Inside PennSoundFeatured resources
Selected by Charles Bernstein (read more about his choices here) |
Revamped Resources for Helen and Pat Adam's 'San Francisco's Burning'Posted 7/18/2024 We've long been proud to host Charles Ruas's production of the radio play for the Audio Experimental Theatre, which was first broadcast on New York City's WBAI FM on July 17th, 1977. In addition to the two Adam sisters, the radio play's cast also included Marilyn Hacker, Robert Hershon, and Barbara Wise in major roles. Those recordings have long been augmented by Kristin Prevallet's "Notes on San Francisco's Burning" taken from her excellent A Helen Adam Reader (2007), which features some charming anecdotes about the drama's production, including this recollection from musical director Rob Wynne regarding the "structured chaos" of the recording process: "It took a few months to pull it all together, often ending up after a session at Helen & Pat's apartment, surrounded by her collection of agates and stones, in which she saw images and stories. She always served celery filled with peanut butter, a bizarre but oddly delicious combination." That latter staging is now paired with another: a 1962 recording adapted from a 1961 production directed by Kermit Sheets for the San Francisco Playhouse, which features the drama's original electronic soundtrack, composed by Warner Jepson. Jepson, a wizard on the difficult-to-master Buchla synthesizer and a prominent figure in San Francisco's avant garde music scene, was kind enough to share these original recordings with us prior to his death in 2011. While we've only posted the production itself on Adam's page, there's also a link to additional photographs, press clippings, and other ephemera from the production on Jepson's PennSound author page. Finally, we've also added a link to Norman MacAffee's "Sixteen Drawings for Helen Adam's San Francisco's Burning" at Jacket2, which we mentioned in last week's tribute to the late artist. Taken together, these provide listeners the potential to truly immerse themselves in the Adam sisters' iconic and iconoclastic oddball drama. You can find all of the aforementioned resources, as well as more work from the poet on PennSound's Helen Adam author page. Piotr Gwiazda reads Grzegorz Wróblewski's 'Dear Beloved Humans,' 2024Posted 7/16/2024 Speaking of Wróblewski's collection, Wayne Miller notes that "The amazingly compressed poems in Dear Beloved Humans are constantly banging themselves against this world that makes no sense, but that most of us have nevertheless simply accepted, and Wróblewski has taken on the poetic task of jarring us into a renewed apprehension of the world's terrible, hilarious absurdity." In this brief clip, streamed on February 7th of this year, Gwiazda reads two poems from the volume in both Polish and English translation: an early untitled poem and a more recent piece entitled "Water!" On PennSound's Grzegorz Wroklewski author page you'll find this new video plus recordings from the 27th annual marathon reading at Woodland Pattern, a clip of five poems by Wroblewski, translated by Gwiazda and read by Marcus Slease, which had originally appeared as part of Marit MacArthur and Kacper Bartczak's 2015 Jacket2 feature "(Polish) Poetry after Różewicz," and a number of additional one-off collaborative tracks and readings recorded in Denmark, Sweden, and the UK between 2012 and 2016. Click here to start listening. M.C. Richards on PennSoundPosted 7/10/2024On PennSound's M.C. Richards author page you'll find a 1997 recording made at Indre Studios in Philadelphia, which comes to us courtesy of a close friend, Jasper Brinton, who provided us with a little background to the session. "She made this tape essentially under some strain: she did not live to see it published to any degree; but understood its importance for her legacy," he notes. "The quality of the recording is excellent. Her voice strong. Earlier in 1991 Station Hill Press published Imagine Inventing Yellow: New and Collected Poems of M.C. Richards. The tape includes a few of these poems but also later work she saw fit to preserve." We're very glad to be a part of that preservation process. You can listen to the seventy-five minute recording, consisting of nearly two dozen poems — including "March," "Strawberry," "Imagine Inventing Yellow," "Morning Prayer," "How to Rake Water," "Sweet Corn," and "For John Cage on His 75th Birthday" — along with plentiful fascinating asides and remarks by the author, by clicking here. In Memoriam: Norman MacAfeePosted 7/9/2024 We start this week off with the tragic news that poet, visual artist, translator, and librettist Norman MacAfee passed away on July 2nd after a brief illness. While we do not have a PennSound author page for