Inside PennSoundFeatured resources
Selected by Charles Bernstein (read more about his choices here) |
Love Jawns: A MixtapePosted 11/12/2025 Today we're spotlighting a newly archived podcast series here at PennSound affectionately dubbed Love Jawns: A Mixtape. Originally published between 2019 and 2020 in conjunction with Philadelphia Contemporary, Love Jawns: A Mixtape—or LJAM—was produced by Yolanda Wisher, Jaléssa Savage, and Wayv Wilson, and comprised two seasons, along with a collection of special episodes that effectively serves as a third season. A love letter to the city of Philadelphia and a self-proclaimed "soundtrack of the city," each episode begins with an ethereal announcement from Wisher—"Doors are closing," a proclamation that should be instantly recognizeable to anyone who's ever taken the El in the past thirty years. An overarching soundtrack by a featured DJ then accompanies each episode, punctuated by readings by local and near-local figures, including a number of Philly's recent Poets and Youth Poets Laureate (including two former Kelly Writers House alumni, Husnaa Hashim and Wes Matthews, the latter of whom segmented audio recordings for PennSound as an undergraduate). The full podcast series of twelve episodes, along with hi-res cover images and program notes, is available here. Solarities Series CollectionPosted 11/3/2025Another exciting reading series has come to us thanks to Michael Cavuto and Tessa Bolsover, poets and PhD students in the English Department at Duke University. The series, called Solarities, ran for three years from 2023 to 2025 at the Nelson Reading Room at Duke, and was funded by the Franklin Humanities Institute, with support from the English Department, Gender, Feminism and Sexuality Department, Duke Arts, and the Center for Caribbean and Latin American Studies. Included among Solarities's featured guests some familiar names: Joseph Donahue, Nathaniel Mackey, Will Alexander, Hoa Nguyen, Alice Notley, and Stacy Szymaszek. The series comprises five entries and the full collection is available at the Solarities Reading Series page. Seattle Subtext Series CollectionPosted 9/5/2025
Today’s massive new entry comes to us by way of series organizer Robert Mittenthal, who has generously supplied us with a vast collection of recordings from the Seattle-based Subtext Series. Our selection ranges from 1996 to 2009, during which the Subtext Series called three Seattle venues home: Speakeasy Cafe, Richard Hugo House, and the Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center. Mittenthal writes: We came up with what turned out to be a sustainable format for the series. Two person readings, once per month, on the same day, for example, the 3rd Thursday, at the same venue. One local writer, and one from out of town. Regardless of what was raised via donations at the door, we would pay the readers a nominal fixed amount, plus a small travel stipend for the visitor. We had no budget and no funding, so we focused primarily on the west coast, & tried to coordinate with writers who were traveling thru the Northwest. Mittenthal’s “we” refers to series curators Laynie Browne, Jeanne Heuving, Herb Levy, Ezra Mark, Bryant Mason, C.E. Putnam, and Nico Vassilakis, with guest curators including Curtis Bonney, Daniel Comiskey, Joseph Donahue, Kreg Hasegawa, Drew Kunz, Will Owen, and Lou Rowan. Recordings were created for roughly half of the readings over the course of the fifteen years of the Subtext Series by Herby Levy and Bryant Mason. You can explore the whole collection, which features 93 of the readings, split into sections based on performer, here. Eric Mottram (1924–1995) Centennial CollectionPosted 8/29/2025
We at PennSound are pleased to announce the launch of the new Eric Mottram Centennial Collection. Courtesy of Geoff Browell, Manuela Pallotto Strickland, and the Archives at King’s College London’s Libraries and Collections, the Mottram Collection comprises hundreds of recordings from Eric Mottram’s personal collection, including interviews he conducted, his own readings and lectures, readings by others, and several BBC recordings (of which we’ve only selected the most relevant). The publication of the Mottram Collection culminates a nearly three-year process which began with the rather tedious digital transfer of about 330 GB of WAV files from the King’s College London collection to PennSound, a huge sum of data which was then sorted, labeled, converted, and posted over two summers by PennSound interns Madeleine Song and Madeline Chun. The new collection is truly a treasure trove of newly public recordings, with too many names to list here—but highlights include Charles Olson, Jerome Rothenberg, Muriel Rukeyser, Wallace Stevens, Anne Waldman, and Louis Zukofsky, to name just a few. And thanks to Hannah Judd, many of the recordings in the Mottram Collection already have segmented versions available on their individual author pages. Labor Day Weekend is upon us, and there's no better time to start digging in! Tuli Kupferberg: "No Deposit, No Return" (1966)Posted 7/30/2025 We begin this week with one of my favorite