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Selected by Charles Bernstein (read more about his choices here) |
Boise State University: Spring 2024 ReadingsPosted 5/20/2024 As we ease into summer break let's check in with the Boise State University MFA Reading Series and their spectacular spring roster of readings. This past fall's lineup of Peter Gizzi, Dan Beachy-Quick, Srikanth Reddy, and Alice Notley was quite formidable and this semester kept up the pace with five events held between February and April. First up on February 16th was Christina Piña, who was introduced by Martin Corless-Smith. CAConrad followed on March 8th, with an introduction by Trey Hayden — one of two March readings, along with Jennifer Moxley (who was introduced by Savy Butler) on March 29th. Finally, the program hosted two events during National Poetry Month: Endi Bogue Hardigan and Rob Schlegel (introduced by Caleb Merritt and Christofer Arbudzinsky, respectively) on April 5th, and Ian Dreiblatt on April 12th (with introduction by Adam Ray Wagner). Click here to visit PennSound's Boise State University MFA Reading Series homepage, where you can listen to all of the aforementioned readings. While you're there, check out our repository of recordings made between 2010–2013 under the curation of Corless-Smith, including sets from Alan Halsey, Susan M. Schultz, Ben and Sandra Doller, Forrest Gander, Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, Jennifer Moxley, Bhanu Kapil, Myung Mi Kim, Renée Gladman, Tom Raworth, Lisa Robertson, Alice Notley, and Maggie Nelson. We thank current coordinator Sara Nicholson and grad student Adam Ray Wagner for their help in reviving the series page. David Antin Discusses Kathy Acker, 2002Posted 5/18/2024
"Let me point out I knew Kathy before she was the Kathy Acker you all know," Antin begins, discussing his first meeting her at UC San Diego in 1968, when she was working as a teaching assistant and associating with other "refugees from Brandeis," along with her husband Robert (nominally a student of Marcuse). He goes on to discuss "the climate in which Kathy came to be a poet" — specifically "the proclaimed sexual revolution" and "the year of the assassinations" (Antin's arrival in the city coincided with Robert Kennedy's murder and Valerie Solanas' shooting of Andy Warhol) — then recalls the guidance that he provided to young and aspiring writers like Acker, Mel Freilicher, and others from their social circle, the conceptual art projects he worked closely with (including a Fluxus retrospective), and associations with figures like his wife, Eleanor, Jerry and Diane Rothenberg, Lenny Neufeld, George Quasha, et al., all of which proved to be very influential. "She was exposed to all of these people in various ways that were useful to her," he observes.
He goes on to talk about her compositional use of constraint ("Her engagement was with so many things but she had to restrain herself to not be all over the place all at once."), her means of getting her work out to wider audiences, and the qualities that made her a singular talent: "Kathy had both intelligence and energy, and she had desire [...] It was the intensity of her desire for life." It's a gossipy, raucous recollection that also reveals deeper truths about how Acker came into her own. You can watch it here. Trish Salah on PennSoundPosted 5/8/2024Our holdings begin with the poet's appearance at the 2009 ADFEMPO (Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism) conference, organized by Belladonna*, which took place on September 24th and 25th of that year. Salah appeared as part of a panel on "Body as Discourse" chaired by Kate Eichhorn that included Joan Retallack, Laura Smith, Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël), and Ronaldo V. Wilson in addition to Salah, which explored "questions of the body, referentiality, remapping bodies and borders, intertextuality, narrativity, aesthetics, and the challenges of de-essentialization as we scrutinize 'female,' 'queer,' 'raced' and 'othered' bodies." Beyond that panel, we had a brief set as part of a Belladonna* Reading Series event on Transfeminism and Literature from 2012, and Salah's Segue Series reading at the Zinc Bar in March 2013. Since then, we've added several more recordings, including "Nevada: A Reading and Panel" that also included Imogen Binnie, from the Young Centre for Performing Arts in 2013; 2014's Wanting in Arabic: A Conversation with Poet Trish Salah," recorded as part of the Asia Pacific Forum for NYC's WBAI-FM; and a 2014 reading at the East Bay Poetry Summit, hosted by the Manifest Reading and Workshop Series. There's also a very exciting PennSound Podcast episode (#57) in which Christy Davids interviews Salah and Salah reads her poetry, including "Two Self Portraits," "Interlude for the Voice," "Future Foundered," and "Gossels in Fugue." You can listen to any and all of the recordings mentioned above by clicking here. In Memoriam: David Shapiro (1947–2024)Posted 5/7/2024 Last week, while the world was focused on pro-Palestine campus occupations at Columbia University and elsewhere one photo that frequently made the rounds was this one of students occupying the office of Columbia's president in 1968. Those in the know will recognize the central figure as poet David Shapiro, who died yesterday at the age of 77. A precocious and prolific polymath, Shapiro first hit the cultural scene as a teenager, working as a professional violinist with several orchestras and publishing his first work in Poetry at the age of sixteen. That infamous photo was taken during the end of the first of three tenures at Columbia: he earned his BA in 1968, returned for a Ph.D. in 1973, and eventually joined the faculty. Beyond his own poetry, Shapiro published both art and literary criticism, along with work as a translator and editor (perhaps most notably, An Anthology of New York Poets with Ron Padgett). His influence was felt widely and he will be missed by many. We direct listeners to Shapiro's PennSound author page, where you can browse a small collection of more recently recordings, including a pair of Segue Series events and a reading for Dia Art Foundation, and a 1976 ten-year memorial for Frank O'Hara at the Poetry Project, which also featured Joe LeSeuer, Patsy Southgate, Jane Freilicher (reading James Schuyler), Anne Waldman as MC, Kenneth Koch (reading "Awake in Spain"), Carter Ratcliffe, Tony Towle, Patsy Southgate, and Peter Schjedahl. Click here to start exploring. In Memoriam: Paul Auster (1947–2024)Posted 5/3/2024 Unfortunately we close this week out with word of yet another major literary figure's passing: Paul Auster, best known as a novelist, but also a poet, translator, essayist, and screenwriter, died on April 30th at the age of 77. Our cofounders both shared remembrances of the author this week. Al Filreis recalled that "Paul Auster's two visits to the Kelly Writers House were fabulously memorable — one in 2001, the second 17 years later during his time as a Writers House Fellow in 2018. I had the honor of hosting him, and hanging out with him, for the 3 days of that second stay. What a literary mind! What a voice (in all senses)." Concluding by noting that "his passing is a major loss," he encouraged folks to "look at his PennSound page and have a listen."  Charles Bernstein shared this photo of him flanked by three authors who've passed away recently, with the caption, "Ave atque vale: Paul Auster, Jerome Rothenberg, Marjorie Perloff, 20 years ago at a panel I organized on Radical Jewish Poetry / Secular Jewish Practice at the Center for Jewish History in NY. Our talks and much more were later collected in a book in the Alabama series: Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture." The recordings highlighted in their notes are just some of the treasures waiting for you on PennSound's Paul Auster author page, along with a 1995 LINEbreak interview with Bernstein and a contemporaneous reading from The Red Notebook at SUNY-Buffalo as part of the Wednesdays @ 4Plus series, along with a 1989 reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project with Paul Violi. The 2004 Secular Jewish Culture / Radical Poetic Practice event at Manhattan's Center for Jewish History/American Jewish Historical Society — which also included Kathryn Hellerstein and Stephen Paul Miller — can be found here along with more information on the event. We send our condolences to Auster's family, friends, and fans worldwide. Steve McCaffery, "Wot We Wokkers Want" b/w "One Step to the Next"Posted 5/1/2024:format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-2529703-1289069028.jpeg.jpg) There's probably no more fitting recording for May Day in the PennSound archives than Steve McCaffery's "Wot We Wokkers Want" b/w "One Step to the Next," This album was released on LP and cassette in 1980 by the Underwhich Audio Collective, a small Canadian independent label (based in Toronto, Ontario and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) that also issued small run releases (usually about 100 copies) by the likes of Owen Sound, the Four Horsemen, Paul Dutton, Bob Cobbing, Susan Frykberg, Larry Wendt, and DUCT, among others. Better known by its full title, The Kommunist Manifesto or Wot We Wukkerz Want Bi Charley Marx un Fred Engels, the leadoff track is McCaffery's translation of The Communist Manifesto into