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From "Down To Write You This Poem Sat" at the Oakville Gallery

Contemporary
  1. Charles Bernstein, "Phone Poem" (2011) (1:30): MP3
  2. Caroline Bergvall, "Love song: 'The Not Tale (funeral)' from Shorter Caucer Tales (2006): MP3
  3. Christian Bôk, excerpt from Eunoia, from Chapter "I" for Dick Higgins (2009) (1:38):  MP3
  4. Tonya Foster, Nocturne II (0:40) (2010) MP3
  5. Ted Greenwald, "The Pears are the Pears" (2005) (0:29): MP3
  6. Susan Howe, Thorow, III (3:13) (1998):  MP3
  7. Tan Lin, "¼ : 1 foot" (2005) (1:16): MP3
  8. Steve McCaffery, "Cappuccino" (1995) (2:35): MP3
  9. Tracie Morris, From "Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful" (2002) (3:40): MP3
  10. Julie Patton, "Scribbling thru the Times" (2016) (5:12): MP3
  11. Tom Raworth, "Errory" (c. 1975) (2:08): MP3
  12. Jerome Rothenberg, from "The First Horse Song of Frank Mitchell: 4-Voice Version" (c. 1975) (3:30): MP3
  13. Cecilia Vicuna, "When This Language Disappeared" (2009) (1:30): MP3
Historical
  1. Guillaume Apollinaire, "Le Pont Mirabeau" (1913) (1:14): MP3
  2. Amiri Baraka, "Black Dada Nihilismus" (1964) (4:02):  MP3
  3. Louise Bennett, "Colonization in Reverse" (1983) (1:09): MP3
  4. Sterling Brown, "Old Lem " (c. 1950s) (2:06):  MP3
  5. John Clare, "Vowelless Letter" (1849) performed by Charles Bernstein (2:54): MP3
  6. Velimir Khlebnikov, "Incantation by Laughter" (1910), tr. and performed by Bernstein (:28)  MP3
  7. Harry Partch, from Barstow (part 1), performed by Bernstein (1968) (1:11): MP3
  8. Leslie Scalapino, "Can’t’ is ‘Night’" (2007) (3:19): MP3
  9. Kurt Schwitters, "Ur Sonata: Largo" performed by Ernst Scwhitter (1922-1932) ( (3:12): MP3
  10. Gertrude Stein, If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1934-35) (3:42): MP3
  11. William Carlos Willliams, "The Defective Record" (1942) (0:28): MP3
  12. Hannah Weiner, from Clairvoyant Journal, performed by Weiner, Sharon Mattlin & Rochelle Kraut (2001) (6:12): MP3

Selected by Charles Bernstein (read more about his choices here)

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Happy Birthday, Joe Brainard

Posted 3/11/2025

Today we celebrate endlessly influential author and artist Joe Brainard, born on this day in 1942. Our Joe Brainard author page is anchored by four readings from the St. Mark's Poetry Project recorded between 1971 and 1981. They include copious excerpts from his magnum opus, I Remember, along with selections from his journals and numerous other pieces such as "Thanksgiving," "Insomnia," "Worry Wart," "The Zucchini Problem," "Today (Monday, February 23rd, 1981)," and "Sick Art." Additionally, you'll find excerpts from Train Ride read at SFSU in the mid-1970s and a stellar reading with Bill Berkson at Intersection for the Arts in 1971, plus more I Remember selections taken from a 1974 Giorno Poetry Systems session and a recording session at home in Calais, VT in 1970. 

