Featured resources
From "Down To Write You This Poem Sat" at the Oakville Gallery
- Charles Bernstein, "Phone Poem" (2011) (1:30): MP3
- Caroline Bergvall, "Love song: 'The Not Tale (funeral)' from Shorter Caucer Tales (2006): MP3
- Christian Bôk, excerpt from Eunoia, from Chapter "I" for Dick Higgins (2009) (1:38): MP3
- Tonya Foster, Nocturne II (0:40) (2010) MP3
- Ted Greenwald, "The Pears are the Pears" (2005) (0:29): MP3
- Susan Howe, Thorow, III (3:13) (1998): MP3
- Tan Lin, "¼ : 1 foot" (2005) (1:16): MP3
- Steve McCaffery, "Cappuccino" (1995) (2:35): MP3
- Tracie Morris, From "Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful" (2002) (3:40): MP3
- Julie Patton, "Scribbling thru the Times" (2016) (5:12): MP3
- Tom Raworth, "Errory" (c. 1975) (2:08): MP3
- Jerome Rothenberg, from "The First Horse Song of Frank Mitchell: 4-Voice Version" (c. 1975) (3:30): MP3
- Cecilia Vicuna, "When This Language Disappeared" (2009) (1:30): MP3
- Guillaume Apollinaire, "Le Pont Mirabeau" (1913) (1:14):
MP3
- Amiri Baraka, "Black Dada Nihilismus" (1964) (4:02): MP3
- Louise Bennett, "Colonization in Reverse" (1983) (1:09): MP3
- Sterling Brown, "Old Lem " (c. 1950s) (2:06): MP3
- John Clare, "Vowelless Letter" (1849) performed by Charles Bernstein (2:54): MP3
- Velimir Khlebnikov, "Incantation by Laughter" (1910), tr. and performed by Bernstein (:28) MP3
- Harry Partch, from Barstow (part 1), performed by Bernstein (1968) (1:11): MP3
- Leslie Scalapino, "Can’t’ is ‘Night’" (2007) (3:19): MP3
- Kurt Schwitters, "Ur Sonata: Largo" performed by Ernst Scwhitter (1922-1932) ( (3:12): MP3
- Gertrude Stein, If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1934-35) (3:42): MP3
- William Carlos Willliams, "The Defective Record" (1942) (0:28): MP3
- 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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Posted 3/15/2024
As part of my work to excavate, digitize, and contextualize one of the first poetry audio archives in US, The Speech Lab Recordings, I'm thrilled to announce a significant addition to the collection: new digitizations of previously unreleased Robert Frost recordings, made in the Speech Lab in 1933 and 1934.
These recordings, which may be the first recordings ever made of Frost, in one sense mark a departure from the aesthetic circumscription of the collection. Many of the poets who were recorded in Professors W. Cabell Greet and George W. Hibbitt's Columbia University lab built for the study of American dialects operated in a modernist tradition of formal innovation. From the collection's founding with the performance-forward, Dada-esque incantations of Vachel Lindsay through James Weldon Johnson's Afro-Modernist scoring of speech sounds and Gertrude Stein's proto-Language poetics, it's clear that the editors favored a particular strain of modernism.
But while Frost is known for his use of and variation upon traditional forms and rhyme schemes, his poetics do bear affinities to those of the more formally innovative poets recorded in the series, most especially his interest in the aural properties of the poem.
You can read more of his detailed intro here. The two sessions archived here were made in 1933 and 1934 and include iconic poems like "Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Mending Wall," and "The Road Not Taken" along with "Dust of Snow," "Once by the Pacific," "Mowing," "Spring Pools," "Birches," "The Grindstone," "The Runaway," and "An Old Man's Winter Night," along with two takes of "The Code," which Mustazza singles out in his notes.
Posted 3/12/2024
We at PennSound regretfully share the news that beloved poet and critic Tyrone Williams passed away on March 11th at the age of 70. The author of numerous books, including c.c. (2002), On Spec (2008), "the Hero Project of the Century" (2009), Adventures of Pi (2011), Howell (2011), As Iz (2018) and washpark (with Pat Clifford, 2021), Williams had recently joined the SUNY-Buffalo faculty as David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters after a long teaching career at Xavier University in Cincinnati. Our own Charles Bernstein, shown with Williams at right, noted that both "had the honor" of leading the Buffalo Poetics Program as the David Gray Professor and offered this lament: "The pleasure of his company now so painfully the pleasure of his memory."
That's just one of many PoemTalk programs you'll find on PennSound's Tyrone Williams author page, along with a wide array of recordings from 2006 to the present. One of my favorites is Tyrone's brief intro set to a reading by Sueyeun Juliette Lee, whom he'd invited to Xavier University. It was early evening at the end of the semester, with an enthusiastic audience crowded into a classroom on a high floor, the sunset seeping in through the windows. As tired as I was that late in the semester, the experience was sublime. Not knowing about his illness, I had just reached out to Tyrone recently, with hopes that he'd be involved in a PennSound project that I was putting together, and had hoped I would see him at the upcoming Louisville Conference. Certainly, our city was already lessened by Tyrone's departure, but now the whole world knows that feeling just as well.
