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Selected by Charles Bernstein (read more about his choices here) |
Happy Birthday, Joe BrainardPosted 3/11/2025 We're also very proud to be able to present an exclusive excerpt from Matt Wolf's 2012 documentary short, I Remember: a Film About Joe Brainard. Here's how we announced the film's addition to our archives in August of that year:
You'll find all of the recordings mentioned above by clicking here. It's also worth checking out Andrew Epstein's 2014 Brainard birthday post on his New York School-focused blog, Locus Solus, which features excerpts from a tribute poem by James Schuyler, excerpts from I Remember "thinking about birthdays, and our frustrating efforts to understand 'time,'" and a few examples of his artwork. Brainard's birthday is also a wonderful reason to revisit the Make Your Own Brainard site, where you can make your own collages using fragments from his visual work. Haraldo de Campos on PennSoundPosted 3/10/2025 Today we're highlighting our author page for poesia concreta pioneer, Haroldo de Campos, which is anchored by a 2002 video from the Guggenheim Museum celebrating his life and work. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Brazil: Body and Soul, this January 12, 2002 event featured both performances and discussion of de Campos' work by a wide variety of poets, translators and critics. The video begins with introductory comments by Pablo Helguera and organizer Sergio Bessa, who are followed by a staging of de Campos' 1950 poem/play "Auto do Possesso (Act of the Possessed)," translated by Odile Cisneros and directed by Cynthia Croot. Craig Dworkin is next, reading his translation of "Signantia quasi coelum / signância quase céu," follwed by a brief set by Cisneros, who reads her translations. The performances conclude with Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein reading Bessa's translation of "Finismundo," after which Perloff and Bernstein take part in a panel discussion moderated by Bessa. Next, from 2005's Rattapallax we have a single track, "Calcas Cor de Abobora." Finally, we have a 2017 video of our own Charles Bernstein performing at New York's Hauser and Wirth Gallery with Sergio Bessa on September 28, 2017. This event, co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America and held in conjunction with an exhibit by Mira Schendel at the gallery, included Bessa speaking about de Campos and Bernstein reading his translations of Drummond, Cabral, Cruz e Sousa, Leminksi, and Bonvicino. On our Haroldo de Campos author page, you'll also find a link to Bernstein's 2003 essay "De Campos Thou Art Translated (Knot)", first published in the Poetry Society of America's Crosscurrents. Alan Bernheimer, 'Particle Arms' (1982)Posted 3/7/2025 Today, we shine the spotlight on Alan Bernheimer's play, Particle Arms, which was performed November 21, 1982 as part of the Poets Theatre at Studio Eremos in San Francisco. Particle Arms features a vertible who's who of Bay Area poetics, including cast members Steve Benson, Tom Mandel, Kit Robinson, Eileen Corder, and Steven Rodefer, set designer Johanna Drucker, and even Lyn Hejinian, who wrote the play's program. The play lives up to its description, as "tracing the trajectory of two men and a woman over an Edward Hopper hotelscape, peopled by psychological misfits, to an economy dependent on stunt work," dabbling in noir delights and failed romance with hilarious results, however Particle Arms is not just great entertainment, but also an evocative time capsule of a close-knit community of friends and artists — as evidenced by the "experiment in collective autobiography," The Grand Piano, which features many of these poets and their contemporaries. In addition to Particle Arms, Bernheimer's PennSound author page features links to twenty episodes of the influential radio program, In the American Tree, hosted by the poet during the show's 1979-1980 season — including interviews with Ted Greenwald, Erica Hunt, and Bill Berkson, among others — as well as his own November 10, 1978 appearance on the show, as Hejinian and Robinson's guest. There's also a 2001 reading from the St. Mark's Poetry Project and the 1980 talk "Subject Matter" from the New Langton Arts Center. Listeners might also want to check out Bernheimer's collection of photos and documents from the production of Particle Arms, which is linked on the page as well. Click here to start exploring. Spending "Ash Wednesday" with T. S. EliotPosted 3/5/2025 With Christians worldwide marking Ash Wednesday today, we thought it might be worthwhile to revisit T. S. Eliot's iconic poem of the same name, which is available on PennSound two ways: a recording