Filmmaker Matt Wolf (who directed the much-lauded Wild Combination, a documentary on the life of avant-pop cellist Arthur Russell) is back with an exciting new project — I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard — a haunting and gorgeous meditation that deftly intertwines both imagery and audio to create a compelling tribute to the artist and author. We're very glad to see Brainard commemorated in such grand fashion, and happier still that Wolf was was kind enough to share an exclusive clip with PennSound. In it, longtime friend, collaborator and confidante Ron Padgett discusses Brainard's early development as a visual artist and his ability to work confidently in a wide variety of media and forms, never becoming complacent in one style.
You'll find all of the recordings mentioned above by clicking here. It's also worth checking out Andrew Epstein's 2014 Brainard birthday post on his New York School-focused blog, Locus Solus, which features excerpts from a tribute poem by James Schuyler, excerpts from I Remember "thinking about birthdays, and our frustrating efforts to understand 'time,'" and a few examples of his artwork. Brainard's birthday is also a wonderful reason to revisit the Make Your Own Brainard site, where you can make your own collages using fragments from his visual work.


Haraldo de Campos on PennSound

Posted 3/10/2025

Today we're highlighting our author page for poesia concreta pioneer, Haroldo de Campos, which is anchored by a 2002 video from the Guggenheim Museum celebrating his life and work. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Brazil: Body and Soul, this January 12, 2002 event featured both performances and discussion of de Campos' work by a wide variety of poets, translators and critics.

The video begins with introductory comments by Pablo Helguera and organizer Sergio Bessa, who are followed by a staging of de Campos' 1950 poem/play "Auto do Possesso (Act of the Possessed)," translated by Odile Cisneros and directed by Cynthia Croot. Craig Dworkin is next, reading his translation of "Signantia quasi coelum / signância quase céu," follwed by a brief set by Cisneros, who reads her translations. The performances conclude with Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein reading Bessa's translation of "Finismundo," after which Perloff and Bernstein take part in a panel discussion moderated by Bessa.

Next, from 2005's Rattapallax we have a single track, "Calcas Cor de Abobora." Finally, we have a 2017 video of our own Charles Bernstein performing at New York's Hauser and Wirth Gallery with Sergio Bessa on September 28, 2017. This event, co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America and held in conjunction with an exhibit by Mira Schendel at the gallery, included Bessa speaking about de Campos and Bernstein reading his translations of Drummond, Cabral, Cruz e Sousa, Leminksi, and Bonvicino.

On our Haroldo de Campos author page, you'll also find a link to Bernstein's 2003 essay "De Campos Thou Art Translated (Knot)", first published in the Poetry Society of America's Crosscurrents.


Alan Bernheimer, 'Particle Arms' (1982)

Posted 3/7/2025

Today, we shine the spotlight on Alan Bernheimer's play, Particle Arms, which was performed November 21, 1982 as part of the Poets Theatre at Studio Eremos in San Francisco. Particle Arms features a vertible who's who of Bay Area poetics, including cast members Steve Benson, Tom Mandel, Kit Robinson, Eileen Corder, and Steven Rodefer, set designer Johanna Drucker, and even Lyn Hejinian, who wrote the play's program.

The play lives up to its description, as "tracing the trajectory of two men and a woman over an Edward Hopper hotelscape, peopled by psychological misfits, to an economy dependent on stunt work," dabbling in noir delights and failed romance with hilarious results, however Particle Arms is not just great entertainment, but also an evocative time capsule of a close-knit community of friends and artists — as evidenced by the "experiment in collective autobiography," The Grand Piano, which features many of these poets and their contemporaries.

In addition to Particle Arms, Bernheimer's PennSound author page features links to twenty episodes of the influential radio program, In the American Tree, hosted by the poet during the show's 1979-1980 season — including interviews with Ted Greenwald, Erica Hunt, and Bill Berkson, among others — as well as his own November 10, 1978 appearance on the show, as Hejinian and Robinson's guest. There's also a 2001 reading from the St. Mark's Poetry Project and the 1980 talk "Subject Matter" from the New Langton Arts Center. Listeners might also want to check out Bernheimer's collection of photos and documents from the production of Particle Arms, which is linked on the page as well. Click here to start exploring.


