PennSound Daily

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.

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."

Today we offer our heartiest congratulations to Peter Gizzi, who was recently announced as the winner of the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize for his 2023 collection Fierce Elegy. 

The UMass College of Fine Arts and Humanities joins the poetry world in celebrating Prof. Peter Gizzi’s T.S. Eliot Prize. Prof. Gizzi’s poems explore the imagination and the self. They examine love and grief and wrestle with despair, opening for the listener a way into our joys, our sorrows, and our songs of self. We are thrilled to have Prof. Gizzi teaching in the MFA and English department and to offer so many emerging writers the opportunity to work with and learn from him.

A charming yet revealing interview on the set by pre-teen protagonist Emma Bee Bernstein is interwoven with footage focusing on the periphery of a recent production — the elaborate set design and lighting, the non-speaking supporting cast (the so-called "stage crew") with their frantic movement patterns, typical props and recurrent imagery, all shot & edited in a disruptive manner to mimetically compensate for the loss of actual presence.

Hills said of the film, "Curators don't seem to get this piece. I don't understand because I find it fantastic and endlessly interesting. This is my most misunderstood work in years!" 

Speaking of Hills, surveying the work collected on Foreman's PennSound page in her New Yorker piece, Helen Shaw offers the opinion that "The best one to start with, I think, is Henry Hills's extraordinary 2010 film of Astronome, which feels like a Kabbalistic ritual sped up into a panic attack." Finally, Foreman was also a frequent guest on Leonard Schwartz's long-running radio program Cross Cultural Poetics, appearing on a half-dozen episodes between 2004 and 2009, and one can track his evolution during this period across each visit. You can find all of the aforementioned recordings, along with a great deal more, here.

We'll give the final word to Bernstein, who, announcing the death of his close friend offered this simple summation: "His memory, and the memory of his work, is a blessing for all who had the pleasure to experience it."

We start this week with one more beloved December tradition: our good friend John Richetti performing Clement Clarke Moore's poem, "A Visit from St. Nicholas," from his ever-growing anthology, "125 Favorite Poems, Good for Memorizing."

More frequently known by its opening phrase, "'Twas the night before Christmas ...," "A Visit from St. Nicholas" was first published in Troy, New York's Sentinel on this day in 1823 with no attribution. It became wildly popular, reprinted far and wide, and its author — a professor of literature and divinity at New York City's General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, who initially sought to downplay his connection to the poem — would finally be credited in 1837, with Moore including it in a collection of his verse in 1844.

Click here to listen to Richetti's performance of the poem. You can read along on the Poetry Foundation's copy of the poem here. Many more recordings made by Richetti form the backbone of our PennSound Classics page, which is organized by author name. To start browsing, click here.

Begins jokingly proclaiming, "I'll make my Ernie Gehr film," a major preoccupation of my generation in the late 70s/early 80s, & then this very raw other thing proceeds to unfold, raw because I only had enough money (a loan from Abby Child) to do 4 shoots never having done sync & using outdated film stock from Rafik & an unfamiliar, undependable camera & trying to keep everything together & everything going wrong, yet determined to make concrete the ideas I had been abstractly developing over several years with whatever I got back from the lab no matter & so abandoning all caution to open a new area, I decided who could possibly talk better than poets? Edited in Times Square.

Fans of Hill's Money (1985) will recognize many familiar techniques at play here, with rapid-fire cuts creating a dense, rhythmic collage of sights and sounds punctuated by pregnant pauses, bursts of noise, and enigmatic, orphaned fragments of speech. It would be a mistake to judge it solely in its relationship to Money, however, since the two films differ radically in scope and spirit: while the latter is an expansive survey of the city and its scenes (including poets, dancers, and musicians), the feel here is much more intimate, between the smaller cast and the more limited visual vocabulary. At the same time it's fascinating to see hallmarks of Hills' style in a raw early state, particularly given the influence of the considerable technical challenges that Hills enumerates above. You can watch Plagiarism by clicking here.