Posted 3/11/2024
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.
Posted 3/8/2024
Belladonna* Collaborative promotes the work of women and feminist writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, impossible to define, unpredictable, and dangerous with language. Belladonna* is committed to publishing and building literary community among women and LGBTQIA+ authors who write off-center, producing work that is political and critical; situational rather than plot-driven; inter-subjective, performative, or witnessing rather than personally revelatory; work that reaches across the boundaries and binaries of literary genre and artistic fields, and that questions the gender binary.
You'll find a vast archive of recordings on PennSound's series page for the collective, going all the way back to the summer of 1999. Recent Belladonna* events posted to our site have included performances by Erica Hunt, Anne Waldman, Carla Harryman, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Rachel Levitsky, Sawako Nakayasu, Tonya Foster, Julie Patton, Marcella Durand, Lyn Hejinian, Anna Moschovakis, Gail Scott, Bernadette Mayer, Stacy Szymaszek, Tina Darragh, K. Lorraine Graham, Mónica de la Torre, Patricia Spears Jones, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Orchid Tierney among many others. Start exploring this groundbreaking series' quarter-century history by clicking here.
Posted 3/6/2024
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.
Posted 3/5/2024
Today we're taking a dip into the PennSound archives to showcase Kathy Acker's album Redoing Childhood (Kill Rock Stars, 1999), which we first added to the site in December 2007. Here's what our original PennSound Daily announcement said about the record:
Produced by Hal Willner (William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lou Reed), the album features musical accompaniment by feminist punk band Tribe 8, as well as David Cunningham (keyboards), Ralph Carney (reeds), Joe Gore (guitar), Steve Bernstein (trumpet) and Kenny Wollesen (drums), who slip effortlessly between time signatures and genres, providing a roiling bed of sound which perfectly complements Acker's seething delivery. Willner originally recorded Acker's contribution in 1993 — a time in which the recurring references to President Bush were a not-yet-faded memory of a graceless political era — and though she worried about the timeliness of such allusions during the general political torpor of the Clinton era, they're eerily fitting now, a decade after her death.
Of course, our current political climate seemed practically unimaginable way back then, and Acker's strident and uncompromising perspectives are, no doubt, even more vital then than now. Hindsight also provides us with the opportunity to share these observations on the album and its origins, via Chris Kraus' After Kathy Acker: A Biography, which explains how Acker reframed large chunks of her recent book, My Mother: Demonology as "as an avant-operatic spoken-word CD":
Each take was done virtually nonstop, and Ralph Carney recalls Acker jumping up and down in the booth while Tribe 8 played. When it was finally released two years after her death, Redoing Childhood revealed a new dimension to Acker's work. "Her voice in general, there was something so lush and luscious and embracing and sexy," Ira Silverberg told the Seattle Weekly. "Kathy had rock star energy about her. [Her performance] had less to do with the punctuation of the actual sentences than with her almost reinterpreting her own work in a lyrical way … Kathy just got it."
You can listen to the complete album, along with a 1978 Segue Series reading (with selections from Blood and Guts in High School), recordings from SUNY-Buffalo in 1979 and 1995, and several recordings surrounding Acker's late novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates, including the 1995 album of the same name she recorded with the Mekons by clicking here. As always, we're grateful to Matias Viegener and the Acker estate for their permission to share these recordings with our listeners.
Posted 3/1/2024
This March 1st marks twenty-two years since the passing of beloved poet John Wieners, whose long writing life took him from Black Mountain to San Francisco to New York City to Buffalo, and finally to Boston, where he spent the last three decades of his life. It's also a great opportunity for our listeners to reacquaint themselves with the recordings available on PennSound's Wieners author page.
Our earliest recordings include Wieners' participation in the Mad Monster Mammoth Poets Reading for Auerhahn Press in 1959 and a 1960s appearance on Paul Blackburn's radio program. That's followed by a trio of recordings from 1965: Wieners' July 14th set at the Berkeley Poetry Conference, another July reading possibly in Berkeley, and a brief recording from SUNY-Buffalo that September. Next, we have a October 1966 event from the 92nd Street Y's Unterberg Poetry Center and a pair of long recordings made at SUNY-Buffalo in 1967 and at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in 1968. Following that we have a wonderful conversation with Walter Lowenfels, Lillian Lowenfels, and Alan DeLoach in March 1969 and two recordings from Boston in 1972: two days' worth of visits to Robert Creeley's ENG-1670 class at Harvard and a short appearance on WBCN-FM.
