PennSound Daily

Boards ceilings canes baskets wrappings

for tobacco plants

bundled fan palm: nourishing sprout and heart

oleaginous fruit. I am:

a Cuban Royal Palm, tall, coronated, barefoot, unarmed

sessile flowers, pinnatisect leaves

These new tracks join an old favorite, a January 2019 reading of "USAvsCuba," taken from his debut collection The Crown Ain't Worth Much (Button Poetry, 2016). Listeners can read along with that poem in Western Beefs here. To listen to all of the aforementioned recordings, click here.

Last summer we announced a new video of five poems by Wroblewski, translated by Piotr Gwiazda and read by Marcus Slease, which had originally appeared as part of Marit MacArthur and Kacper Bartczak's 2015 Jacket2 feature "(Polish) Poetry after Różewicz." On PennSound's Grzegorz Wroklewski author page you'll also find a number of additional one-off collaborative tracks and readings recorded in Denmark, Sweden, and the UK between 2012 and 2016. Click here to start listening.

We're a little late hearing about the passing of poet, editor, and teacher Gary Lenhart, who succumbed to cancer on March 31st, but didn't want to miss the opportunity to commemorate his life and work. A thoughtful obituary in Valley News notes that "Ever attentive to his craft, he was working on poems and a book review the last morning of his life." It continues:

To his devoted wife and daughter he was the fine mind that enlivened theirs, the wry wit that brightened their days, and the heart so true they never felt alone. He lived with deep personal integrity and unfailing courtesy to all. He was, in the words of one friend, the best of men. His broad knowledge and inventive attention to thought and language combined with a profound love of poetry to inform the rich body of work he left behind.

PennSound listeners might best be acquainted with Lenhart through his work as (co-)editor of the journals Mag City and Transfer or as part of the group behind the groundbreaking Public Access Poetry, and while the videos on our PAP series page are currently unavailable due to the absence of Adobe Flash, we're currently working to make them — and our other video holdings — available as soon as possible. Lenhart appeared a total of three times on the program, reading on July 14, 1977; February 14, 1978; and July 27, 1978. We also enthusiastically direct our listeners towards "'Readers of the Future' Would Be Interested," at Jacket2, an astounding interview with Lenhart conducted by Ben Olin, which provides a lot of inside information on the development and history of Public Access Poetry. 

In a remembrance posted last month, Michael Lally recalls that Lenhart "was always a calm but radiant presence on the downtown scene and I admired him a lot." Certainly, many others felt the same, and we send our condolences to Lenhart's friends, family, colleagues, and fans, as well as thank him for his visionary work with poetry and media, prefiguring projects like our own.

Last week we released episode #159 in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which addresses two poems by the legendary bpNichol: "Dada Lama" and "A Small Song That Is His." For this program, host Al Filreis assembled a virtual panel that included "Tracie Morris, Douglas Kearney, and Derek Beaulieu, from Brooklyn, Minneapolis, and Banff, respectively."

The two pieces we discuss are “Dada Lama” of 1966 (recorded in 1969) and “A Small Song That Is His” of 1974. “Dada Lama” was published by Cavan McCarthy in an edition of three hundred copies and is available from bpNichol.ca as a PDF. A recording was included in Journeying and the Returns (Coach House Press, 1967). “A Small Song That Is His” has long been part of PennSound’s extensive bpNichol page. It has been segmented from a rare sixty-minute cassette published in 1971 by High Barnet Company in Toronto. “A Small Song” is performed on that tape along with “Love Poem for Gertrude Stein,” “Beast (for Hugo Ball),” and other bpNichol favorites. The text of “A Small Song” later appeared in Love: A Book of Remembances, published by Talonbooks in 1974.

From there, the discussion begins with Beaulieu providing some context for this work: "Derek notes of 'Dada Lama” that it's an early piece in which bpNichol's clearly working through his influences. At that point the sound poem was 'really new to the Canadian conversation.' It echoes Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara. By the time you get to 'A Small Song' there's more confidence in bpNichol’s grasp of the sound poem, such that he can begin to 'come up with a poetics of the letter.'" He continues, "'And poems are not made of feelings,' Derek reminds us. 'Poems are made of letters.'"