by the poet himself, and a rendition by John Richetti made for our PennSound Classics page. In a 2014 essay for The Guardian, Roz Kaveney identifies the poem as one of "the first fruits of T. S. Eliot's conversion [to Anglicanism]" and acknowledges that "we think of ["Ash Wednesday"], not wholly inaccurately, as an essentially liturgical piece ... Yet that is not all that is going on here." "For a religious poem," Kaveney continues, "'Ash Wednesday' has a distinctly secular aspect some of the time. Even more than 'The Waste Land,' it is heavily intertextual; you can read its allusions as metonymous, that is to say as bringing into his text the whole of the texts that they echo." Much of the poem is shaped by Eliot's stagnant marriage to Vivienne, the poem's dedicatee, producing "moments of nightmare" full of guilt, disorder, and sinfulness. "It's interesting that there is so much talk of fertility here and it is always gardens and never children," Kaveney notes, hypothesizing that Eliot was sublimating his desire for a daughter within the poem: "There is something deeply sad, but also dishonest, in this replacement of what he perhaps really desired with an etiolated and inauthentic religious vision; Eliot at his best speaks more honestly than that, even when he is being cryptic." As for that "call to spiritual awareness" in the poem's latter half, Kaveney observes that "There's something worrying, if logical, about Eliot's vision of himself as a preacher calling the world to order — it was after all, the original family business, running revivals was why his ancestors moved to the Midwest. The problem is that the organic society he shows us is so totally a decoration, people walking and talking in a landscape, and a piper playing plaintive tunes; in the later sections of 'Ash Wednesday,' the quotations of liturgy are progressively stronger than the bits that are Eliot." The critic concludes, "This is a poem – the same can be said of Dante – in which the visions of hell are stronger than the visions of heaven, in which the original evocation of the heavenly ... is much more effective than the later parts; Eliot is trying urgently to convince us, and sacrificing much to that attempt, and yet he falls short of what he is trying to do." As noted above, our archives include a recording of Eliot reading the poem in three segments, each containing two parts, which was made at the Speech Lab at Columbia University in 1933, the first of several sessions over two years that would yield documents of the majority of Eliot's most iconic poems. You can listen to that recording here on PennSound's T. S. Eliot author page. We also have a recording made by John Richetti for PennSound Classics at our own Wexler Studios in May 2022 as part of a set of twenty-nine poems by Eliot. Listen to that performance by clicking here. David Antin: "Sky Poem #1" (1987)Posted 3/3/2025 Today we're revisiting video documentation of "Sky Poem #1," staged by David Antin in Santa Monica, CA during May 1987. The latter half of the video is largely taken up with an interview with Antin, who discusses the his impressions of the piece's execution and his plans for further poems in the series, as well as the relationship between this sort of poem and his talk pieces. "In a way, even if the text of this is fixed, I had to write a text that wouldn't be so fixed," he explains, "it wasn't fixed, because one line goes away, and then another one goes away and no one is quite sure of exactly what it refers to, and has a family of possible things it could refer to, all of which are interesting: who are we? who are they? what is it we get together? what is it that could fall apart of be taken apart? and what is it we could lose?" Given the importance of ambiguity to the piece's interpretation, it's particularly interesting to be able to hear the responses of so many spectators (one personal favorite: "Corinne, it's a poem! Come here, I have to tell you about this. It's a poem and the poet is the man up on the roof and he is conducting the airplanes, and it's an eighteen-minute piece so we have to stay here and we can't talk."). "There were probably hundreds of different texts that people generated out of what I did because it was stimulating other people to come up with their own versions," he observes "so a lot of different poems got written today." You can watch this video on PennSound's David Antin author page, which is home to forty years' worth of recordings, by clicking here. James Schuyler "on the Day Before March First"Posted 2/28/2025 As Epstein notes, "'February' seems to have been a breakthrough for Schuyler, ushering in his mature style and set of concerns; years later, he decided to