Jumping forward to the 1980s, there are two tracks from The World Record: Readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, 1969-1980 and three poems recorded at Brooklyn College in 1988. The next decade starts in grand fashion with a pair of recordings from the spring of 1990: the first in San Francisco, followed by an appearance at the St. Mark's Poetry Project. There's another Poetry Project set from the fall of 1996, and an October 1999 reading at the Guggenheim to round things out, along with the recently-added film Hanuman Presents!
Posted 3/1/2024
Lyn Hejinian, American poet and essayist, died on Saturday, February 24. Born Carolyn Frances Hall on May 17, 1941, and raised in Berkeley and later Cambridge, Massachusetts, she graduated from Harvard University in 1963. Her children, Paull and Anna, were born while she was married to the physician John Hejinian. After her divorce, Hejinian eventually partnered up with the jazz saxophonist Larry Ochs, living from 1972 to 1977 nine miles north of Willits, California, on eighty acres of rural property that she referred to as "the land." There in 1976 she acquired a Vandercook letterpress, taught herself typesetting, and began editing Tuumba Press, which, especially after her return to Berkeley in 1977, put her in touch with her peers in the poetry world. The Tuumba series included books by poets that, like Hejinian herself, would come to be associated with Language writing, including Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten. Hejinian's own poetry also began to appear at this time: A Thought is the Bride of What Thinking (Tuumba, 1976), A Mask of Motion (Burning Deck, 1977), Gesualdo (Tuumba, 1978), and Writing is an Aid to Memory (The Figures, 1978). But her work gained attention in particular with the two editions of My Life (Burning Deck, 1980, and Sun and Moon, 1987), a book that at once exploded many of the conventions of the genre of autobiography and developed an innovative poetics of everyday life. The 1980 version of My Life, written when Hejinian was thirty-seven years old, included thirty-seven sections, each comprised of thirty-seven sentences; the 1987 version added eight sections and also eight sentences to each of the previous sections. You can read Shaw's complete obituary here. Visit Monday's PennSound Daily remembrance for a statement from our own Al Filreis and a guide to Hejinian resources at both PennSound and Jacket2.
Posted 2/28/2024
Today, we share the sad news that poet Elizabeth Arnold passed away on February 24th after a long illness. The news was announced by her publisher, Flood Editions, who note that: She was a dear person — a restless traveler as well as an intrepid thinker, devoted to her dogs, friends, and students — and a remarkable poet. She published six books of poetry, which to a rare degree, constitute a coherent body of work: Wave House (2023), Skeleton Coast (2017), Life (2014), Effacement (2010), Civilization (2006), and The Reef (1999). Arnold earned her PhD in English at the University of Chicago, where she worked for Chicago Review. Researching the poet Mina Loy for her dissertation, she discovered the poet’s lost novel, Insel, which she edited for Black Sparrow Press in 1991. Arnold taught in the MFA program at the University of Maryland before retiring and moving to Frostburg, Maryland, where she found a community of friends.
We at Flood Editions were honored to work with her for nearly twenty years. She will be greatly missed.
Arnold was a guest of host Leonard Schwartz on episode #124 of his KAOS-FM program, Cross Cultural Poetics. Arnold's segment takes up the majority of the January 7, 2007 program, entitled "Civilization" after the collection she read from and discussed. Click here to listen to the show.
Posted 2/27/2024
We start this week off with unwelcome news that resonates widely: Lyn Hejinian has passed away suddenly at the age of 82. Our own Al Filreis shared the following message this morning, reflecting the feelings of many of us at KWH, PennSound, and Jacket2: The loss of the wonderful, talented, groundbreaking, generous poet and literary citizen Lyn Hejinian has rocked the poetry world. Those who knew her personally — as many of us at the Writers House did — and those who have read and discussed her work (e.g. the experimental coming-of-age book-length prose poem, My Life), are already feeling the impact of the loss: we won’t be able to read new poems and new books by Lyn. It remains for us to read and re-read the astonishing writings she left us.
As a close friend of our overlapping projects, it's no surprise that Hejinian is well-represented on both PennSound and Jacket2. Her encyclopedic PennSound author page presents approximately 150 individual files (complete readings and individual tracks) spanning 1977 to the present, which amply represent her diverse lives as poet, critic, publisher, and translator. Those recordings include germinal talks given as part of series organized by Bob Perelman and Charles Bernstein, readings (with My Life well represented) from every corner of the US, and Hejinian as both interviewee and interviewer (on her series of In the American Tree programs co-hosted with Kit Robinson on KPFA-FM). Hejinian's "constant change figures" was the subject of PoemTalk #15 in 2009. Over at Jacket2, pieces with Hejinian as author or co-author include the essay "Continuing Against Closure," a furthering of her foundational essay "The Rejection of Closure" (which appeared in Jacket #14 in 2001); "I Am Suddenly Aware That Phrases Happen," the transcription of a 2005 talk with Filreis; "We Might Say Poetry," Hejinian's contribution to a 2005 feature in tribute to Ken Irby; and a transcription of Ted Berrigan's 1978 appearance on In the American Tree. You'll also find reviews of recent books by B.K. Fischer and Tim Wood, and articles referencing Hejinian by Miriam Atkin ("'to be a boundless reflection': On Critical Composition in Hejinian and Scalapino's 'Sight' and 'Hearing'"), Hillary Gravendyk ("Uses of the Useless"), and Raymond de Borja ("Lineated Time: Some Thoughts on the Line in Poetry"). Like many others in the poetry world, we are still reeling from the news, and join our community in grieving the loss of a poet of such tremendous influence.
