PennSound Daily

One of our latest additions to the PennSound archives is this wonderful event featuring Kit Robinson and hosted by Avery Burns, recorded at San Francisco's Canessa Gallery on July 25, 2011. Here's Kit's own description of the seventy-minute career-spanning set, which took the form of an extended and informal conversation between Robinson, Burns and the audience, punctuated by poems: "Readings from The Dolch Stanzas (1976), Train I Ride (2009), The Crave (2002), Determination (2010) and recent work. Discussion of Mad Magazine, prose and verse forms, the language of the workplace, salsa lyrics and book design."

In addition to this latest addition, Kit was kind enough to take a look over his PennSound author page and send along several corrections. Most interesting among these is the proper attribution of what was previously identified as a July 1982 Segue Series reading, which is now included as the first part of a recording at Amsterdam Avenue — featuring Charles Bernstein, Susan Bee, Alan Davies, Erica Hunt, Bruce Andrews, Ted Greenwald, Michael Gottlieb, Peter Seaton and George-Therese Dickinson — that ends with a group reading of the play "Collateral." As the person who originally processed this recording not long after I started working at PennSound, I'm very glad to see this error (due by the scant markings on the original cassette tape) corrected!

Likewise, I'm equally glad to have the opportunity to listen to this marvelous new survey of Kit's work and am sure that many of you will feel the same. Click on the title above to be taken directly to our Kit Robinson author page.

As I mentioned in our last PennSound Daily post, we were lucky to have Charles Bernstein and Kenneth Goldsmith in town last week to take part in the University of Cincinnati's Ropes Lecture Series in Digital Humanities — an exciting and exhausting visit that featured these two preeminent theorists discussing a wide variety of topics with faculty, students and members of the local poetry community.

The day began with a morning workshop for grad students in this year's Ropes class — "Adventures in the Digital Trade: Collecting and Distributing the Unpopular Arts, with Special Reference to the Strange Attractors Ubuweb & PennSound, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Web, Baby!" — which is presented in two parts. In the first set, running close to eighty minutes, the two poets discuss their groundbreaking archival work through PennSound, the EPC and UbuWeb; outline the ideological differences between their respective projects; and address key contemporary issues surrounding technology and creativity. The second segment, almost an hour long, continues this dialogue, guided by student questions. Later that evening, the two delivered back-to-back lectures — starting with Goldsmith's "Uncreative Writing," followed by Bernstein's "The Present of the Word" — then took questions from the audience. You'll find segmented recordings of the evening lectures, as well as the morning workshop, on our homepage for the Ropes series events, along with photographs. You'll also find a link for more information on the year-long Ropes Lecture Series, co-organized by Laura Micciche and Jennifer Glaser, which features talks and workshops by N. Katherine Hayles, Ryan Trauman, Lisa Nakamura, Lewis Ulman, Siva Vaidhyanathan and Alan Liu.

Finally, the evening before the Ropes events, Charles Bernstein gave a reading across town at Xavier University, and a partial recording of that event is available on the poet's readings page. Highlighting recent work, the set includes "A Theory's Evolution," "The Sixties, with Apologies," "Every True Religion is Bound to Fail," "Strike!" and "Dea%r Fr~ien%d," ending with translations of Baudelaire's "Be Drunken" and Goethe's "Der Erlkönig."

In a day that seemed overwhelmingly full of deaths in the creative community — including poets Dorothea Tanning, Wisława Szymborska, and Morgan Lucas Schuldt, artist Mike Kelly and Soul Train host Don Cornelius — we wanted to single out Bay Area poet and translator (and PennSound author) Stacy Doris, who passed away late Tuesday evening.

Our own Charles Bernstein — here in Cincinnati for a series of events with Kenneth Goldsmith — paid tribute to Doris in his reading last night, dedicating his closing poems to her and later posting on Facebook about the "unspeakably sad news" of her passing. Over on the Poetry Project blog, we find another memorial: "The poetry community has lost someone who touched many lives through her work as a teacher, through her poetry, through the person that she was. We are with heavy heart tonight, and sending love to those closest to her."

You can browse through a variety of materials on PennSound's Stacy Doris author page, including Segue Series readings at the Bowery Poetry Club from 2008 and 2010, a 2007 reading in Paris for Double Change, a 2004 appearance on Cross Cultural Poetics and a 2001 reading at SUNY-Buffalo among other recordings. Over at the EPC you'll find a complete html version of Doris' 1994 Roof book Kildare while on Jacket2 you'll find recent commentaries by Bernstein, Eric Baus and Oana Avasilichioaei addressing Doris' work.

Our thoughts are with Doris' family in this trying time, as well as her many friends in the world of contemporary poetry who'll miss her greatly. Also, we've just learned that Laynie Browne is collecting written responses to Doris' life and work for Volta, where she is a contributing editor. Those interested in contributing can send submissions to info@poetryproject.org.