PennSound Daily

It was Leonard Schwartz, host of the sorely-missed radio show Cross Cultural Poetics that brought this news to our attention, and therefore I thought it appropriate to ask him to share his thoughts on Calasso, who appeared twice as a guest on his show. Here is his reply, which came back in a flash:

The two conversations with Roberto Calasso were for me among the program's most memorable. I am still astonished by his discussion of Pound's poetics, and by the recognition of how deeply this consummate Italian intellectual was influenced by the notion from The Spirit of Romance that "all ages are contemporaneous". Whether writing about Baudelaire's influence on the painters, revivifying Greek and Roman myth, or pondering the unknowables of the Vedas, Calasso was illuminating. In Ardor he wrote "If the Vedic people had been asked why they did not build cities, they could have replied: we did not seek power, but rapture." He also wrote in Ardor: "the infinite is presented as a gradual, imperceptible expansion of the dominion of light." With his passing, a certain responsibility for the continued expansion of this light and this rapture shifts to us.

While Leonard mentions two conversations, Calasso actually appears on three episode of Cross Cultural Poetics. First there's program #265, "Baudelaire, Helen, and The Fugitive Gods," from 2013, where Calasso reads from and discusses his books, La Folie Baudelaire and The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony in each of the show's two segments. Calasso returned in 2015 at the time of Ardor's publication, and he discusses the book in program #317, "Ardor," while he reads from the book in program #318, "The Italian Friend." The late author also factored into 2013's program #283, "From the Italian," in which his own translator, Tim Parks, reads from Ardor for the audience.

We send our condolences to Calasso's family, friends, and fans worldwide and express our gratitude to Leonard Schwartz, for notifying us of the author's passing, for his lovely tribute, and for having the foresight to have Calasso as a guest on his wonderful show all those years ago.

The centerpiece of these new additions is a September 11, 1978 interview with Pritchard conducted by Judd Tully. Charles Bernstein announced this recording with a Jacket2 commentary post earlier this week, in which he notes, "The ninety-minute conversation is informative and engrossing, offering more information about Pritchard than has been previously available." He continues, "Pritchard was a poet in the CETA / Cultural Council Foundation Artists Project in New York and Tully, a CETA writer, interviewed him as part of the program. PennSound is happy to make this recording, made as part of the Artists Project, available, thanks to Tully and to Molly Garfinkel of CityLore."

Bernstein's post goes further still — noting that Pritchard "reads an early poem and two recent poems (at the beginning of part two)" he goes on to break out MP3 tracks of these particular poems, and then provides an extensive list of resources on the poet that one can find online and in print, including versions of his two published books via the Eclipse archive, as well as rare photos and a biographical sketch. He also notes our pre-existing recording of the poet reading "Gyre's Galaxy" in 1967, but since his initial announcement, we've managed to get our hands on another recording of Pritchard, which we're very happy to share. That ten-minute recording, made in 1966, includes eight poems from the manuscript Destinations, including "Alcoved Agonies," "As Once Was," "These Dead," "From a Harlem Mourning Vantage," "Hue: Blue," "As Altar Is," "Constriction, " and an abbreviated version of "Aswelay."

With any luck, we can hope to get our hands on more recordings in the near future to add to this already-wonderful resource. You can check out the aforementioned recordings by clicking here.