the dialect of West Riding of Yorkshire, or, as he puts it, "Redacted un traduced intuht’ dialect uht’ west riding er Yorkshuh bi Steve McCaffery, eh son of that shire. Transcribed in Calgary 25 November to 3 December 1977 un dedicated entirely to Messoors Robert Filliou and George Brecht uv wooz original idea this is a reullizayshun." You can read the piece in its entirety here as part of the PECP Library. Side A also includes "Mid●night Peace" ("a nostalgic translation of the Dadaphony of hell") and "A Hundred And One Zero S One Ng," which is McCaffery's translation of Brecht's translation of the closing section of Robert Filliou's 14 Chansons et Charade. Side B starts with "One Step Next to the Next," co-created with Clive Robertson, which centers around turntable manipulations of a National Geographic flexi-disc on the Apollo space flights. The closing track, Emes1 in which "a phrase is intercepted, reversed, synthesized, and obsessively repeated as a stolen micro-unit." As the liner notes explain, "it represents McCaffery's first theft from himself." Listen in to all of these tracks here. In Memoriam: Andy Clausen (1941–2024)Posted 4/30/2024 We are sorry to report the death of latter-day Beat poet Andy Clausen, who passed away at the age of 83 on April 11th. Clausen came a long way from bomb-scarred Belgium to Woodstock, NY, where he was a mainstay of the poetry scene for the last quarter century. A tribute by Eliot Katz on the website of the National Beat Poetry Foundation provides a rollicking biography as well as a bibliography, listing his publications including "The Iron Curtain of Love, 40th Century Man, Songs of Bo Baba, Without Doubt, and Home of the Blues [and] an extraordinary memoir, Beat, about his adventures with well-known and lesser-known Beat Generation writers." Katz also frame Clausen's poetry as "extend[ing] the democratic-left and imagination-filled traditions of poets like Walt Whitman, William Blake, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, the French surrealists, and the Russian Futurists, especially Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was always one of Andy’s favorites." He also provides this fascinating description of Clausen's Pauline transformation from a Marine into a poet: Andy was physically stronger than most poets. After graduating from high school, he became a talented Golden Gloves boxer and, for a brief time, joined the Marines, which he left in 1966 after watching Allen Ginsberg on TV read his anti-Vietnam War poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra." The line from Allen's poem that caught Andy's attention and changed the direction of his life was the simple but poignant, humanizing question: "Has anyone looked in the eyes of the dead?" Folks wanting a taste of Clausen's poetry should head over to our archive page for the recordings of Chris Funkhouser, where you'll find several recordings: two tracks from issue #14 of We Magazine (one a collaboration with thelemonade), a December 1991 We Press/Gargoyle Mechanique Laboratory Benefit from New York City, and Clausen's set from the 27th Annual Subterranean Poetry Festival, held in Rosendale, NY in 2017. We send our condolences to Clausen's friends and family. Caroline Bergvall in Conversation with David Wallace and Orchid Tierney, 2014Posted 4/27/2024 You can hear much more from Bergvall's trilogy, along with earlier work like Fig and Goan Atom on her PennSound author page. Click here to start exploring. Amish Trivedi on Jerry Rothenberg at Jacket2Posted 4/26/2024 I'll admit I chuckled a little when I read about the decision to join us in our new publishing endeavor: I told him at the time that I thought the whole blog thing was dying, that we had all slowed down on Blogger, and that with the Buffalo List seemingly on fumes at that point, Ron Silliman having slowed as well, and social media booming, the age of the poetry blog was winding down. Did we want to move to Jacket2's new thing just to watch it all end? "Of course!" Jerry shouted into the phone. There was a crackling sound as the receiver hit its max volume and the audio broke slightly. I didn't argue — just agreed. Whatever Jerry was up to, I wanted in. And needless to say, we are grateful for Jerry's enthusiasm and everything that's followed! Later, after lamenting their distant friendship, Trivedi shares a luminous memory of seeing Rothenberg read in person: We had been lucky to run into each other a few times in person over the years, despite entire books of the Americas of our own in the middle. I was doing an MFA and a PhD and adjuncting and broke but there was always an invite on every call to visit Encinitas. Thankfully, the last