Featured resources

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

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

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

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George Quasha Reads 'syntactic sentience," 2024

Posted 2/8/2025

Today we are excited to highlight 2025's first  installment from  Chris Funkhouser's ongoing project to document the work of his prolific friend and neighbor, George Quasha. If you're a PennSound Daily regular, you have been following this endeavor through periodic releases that trace all the way back to 2017. This newest session — recorded in Barrytown, NY on December 13, 2024 — yielded a 90+ minute recording of syntactic sentience in its entirety. Excerpts from syntactic sentience appeared in issue #3 of New Issue: The Biannual Journal of American Poetry in 2023.

You'll find this new track and many more recordings on PennSound's George Quasha author page, along with lengthy selections from many of his books including laryngeal uterus of the wordstrange beauty by stranger attraction, waking from myself, gnostalgia for the present, not even rabbits go down this holedowsing axishearing otherthe ghost in betweenverbal paradiseglossodelia attract: preverbsthe daimon of moment: preverbsscorned beauty comes up behind: preverbsthings done for themselves: preverbsand polypoikilos: matrix in variance: preverbs, among others. Click here to start listening.


James Weldon Johnson on PennSound

Posted 2/5/2025

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.


Happy Birthday, Gertrude Stein

Posted 2/3/2025

February 3rd marks the 151th anniversary of Gertrude Stein's birth, and that's a wonderful reason to reacquaint our listeners with the Stein-related resources that are available at both PennSound and Jacket2.

Our Gertrude Stein author page, edited by the late scholar Ulla Dydo, is home to all known extant recordings of the iconic author, including the contents of her 1956 Caedmon album Gertrude Stein Reads From Her Works — which were recorded during the winter of 1934–35 in New York City — and several tracks not used for the album. The other large body of material you'll find there are Stein's sessions for Columbia University's Speech Lab, uncovered by our own Chris Mustazza several years back.

We're also very proud to be able to share a 1947 recording of Virgil Thompson's opera Four Saints in Three Acts, based on Stein's work of the same name, which came to us courtesy of John Whiting. In addition to complete audio of the performance and the full text of its libretto, we've provided listeners with a link where they can see a brief clip from the production, which includes gorgeous sets by Florine Stettheimer.

Beyond that, Stein has been the subject of two PoemTalk programs: episode #10 from 2008, which addresses "Portrait of Christian Bernard," and episode #90 from 2015, which discusses "How She Bowed to Her Brother." Audio and video from the 2014 Kelly Writers House celebration "Tender Buttons at 100" rounds out our holdings, along with a link to "A Little Bit of a Tumblr," which is quite possibly the only single-serving website influenced by Stein and her work.

Over at our sister site, Jacket2, you'll want to check out Charles Bernstein's ongoing dossier, "Gertrude Stein's War Years; Setting the Record Straight," and Julia Bloch's micro-reviews feature, "Twenty-Two on Tender Buttons." Readers might also enjoy Rachel Galvin's review of Stein's Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition or Joshua Schuster's 2011 article, "The Making of Tender Buttons," and you can browse our complete archive of commentary posts tagged with Stein's name here.



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