PennSound Daily

Running just shy of an hour, Katz's set is comprised of twenty-two titles in total, which show the breadth of his talents. There are generous selections from his most recent collection, Broadway for Paul ("Propensities," "Autumn Days and Hours," "Six Figures Fire," "Winter Window") as well as his current manuscript-in-progress ("Keys and Ripples," "Pulling Out," "The Sign on the Closed Theater Marquee," "Time Marches On," "Walk Beside You") and Previous Glances, a recent retrospective collection published in Italy ("Poem," "The Sky," "Wellsprings"). Katz also reads a pair of translations from the works of germinal Roman elegist Sextus Propertius.

Listen to this sprawling set on our Vincent Katz author page, where you'll also find a broad array of readings, talks, and films spanning the past forty five years. Click here to start exploring.

While Whitman left behind no recordings of his poetry — that much heralded wax cylinder with four lines of the late poem "America" is unlikely to be the poet himself — but that doesn't mean that we don't have recordings of Whitman's work for your enjoyment. Today we'll highlight performances and interpretations by three poets.

We start with UPenn professor emeritus John Richetti, who has recorded a wide variety of Whitman's work over the years, including "O Captain! My Captain!," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "The Sleepers," "Goodbye My Fancy," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "I Hear America Singing," and sections 1 and 2 of "Calumus." You'll find these tracks on a special page containing all of Richetti's renditions of Whitman's work, which also includes "Song of Myself" in its entirety,  among other titles. Sticking with "Song of Myself," we're also lucky to have a 1974 recording of Aaron Kramer reading sections I-XXXII of that poem, and Basil Bunting winds things up with a 1977 reading at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he read "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" as part of a performance that also included work by Louis Zukofsky, Ezra Pound, Thomas Wyatt, and Edmund Spenser. You can click on any of the poets' names above to be taken right to the mentioned recordings.

Fifty-two years ago today Lew Welch disappeared into the California wilderness, never to be found, which makes it an excellent occasion to revisit our PennSound author page for the poet. Though modest, it nevertheless represents much of the most notable work of his tragically brief career.

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Shakespeare Milton

Shakespeare Milton

Shelley as well

Shelley as well

Sarah something Teasdale

Sarah something Teasdale

Edith M. Bell

Edith M. Bell

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We start this new week off by taking a look at one of the most remarkable series housed on our PennSound Cinema page: Robert Ashley's seven-part "opera for television," Music with Roots in the Aether. We've hosted a copy of this series for many years, and replaced our original lo-fi copies with new remasters in January 2011. Here's how Ashley describes his ambitious project, first released in 1974:

Music with Roots in the Aether is a music-theater piece in color video. It is the final version of an idea that I had thought about and worked on for a few years: to make a very large collaborative piece with other composers whose music I like. The collaborative aspect of Music with Roots in the Aether is in the theater of the interviews, at least primarily, and I am indebted to all of the composers involved for their generosity in allowing me to portray them in this manner.

The piece turns out to be, in addition, a large-scale documentation of an important stylistic that came into American concert music in about 1960. These composers of the "post-serial" / "post-Cage" movement have all made international reputations for the originality of their work and for their contributions to this area of musical compositions.

The style of the video presentation comes from the need I felt to find a new way to show music being performed. The idea of the visual style of Music with Roots in the Aether is plain: to watch as closely as possible the action of the performers and to not "cut" the seen material in any way — that is, to not editorialize on the time domain of the music through arbitrary space-time substitutions.

The visual style for showing the music being made became the "theater" (the stage) for the interviews, and the portraits of the composers were designed to happen in that style.

First up, we have a March 31st reading by Clyde Moneyhun, poet, translator, and BSU faculty member, who read from his latest book in translation, Witch in Mourning, by Catalan poet Maria Mercè Marçal. That was followed by an April 13th reading by Gothataone Moeng, author of the celebrated short story collection, Call and Response. Finally, poets Alli Warren and Brandon Brown brought the spring reading series to a close with a double-bill on April 28th.

Click on the dates above to be taken directly to each respective reading on PennSound's Boise State University MFA Reading Series homepage. While you're there, check out our repository of recordings made between 2010–2013 under the curation of Martin Corless-Smith, including sets from Alan Halsey, Susan M. Schultz, Ben and Sandra Doller, Forrest Gander, Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, Jennifer Moxley, Bhanu Kapil, Myung Mi Kim, Renée Gladman, Tom Raworth, Lisa Robertson, Alice Notley, and Maggie Nelson. We thank current coordinator Sara Nicholson and grad student Adam Ray Wagner for their help in reviving the series page this academic year and look forward to future readings.

Today we share the tragic news that poet John Tranter has passed away on April 21st, just days shy of his 80th birthday. While his loss will be felt worldwide, we are feeling it more acutely at PennSound's sister site Jacket2, which has archived and continued the mission of Tranter's germinal Jacket magazine since 2011. Julia Bloch penned this tribute on behalf of our editorial team:

We here at Jacket2 are mourning the loss of John Tranter, founder, publisher, and editor of Jacket magazine.