Posted 2/23/2024
Here's a rather interesting gathering of authors gathered in one room thanks to the influence of the one and only Robert Creeley, whose reel to reel tape archives provided the recording. This nearly two-hour event, taking place at the Allentown Community Center in Buffalo, NY on October 6, 1978, featured a lineup of literary critic Leslie Fiedler, Canadian/Romanian poet Irving Layton, author and editor Allen DeLoach, and Allen Ginsberg, who's joined by Peter Orlovsky in song.
Amongst a diverse set of voices — conscious of being "mischpokhe" (Yiddish for all part of the same family) as Ginsberg acknowledges — one of the more noteworthy is Fiedler, not typically thought of as a poet, who reads a handful of poems including "No Ghost Is True" (from Thou Shalt Truly Die), his very first publication from Poetry in 1947, along with "Song for Buffalo" and "To Chookie."
Ginsberg's set draws largely from his then-latest collection, Mind Breaths (1977), beginning with a powerful reading of "Don't Grow Old," his elegy to his father, Louis Ginsberg (who's also mentioned fondly in Fiedler's between-poem comments), complete with a harmonium-accompanied rendition of "Father Death Blues." In his introductory comments, Ginsberg indicates that he's written new additions to this poem while in Buffalo, and indeed, here the poem later published as "'Don't Grow Old,'" in Plutonian Ode — its first two parts written two days prior in Amherst, MA, while its conclusion was written the day before — is here treated as a continuation of the former poem, with its three sections numbered as parts eight, nine, and ten. He concludes his first set in a very different mode with the raucous "Punk Rock Your My Big Crybaby." For his second set he's joined by Orlovsky to perform "two compositions dealing with wrath": William Blake's "The Tyger," and "Plutonian Ode," written the previous summer, which is given a lavish introduction here, spelling out its influences and intentions. For serious Ginsberg scholars and more casual fans, this is certainly a historic performance worth checking out.
(photo above: Allen DeLoach, Allen Ginsberg, Carl Solomon, and Peter Orlovsky, August 1973)
Posted 2/21/2024
Today we are shining the spotlight on our author page is for poet, performer, and librettist Douglas Kearney, whose 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize win we celebrated here on PennSound Daily. The majority of the recordings you'll find there come from Kearney's fall 2018 visit to our own Kelly Writers House, which included a two-part Close Listening reading and conversation with Charles Bernstein recorded on October 22nd, along with an appearance alongside Brian Goldstein for a "City Planning Poetics" event. This sixth installment in the series, organized by Davy Knittle, was titled "Urban Revitalization" and took place the following day.
In addition to these recordings, which are available in MP3 format or streaming video, we also have video from a trio of recent readings, including a September 2017 reading at the Poetry Center at the San Francisco State University, and a pair of undated recordings from Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art and Harvard University's Vocarium Reading Series. A 2005 appearance on LA-Lit is our earliest recording, while a set of home recordings made this October for a future episode of PoemTalk rounds out the collection.
Posted 2/19/2024
Here's a blast from the Kelly Writers House's past that's emblematic of its spirit of outreach to diverse audiences and an interesting precursor, of sorts, to ModPo. "Six Poets Each Teach One Short Poem to High-School Students," was a special event first held in May 2009 that brought together students from Liza Ewen's poetry course at Friends Central School and a half-dozen poets from the Philadelphia community, who discussed favorite poems "that would somehow convey something significant about themselves as a poet." It was such a great success that a second event was organized by Al Filreis and Ewen in May 2010.
In a blog post not long after the 2010 event, Filreis gave this rundown of the participants and their choices:
Rivka Fogel taught "This Room" by John Ashbery, a beautiful indirect memorial to Pierre Martory and non-narrative meditation on absence as presence. Sarah Dowling then came in and taught a section of "A Frame of the Book" by Erin Moure. Jessica Lowenthal then taught Harryette Mullen's "Trimmings." Randall Couch taught a very early poem by John Keats before revealing that it was Keats. John Timpane taught an Yvor Winters poem about the emotional complication of saying farewell to an adult child at an airport; Wintersean restraint and emotional distance abound here and strike one (strike me, at least) as a refreshing sort of illiberalism in an age of gobs of conventionally sentimental parent-child verse. Tom Devaney may have taken the pedagogical prize on this day, presenting William Carlos Williams' "The Last Words of My English Grandmother" — a seemingly easy poem for h.s. students to grasp. Yet it also does everything a modern poem does, and makes a remarkably good scene of instruction.
