PennSound Daily

The latest installment of the PoemTalk podcast series has just been released — a meditation on Jaap Blonk's "What the President Will Say and Do," an homage to Madeline Gins' book-length work of the same name. Al Filreis was joined by Kenneth Goldsmith, Tracie Morris and Joshua Schuster for this episode, which starts by exploring the relationship between Gins' text and Blonk's imaginative revision, as well as the limitations (or lack thereof) between live performance and audio artifact.

While one misses the auratic thrill of Blonk's strained, strangled and violet-faced performance, there's still a great deal of meaning to be discovered behind the words and sounds, and the PoemTalkers see a wide variety of politicized perspectives on the work — from an emulation of empty rhetoric to torture to a visceral representation of the impotence of power. From here, the discussion expands to broader consideration of the political potential of sound poetry as a whole (with John Cage, Miles Davis and Patti LaBelle invoked), as well as the politicization of everyday language.

To listen to this episode, along with the first five episodes of the PoemTalk series, click on the title above, and keep your eyes peeled for future episodes highlighting the work of Jerome Rothenberg, Rae Armantrout and John Ashbery, among others.

In addition to the Chris Funkhouser performance mentioned in the last PennSound Daily, we've added a number of new and exciting recordings from the Segue Series at the Bowery Poetry Club in the past week. Click on the link above to hear a November 10, 2007 reading by Sean Cole, Susan Howe and James Thomas Stevens' reading from January 26, 2008, and a number of readings from this spring, including Noah Eli Gordon and David Shapiro (recorded March 22nd), Mark Wallace and Rodrigo Toscano (from March 29th), and Tonya Foster and Anne Tardos (from April 12th).

These nine recordings are only the tip of the iceberg, and we'll continue adding the remainder of Segue's winter and spring reading series in the coming weeks. Don't forget that there are thirty years' worth of Segue Series readings available on PennSound, from the earliest events held at the Ear Inn, through the series' time at Double Happiness, and up to its tenure at the Bowery Poetry Club, which began not long after the club opened in 2002. We hope to be able to continue to host Segue Series recordings on PennSound for the next thirty years, and much longer beyond that.