year I was in person doing my PhD, we managed to get Jerry out for a couple of nights to do a reading and interview to Normal, Illinois. Watching him read to a packed room after a few glasses of wine, all of us sweaty and tired on an April night, is going to be a happy memory a lot of us get to carry forward. As I say, anyone mourning the loss of Jerry Rothenberg will take solace from Trivedi's remembrance. Click here to read it in its entirety. In Memoriam: Jerry Rothenberg (1931–2024)Posted 4/23/2024 How do you begin to describe the many lives of Jerry Rothenberg, who passed away on Sunday at the age of ninety-two? His output as poet alone, or translator, or editor, or anthologist would be enough to secure his reputation for the ages, and yet he excelled in all those areas and more with equal brilliance, fervor, and prescience. The poetry world we inhabit has been shaped over and over again by Rothenberg's vision, which comprehensively traces an evolution in Western poetics from Romanticism through Modernism to the present, while also inviting a diverse array of marginalized voices to take an equal place at the table. Who else could find profound commonalities that transcended time and space, or trace mercurial ideas into the most obscure corners of expression? Who else could subvert the anthology's colonial trappings, creating cherished collections — Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, [Europe], & Oceania; Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas; and A Big Jewish Book: Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to the Present; among others — that envision a pluralistic and egalitarian, almost utopian, worldview entire generations before the literary mainstream caught up with him?  The Rothenberg family broke the news on Sunday night with the following note:
Our own Al Filreis offered this remembrance on behalf of the UPenn community: "Here at the Writers House our hearts go out to Diane and Matthew and all of Jerry's many, many friends. Jerry and Diane visited KWH a number of times over the years. We were blessed by his poetry and his overall poeticness." He concluded, "[Rothenberg] always felt — and said — the poetry should be learned 'where poetry actually happens.' And he of course made it happen in whatever space he joined." Charles Bernstein offered a more succinct tribute: "Infinite sadness to get this news, infinite happiness for Jerry’s life, work, lifelong friendship."  I was lucky to meet Jerry during his time as a KWH Fellow in 2008 and to see him again here in Cincinnati in 2011 and Ann Arbor in 2013, and I would be hard pressed to think of a poet with a more magnetic presence in a live setting. He'd have you doubled over with laughter one minute, wiping tears from your eyes the next, and enraptured throughout — indeed, I never saw him read without entering into an almost transcendent state, suffused with a sense of peace and wellbeing. I had always hoped to see him read again, to get back to that place of preternatural poetic calm, but sadly it appears that I'll no longer have the chance.  As always, in times of profound loss, it's natural to turn back to the work itself, where a beloved author lives eternally. PennSound's Jerry Rothenberg author page is an excellent place to do exactly that, with well over 350 individual tracks taken from dozens of events spanning more than half a century. These include readings, interviews, panel discussions and talks, albums, performances, podcasts, films, and more. We also direct our listeners to Jacket2, where we were honored to host Jerry's commentary series, "Poems and Poetics," since our launch, and don't forget about our Reissues section, where you browse the complete runs of the groundbreaking journals Alcheringa (1970–1980, co-edited with Dennis Tedlock) and New Wilderness Letter (1977–1984). In a year full of unfathomable losses, Jerry Rothenberg's departure overshadows all others. It truly feels like the end of an era. We join with his family, friends, and fans worldwide in celebrating the life and work of this singular talent. Happy Birthday Bob KaufmanPosted 4/18/2024 PennSound's Bob Kaufman author page, curated by Raymond Foye — who co-edited 2019's Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman from City Lights with Neeli Cherkovski and Tate Swindell — is anchored by Bob Kaufman, poet: the life and times of an African-American man, a stunning 1992 audio documentary written and produced by David Henderson, which comes to us courtesy of Naropa University Audio Archive, Henderson, and Cherkovski. Extensive timetables have also been generated for both one-hour installments, providing details on the various speakers, topics