Posted 2/17/2024
Yesterday we announced the latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which addresses Ariana Reines' poem "To the Reader," from her 2019 Tin House collection, A Sand House. For this program, host Al Filreis was joined at the Kelly Writers House by a panel that included (from left to right) Pattie McCarthy, Eric Shoemaker, and Michelle Taransky. Filreis offers this encapsulation of the discussion's evolution in his write-up of this new episode on Jacket2, noting, "The group began with an improvised list of topics this poem urges us to confront." "One topic (taken up toward the end of the discussion)," he continues, "is the trope of the unsayable. The speaker has 'seen things no one can explain' — has had an experience but the poem will defer or show itself incapable of describing it. Then there's the problem of conscious and unconscious literariness: that which isn't explainable ... is a knowledge 'for which no lineage / Credentialed me.'" "Such arising from nowhere frees her to pass in and out of the living world," Filreis concludes.
You can listen to this latest program 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.
Posted 2/14/2024
PennSound's author page for James Weldon Johnson — a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance and former leader of the NAACP — is edited by Chris Mustazza, building upon his archival research. Here's his description of the project:
These recordings of James Weldon Johnson were made on December 24, 1935 at Columbia University and are part of a larger collection of recordings known as The Contemporary Poets Series. Johnson is the only African American poet in the series, which ran from 1931 through the 1940s. The addition of the Johnson recordings to PennSound is crucial for a number of reasons, one of them being the function of Johnson's poetry as an ethnographic preservation of culture through the transduction of the sounds of language.
The first two recordings in the collection, "The Creation" and "Go Down Death," both from Johnson's 1927 collection God's Trombones, seek to preserve the sounds of African American folk sermons of the early 20th century. Johnson's poetics in the introduction to God's Trombones speaks extensively about how these poems are a visual representation of the sounds of the preachers of the sermons, a kind of musical score and libretto. He works to represent the cadences of these dynamic sermons through punctuation and lineation, with em-dashes representing a pause longer than a comma, and line breaks an even longer pause. In this regard, Johnson's work serves as a kind of proto-Projective Verse: he scores these poems for sonic representation. As such, the addition of the recordings to PennSound allows us to hear firsthand the poems as Johnson heard them when he composed them. And, in doing so, Johnson's vision of preserving the sounds and cultural significance of these sermons for posterity is realized.
The poems from Johnson's 1917 collection of poems, Fifty Years and Other Poems, are also sonic representations and cultural preservations. For example, Johnson's use of dialect poetry in some of the poems is a representation of speech sounds. By the time of these recordings, Johnson had spent a significant amount of time thinking about the aesthetic effects of writing dialect poetry, during which time he renounced the practice, and here returns to it (perhaps after being convinced of the the value of dialect poetry by Sterling A. Browns's 1932 collection of poetry, Southern Road). Johnson deftly uses dialect to great aesthetic effect, especially in "Sence You Went Away," a poem that creates a slippage between the dialect for "since" and the sound of "sense" (i.e. which could be read as "Sense, you went away"). Here, too, Johnson's poetry and poetics prefigure aesthetic movements of the later 20th century.
This very important collection is publicly available here in PennSound for the first time ever. For this, we thank Jill Rosenberg Jones and the James Weldon Johnson estate for their permission to distribute the recordings, as well as the staff at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library for their assistance in digitizing these materials. Thanks, too, to the Penn Digital Humanities Forum for supporting a project that made these digitizations possible. I hope you will enjoy listening to these recordings.
Posted 2/12/2024
We've got a really exciting series of short poetry films made circa 2013 to start off this new week. They come to us courtesy of Ted Roeder, and it's possible you might have already enjoyed his two videos starring Julie Patton, which we initially announced in the fall of 2020 (but also regrettably misidentified the director as Ted Roemer). In addition to those films we've added ten new ones, which I'll detail below. First up is a trio of films featuring Larry Fagin. In the first he speaks about writing while the second and third featuring his poetry: several new poems in the second and an excerpt from Ecology in the third. Tonya Foster (shown above) is next, reading from New Orleans Bibliography, then John Godfrey, who discusses writing in his first film and reads new work in the second. Julie Patton's two films come next, followed by Stacy Syzmaszek, who reads from Hart Island. Finally, Anne Waldman brings things to a close with three films of her reading various works. Shot in intimate settings and with glorious silvery black and white cinematography these films are as much a delight to watch as they are to listen to. You can view all of the aforementioned films on the individual authors' pages or by clicking here for our Ted Roeder collection homepage.
