Inside PennSound

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)

PennSound Daily

 Subscribe in a reader Viewing entries

Bern Porter on PennSound

Posted 1/2/2025

Today we're highlighting our holdings from the influential author, artist, and publisher Bern Porter, perhaps best known for his pioneering work in the field of Found Poetry.

Our earliest recording is parts one and two of "For Our Friends in Germany," recorded by Mark Melnicove in 1979 at the Eternal Poetry Festival in South Harpswell, Maine. Then there's "Aspects of Modern Poetry," a 1982 WBAI program with Bob Holman that was broadcast live. It's presented in two parts that are roughly a half-hour each.

Next, we have the New Wilderness Audiographics cassette release, Found Sounds, whose two sides consist of two separate sessions, the first made on December 2, 1978 with Dick Higgins and Charlie Morrow; the second from May 9, 1981 and featuring Patricia Burgess (tenor saxophone), Glen Velez (bodhrán, cymbal, tambourine), and Morrow (brass, ocarina, and voice). 

Jumping forward to December 1989, we have a recording from "Williamson Street Night" at the Avant Garde, Museum of Temporary Art in Madison, Wisconsin with contributions by Malok, Elizabeth Was & mIEKAL aND, and our final recording is an interview with Higgins and aND from Woodland Pattern Book Center on March 16, 1990. You can browse all of the aforementioned recordings by visiting our Bern Porter author page.


Abigail Child: Selected Films 1986–2006

Posted 12/30/2024

Today we're highlighting a series of short films by poet and filmmaker Abigail Child. Our new page for Child's Selected Films 1986-2006 — edited by PennSound Contributing Editor, Danny Snelson — showcases four short films from throughout her past two decades of work.

The most recent film present here is 2006's Mirror World, a collaboration with Gary Sullivan, which reworks material from Mehboob Khan's Bollywood film, AAN into a fascinating twelve-minute short that layers soundtrack, dialogue and subtitles, manipulates framing and fractures narrative to critique both gender and social roles within Indian cinema while simultaneously celebrating its bright spectacle.

Next, we have three selections from Child's ongoing series, Is This What You Were Born For?: Perils (1986), Mayhem (1987) and Mercy (1989). Each organized around a central abstract notion, and embracing a jarring montage aesthetic (that's wonderfully complemented by scores featuring Christian Marclay, Charles Noyes and Zeena Parkins, among others), these films navigate a broad array of source materials to create mesmerizing meditations on our relationship to film and the ways in which the everyday and the extraordinary are reflected through the medium.

In addition to these videos, you'll want to check out the extensive archive of recordings on Child's main PennSound author page. A perennial favorite of the Segue Series, you'll find no less than six readings taking place between 1985 and 2008, split equally between the Ear Inn and the Bowery Poetry Club. There's also a 2000 appearance on PhillyTalks (which includes four poems) and a wonderful Close Listening reading and conversation with Charles Bernstein in 2007 (the former show, featuring writing from Solids, A Motive for Mayhem and Post Industrials, among others, is also segmented into six individual files). An audio-visual introduction to Child's work is only a click away.


St. Mark's Talks (1984-1986), Curated by Charles Bernstein

Posted 12/27/2024

Today we revisit the St. Mark's Talks series, which was organized by Charles Bernstein at the Poetry Project from the fall of 1984 to the spring of 1986. The St. Mark's Talks series was an extension of the New York Talks series Bernstein curated and moderated during the first half of 1984.

In a Jacket2 commentary post announcing the new additions in 2012, Bernstein explains the origins of the series: "In 1985, Eileen Myles was the new director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York. [They] asked me to curate a lecture series, the first such program at the church. I modeled the series at the Poetry Project on my earlier series New York Talk, giving it the amusing title, given the sometimes seeming resistance to poetics at the St. Mark's at the time, St. Mark's Talks. And talk it did." "I made these recordings myself," he continues, "and we are missing some of the talks, and in some case parts of the talk ... Here is what we got."

Altogether, PennSound has preserved all or part of fifteen events in the series, which follow the same general pattern of talk followed by discussion established during New York Talks. The series began with "Politics and Language," featuring Bruce Boone, P. Inman, Erica Hunt, and Jackson Mac Low, and continued with events including David Antin's "line music counterpoint disjunction and the measure of mind," Nathaniel Mackey's "Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol," "The Tradition of Marginality," featuring Kathleen Fraser and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Barbara Guest's "Mysteriously Speaking of the Mysterious Byzantine Proposals of the Poem," and Ron Silliman's "Postmodernism: Sign for a Struggle, the Struggle for the Sign." Other participants included Steve McCaffery, Lyn Hejinian, Anne Waldman, David Bromige, Nick Piombino, Lorenzo Thomas, and Bob Perelman, among others.


Want to read more? Visit the PennSound Daily archive.