discussed, etc. Individual poems read by Kaufman have also been broken out into their own MP3 files. Additionally, we're proud to be able to share a twenty-one minute recording made by A. L. Nielsen, for which we have no details regarding date or location, and a brief recording of Kaufman reading the poem "Suicide," which comes to us courtesy of Will Combs. Combs' recording forms the basis for PoemTalk #158, in which Christopher Stackhouse, Maria Damon, and Devorah Major join host Al Filreis for a discussion of the poem. Click here to start browsing. PoemTalk #195: Two by Ron PadgettPosted 4/18/2024 Filreis offers some provenance for the two recordings under discussion in his write-up of this new episode on Jacket2. " Published a year earlier in You Never Know, "The Austrian Maiden" is taken from a February 26, 2003 reading Padgett gave at our own Kelly Writers House, and "had just recently been published in Padgett's book You Never Know (2002)." He continues: "The recording of 'Joe Brainard's Painting Bingo' — a poem published in Great Balls of Fire (1969) — was performed at a November 20, 1979, reading given at a location that is now (sadly) unknown," and notes that "the recording comes to us courtesy of the Maureen Owen Collection of Greenwich Village Poetry, now housed at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library." You can listen to this latest program, read both poems in their entirety, 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 a decade, by clicking here. Adonis on PennSoundPosted 4/15/2024
We start this week off by highlighting our author page for Syrian poet, essayist and translator Adonis, for which we owe our gratitude to Pierre Joris (shown at left with the poet), who provided the recording to us back in 2013.
This Poets House-sponsored reading took place on March 7, 2013 as part of that year's AWP conference in Boston. For this event, Adonis was joined by Khaled Mattawa, whose Adonis: Selected Poems was shortlisted for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize, and after the reading, the two engaged in a lively discussion about poetry and contemporary issues.
Unfortunately, in the intervening years, we have not had the opportunity to add more recordings to our Adonis author page, but this modest gem is still well worth sharing with our listeners.
Congratulations to the 2024 Guggenheim Foundation FellowsPosted 4/12/2024As always, we're delighted to be able to allow our listeners to connect with the work of the celebrated authors, and you'll find recordings from three of the nine fellows on our site. On Elaine Equi's PennSound author page, you'll find nearly a dozen recordings from 1984 up to the present, including events from the Segue Series, Belladonna* Reading Series, Philadelphia's Chapter & Verse Series, and the Dia Art Foundations' Readings in Contemporary Poetry Series. Airea D. Matthews' PennSound author page is home to two recordings from the Kelly Writers House: a 2019 reading and her 2021 interview with Rachel Zolf. Finally, you can listen to Tracy K. Smith read from her beloved Life on Mars at a March 2013 Brave Testimony event also held at the Writers House. We send our enthusiastic congratulations to these poets, and the rest of this year's fellows class, for this well-deserved achievement. Congratulations to PEN American Literary Awards Longlist PoetsPosted 4/12/2024 Earlier this week, PEN America announced the longlists for their 2024 literary awards and we were excited to see a number of PennSound poets included. Poem Bitten by a Man (Nightboat Books) by Brian Teare was listed for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award (given "to a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact, which has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence") as well as the PEN/Voelcker Award (presented to "a poet whose distinguished collection of poetry represents a notable and accomplished literary presence"). We also congratulate Evie Shockley and Eleni Sikelianos who also made the PEN/Voelcker longlist for their latest collections, suddenly we (Wesleyan University Press) and Your Kingdom (Coffee House Press) respectively. Finalists will be announced in advance of the ceremonies on April 29th. If you'd like to acquaint yourselves with these three very deserving poets, click their names above to start browsing their PennSound author pages. George Kuchar: 'Eclipse of the Sun Virgin' (1967)Posted 4/8/2024 If you're located far from the path of today's total solar eclipse, or your forecast is for cloudy skies, we've got you covered. Feast your eyes on a very different eclipse, namely filmmaker George Kuchar's 1967 twelve minute short, Eclipse of