Posted 2/11/2024
E was a magazine of experimental and performance writing with a particular interest in visual, concrete, and sound poetry, edited by poet/performer Marshall Reese and composer Eugene Carl. Like many upstart journals, it got off to an enthusiastic start with two issues published in 1976, with a note on the back cover of the second issue promising "next issue will be cassette or lp." Well, the editors have proven true to their word, though it took a little longer than expected, with the material initially gathered for E's third issue finally being released on red vinyl by the esteemed label Slowscan in 2020 in a limited edition of 250 copies ( available via Granary Books). Reese was kind enough to contact PennSound about hosting a free digital copy of the issue and we were grateful for the opportunity, especially given how well this exciting compilation sits alongside similar works within our archives. In his liner notes, Reese discusses the influences shaping the direction E would take, most notably his experience of the Toronto Sound Poetry Festival of 1978. He writes, "this record documents those forces and influences affecting me in the 70's, early 80's. My generation was the the forefront of an expansion of literacy combining indigenous poetries, graphics, still and moving images, recorded words, music and sound, an oral/aural culture experiencing poetry and music as synesthesia." E no. 3 features nine tracks in total from eight artists, starting with Steve McCaffery's "Cappuccino: A Suffix Story for Henri Poincaré." Next up is CoAccident (a Baltimore-based "sound poetry music performance group" featuring Kirby Malone, Chris Mason, Ellen Carter, Alec Bernstein, Mitch Pressman, and Reese) with "When What Whole Wheat Means Meant That" and Greta Monach with two excerpts from Fonergon, before Jackson Mac Low closes out side A with "The First Sharon Belle Matla Vocabulary Gatha." Side B starts with two untitled pieces by Vladan Radovanovic, followed by Irrepressible Bastards (a.k.a. cris cheek and Lawrence Upton), followed by an excerpt from Hannah Weiner's Clairvoyant Journal (taken from her 1978 New Wilderness Audiographics cassette release), with Gene Carl wrapping up the record with "Words and Music by Gene Carl." Click here to start exploring.
Posted 2/7/2024
Today we bring you the final 2023 session from Chris Funkhouser and George Quasha. If you're a regular PennSound Daily reader you know that Funkhouser has been periodically recording the complete poetic works of his friend and neighbor Quasha since at least 2017 to the benefit of listeners worldwide. The pair already completed Quasha's multipart waking from myself last year, as well as gnostalgia for the present, a collaborative work featuring photographs by the poet's wife Susan. Today's ninety-minute session, recorded on December 30th, is comprised of the 34 poem sequence, crossroads angelics, which is dedicated to Funkhouser. You can read the first three poems in this series in the Spring 2020 issue of Marsh Hawk Review. You'll find these and many more recordings on PennSound's George Quasha author page, along with lengthy selections from many of his books including Not Even Rabbits Go Down This Hole, Dowsing Axis, Hearing Other, The Ghost In Between, Verbal Paradise, Glossodelia Attract: Preverbs, The Daimon of Moment: Preverbs, Scorned Beauty Comes Up Behind: Preverbs, Things Done for Themselves: Preverbs, and Polypoikilos: Matrix in Variance: Preverbs, among others. Click here to start listening.
Posted 2/5/2024
Here's a fascinating recording from the late Ted Greenwald that we added to the site in January 2015. "Voice Truck" was assembled as part of Gordon Matta-Clark's installation Open Space (a similar contemporary work is shown at right). Our own Charles Bernstein announced the new addition in a Jacket2 commentary post, which includes this description of the recordings: In May 1972, the artist Gordon Matta-Clark installed a dumpster in front of 98 Greene Street in Soho (Manhattan). The work was called both Open Space and Dumpster. The Dumpster was filled with construction debris and other material, formed into three corridors. For Ted Greenwald's contribution to the installation, he created a special audio work. Greenwald installed a tape recorder on the delivery truck for the Village Voice, his long-time day job. Six reels were recorded. One of the tapes, featuring the most dramatic action of the day, was stolen from the cab of the truck: in the middle of Times Square, mounted police galloped up to a subway entrance, tied their horses to the entrance, and ran down into the subway. The other five reels survived and are being made available by PennSound for the first time (one of those cassettes is listed below in two parts)." You can listen, read more about the work, and find a link for further discussion of Open Space as well as a short video on Matta-Clark on Bernstein's J2 commentary. The recordings are also linked on our Ted Greenwald author page, where, among many other recordings, you can also listen to a March 1971 reading by Greenwald with Matta-Clark. Click here to start listening.
Posted 2/2/2024
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.