Spending "Ash Wednesday" with T. S. Eliot

Posted 3/5/2025

With Christians worldwide marking Ash Wednesday today, we thought it might be worthwhile to revisit T. S. Eliot's iconic poem of the same name, which is available on PennSound two ways: a recording by the poet himself, and a rendition by John Richetti made for our PennSound Classics page.

In a 2014 essay for The Guardian, Roz Kaveney identifies the poem as one of "the first fruits of T. S. Eliot's conversion [to Anglicanism]" and acknowledges that "we think of ["Ash Wednesday"], not wholly inaccurately, as an essentially liturgical piece ... Yet that is not all that is going on here." "For a religious poem," Kaveney continues, "'Ash Wednesday' has a distinctly secular aspect some of the time. Even more than 'The Waste Land,' it is heavily intertextual; you can read its allusions as metonymous, that is to say as bringing into his text the whole of the texts that they echo." Much of the poem is shaped by Eliot's stagnant marriage to Vivienne, the poem's dedicatee, producing "moments of nightmare" full of guilt, disorder, and sinfulness. "It's interesting that there is so much talk of fertility here and it is always gardens and never children," Kaveney notes, hypothesizing that Eliot was sublimating his desire for a daughter within the poem: "There is something deeply sad, but also dishonest, in this replacement of what he perhaps really desired with an etiolated and inauthentic religious vision; Eliot at his best speaks more honestly than that, even when he is being cryptic."

As for that "call to spiritual awareness" in the poem's latter half, Kaveney observes that "There's something worrying, if logical, about Eliot's vision of himself as a preacher calling the world to order — it was after all, the original family business, running revivals was why his ancestors moved to the Midwest. The problem is that the organic society he shows us is so totally a decoration, people walking and talking in a landscape, and a piper playing plaintive tunes; in the later sections of 'Ash Wednesday,' the quotations of liturgy are progressively stronger than the bits that are Eliot." The critic concludes, "This is a poem – the same can be said of Dante – in which the visions of hell are stronger than the visions of heaven, in which the original evocation of the heavenly ... is much more effective than the later parts; Eliot is trying urgently to convince us, and sacrificing much to that attempt, and yet he falls short of what he is trying to do."

As noted above, our archives include a recording of Eliot reading the poem in three segments, each containing two parts, which was made at the Speech Lab at Columbia University in 1933, the first of several sessions over two years that would yield documents of the majority of Eliot's most iconic poems. You can listen to that recording here on PennSound's T. S. Eliot author page. We also have a recording made by John Richetti for PennSound Classics at our own Wexler Studios in May 2022 as part of a set of twenty-nine poems by Eliot. Listen to that performance by clicking here.


David Antin: "Sky Poem #1" (1987)

Posted 3/3/2025

Today we're revisiting video documentation of "Sky Poem #1," staged by David Antin in Santa Monica, CA during May 1987.

The latter half of the video is largely taken up with an interview with Antin, who discusses the his impressions of the piece's execution and his plans for further poems in the series, as well as the relationship between this sort of poem and his talk pieces. "In a way, even if the text of this is fixed, I had to write a text that wouldn't be so fixed," he explains, "it wasn't fixed, because one line goes away, and then another one goes away and no one is quite sure of exactly what it refers to, and has a family of possible things it could refer to, all of which are interesting: who are we? who are they? what is it we get together? what is it that could fall apart of be taken apart? and what is it we could lose?" 

Given the importance of ambiguity to the piece's interpretation, it's particularly interesting to be able to hear the responses of so many spectators (one personal favorite: "Corinne, it's a poem! Come here, I have to tell you about this. It's a poem and the poet is the man up on the roof and he is conducting the airplanes, and it's an eighteen-minute piece so we have to stay here and we can't talk."). "There were probably hundreds of different texts that people generated out of what I did because it was stimulating other people to come up with their own versions," he observes "so a lot of different poems got written today."