the Sun Virgin. You won't even need special glasses! Writing in Artforum, Ed Halter situates the film in an important moment of transition for the director that accompanied a key technological upgrade: "After switching to 16 mm, each brother worked independently, and George cast himself as nebbish-protagonist in nerdy-dirty works like Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966) and Eclipse of the Sun Virgin (1967), countering contemporary celebrations of free love with fractured ballads of sexual frustration." Kuchar had this to say of the film, which starred Deborah-Ann and Edith Fischer: "I dedicate this film poem to the behemoths of yesteryear that perished in Siberia along with the horned pachyderms of the pre-glacial epoch. This chilling montage of crimson repression must be seen. Painstakingly filmed and edited, it will be painful to watch, too." We'll let our listeners judge for themselves. You can see Eclipse of the Sun Virgin and many more films — including the aforementioned Hold Me While I'm Naked; The Kiss of Frankenstein; Meet the Kuchar Brothers; I, of the Cyclops; Coven of the Heathenites; and Zealots of the Zinc Zone — on PennSound's George Kuchar author page, along with a three-part Close Listening program hosted by Charles Bernstein, which was recorded in Provincetown during the summer of 2009. In Memoriam: John Sinclair (1941–2024)Posted 4/6/2024 We close out this week remembering yet another member of our literary community: poet and activist John Sinclair, who passed away on April 2nd at the age of 82. Famously enshrined in song by John Lennon as being "in the stir / for breathing air" (trust us, that rhymes), Sinclair became a figurehead for the marijuana legalization movement after being arrested in 1969 for giving two joints to an undercover cop. His wildly disproportionate sentence of 8½–10 years resulted in public outrage and vocal protest culminating in 1971 with "Ten for Two: The John Sinclair Freedom Rally," a benefit concert in Ann Arbor featuring an astounding line-up of musicians — Bob Seger, Phil Ochs, Archie Shepp, and Stevie Wonder along with Lennon and Yoko Ono — and political figures Bobby Seale and Jerry Rubin, which resulted in his release. One other notable participant at the rally was poet Allen Ginsberg, whose "Prayer for John Sinclair," written for and performed with Peter Orlovsky at the event, was released on a split single with Michigan psyche-rock group UP the same year. You can hear this track on PennSound's Ginsberg author page or by clicking this link: [MP3] While typically this is where we'd close by offering our condolences, perhaps it's more fitting to say that we'll gladly fire one up in Sinclair's memory. In Memoriam: John Barth (1930–2024)Posted 4/5/2024 While we do not have a proper PennSound author page for Barth, you can find recordings from recordings from his visit to UPenn as one of 2012's class of Kelly Writers House Fellows. Our own Al Filreis offered this remembrance of that visit: "Reading *all* of John Barth's writings — and teaching a number of his books to get ready for his 3-day visit to the Writers House as a KWH Fellow — has been truly one of the highlights of my time as a teacher. Giles Goat-Boy, with its piercing critique of universities, is one of the strangest and most affecting novels (and among the longest) I've read. RIP, Jack." We join him in sharing our condolences with Barth's family, colleagues, and fans worldwide. PigeonSound at 15Posted 4/1/2024.png) This April Fool's Day marks fifteen years since our PennSound Daily announcement of our PigeonSound ™ service, which sadly never got off the ground given — among other things — the widespread rejection of pigeon post in the United States. Turntables still continue to sell healthily, flip phones are coming back, and every hipster has a vintage typewriter they paid too much money for, but the same enthusiasm could not be rekindled for avian poetry delivery, and so our fleet coos in waiting for more genteel and discerning times. Here's our original announcement, which, in true April Fool's Day fashion, came a month early, alongside the unveiling of our Twitter account:
Susan Howe and David Grubbs, 'Thiefth' (2005)Posted 3/29/2024 With this week's exciting news of a forthcoming album from Gastr del Sol — We Have Dozens of Titles, "an alternative view to their genre-melting 1993–1998 run" consisting of "previously uncollected studio recordings and beautifully captured unreleased live performances" — it's a great day to revisit Thiefth, one of band co-founder David Grubbs' groundbreaking collaborations with poet Susan Howe. Originally released on the indie label Blue Chopsticks in 2005, Thiefth was the first album issued by Howe and Grubbs (they would work together on the 2007 album, Souls of the Labadie Tract and many live performances since). The project was proposed by the Fondation Cartier in 2003, and late in the year, the two began work on staging performance versions of two long-form Howe poems: "Thorow" and "Melville's Marginalia." "Drawing from the journals of Sir William Johnson and Henry David Thoreau," we're told in the production notes, "'Thorow' both evokes the winter landscape that surrounds Lake George in upstate New York, and explores collisions and collusions of historical violence and national identity," creating "an act of second seeing in which Howe and Grubbs engage the lake's glittering, ice surface as well as the insistent voices that haunt an unseen world underneath. Presented in four parts, the piece features woodwinds from Mats Gustafsson and cello by Nikos Veliotis, which, along with Howe's voice, are woven together by Grubbs into a soundscape of sinister, reedy drones, celestial noise and dense, skittery montages of processed speech.  Thiefth's coda is "Melville's Marginalia," described in the notes as "an approach to an elusive and allusive mind through Herman Melville's own reading and the notations he made in some of the books he owned and loved. Undergirded by Grubbs' piano and laptop manipulations the soundtrack toys with listeners' emotions, shifting between striving strings and skewed piano figures set in motion by the percussive sounds of dripping water, while Howe's recitation creates a similarly multi-faceted dialogue between her perspective and Melville's. "The collaging and mirror-imaging of words and sounds," Grubbs writes, "are concretions of verbal static, visual mediations on what can and cannot be said." We've put together a special page to house Howe and Grubbs' collaborations, where Thiefth is presented in lavish fashion, complete with photographs, liner notes and more. We're grateful to David Grubbs for passing along these supplementary materials, and to Blue Chopsticks (and its parent label, Drag City) for generously agreeing to make this album available through PennSound. Remembering Adrienne RichPosted 3/28/2024 Today we're remembering legendary poet and theorist Adrienne Rich, who passed away on this day in 2012. It would be difficult to list all of the accolades that Rich accumulated in the more than sixty years since her debut collection, A Change of World, was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1950, but they include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1952), the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1960), the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award (1970), the National Book Award (for Diving into the Wreck, 1974), the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1986), admission to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991), the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (1992), the Frost Medal (1992), an Academy of American Poets Fellowship (1992), a MacArthur Fellowship (colloquially known as the "genius grant," 1994), the Wallace Stevens Award (1996), the National Medal of Arts (1997), and the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award (2010). Among these, it is perhaps the penultimate honor that is the most important, as Rich refused it, citing the government's hostile policies towards culture. "I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House," she stated, "because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration . . . The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate. A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored"  You can listen to a variety of recordings spanning four decades on PennSound's Adrienne Rich author page, which is home to recording spanning from a 1951 set at Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room all the way up to a 2006 reading at The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. In them, and the twenty or so readings that come in-between, you'll find a thoroughgoing survey of almost her entire poetic career — from iconic poems to deep cuts — as well some representative prose. Of course, one of our favorite recordings is from Rich's 2005 visit to UPenn as a Kelly Writers House Fellow. Click here to start exploring. In Memoriam: Marjorie Perloff (1931–2024)Posted 3/26/2024 This year's overwhelming procession of deaths within the poetry community continues with news that critic Marjorie Perloff passed away on March 24th at the age of 92. Our own Al Filreis posted a remembrance today, noting "I spoke for a lively, *lively* hour with the late and already much-missed Marjorie