give it pride of place as the second poem in Freely Espousing, his debut full-length collection, published in 1969." He continues, telling us that it "was also one of only four poems by Schuyler included in The New American Poetry, the epochal 1960 anthology edited by Donald Allen, which ensured that it would become an early 'greatest hit' for the poet." He then moves on to discuss Schuyler's writing process: "February" is one of the first of Schuyler's many "window" poems; it sets out to recount exactly what could be seen from his apartment window in New York during a wintry sunset, at precisely 5 P.M. "on the day before March first." Fortunately for us, Schuyler discussed the composition of this poem in a letter he wrote (and apparently never mailed) to a woman ("Miss Batie") who had written a fan letter to him about his poems. In the letter, he explains that the day on which I wrote the poem I had been trying to write a poem in a regular form about (I think) Palermo, the Palazzo Abatelli, which has splendid carved stone ropes around its doors and windows, and the chapels decorated by Serpotta, with clouds of plaster cherubs; the poem turned out laborious and flat, and looking out the window I saw that something marvelous was happening to the light, transforming everything. It then occurred to me that this happened more often than not (a beautiful sunset I mean) and that it was 'a day like any other,' which I put down as a title. The rest of poem popped out of its own accord. Or so it seems now. By deciding to abandon the other, unwritten hymn to Palermo and Serpotta's baroque cherubs, and by choosing to write "February" instead, Schuyler seems to have stumbled upon a recognition about subject matter, about attentiveness to daily life, and about form. You can read more of Epstein's observations, along with the poem in its entirety here. You can listen to Schuyler read the poem as part of a reading at New York's Dia Art Foundation on November 15, 1988 — where he was introduced by close friend and collaborator John Ashbery — on PennSound's James Schuyler author page. In Memoriam: Pierre Joris (1946–2025)Posted 2/27/2025 Back in 2021, we celebrated Joris' selection for the PEN/Manheim Award for Translation, which recognizes the breadth of a translator's career. The judges' citation begins offers a fine summation of that career, starting by acknowledging his resistance to the "landscape of literary translation that is still beholden to linguistic and national silos." "Pierre Joris's work has long been and remains essential in mapping currents and countercurrents of global modernity," they continue. "As literary translation struggles to confront imperial histories of violence and erasure, and to engage with and encourage voices of cultural and linguistic differences, Joris has blazed a path for generations of emerging translators to follow." The citation notes Joris' "stunning and unparalleled career as a translator, poet, essayist, editor, critic, performer, and academic," and spotlights his "personal trajectory has fueled his articulation of a 'nomad poetics' that cannot be contained by national or linguistic boundaries, one in which Anglo-European perspectives are enriched and complicated by those of the Global South, and where translation models the potentialities and necessary complexities of cross-cultural contact. PennSound listeners will probably be most familiar with Joris' work on Paul Celan or the groundbreaking series of Poems for the Millennium anthologies he co-edited with the late Jerry Rothenberg, but he translated a wide array of authors into both English (Adonis, Jean-Pierre Duprey, Safaa Fathy, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Pablo Picasso, Rainer Maria Rilke, Kurt Schwitters, Habib Tengour, and Tristan Tzara) and French (Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Sam Shepard, and Pete Townshend). Joris was also a good friend of PennSound and the Kelly Writers house, as evidenced by his PennSound author page, which is home to dozens of recordings spanning the nearly thirty years, including readings, talks, interviews, and podcast appearances., many at KWH. We send our heartiest congratulations to Joris' widow, Nicole Peyrafitte, his family, friends, colleagues, and readers worldwide. Aural Monsoon: 'Live in the Haight' (2017)Posted 2/26/2025 Here's an opportunity to get to know another side of poet Will Alexander through his jazz duo, Aural Monsoon, where he plays piano alongside drummer Mark Pino. Today, we're proud to highlight Live at the Haight, an album recorded on August 13, 2017. Click here to listen to all nine tracks, including "Bamboo and Fire," "Calm and Furious Waters," "Verdigris Panorama," "Lyrical