recordings from our archives and one I'm very proud that we can share with our listeners: Tuli Kupferberg's 1966 ESP-Disk release, No Deposit, No Return. While many know the late Kupferberg for his inimitable contributions to poetry-rock mavericks, the Fugs, this ambitious solo album is far more obscure, though not without its dedicated fans. Subtitled "an evening of pop poetry" on the record sleeve, which devolves into "a nightmare of popular poetry" in Kupferberg's opening track, No Deposit, No Return is comprised exclusively of found texts performed with musical accompaniment "by Gary Elton on the various": "Real Advertisements," as the back cover explains, "As they appeared in newspapers, magazines, in direct mail. No word has been added. There are genuine ads. Parts of some ads have been repeated. Parts of some ads have been omitted. But these are the very texts. These are for real!" The end result is quite poetic, yet also drifts into the realm of pure comedy — albeit a comedy rooted in social critique — along with the golden age of radio, thanks to Elton's musical backings and sound effects. The invocation of sixties pop sensibilities and appropriative aesthetic also adds an element of the visual arts, creating a truly hybrid electric form that neatly parallels the contemporaneous sound poetry of John Giorno in building upon the foundational work of Charles Reznikoff. "Everyone I suppose has always wanted to write his own commercial." Kupferberg notes in the introductory track, explaining the album's origins. "I have resisted this temptation strenuously, especially for this album, but when a certain well-known shampoo company came to the Fugs last summer, proposing that we do our own commercial for their new summer product, I countered with my own suggestion for a new product" — namely, Pubol, a pubic hair shampoo — and thus the project was born. Aside from consumerism and America's culture of violence, No Deposit, No Return's major preoccupation is sex and sexuality, as Kupferberg performs advertisements for timid swingers, not-so-timid swingers, fetish photos, an erotic novel (Violations of the Child Marilyn Monroe, attributed to "Her Psychiatrist Friend") and a scary-looking penis pump,"the Hyperemiator," whose ad is one of two reproduced on the record's back cover. In a Foucauldian sense, particularly in the midst of a period of revolutionary sexual exploration, the poet reminds us that societal curiosity about sex and atypical sexual interest are nothing new. Regardless, there's a startling difference between the hidden, repressed and clinical nature of the poems on No Deposit, No Return, and the joyous and liberated carnality celebrated in Fugs' songs like "Supergirl" and "Coca Cola Douche." Thus, the album serves as both a strident cross-generational critique and a statement of shared beliefs, targeted at young audiences through one of their most popular media. In a fashion not dissimilar from what Kupferberg parodies in tracks like the heartbreaking "Social Studies," or the Fugs' "Kill for Peace," No Deposit, No Return is very effective propaganda. We're grateful to Kupferberg's daughter, Samara, for her permission to share this groundbreaking record, which you can listen to in its entirety here. By clicking on the thumbnail images you can view large-format scans of the album covers and liner notes as well. Melvin B. Tolson on PennSoundPosted 7/28/2025 Today we're taking a look at the recordings you can find on PennSound's Melvin B. Tolson author page. The heart of this collection is a two-part career-spanning reading at Washington, D.C.'s Coolidge Auditorium, on October 18, 1965 — an event held in coordination with the Library of Congress — which serves as a fitting tribute to the influential poet, politician, and pedagogue, who'd pass away less than one year later. After a lavish introduction, Tolson starts with his debut collection, Rendezvous with America and hits many of the high points of his prestigious career, including his magnum opus, Dark Symphony, and Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, written during his time as that nation's poet laureate. Running just short of eighty minutes, Tolson's reading includes the poems "Sometimes," "The Gallows," "If You Should Lie to Me," "The Primer for Today," "The Dictionary of the Wolf," "Harlem Gallery," "The Birth of John Henry," "Ballad on Old Satchmo," and "The Sea Turtle and the Shark," among others, with commentary provided along the way. This retrospective performance is nicely complemented by a second recording of excerpts from Dark Symphony, for which, unfortunately, we have no information regarding its recording date and location. Nevertheless we're grateful to be Tolson's estate and the Library of Congress for the opportunity to present these materials to our listeners. Click here to visit PennSound's Melvin B. Tolson author page. Sophia Naz: Wexner Studio Session, 2024Posted 7/25/2025 We close out this week by taking a look at our holdings from bilingual poet, essayist, author, editor and translator Sophia Naz. Naz has published four poetry collections in