First up, from 2006 we have Keith Waldrop reading from his translations of Paris Spleen, released that same year by Wesleyan. This session — recorded and edited by Steve Evans — consists of eleven tracks in total, including "Benediction," "The Life Before," "Don Juan in Hell" "Giantess," "Posthumous Remorse," "Invitation to the Voyage," "Spleen," and "Danse Macabre." Writing in The New York Times, Joshua Clover observed that Waldrop's translation is "by no means the first prose translation, but it's the most charming: I don't recall another version, verse or prose, that slips so easily into the comradely 'we.' Or that uses the phrase 'dropsical dame.' If such choices tilt the anxious balance of the author's sensibility, this is inevitable — and the poems slink toward us from their historical distance." 

Then, we'd be remiss if we didn't include co-Founder Charles Bernstein's well-known translation of Baudelaire's "Be Drunken." This recording [MP3] was recorded at a 2009 reading for Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room, and it's one of several versions you can hear on Bernstein's Readings page. You can read the poem, taken from Recalculating, here.

It's been less than 24 hours since we launched our PennSound Twitter page, and already we have 50 followers. Sign up to follow our feed to get micro-updates — from co-directors Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein, and managing editor Michael S. Hennessey — highlighting changes to the site, new additions and favorite recordings from our archives. Recent tweets have featured Bernadette Mayer & Lee Ann Brown, Tracie Morris, the PennSound Podcast series and our video page. 

Are you getting the most out of your PennSound experience? Aside from Twitter, don't forget all of the other ways in which you can keep up to date with the site through the web or your cell phone: first, there's the PennSound Daily newsfeed, which automatically delivers entries like this one to your iGoogle page, Google Reader, or favorite feed reader.PennSound is also on FaceBook, along with pages for our sister sites, including the Kelly Writers House and the Electronic Poetry Center. One additional option is the Kelly Writers House's Dial-a-Poem service: just dial 215-746-POEM (7636), and aside from news on upcoming KWH events, you can also hear a recording from a past reading, courtesy of the PennSound archives.

Finally, for those of you who feel overwhelmed by all this new technology, and liked the world a lot more before it Twittered, Tumblred and Bloggered, we're currently beta-testing yet another, more traditional means of transmission. Utilizing homing pigeons equipped with state-of-the-art (well, state-of-the-art circa WWI) wire recording technology, PigeonSound ™ (see prototype at right) will be able to deliver three minutes of telephone-quality audio up to several hundred miles from our home base at UPenn's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (our apologies to the rest of the world). Though there have been numerous unfortunate setbacks to date, we hope to have the program up and running by the first of next month with our inaugural offering: The Selected Poems of Ern Malley (read by the author himself). From sites that tweet to birds that tweet, we have all of your poetry options covered at PennSound.

For what it's worth, I still think it's funnier than Voltswagen. 

Peter Seaton (1944–2010) was a gloriously radical poet, one of the stellar writers working in New York in the 1970s and 1980s. Featured in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, ROOF, Tuumba, ++. For some years, Steve McLaughlin has been working on a collection of his "complete" work — everything Seaton published, with reproductions from his  magazine and anthology appearances, plus a substantial file of holographs. While his papers went to UCSD's Archive for New Poetry, and his three books are available at Eclipse (and linked here), this EPC page gives you access to a trove of significant works not included in his books or otherwise available, plus biographical information, a bibliography, and a few things written about or for Seaton. I am very grateful to Steve for this great job he has done on this digital edition. As always at EPC: free and without advertising.

We couldn't agree more with Charles' assessment: this is both a labor of love and an astounding resource for well-established fans of Seaton's work along with those encountering him for the first time. If you'd like to hear some of these poems in performance, PennSound's Peter Seaton author page is home to a half-dozen vintage recordings from Segue Series events at the Ear Inn, taking place in December 1978, April and September 1971, July 1982, December 1984 and February 1987 — the first and last of which have been segmented into individual tracks. There's also a 1980 home recording of The Son Master and a pair of recordings from 1985: a reading at the Segue Foundation offices and an interview with filmmaker and friend Henry Hills. Click here to start listening, and here to browse Seaton's work at the EPC.