MacAfee, his "Sixteen Drawings for Helen Adam's San Francisco's Burning" (published by Jacket2 in 2013) is a marvelous complement to the 1977 radio play staging of the drama by Charles Ruas and the Audio-Experimental Theatre, which you'll find on PennSound's Helen Adam author page. MacAfee starts off his introductory notes to the gallery by explaining how he first made Adam's acquaintance: "My first poet friend in New York was William Leo Coakley. He and his lover, the actor and writer Robin Prising, lived on the Upper West Side, and they introduced me to Helen Adam in the early 1980s. I spent several jolly Victorian Christmas dinners at Robin and Willie's, with Helen and her sister, Pat, and others of the hosts' friends." He then goes on to explain how these remarkable drawings came to be, explaining, "One evening in the fall of 1983, Helen, Bob Holman, and I read our poems at a reading organized by Chris Kadison at No Se No Cafe on the Lower East Side. Over the next months Bob, Helen, and I began planning a production of San Francisco's Burning." He continues, "Helen gave us photocopies of the libretto manuscript and score. One afternoon in March of 1984, I made twenty color production drawings and planned more. Around the same time Bob directed a video of Helen, in costume as the Worm Queen, singing songs from the piece. We asked the composer Raphael Mostel to be music director, and he made an audiotape of himself singing and playing the openings of each of the opera's songs." While the production never came to pass, we are still left with MacAfee's stylish and charming artwork, which he was kind enough to share with Jacket2.  You'll find that piece here, and MacAfee's Jacket2 contributor page also includes links to two earlier publications in Jacket Magazine. We send our condolences to MacAfee's spouse, Miguel Cervantes-Cervantes, and his friends and family at this time. 'How to Be European' by Anya Lewin (2007)Posted 7/5/2024 We'll wrap up the week with another offering from PennSound Cinema in honor of today's auspicious news from across the pond: How to Be European, by Anya Lewin.
Created during a three-month residency at InterSpace in Sofia, Bulgaria (as part of 2007's At Home in Europe Project, which also included artists' residencies in Norway, Latvia, and the UK), How to Be European was inspired by Lewin's lessons in Bulgarian with Boris Angelov. "The lessons question who learns and who teaches and whether European identity exists for anyone but Americans?," she explains. "The work uses a mixed methodology of pre-written Socratic dialogues, bad acting, experimental visual techniques, educational television, obscure references and poetic news reading and covers concepts such as time, language, economics, flow and mobility, dog watching, and cultural presentation." 
You can watch How to Be European on Lewin's PennSound author page, where you'll also find a number of supplemental links, including her homepage, where more of her work is on display. Rudy Burckhardt: Two Short Films Featuring Kenneth KochPosted 7/3/2024 The earlier of the two, The Apple (1967), features a lyric and spoken interlude written by Koch, which was set to music by Tony Ackerman and Brad Burg, and sung by Kim Brody. In stop-motion and live action, it traces the sprawling adventures of its titular fruit. Running just one minute and fifty-four seconds, the film is nevertheless the subject of a marvelous essay by Daniel Kane — "Whimsy, the Avant-Garde and Rudy Burckhardt's and Kenneth Koch's The Apple" — in which he praises it for "the ways in which ideas of temporality, spontaneity, childishness, and parody are expressed within this tiny little film work," thus "revealing the latent and hilarious power of the whimsical affect." The latter film, On Aesthetics (1999) has a sense of finality about it, coming during Burckhardt's last year and not long before Koch developed leukemia that would ultimately take his life in 2002. Running nine minutes and taking its name from the last poem in Koch's 1994 collection One Train, On Aesthetics — charmingly presented by "KoBu Productions" — features the poet's voice-over reciting the various micropoems contained under that title, from "Aesthetics of the Man in the Moon" and "Aesthetics of Creating Light" to "Aesthetics of Being with Child" and "Aesthetics of Echo," while Burckhardt's camera eye finds appropriate accompanying images, whether literary or abstract. We're grateful to be able to share this work with our listeners, along with two other Burckhardt films: — The Automotive Story (1954) and Central Park in the Dark (1985) — which you can find here. Our Kenneth Koch author page also houses these films, along with a 1998 reading at our own Kelly Writers House and a few brief