total — Peripheries (Cyberhex 2015), Pointillism (Copper Coin 2017), Date Palms (City Press 2017), and Open Zero (Yoda Press 2021) — as well as a biography of her mother, titled Shehnaz; A Tragic True Tale of Royalty, Glamour and Heartbreak (Penguin Random House 2019). On her PennSound author page you'll find a pair of sessions recorded at the Kelly Writers House's Wexler Studios in 2019 and 2021. Naz's April 3, 2019 session consists of sixteen titles in total, including "Black Butterflies," "Eye of the Labyrinth," "The Heart of the Matter," "Habeas Corpus," "If You Spoke, Firefly," "Odysseys of an Onion Moon," "Chappan Churi," "Ode to a Scar," "In the Margins," "Atomic Nocta," and "The Department of Wronged Rights." Jumping forward to September 8, 2021, Naz's second session for PennSound included five short poems: "The Lesson," "Thumbnail," "Split Ends," "Nakhuda," and "The Dance." You can listen in to both sets of recordings on PennSound's Sophia Naz author page. Kathy Acker: SUNY-Buffalo Talk and Creeley Interview, 1979Posted 7/23/2025
Today we're highlighting a fascinating meeting of two seemingly incongruous minds: on December 12–13, 1979, Kathy Acker was a guest of Robert Creeley's at SUNY-Buffalo. Over those two days she read from her own work, delivered a talk on French novelists, and was interviewed by Creeley. Both events have been segmented, and are available on our Kathy Acker author page. After introductory comments by Creeley, Acker begins with "Tangier," a long chapter (the recording is forty-six minutes long) from Blood and Guts in High School about meeting Jean Genet in Tangiers. She and Creeley then talk briefly about Erica Jong before the first day's event ends. The second day begins with Acker offering introductory comments on the pair of French novelists "whose work I'm absolutely fascinated with" that she'll be discussing in this session: Pierre Guyotat and Laure (the pen name of Colette Peignot). "You can't get these books in this country. Don't even try," Acker warns, however she explains that "I wanted to present what I'm doing with their work to you" — even though her translations are rough first drafts and "my French is very bad," ("I knew it enough to know I didn't know it," she later tells the audience) — because of how captivated she became with these authors on a recent trip to France. Specifically, this interest ties into language: both her experience of their language and mediation inherent to encountering a foreign language of which one only has a basic knowledge, but also concerns that have followed her for much longer: "It seemed to me that more and more — I've lived in New York for the last seven years — [that] language is almost impossible now. It's as if ... to have a language, to be able to really speak to someone, seems to be almost like total freedom, in my mind." She then reads brief translations from each author's work: an excerpt from Guyotat's novel, Eden, Eden, Eden, followed by a piece by Laure about her childhood. A half-hour lecture on the two authors comes next, with a discussion session of about the same length wrapping up the event. That conversation has been segmented into five thematic parts: "on self-expression," "on self-reflection," "on subjectivity and perception," "on the writer's perspective," and "on the divided self." You can listen in by clicking here. Robert Ashley: Music with Roots in the Aether (1974)Posted 7/21/2025/media/movies/covers/2018/06/music2.jpg)
The seven installments focus on the work of (in order) David Behrman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and Ashley himself — representing the vanguard of contemporary composers — and include both lengthy interviews as well as performances. We've also included a link to a 2004 essay in The Brooklyn Rail by Kenneth Goldsmith: in it, Goldsmith appraises Music with Roots in the Aether as "a great snapshot of the period," and observes that "we're lucky that someone went through all this trouble to preserve a very valuable piece of musical history." Yusef Komunyakaa on PennSoundPosted 7/18/2025 The heart of our Komunyakaa page is a March 1998 reading at our own Kelly Writers House. This segmented recording consists of twenty-four in total, including favorite poems like "Facing It," "The Smokehouse," "Ode to the Maggot," "The God of Land Mines," "You and I Are Disappearing," and "Ode to a Drum," along with "Rhythm Method," "Letter to Bob Kaufman," "Camouflage in the Chimera," "We Never Know," and "Thanks," which has been a cherished part of PennSound's "Poems of Thanks and Thanksgiving" playlist for more than a decade. There's also a July 1999 appearance with Deborah Garrison on BBC Radio 3's Contemporary American Poetry Program, and the single poem "Slam, Dunk & Hook," published as part of the 2005 anthology Rattapallax. We're grateful and proud to have Yusef Komunyakaa as part of the diverse array of voices found within PennSound's vast archives. You can listen to all of the poems mentioned above my clicking here. Want to read more? Visit the PennSound Daily archive. |
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