You can watch this video on PennSound's David Antin author page, which is home to forty years' worth of recordings, by clicking here.


James Schuyler "on the Day Before March First"

Posted 2/28/2025

"It's February 28, and that means it's a good day to read and think about one of my favorite James Schuyler poems, 'February,' which takes place 'on the day before March first.'" Thus begins a 2018 blog post by Andrew Epstein on his indispensable blog, "Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets." What follows is an excerpt from Epstein's book, Attention Equals Life, which is concerned with the poem's origins and its place within Schuyler's ouvre. 

As Epstein notes, "'February' seems to have been a breakthrough for Schuyler, ushering in his mature style and set of concerns;  years later, he decided to give it pride of place as the second poem in Freely Espousing, his debut full-length collection, published in 1969." He continues, telling us that it "was also one of only four poems by Schuyler included in The New American Poetry, the epochal 1960 anthology edited by Donald Allen, which ensured that it would become an early 'greatest hit' for the poet." He then moves on to discuss Schuyler's writing process:
"February" is one of the first of Schuyler's many "window" poems; it sets out to recount exactly what could be seen from his apartment window in New York during a wintry sunset, at precisely 5 P.M. "on the day before March first." Fortunately for us, Schuyler discussed the composition of this poem in a letter he wrote (and apparently never mailed) to a woman ("Miss Batie") who had written a fan letter to him about his poems.  In the letter, he explains that
the day on which I wrote the poem I had been trying to write a poem in a regular form about (I think) Palermo, the Palazzo Abatelli, which has splendid carved stone ropes around its doors and windows, and the chapels decorated by Serpotta, with clouds of plaster cherubs; the poem turned out laborious and flat, and looking out the window I saw that something marvelous was happening to the light, transforming everything.  It then occurred to me that this happened more often than not (a beautiful sunset I mean) and that it was 'a day like any other,' which I put down as a title.  The rest of poem popped out of its own accord.  Or so it seems now.
By deciding to abandon the other, unwritten hymn to Palermo and Serpotta's baroque cherubs, and by choosing to write "February" instead, Schuyler seems to have stumbled upon a recognition about subject matter, about attentiveness to daily life, and about form.
You can read more of Epstein's observations, along with the poem in its entirety here.  You can listen to Schuyler read the poem as part of a reading at New York's Dia Art Foundation on November 15, 1988 — where he was introduced by close friend and collaborator John Ashbery — on PennSound's James Schuyler author page.


In Memoriam: Pierre Joris (1946–2025)

Posted 2/27/2025

All of us at PennSound are saddened by the passing of Pierre Joris. The Luxembourgish poet, translator, scholar, anthologist, and performer was 78 years old. 

Back in 2021, we celebrated Joris' selection for the PEN/Manheim Award for Translation, which recognizes the breadth of a translator's career. The judges' citation begins offers a fine summation of that career, starting by acknowledging his resistance to the "landscape of literary translation that is still beholden to linguistic and national silos." "Pierre Joris's work has long been and remains essential in mapping currents and countercurrents of global modernity," they continue. "As literary translation struggles to confront imperial histories of violence and erasure, and to engage with and encourage voices of cultural and linguistic differences, Joris has blazed a path for generations of emerging translators to follow." The citation notes Joris' "stunning and unparalleled career as a translator, poet, essayist, editor, critic, performer, and academic," and spotlights his "personal trajectory has fueled his articulation of a 'nomad poetics' that cannot be contained by national or linguistic boundaries, one in which Anglo-European perspectives are enriched and complicated by those of the Global South, and where translation models the potentialities and necessary complexities of cross-cultural contact.