Perloff just a week ago. I loved her energy always and even then — was and am inspired by her skills & daring as a careful reader of and talker about supposedly 'difficult' poetry." He continues,"From the moment we met in 1982 (at the Huntington Library, where we shared days together for a month), she showed interested in me and my work and was unfailingly supportive. Even last week, during our final conversation, she wanted to know what I was doing, how my family was, how my ideas were evolving, what I was reading." He also encouraged everyone "to have a look back at that array of comments and criticism" in his 2012 co-edited Jacket2 feature "Marjorie Perloff: A Celebration." We also direct listeners towards Perloff's PennSound author page, which archives a wide array of recordings spanning 35 years, including talks, interviews, podcasts, and more. One key highlight is Perloff's epic, three-part 2009 Close Listening program hosted by Charles Bernstein, in which she reads from her 2004 memoir Vienna Paradox and discusses topics ranging from Kristallnacht and literary figures associated with Nazi Germany to her European outsider's perspective on American arts and culture, as well as several key "schisms that seem to divide 20th century poetry" — Yeats and the Futurists, O'Hara and Lowell, Pound and Stein/Stevens. Another is her 2011 visit to UPenn as one of that year's Kelly Writers House Fellows. You can browse all of these recordings and more on PennSound's Marjorie Perloff author page. We send our condolences to Perloff's family and her friends and colleague worldwide. Happy Birthday to Lawrence FerlinghettiPosted 3/24/2024 The most recent recording you'll find there is an hour-long set from 1994 at Page Hall in Albany, which comes to us via Chris Funkhouser. Next we have a pair of recordings from the archives of George Drury and Lois Baum, including an appearance on the program Word of Mouth and a forty-minute reading of selected poems at the Art Institute of Chicago. Then there's Ferlinghetti's Watershed Tapes release Into the Deeper Pools, recorded in two sessions in Bethesda and Baltimore, Maryland in 1984 and 1983, respectively, and his 1981 S-Press cassette release, No Escape Except Peace. Jumping back a few decades, there's a set of poems recorded in 1969, including "Assassination Raga" and "Tyrannus Nix," which were digitized by Joel Kuszai for The Factory School, and the Ferlinghetti/Ginsberg episode of Richard O. Moore's Poetry USA series from 1966. Finally, along with a short recording from the Berkeley Poetry Conference and a few assorted recordings without dates. You can listen to any of the aforementioned recordings by clicking here. PoemTalk #194: Two by Veronica Forrest-ThomsonPosted 3/23/2024 After thanking Browne ("who chose the poems and curated this episode"), Filreis' write-up of this new episode on Jacket2, offers some provenance for the recordings under discussion here: "The audio you'll hear toward the beginning is from a recording made at the important Cambridge Poetry Festival of April 1975; we note that Forrest-Thomson's performance there preceded her death by just a few weeks." He continues, "If you follow the reading of 'Lemon and Rosemary' along with the final published text you'll notice that there are significant differences between that and the version she read at the festival." He concludes with thanks for Dr. Gareth Farmer and Forrest-Thomson's estate for permission to use these recordings. In Memoriam: Neeli Cherkovski (1945–2024)Posted 3/22/2024 Today we are sad to share news that poet, biographer, and memoirist Neeli Cherkovski passed away on March 19th at the age of 78. His death was announced by Garrett Caples on the City Lights Booksellers blog — a fitting tribute given his long, loving association with San Francisco. I was particularly struck by his summation of Cherkovski's dedication to poetry itself and its broader communities. While he was "occasionally exasperating, needy, desperate to be read and loved," Caples notes, "he was no less desperate for the poets he loved to be read and loved, and he loved a lot of poets." He continues:
On PennSound's Neeli Cherkovski author page, you'll find a couple of vintage recordings from the poet — including a 1969 reading with Charles Bukowski and a 1980 set from San Francisco's Caffe Malvina — along with a number of videos from the last 15 years or so. These include readings, talks, conversations, and interviews and provide a wonderful sense of Cherkovski's diverse talents. We send our condolences to the poet's friends and fans worldwide. Want to read more? Visit the PennSound Daily archive. |
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