Jasmine Towers," "Aural Diamonds in Motion," and "Double Recognition." Here's what Pino had to say about his their collaboration: "Los Angeles poet and musician Will Alexander's work been shaking my perceptions for several years now. I was happy to play with him on sets with Cloud Shepherd, and continue to love to read his writing. Hence, when Will contacted me to ask about my being available for a house show in San Francisco, with me on drums and he on piano, I jumped at the opportunity." Later, he says of the same gig, "Towards the end of the second set, I simply stopped playing my drums and listened to Will, more as a fan than a duo partner. I guess I kind of got lost in that for a few minutes. Will's Surreal Trance moves will have that effect!" For those craving more of Alexander's work, click here to visit his PennSound author page, which is home to a variety of talks, readings, and interviews going back to 1994. PoemTalk #205: on Two by June JordanPosted 2/24/2025 As Filreis explains in his program notes at Jacket2, Holman's short films "aired on WNYC-TV as 'non-commercial commercials' from 1987 through 1993" with the Jordan clips first broadcast on April 26, 1989. Filreis goes on to quote an interview with Holman describing the spirit of the endeavor: " “I love poetry, I love its variety. I love people who say that's not a poem, because when that's not a poem, you get to talk about what a poem is. And who dares define that?” You can listen to this latest program; watch, listen to, and read Jordan's two poems; 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. Hilda Morley on PennSoundPosted 2/21/2025In her New York Times obituary, Wolfgang Saxon observed that "Ms. Morley published five books of poetry in which she articulated emotions and feelings in free verse, but a type of verse as measured as dance or music. She was a 'master of that ability,' Robert Creeley, a fellow poet, said." He continues: "She wrote that her poetry was shaped by the visions of Abstract Expressionism, which can create metamorphoses. Artists like Klee and Picasso, she said, gave her the means to create word canvases depicting the world around her." We're grateful to be able to share this document of Morley's life, no matter how brief, and thank Patrick Beurard-Valdoye and Austin Clarkson for their assistance in making this recording available. Kate Colby: Wexler Studio Session, 2024Posted 2/19/2025 Today we're highlighting a newly posted session from Boston-born poet Kate Colby, recorded in our own Wexler Studio at the Kelly Writers House on October 17th of last year. The session contains twenty-two titles altogether, including "Looker," "Gem," "Unmentionables," "Autoclave," "The Rest," "Easter Eggs," "Product Placement," "Drive," "Thinkging," "Theory of Anything," "Prop Girl," "Aminxed," and "No Time Present." These new recordings can be found on PennSound's Kate Colby author page, along with two previous Wexler Studio sessions recorded in 2016 and 2018, a 2019 reading at the Kelly Writers House, and an assortment of readings from other venues spanning 2011 to 2019. There are also links to a half-dozen PoemTalk episodes she's participated in. Taken together, they present a fair representation of the breadth of Colby's complete poetic output. Click here to listen along. "E" no. 3 (2020), featuring McCaffery, Mac Low, Weiner, et al.Posted 2/17/2025 E was a magazine of experimental and performance writing with a particular interest in visual, concrete, and sound poetry, edited by poet/performer Marshall Reese and composer Eugene Carl. Like many upstart journals, it got off to an enthusiastic start with two issues published in 1976, with a note on the back cover of the second issue promising "next issue will be cassette or lp." Well, the editors have proven true to their word, though it took a little longer than expected, with the material initially gathered for E's third issue finally being released on red vinyl by the esteemed label Slowscan in 2020 in a limited edition of 250 copies (available via Granary Books). Reese was kind enough to contact PennSound about hosting a free digital copy of the issue and we were grateful for the opportunity, especially given how well this exciting compilation sits alongside similar works within our archives. In his liner notes, Reese discusses the influences shaping the direction E would take, most notably his experience of the Toronto Sound Poetry Festival of 1978. He writes, "this record documents those forces and influences affecting me in the 70's, early 80's. My generation was the the forefront of an expansion of literacy combining indigenous poetries, graphics, still and moving images, recorded words, music and