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

PoemTalk #206: on Lewis Warsh's "Polar Night"

Posted 3/28/2025

Yesterday saw the release of the newest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which focuses on Lewis Warsh's poem "Polar Night," taken from a 2008 reading as part of the Chapter and Verse series at at Chapterhouse Café in Philadelphia. Joining host Al Filreis for this program are (from left to right) Anselm Berrigan, Kate Colby, and Laynie Browne.

Filreis begins his program notes at Jacket2, by discussing the provenance of both the poem and its recording: "The poem was published in the poetry collection Alien Abduction in 2015. (This was his first book of poems since Inseparable of 2008, so we assume 'Polar Night' was written around then but not in time to be included in the 2008 book.)" He then frames the program through that collection, noting "Our discussion of the poem aligns well with a comment made by Dorothea Lasky about Alien Abduction as a whole: 'Warsh listens closely to everything, and in this book we find the mix of everything that makes up life... In it too we find a life that is always strange because it is living and constantly changing.'" 

You can listen to this latest program, listen to and read and the poem, 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 two hundred episodes, by clicking here.


David Shapiro on PennSound

Posted 3/26/2025

In light of last week's cowardice on the part of Columbia University, we thought it might be worthwhile to remember another historic moment when the school's student body needed to serve as a moral compass for a wayward administration: namely the 1968 campus occupation, during which beloved poet David Shapiro —  famously pictured at right sitting at the desk of university president Grayson L. Kirk, smoking one of his cigars.

A precocious and prolific polymath, Shapiro first hit the cultural scene as a teenager, working as a professional violinist with several orchestras and publishing his first work in Poetry at the age of sixteen. That infamous photo was taken during the end of the first of three tenures at Columbia: he earned his BA in 1968, returned for a Ph.D. in 1973, and eventually joined the faculty. Beyond his own poetry, Shapiro published both art and literary criticism, along with work as a translator and editor (perhaps most notably, An Anthology of New York Poets with Ron Padgett). His influence was felt widely and he will be missed by many.

We direct listeners to Shapiro's PennSound author page, where you can browse a small collection of more recent recordings, including a pair of Segue Series events and a reading for Dia Art Foundation, and a 1976 ten-year memorial for Frank O'Hara at the Poetry Project, which also featured 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, and Peter Schjedahl. Our most recent addition to the page, sent to us by Peter Gizzi after Shapiro's passing, is a pair of recordings from a 2004 visit to UMass Amherst, which includes both a talk on painters Fairfield Porter and Jasper Johns and a lengthy reading. Click here to start exploring.


Kristin Prevallet and Steven Brent, "What She Said" (2018)

Posted 3/24/2025

Here's a fascinating performance from Kristin Prevallet for your listening pleasure: a 2017 collaboration with musician Steven Brent, titled "What She Said," which first appeared on Brent's 2018 album, Even the Failures Are Beautiful, which you can listen to in its entirety here.

In "What She Said," Prevallet presents us with a lengthy inventory of questions asked of an unnamed "she," which casts a wide net, encompassing all manner of somatic and psychological experience, and occasionally folds back on itself, before evolving into a more objective narrative in the final section. It's undergirded by Brent's subtle soundscape, which blends a foundation of menacing drones, atonal guitar chime, and orchestral gravity with periodic overlays of ticking typewriters and threshing clacks, and Prevallet's performance here is just as musical and important, wavering from sedate calm to a more fervent delivery, sometimes speaking naturalistically and other times veering into stop-start Creeley-style hesitations, which interact beautifully with the sounds around it. Click here to listen now. It will be nine and a half minutes well spent.



Want to read more? Visit the PennSound Daily archive.