recordings from the St. Mark's Poetry Project. Introducing the 2025 Kelly Writers House FellowsPosted 7/1/2024 This weekend we announced the trio of authors that will be joining us next spring semester for the annual Kelly Writers House Fellows program. While there's much more info to follow in the coming weeks and months, we wanted to share the amazing line-up as soon as possible. The program works in coordination with an undergrad course in which twenty or so students will read the work of each Fellow and then meet privately with them during that week's three-hour class session. Current UPenn undergrads interested in joining the class should contact KWH Fellows Coordinator Sophia DuRose at sdurose@writing.upenn.edu. In conjunction with the class the public will be able to take part in (either in person or from afar) the traditional Monday evening reading and Tuesday morning interview/conversation with each guest. Limited in-person seating for each event can be reserved by writing to whfellow@writing.upenn.edu.  Our full slate of 2025 Kelly Writers House Fellows will include: Patti Smith: February 24–25 Carmen Machado: March 31–April 1 Alice Notley: April 28-29 Of course, we'll keep our readers posted with more info as it becomes available. In the meantime, if you'd like to spend a little time some of the wonderful visitors we've had over the past 25 years, you can do so here. In Memoriam: Nathaniel Tarn (1928–2024)Posted 6/27/2024 Today we're sad to share the news that poet, translator, and anthropologist Nathaniel Tarn has passed away just a few days shy of his 96th birthday. Born in France in 1928, Tarn's peripetitic life took him to Belgium, England, and eventually the US, where he'd teach at Rutgers for more than a dozen years before retiring to New Mexico in the mid-1980s. His life as a poet spanned nearly 60 years, with the most recent publications including Atlantis, an Autoanthropology; The Hölderliniae; and Palenque: Selected Poems 1972-1984. Forrest Gander has praised Tarn's poetry, observing that "Tarn’s books have inspired a wild, almost religious devotion among readers. His work is a tremendous force field in which world and perception collaborate in the construction of innovative formal 'architextures' for a sensual language that has no like." He concludes, "Tarn is one of the most elegant and formidably intelligent minds in contemporary poetry. His books open up a means for us to be delighted again to belong to this world." On PennSound's Nathaniel Tarn author page, you'll find a modest collection of recordings, including readings at SUNY Buffalo, Hoboken, Harvard University, the Louisville Conference (as part of the Lute & Drum series), London (for the Shearsman reading series) and our own Kelly Writers House. There are also a number of album releases, including two New Mexico readings from the VOX Audio collection and Tarn's 1985 collaboration with musician Billy Panda, I Think This May Be Eden. There's also a link to PoemTalk #42, which covers Tarn's poem "Unravelling / Shock." We send our condolences to Tarn's family and his network of friends and fans worldwide. PoemTalk #197: on Marjorie Welish's "Begetting Textile"Posted 6/25/2024 Filreis offers this lyrical take on the poems' impact in his write-up of the new episode: "The poems are texts in the sense of text inside the term textile. They are barely raveled. Phrase do and don't knit. A sweater is put on and overcomes mimesis. Fragmentation, the group agrees, is not the vibe — that’s too definitely indefinite." He continues, "Welish deploys phrasings on the page that convey the unraveling of work (and the meaning of work, especially women's work) rather than fractioning, shattering, and atomizing," before asserting, "There is a wholeness to the untangling." Etheridge Knight Reads 'Prison Poems,' c. 1968Posted 6/24/2024 When these segmented tracks were first introduced, our own Al Filreis commented that the "recording is marred by — or indeed perhaps enhanced and positively complicated by — the loud music playing in the background." You can judge for yourself. Altogether, there are twenty-eight tracks, including an introduction and the following titles among many others: "Cell Song," "Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane," "To the Man Who Sidled Up to Me and Asked: How Long You In Fer, Buddy?," "Poems for Black Relocation Centers," "For Malcolm, A Year After," and "Apology for Apostasy." You'll find these tracks, along with Watershed Tapes' album, So My Soul Can Sing and video footage of a 1980 reading for the Friends of the Scranton Public Library Poetry Series on our Etheridge Knight author page. Want to read more? Visit the PennSound Daily archive. |
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