sound, an oral/aural culture experiencing poetry and music as synesthesia." E no. 3 features nine tracks in total from eight artists, starting with Steve McCaffery's "Cappuccino: A Suffix Story for Henri Poincaré." Next up is CoAccident (a Baltimore-based "sound poetry music performance group" featuring Kirby Malone, Chris Mason, Ellen Carter, Alec Bernstein, Mitch Pressman, and Reese) with "When What Whole Wheat Means Meant That" and Greta Monach with two excerpts from Fonergon, before Jackson Mac Low closes out side A with "The First Sharon Belle Matla Vocabulary Gatha." Side B starts with two untitled pieces by Vladan Radovanovic, followed by Irrepressible Bastards (a.k.a. cris cheek and Lawrence Upton), followed by an excerpt from Hannah Weiner's Clairvoyant Journal (taken from her 1978 New Wilderness Audiographics cassette release), with Gene Carl wrapping up the record with "Words and Music by Gene Carl." Click here to start exploring. Dennis Barone Reads Pascal D'Angelo, 2025Posted 2/14/2025 We close out this week with a recent addition to the PennSound author page of Dennis Barone: a brief set of four poems by Pascal D'Angelo (1894–1932, shown at right) recorded at his home in January of this year. Barone begins the recording with a capsule biography of D'Angelo, a now-obscure poet who came to the US in his teens, and gave up "pick and shovel" work as a day labor to pursue his desire to become a poet, eventually publishing his autobiography Son of Italy, which included a selection of ten poems, in 1924. Carl Van Doren, an early mentor who penned the introduction to that book, hailed D'Angelo's "enormous struggles against every disadvantage" as representational of the cruel depravations that our nation's immigrant underclass endured in the pre-Depression years. Barone then reads four poems taken from diverse sources — "Accident in the Coal Dump," "Mid-Dream," "To Some Modern Poets," and "The Toilers" — out the twenty-seven or so that remain, providing brief introductions to each. Click here to start exploring these poems on our Dennis Barone author page. PennSound Cinema: Ken JacobsPosted 2/12/2025This is probably a good point to warn readers that due to this intense flickering effect we recommend that those with epilepsy and similar conditions triggered by light avoid watching these films. They can be challenging even for those without seizure disorders: I started to get a headache after about a half hour with the films, but it was a worthwhile tradeoff for the viewing experience. After the super-brief clips, we have a trio of longer films: Capitalism: Child Labor (2006), Another Occupation (2011), and Seeking the Monkey King (2012). On the small scale, these films operate much like the aforementioned shorts in terms of their flickering using the Pulfrich effect, however the images are further embellished with color washes, inset details, and other distortions, and evolve over time rather than fixating on one image. They're also scored, with Rick Reed providing music for the first two — which showcase tremoloed drones that shift from peaceful bell-tones to harsh metallic squeals — while J.G. Thirwell's soundbed for the last blends dramatic blockbuster pomp with calmer passages. In Capitalism we meditate on a haunting Lewis Hine-like image of young textile workers, while Another Occupation recycles and degrades found footage of Bangkok, and in Seeking the Monkey King we explore dazzling jewel-like landscapes of crumpled tinfoil while pondering occasional intertitles that rail against the titular monarch. You can view all of these films, and listen to a three-part 2009 Close Listening program with the filmmaker on our Ken Jacobs author page. Kathy Acker, 'Redoing Childhood' (1999)Posted 2/10/2025 Today we're taking a dip into the PennSound archives to showcase Kathy Acker's album Redoing Childhood (Kill Rock Stars, 1999), which we first added to the site in December 2007. Here's what our original PennSound Daily announcement said about the record: Produced by Hal Willner (William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lou Reed), the album features musical accompaniment by feminist punk band Tribe 8, as well as David Cunningham (keyboards), Ralph Carney (reeds), Joe Gore (guitar), Steve Bernstein (trumpet) and Kenny Wollesen (drums), who slip effortlessly between time signatures and genres, providing a roiling bed of sound which perfectly complements Acker's seething delivery. Willner originally recorded Acker's contribution in 1993 — a time in which the recurring references to President Bush were a not-yet-faded memory of a graceless political era — and though she worried about the timeliness of such allusions during the general