and Janet Holmes read from their latest collections (Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger and The Ms of M Y Kin, respectively), and Schwartz talks with John Marshall, who, with Christine Deavel runs Open Books, a Seattle shop devoted solely to poetry. Finally, we have a diverse program in Episode #238: The space/Space left out (May 19, 2011), which features poet Anna Rabinowitz reading from Present Tense, a discussion with Samuel Shimon (editor of Banipal, a British based journal of Arabic writing in English translation) and Schwartz reading from the Collected Poems of Gustave Sobin.

You can hear all of these programs, and the 232 preceding it in the series, on PennSound's Cross Cultural Poetics homepage.