Posted 1/31/2024
Last night, we released the latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which focuses on two titles by Owen Dodson, a prominent poet, novelist, and playwright of the generation of Black authors that followed in the footsteps of the Harlem Renaissance. Together with host Al Filreis, panelists Herman Beavers, Tracie Morris, and Amber Rose Johnson discuss Dodson's "Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One" and an elegaic sonnet "For Billie Holiday — Finally, Lady, You are Gone From Us."
Filreis starts off his write-up of this new episode on Jacket2 noting that "our recordings of these poems come from the Library of Congress, where on December 13, 1960, Dodson entered the Recording Laboratory there to perform a selection of his verse." He also quotes Dodson's recollection of meeting Holiday as a young man from Hilton Als' book The Women: Chile, I met Billie Holiday through my boyfriend, Karl Priebe, in the forties. She was appearing in a club in New York, on Fifty-second Street. I came up from Washington [where he was on the faculty at Howard University] to see Karl. He was working, and he suggested I come along to meet her. Chile, she was in this awful dressing room, smaller than my bathroom. She called me "Teach." Her dress was hiked up around her waist. She was fanning her pussy with a fan. She said, looking straight at me, fanning her pussy: "Teach, it's so goddamn hot in here" (p. 137). You can listen to this latest program 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.
Posted 1/29/2024
Not surprisingly, this tribute features a stellar line-up of poets, painters, and art critics, including 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, David Shapiro, and Peter Schjedahl. Registration is required to join us — click here — and you'll receive a reminder email on Wednesday with the event link. You'll also be added to The Brooklyn Rail's mailing list so you won't miss out on any of the fascinating events (now approaching #1000) held every weekday. We hope to see you Wednesday!
Posted 1/27/2024
January 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the day Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz seventy-eight years ago. In acknowledgment of the day and the six million European Jews who perished senselessly, we revisit one of the more remarkable and harrowing recordings in our archives: In late 2009, we were fortunate enough to be contacted by filmmaker Abraham Ravett, who offered us a treasure trove of rare recordings he'd made of poet Charles Reznikoff reading from his final collection, Holocaust, along with a number of photographs. Recorded December 21, 1975, these eighteen tracks — which include a number of retakes and an audio check — were originally recorded for inclusion in the soundtrack to the recently-graduated director's debut film, Thirty Years Later, which he describes as an autobiographical document of "the emotional and psychological impact of the Holocaust on two survivors and the influence this experience has had on their relationship with the filmmaker — their only surviving child."
In addition to the recordings themselves, Ravett graciously shared his recollections of that day — noting, "Mr. Reznikoff's West End apartment was located within a high-rise apartment complex reminiscent of where I grew up during my teens in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, N.Y. He was very kind and gracious to a rather nervous young filmmaker fumbling with his Nagra tape recorder and Sennheiser microphone who hoped that everything would work as planned" — along with a series of eight photographs of the poet, including the stunning image at right.
While Holocaust, as a text alone, serves as a viscerally pointed indictment of Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, not to mention a marvelous example of documentary poetics, in these selections, the auratic resonance of these appropriated testimonies are amplified dramatically, particularly when framed by the frail yet determined voice of the seventy-nine year old poet — who would pass away a month and a day from the date of this recording session — lending the work a gravid anger, a grand sense of monumental enormity.
Posted 1/26/2024
Today we're highlighting one of the newest additions to the site: a reading by Charles North for the William Corbett Poetry Series, hosted by the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT. This virtual event took place on April 21, 2022. Introduced by Ed Barrett, North begins by discussing how special this reading is for him, due to both his close friendship with the late Bill Corbett, and his lifelong connection to the Boston area. His set includes more than two dozen poems, and as he notes, he breaks with tradition by starting with his most recent work — as collected in Everything and Other Poems and Elevenses (a collaboration with Trevor Winkfield) — and working backwards to older work. Titles read include "Opening Day," "Equilibrium," "French Licks," "Oh Night," "The Toad," "Beat It to the Punch," "Alchemy," "Brownstones," "Tomato," "Pencil Line," "The Sky," "The Silent Splash," "Philosophy of New Jersey," and "Baseball Lineups."
Posted 1/24/2024
Today we take a deep dive into the archives to revisit Art, Fantasy and Experience, a marvelous event organized by Carla Billitteri at the Renee and Chaim Gross Center for the Arts in New York on December 12, 2010. This reading, presented in conjunction with the exhibition Fantasy: Chaim Gross Drawings, 1944-1950 (which rans through March 31, 2011), features an all-star roster of poets, including Elaine Equi, Nada Gordon, Rod Smith and Charles Bernstein.
In her introduction, Billitteri discusses her motivations in inviting these poets to invite these four poets to take part in this event: "I see in their poetry, fantasy as the configuration of a conceptual space that undoes itself, or undoes its configuration; fantasy as the reconfiguration of familiar conceptual space in such a way as to distort it; and finally, fantasy as the presentation of an untranslatable, or only partially translatable experience. In this sense, fantasy is a sense memory."