political torpor of the Clinton era, they're eerily fitting now, a decade after her death. Of course, our current political climate seemed practically unimaginable way back then, and Acker's strident and uncompromising perspectives are, no doubt, even more vital then than now. Hindsight also provides us with the opportunity to share these observations on the album and its origins, via Chris Kraus' After Kathy Acker: A Biography, which explains how Acker reframed large chunks of her recent book, My Mother: Demonology as "as an avant-operatic spoken-word CD": Each take was done virtually nonstop, and Ralph Carney recalls Acker jumping up and down in the booth while Tribe 8 played. When it was finally released two years after her death, Redoing Childhood revealed a new dimension to Acker's work. "Her voice in general, there was something so lush and luscious and embracing and sexy," Ira Silverberg told the Seattle Weekly. "Kathy had rock star energy about her. [Her performance] had less to do with the punctuation of the actual sentences than with her almost reinterpreting her own work in a lyrical way … Kathy just got it." You can listen to the complete album, along with a 1978 Segue Series reading (with selections from Blood and Guts in High School), recordings from SUNY-Buffalo in 1979 and 1995, and several recordings surrounding Acker's late novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates, including the 1995 album of the same name she recorded with the Mekons by clicking here. As always, we're grateful to Matias Viegener and the Acker estate for their permission to share these recordings with our listeners. George Quasha Reads 'syntactic sentience," 2024Posted 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 word, strange beauty by stranger attraction, waking from myself, gnostalgia for the present, not even rabbits go down this hole, dowsing axis, hearing other, the ghost in between, verbal paradise, glossodelia attract: preverbs, the daimon of moment: preverbs, scorned beauty comes up behind: preverbs, things done for themselves: preverbs, and polypoikilos: matrix in variance: preverbs, among others. Click here to start listening. James Weldon Johnson on PennSoundPosted 2/5/2025 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 SteinPosted 2/3/2025 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. Robert Creeley and Company: Home Movies by Bobbie Louise HawkinsPosted 1/31/2025 Today we're reacquainting ourselves with "Robert Creeley and Company: Home Movies by Bobbie Louise Hawkins," a terrific assembly of footage that shows some of midcentury's most influential poets captured in intimate, everyday scenes. Charles Bernstein provided some background information in a 2014 Jacket2 commentary post announcing the addition of these films, along with a timetable of its contents: "Bobbie Louise Hawkins took these home movies from 1962 to 1965. She provided them to Robert McTavish for his film about the Vancouver poetry conference of 1963, The Line Has Shattered (2013), and then asked McTavish to send them to PennSound. Penelope Creeley and McTavish provided most of the annotations. We welcome any further identifications: let us know!" Above, we see a screenshot of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and John Wieners; other captures Bernstein has selected from the films include Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Tuli Kupferberg, Ed Sanders, and John Cage. You can see them here and watch the films here. PoemTalk #204: on Horace Gregory's 'Chorus for Survival'Posted 1/29/2025 As Filreis explains in his program notes at Jacket2, Gregory was a "once hugely famous and now mostly forgotten communist and communist-affiliated poet who thrived for decades but most notably in the 1930s." He also provides the provenance for the recordings under discussion, which were made at the Harvard Vocarium in 1944, as part of a set of six titles.  You can listen to this latest program, read the fifth poem in the series, 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. Charles Reznikoff reads from "Holocaust" for International Holocaust Remembrance DayPosted 1/27/2025