PennSound listeners will probably be most familiar with Joris' work on Paul Celan or the groundbreaking series of Poems for the Millennium anthologies he co-edited with the late Jerry Rothenberg, but he translated a wide array of authors into both English (Adonis, Jean-Pierre Duprey, Safaa Fathy, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Pablo Picasso, Rainer Maria Rilke, Kurt Schwitters, Habib Tengour, and Tristan Tzara) and French (Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Sam Shepard, and Pete Townshend). Joris was also a good friend of PennSound and the Kelly Writers house, as evidenced by his PennSound author page, which is home to dozens of recordings spanning the nearly thirty years, including readings, talks, interviews, and podcast appearances., many at KWH.

We send our heartiest congratulations to Joris' widow, Nicole Peyrafitte, his family, friends, colleagues, and readers worldwide.



Aural Monsoon: 'Live in the Haight' (2017)

Posted 2/26/2025

Here's an opportunity to get to know another side of poet Will Alexander through his jazz duo, Aural Monsoon, where he plays piano alongside drummer Mark Pino. Today, we're proud to highlight Live at the Haight, an album recorded on August 13, 2017. Click here to listen to all nine tracks, including "Bamboo and Fire," "Calm and Furious Waters," "Verdigris Panorama," "Lyrical Jasmine Towers," "Aural Diamonds in Motion," and "Double Recognition."

Here's what Pino had to say about his their collaboration: "Los Angeles poet and musician Will Alexander's work been shaking my perceptions for several years now. I was happy to play with him on sets with Cloud Shepherd, and continue to love to read his writing. Hence, when Will contacted me to ask about my being available for a house show in San Francisco, with me on drums and he on piano, I jumped at the opportunity." Later, he says of the same gig, "Towards the end of the second set, I simply stopped playing my drums and listened to Will, more as a fan than a duo partner. I guess I kind of got lost in that for a few minutes. Will's Surreal Trance moves will have that effect!"

For those craving more of Alexander's work, click here to visit his PennSound author page, which is home to a variety of talks, readings, and interviews going back to 1994.


PoemTalk #205: on Two by June Jordan

Posted 2/24/2025

Today we releasee the newest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which focuses on two poems by June Jordan — "Financial Planning" and "Song of the Law Abiding Citizen" — that were filmed by Bob Holman as "Poetry Spots" for WNYC-TV.  Joining host Al Filreis for this program are Holman, Herman Beavers, and Christy Davids.

As Filreis explains in his program notes at Jacket2,  Holman's short films "aired on WNYC-TV as 'non-commercial commercials' from 1987 through 1993" with the Jordan clips first broadcast on April 26, 1989. Filreis goes on to quote an interview with Holman describing the spirit of the endeavor: " “I love poetry, I love its variety. I love people who say that's not a poem, because when that's not a poem, you get to talk about what a poem is. And who dares define that?”

You can listen to this latest program; watch, listen to, and read Jordan's two poems; and learn more about the show here. PoemTalk is a joint production of PennSound and the Poetry Foundation, aided by the generous support of Nathan and Elizabeth Leight. Browse the full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than two hundred episodes, by clicking here.


Hilda Morley on PennSound

Posted 2/21/2025

Our author page for Black Mountain-associated poet Hilda Morley (1916–1998) is admittedly a scant archive, containing just one three minute recording — the poem "Provence" from a March 15, 1992 reading at New York's Alice Tully Hall — but as PennSound co-director Charles Bernstein notes, "it is the only recording of Morley now available."

In her New York Times obituary, Wolfgang Saxon observed that "Ms. Morley published five books of poetry in which she articulated emotions and feelings in free verse, but a type of verse as measured as dance or music. She was a 'master of that ability,' Robert Creeley, a fellow poet, said." He continues: "She wrote that her poetry was shaped by the visions of Abstract Expressionism, which can create metamorphoses. Artists like Klee and Picasso, she said, gave her the means to create word canvases depicting the world around her."

We're grateful to be able to share this document of Morley's life, no matter how brief, and thank Patrick Beurard-Valdoye and Austin Clarkson for their assistance in making this recording available.



Want to read more? Visit the PennSound Daily archive.