In 1997, John Tranter began publishing Jacket, one of the earliest all-online journals of poetry and poetics. Launched in what was still a field saturated with print, the original quarterly Jacket offered something different. Free, open-access, and impervious to the constraints of page count or paper bindings or subscription income, Jacket taught its readers how to engage with what was then a relatively new medium. As Tranter wrote on the site in its early days, “You can’t actually subscribe to the magazine — just drop by every few weeks. All the past issues will always be there, and the current number will be posted piece by piece until it’s full. You can also read future issues as they are posted piece by piece.” The journal’s first issue, in October 1997, included Philip Mead’s interview with Black Australian surrealist poet Lionel Fogarty, Susan M. Schultz’s essay on the Buffalo poetics program, and Kurt Brereton’s feature on “CyberPoetics of Typography,” which declared, “The page is no longer a flat surface but a virtual field unfolding in time. Words, sounds, images and graphics are now all part of the poetics of the web.”

In an essay called “The Left Hand of Capitalism,” which he originally published in 1999 in London’s Poetry Review, Tranter writes about how this paradigm-shifting moment in online publishing combined the sheer scope of the internet with the niche qualities of a poetry magazine to offer a different kind of economic model: radically accessible with seemingly infinite distribution. “Here’s an example of the reach of the Internet,” Tranter wrote. “In the first issue of Jacket, I published an interview I had recorded with the British poet Roy Fisher, and received an enthusiastic email from a fan. The fellow was grateful for the chance to read an interview with his favourite poet, he said, and went on to explain: ‘It’s hard to find material on Roy Fisher, up here in Nome, Alaska.’”

Jacket quickly grew in reputation not in spite of its DIY roots but by virtue of them. The Guardian lavished praise on the magazine’s aesthetic: “The design is beautiful, the contents awesomely voluminous, the slant international modernist and experimental.” Time called it “an Internet café for postmodernists.” And Lisa Gorton wrote in the Australian Book Review: “People often speak of poetry as a solitary undertaking. Tranter’s Jacket shows how it derives from conversations, allegiances and betrayals — from the human work of inheritance and innovation. Jacket is often playful but it is serious in this purpose: to serve as an archive not just for poems but for those poems’ particular worlds.”

Tranter himself was always forthrightly modest about the undertaking. In a 2013 PennSound podcast, Tranter told Jacket2 publisher Al Filreis: “My background is in book production and magazine production, and in a sense I see Jacket really as just a way of typesetting a magazine and distributing it instantly and cheaply all around the world. […] It solves completely and instantaneously the big problem of poetry, and that is distribution. How do you get copies of a litle book of poetry into a little bookstore in East London? It’s impossible; you can’t do it. But Jacket can do it.” Indeed, Filreis concurs: Jacket simply changed the way poetry could be distributed worldwide.

Tranter, who grew up on a farm and had a background in offset lithography book printing, told Filreis that baling wire was a fitting metaphor for the tools he used to launch Jacket single-handedly from his home office in Balmain, in the inner west of Sydney: “I found I had all these talents: I was an editor, I read widely, I was interested in literature, I was interested in photographic images, I was interested in the layout of the page, how you stuck bits together and got it to work properly, how to navigate from the contents page to the rest of the book, and so on. And when I realized I also had HTML skills, I thought, I happen to have all the skills you needed to tie together a whole lot of stuff you might need to make an issue of a poetry magazine.”

For forty monumental issues — each one archived at Jacket2 — Tranter assiduously curated thousands and thousands of pieces of poetry, essays, interviews, features, and commentary on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. Pam Brown joined Tranter as an associate editor in 2004; in her Commentary series for Jacket2, Brown revisits a number of highlights from Jacket, including Maged Zaher’s feature on Egyptian poetry, Carolyn Burke’s “featurette” on Mina Loy, and “the mis-translations, mis-quotations and bricolage poetry of Sydneysider Chris Edwards.”

In 2011, Tranter retired from his intense daily work on Jacket. The complete archive of the magazine moved intact here to Penn, where it remains open and available to all readers. And then Jacket2 launched.

One of the first conversations we had about launching Jacket2 was how to honor the core of Tranter’s original aesthetic and material vision for Jacket: modernist, international, and published on a rolling schedule. We inherited the notion of a “feature” as a category or department that would collate a huge variety of content on a single topic or figure — often the equivalent of more than three hundred printed pages. We used our own baling wire, as it were, to expand the site by adding podcasts, streaming video, and galleries. And we hosted Tranter’s own Jacket2 Commentary series, in which he reflected on the forty issues of Jacket he edited.

Tranter, who was seventy-nine at the time of his death, published twenty-two collections of poetry and also worked as a radio producer with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, producing programs on history, archaeology, a documentary on carnival sideshow workers, interviews with poets and critics, and radio anthologies of poetry from Thomas Malory to Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery. He edited a number of significant print anthologies, including The New Australian Poetry, The Tin Wash Dish, and The Penguin Anthology of Modern Australian Poetry (coedited with Philip Mead), and his many honors and awards included a Queensland Premier’s Award for Poetry. He founded the Australian Poetry Library, and he was an honorary member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

But Jacket is surely Tranter’s biggest legacy. As Tranter’s daughter Kirsten recently wrote to us here in Philadelphia, “Jacket was something he was incredibly proud of — it was a culmination of his love of bringing people and poetry together, and his love of the creative potential of technology — and he was delighted when it went on to have another life at Penn.” We couldn’t have been more honored to offer Jacket its new home here.

We will miss you, John.