January 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the day Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz seventy-seven years ago. In acknowledgment of the day and the six million European Jews who perished senselessly, we revisit one of the more remarkable and harrowing recordings in our archives: In late 2009, we were fortunate enough to be contacted by filmmaker Abraham Ravett, who offered us a treasure trove of rare recordings he'd made of poet Charles Reznikoff reading from his final collection, Holocaust, along with a number of photographs. Recorded December 21, 1975, these eighteen tracks — which include a number of retakes and an audio check — were originally recorded for inclusion in the soundtrack to the recently-graduated director's debut film, Thirty Years Later, which he describes as an autobiographical document of "the emotional and psychological impact of the Holocaust on two survivors and the influence this experience has had on their relationship with the filmmaker — their only surviving child." In addition to the recordings themselves, Ravett graciously shared his recollections of that day — noting, "Mr. Reznikoff's West End apartment was located within a high-rise apartment complex reminiscent of where I grew up during my teens in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, N.Y. He was very kind and gracious to a rather nervous young filmmaker fumbling with his Nagra tape recorder and Sennheiser microphone who hoped that everything would work as planned" — along with a series of eight photographs of the poet, including the stunning image at right. While Holocaust, as a text alone, serves as a viscerally pointed indictment of Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, not to mention a marvelous example of documentary poetics, in these selections, the auratic resonance of these appropriated testimonies are amplified dramatically, particularly when framed by the frail yet determined voice of the seventy-nine year old poet — who would pass away a month and a day from the date of this recording session — lending the work a gravid anger, a grand sense of monumental enormity. You can listen to these tracks by clicking here, where you'll also find a link to a separate page housing Ravett's photographs, and don't forget to visit Reznikoff's main PennSound author page, where you can listen to the poet's 1974 reading at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University (where he was famously introduced by his Objectivist compatriot, George Oppen) and his 1975 appearance on Susan Howe's Pacifica Radio program, "Poetry Today," among other recordings. Congratulations to 2024 NBCC Poetry Finalist Dawn Lundy MartinPosted 1/26/2025 We wrap up this week with congratulations to Dawn Lundy Martin, who was named a finalist for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for her Nightboat Books collection Instructions for the Lovers. Finalists will give a reading at The New School on March 19th and the ceremony, which marks the NBCC's 50th year, will be held the next day on March 20th. PennSound's Dawn Lundy Martin author page offers listeners the opportunity to check out readings and talks from 2006 to 2016. The earliest pair of recordings come from an April 2006 visit to New York City, which yielded sets for both Belladonna* and the Segue Series; Martin would return for another Segue reading at the Bowery Poetry Club in December 2008. Our first recording from A. L. Nielsen's Heatstrings Theory archives is an October 2009 reading at Penn State University, and Nielsen was also kind enough to share a March 2016 appearance by the poet as part of a reading celebrating What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, held in Brooklyn for that year's National Black Writers Conference at AWP. Then, from Andrew Kenower's A Voice Box archives, we have a pair of Bay Area readings: a 2010 reading at David Buuck's house and a 2013 reading at Tender Oracle held as part of the East Bay Poetry Summit. Finally, we have "On Discomfort and Creativity," the 2016 Leslie Scalapino Lecture in Innovative Poetics, held at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Video of that event is available, along with a link to the text in Something on Paper. Four of the earlier readings mentioned above have been segmented into individual MP3s, providing listeners the unique opportunity to listen to multiple iterations of the same poems — including "The Undress," "The Morning Hour," "Bearer of Arms 1775-1783," and "The Symbolic Nature of Chaos" — read at separate events. Taken together, they also provide an interesting document of Martin's evolving style from her first publications up to just before her most recent collection, Good Stock, Strange Blood (Coffee House Press, 2017), which earned Martin the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2019 for "creating 'fascinating, mysterious, formidable, and sublime' explorations of the meaning of identity, the body, and the burdens of history along with one’s own private traumas." You can experience Dawn Lundy Martin's formidable voice by clicking here. Art, Fantasy and Experience, Moderated by Carla Billitteri, 2010Posted 1/22/2025 In her introduction, Billitteri discusses her motivations