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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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Larry Eigner: Sacred Materials

Posted 11/20/2024

It was a big deal back in 2011 when the legendary Bay Area-documentarian Kush shared footage online for very first time, and we were proud to be the venue to share it. Presented under the title Larry Eigner: Sacred Materials, this trio of videos include nearly two hours of footage from the end of Eigner's life, including his last public reading on November 17, 1995, and two videos shot on February 6, 1996, which document his burial and his work environs.

A vital part of San Francisco's poetry scene since the 1970s, Kush is the proprietor of the renowned Cloud House Poetry Archives, which "is distinguished from any other by the comprehensive depth of its audiovisual collection and the high fidelity of its field recordings. It is a week-by-week, month-by-month, and decade-by-decade living record of the avant-garde practice of poetry in the San Francisco Bay Area. It represents entire communities of poets and affiliated artists that we identify as the 'poet genome' of Northern California/Pacific Rim."

We are grateful to Kush for his ongoing generosity in sharing these and many other films through the PennSound archives. To watch Larry Eigner: Sacred Materials, click here.


Bob Perelman on William Carlos Williams' "The Sea-Elephant"

Posted 11/18/2024

It's entirely possible that you missed out on English Studies in Canada's special issue "On Discreetness: Event and Sound in Poetry," coedited by Louis Cabri and Peter Quartermain, which came out in the summer of 2009. Today, we're highlighting one of that issue's most exciting pieces — Bob Perelman's "A Williams Soundscript: Listening to 'The Sea-Elephant'" — which was subsequently republished in Jacket2 in 2013.

I first met Bob at John Ashbery's reading at Haverford College in February 2008, not long after I started working here at PennSound, and one of the first topics we discussed was his piece for the forthcoming ESC special issue and his desire for the essay to be accompanied by a number of brief excerpts and composite tracks from William Carlos Williams' two readings of "The Sea-Elephant." Eventually, I'd step in at the last minute as sound editor for the issue and put together a CD of tracks to complement the various articles, but even with footnote-esque prompts in the text to indicate when readers should listen to a particular track, this was not the ideal presentation we'd imagined. That's why we're very glad that the essay can finally be read as it was originally intended. 

The Jacket2 reprint includes 50 embedded streamable MP3s, which allow readers to hear illustrative snippets of Williams without having to leave the document. It's a truly marvelous piece, and even more so when made available in this fashion, so head on over to Jacket2 right now (by clicking here) to start reading and listening.


Julie Patton: Two Short Films by Ted Roeder

Posted 11/13/2024

Today we're revisiting a marvelous pair of videos of Julie Patton performing her poetry, which were made by Ted Roeder circa 2013. Filmed in an intimate domestic setting, traffic noises and birdsong drifting through open windows, Patton sits comfortably in a chair before the camera, reading from typescript pages, a pen poised in one hand. She performs in a fluid sprechtstimme, easing in and out of accents and personas, casually adding various musical accompaniments from time to time: she forces the knob on a toddler's toy music box, galloping through the lullabye at a hectic gait, then backs off, plinking it forward in little tonal constellations; she reaches down, offscreen, to plunk a guitar note or stroke the strings behind the nut, producing glassy little accents; her foot settles into a restless and insistent rhythm that resonates through the room. Papers flutter as pages turn, her hands trace and stretch notes through the air. She stares you down, then returns to the poem.

These remarkable clips demand and reward your attention, whether you're watching or simply listening in, the various sonic elements creating one sort of experience with their visual counterparts and a different one without. You'll find these two films here on PennSound's Julie Patton author page, which is also home to a wide variety of audio and video recordings of readings, performances, panel discussions, interviews, and more, from 1997 to the present.



Want to read more? Visit the PennSound Daily archive.