Brief sets from each poet (running approximately ten to fifteen minutes) are presented as both audio and video, with segmented tracks available for both Equi and Gordon's readings. These performances are followed by a short conversation period in which the poets discuss the role of fantasy in their poetry. You can see and hear all of these recordings on the special page we've put together for this event as well as on the individual author pages for each poet. To start exploring these fascinating readings, click on the title above.
Want to read more? Visit the PennSound Daily archive.
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New at PennSound
- Richard Foreman at Segue / Artist Space, New York City, March 16, 2024
- Belladonna* GIST Event Reading featuring Peter Myers and Jameson Fitzpatrick, Brooklyn Central Library, February 24, 2024
- Six Poems by Giovanni Fontana
- Barbara Henning reading with Jaime Manrique, St. Mark's Poetry Project, January 27, 1993
- George Quasha reading crossroads angelics, Barrytown, NY, December 30, 2023
- Charles North reading for the William Corbett Poetry Series, MIT Virtual Event, April 21, 2022
- VOX Audio Collection, 2005–2011
- Fall 2023 readings at Boise State University's Hemingway Center: Peter Gizzi,
Dan Beachy-Quick, Srikanth Reddy, and Alice Notley
- New author page: Davide Balula
- Hugh Seidman: New Author Page
- Paul Dutton's Oralizations, actuellecd, 2005
- Richard Foreman's production of John Zorn's Astronome,
2010, film by Henry Hills
- Jena Osman and Adam Pendleton reading for the launch of A Very Large Array, Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore, October 21, 2023
- George Quasha reading mirroring by alterity, Barrytown, NY, September 29, 2023
- The Swan 20: Dorota Czerner, September 2, 2023
- Tracie Morris and Tongo Eisen-Martin performing for the Flow Chart Foundation, Hudson, NY, September 22, 2023
- Harryette Mullen on Morton Marcus's "The Poetry Show," KUSP, March 18, 1987
- Ann Lauterbach reading at 'T' Space, Rhinebeck, NY, July 8, 2017 and July 16, 2023
- George Quasha reading non binding horizon, Barrytown, NY, September 1, 2023
- Ron Padgett reading for the Yale Literary Magazine, November 1, 2022
- A reading with Chris Martin and Adam Wolfond, February 15, 2023
- Julia Bloch reading Valley Oak for PoemADay, August 12, 2023
- Clark Coolidge, The Painter's Poet: a talk on Philip Guston, Poets House, April 4, 2013
- Philip Whalen reading at National Poetry Festival, Allendale, MI, July, 1971
- Lew Welch reading The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings, Planning and Conservation League, date unknown
- Philip Whalen reading at the Unicorn Bookshop, Santa Barbara, February 6, 1967
- Performance of Louis Zukofsky's "A"-24 Act I at UCSD New Writing Series, April 11, 1986.
- Leslie Scalapino reading in the USCD New Poetry Series, May 9, 1979
- Jerome Rothenberg and Bertram Turetzky Performing For Poet's Voice and Contrabass, 1984
- Hoa Nguyen reading at Kelly Writers House, February 28, 2023
- Joan Retallack reading and conversation for Kelly Writers House Fellows Program, February 20–21, 2023
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- Barbara Henning and Maureen Owen reading from Poets on the Road, May 27, 2023
- Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian reading, November 6, 1995
- Robert Creeley reading for Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles, April 16, 1990
- Thin Air Lectures with Ron Silliman, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, and Ron Padgett, St. Marks Church, May 1988
- Kass Fleisher interview on The Bear River and the Making of History, Access Utah, Utah Public Radio, June 25, 2004
- Cliff Fyman reading, San Francisco, CA, June 11, 2023
- Charles Olson reads from Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, c. 1969
- The Marginalization of Poetry, Segue Series at Double Happiness, NYC, March 22, 1997
- Adam Fieled reading from Equations: The Thesis Episodes, Carriage Hill, Plymouth Township, 2023
- New videos for Aaron Kramer
- Thomas Devaney reading at Wexler Studio, Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, May 30, 2023
- New video of Joan Retallack for Alternative Poetries and Alternative Pedagogies Reading and Discussion at the Kelly Writers House, February 28, 2001
- George Quasha reading waking from myself, Barrytown, NY, May 20, 2023
- Clark Coolidge reading from A Book
Beginning What and Ending Away for 80 Langton Street Writers In Residence Readings,
October 15–21, 1979
- Vincent Katz reading at Green Arcade, SF, November 18, 2022
- George Quasha reading flayed flaws & other finagled opacities, Barrytown, NY, May 5, 2023
- Joel Newberger's The Swan reading series, nos. 2 & 25
- William Fuller Wexler Studio Recording Session, March 16, 2023
- Newly Segmented: Charles Borkhuis Segue Reading, November 18, 2006
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