in inviting these poets to invite these four poets to take part in this event: "I see in their poetry, fantasy as the configuration of a conceptual space that undoes itself, or undoes its configuration; fantasy as the reconfiguration of familiar conceptual space in such a way as to distort it; and finally, fantasy as the presentation of an untranslatable, or only partially translatable experience. In this sense, fantasy is a sense memory." Brief sets from each poet (running approximately ten to fifteen minutes) are presented as both audio and video, with segmented tracks available for both Equi and Gordon's readings. These performances are followed by a short conversation period in which the poets discuss the role of fantasy in their poetry. You can see and hear all of these recordings on the special page we've put together for this event as well as on the individual author pages for each poet. To start exploring these fascinating readings, click on the title above. Al Young on PennSoundPosted 1/20/2025 Young has received the American Book Award twice, for Bodies and Soul: Musical Memoirs (1982) and The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990-2000 (2002). He was also awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Whittier College in 2009. He is a recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Wallace Stegner fellowships, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN-Library of Congress Award for Short Fiction, the PEN-USA Award for Non-Fiction, the Pushcart Prize, and two New York Times Notable Book of the year citations. We're particularly partial to Young's reading at our own Kelly Writers House on November 15, 2018, which starts off with a warm welcome from Al Filreis and a longer introduction by William J. Harris, who details his personal history with Young more than fifty years ago as a grad student, and observes that "like Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka, Al is a blues jazz poet." Later, Harris tells us that "like a blues in the heart, there's much pain and joy in the poems of Al Young," before enumerating his many publications and achievements of this "man of great craft and soul." After a long and charming salvo of opening comments, that moves from Ben Franklin to Bahrain and back again, Young delivers a fantastic reading for the appreciative audience. You can find audio and video of this event on PennSound's Al Young author page, which is also home to a 2006 reading in San Francisco and a 1990 set at Printer's Ink in Palo Alto, CA. To listen to any of these recordings, click here. Remembering Gregory CorsoPosted 1/17/2025 We launched our Gregory Corso author page in June 2017, with assistance from Raymond Foye. There, you'll find five full readings plus one individual poem recorded between the 1970s and 1990s. The earliest recording is a April 1971 reading at Duke University, which is followed by an August 1985 appearance at the San Francisco Art Institute as part of their "Art of Poetry" series. Jumping forward to the 90s, there's a March 1991 Brooklyn College reading notable for the appearance of Corso's iconic late poem "The Whole Mess ... Almost" and for the half-hour candid conversation recorded in the car on the way home. From December 1992, there's a stellar reading in New York City also featuring Herbert Huncke, John Wieners, and Allen Ginsberg, and finally, from March 1993, we have a half-hour reading from Rutgers University including "I Met This Guy Who Died," "Earliest Memory," "Youthful Religious Experiences," and "How Not to Die," among other poems. Our most recent addition is a 1969 recording session at Fantasy Records' San Francisco studios on Natoma Street showcasing "In the Fleeting Hand of Time," "Vision of Rotterdam," "The Last Warmth of Arnold," "Mexican Impressions," "Botticelli Spring," "Sun — A Spontaneous Poem," "Ode to Coit Tower," and "I Am 25," among others. Ginsberg famously offered high praise for his dear friend, calling him "a poet's Poet, his verse pure velvet, close to John Keats for our time, exquisitely delicate in manners of the Muse," who "has been and always will be a popular poet, awakener of youth, puzzlement & pleasure for sophisticated elder bibliophiles." He continues, judging Corso as "'Immortal' as immortal is, Captain Poetry exampling revolution of Spirit, his 'poetry the opposite of hypocrisy,' a loner, laughably unlaurelled by native prizes, divine Poet Maudit, rascal poet Villonesque and Rimbaudian whose wild fame's extended for decades around the world from France to China, World poet." Click here to start listening. Want to read more? Visit the PennSound Daily archive. |
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