Hanging Loose is rightly celebrated for its longevity, having published a whopping 111 issues since its launch 55 years ago, as well as its dedication to publishing emerging writers, including high school students. The press is likewise beloved for its prescience in recognizing voices that would go on to greatly shape the field of contemporary poetry. As they note on their website:

The editors are proud of having published many first books, including the first full collections by Sherman Alexie, Kimiko Hahn, D. Nurkse, Jack Agüeros, Cathy Park Hong, Eula Biss, Joanna Fuhrman, Hayan Charara, Maggie Nelson, Indran Amirthanayagam, R. Zamora Linmark, and Beth Bosworth, among others. Some of the other writers published by HL are Harvey Shapiro, Elizabeth Swados, Joan Larkin, Gary Lenhart, Jack Anderson, Maureen Owen, Donna Brook, Ha Jin, Charles North, Paul Violi, Tony Towle, William Corbett, Ed Friedman, and Jayne Cortez.

Over the years, the journal and press would receive a number of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Poetry Fund. Among more than 200 books published by the press, you'll find recipients of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Prize, The Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize, along with other notable accolades.

Of course, it would be a mistake to overlook Herson's own creative output, as John Yau recognizes with the title of a recent tribute in Hyperallergic: "Did You Know That Robert Hershon Is a Major Poet?" Therein, Yau praises Hershon for his plainspoken tone and subtle experimentalism, along with his candor, observing, "I cannot think of another contemporary poet who is willing to expose his vulnerability, worry, and pettiness through the lens of humor."

Hershon was a guest of the Kelly Writers House on October 11, 2006, where he read alongside poet Donna Brook. His half-hour set from that evening consisted of eleven poems in total, including "Big Blue Chair," "Calls from the Outside World," "Mysteries of Marriage," "International Incidents," and "Three Photographs Taken Around the House at the Request of Anselm Berrigan and Tom Devaney for a Mysterious Future Project." You can listen to that reading here. We send our deepest sympathies to Hershon's family, friends, and fans, as well as the great many readers whose lives have been touched by the work of Hanging Loose and its press.

Wah begins by discussing his own ethnic identity and his grandfather's emigration from China to Canada followed by "the cultural inability to write about race in the late 1950s–early 1960s after he (himself) arrived at the University of British Columbia." From there he addresses "the introduction of bilingualism and biculturalism in Canada in the 1970s," via Joy Kogawa's novel Obasan (set in Japanese-Canadian internment camps), which "allowed for conversations about race to begin in English departments in Canada," as well as "the chronology of national racial conversations and redress (for internment)." Wah shares that he was pleasantly surprised "about race suddenly becoming discussable in English literary spaces in comparison to the conversations he had been having with white colleagues (mostly on class)," then goes on discuss several highlights in that growing discourse from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, including the work of the Vancouver-based Chinese-Canadian Writers Workshop (later the Asian-Canadian Writers Workshop), Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe, Jim Wong-Chu and Bennett Lee's anthology Many-Mouthed Birds: Contemporary Writing by Chinese Canadians, and Rita Wong's Monkey Puzzle, along with contemporaneous cultural developments.

As he nears the end of his talk, Wah explains its metaphoric title through a poem from his Diamond Grill reflecting upon the importance of hybridity to his poetics: "If I stand in the doorway and don’t go through, I can see both rooms.” Thus the hyphen, representative of his hybrid identity, serves a similar purpose, allowing multiple perspectives. He shares more of his poetry and answers questions about his writing process along with culture and memories. You can listen (or watch) this fascinating talk by clicking here.

PennSound has been working in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute to present this remarkable collection of historical and contemporary transrational poetry, centered on an exhibition of Russian Futurist book art held at the Getty earlier this year. The exhibition's title — "Tango with Cows" — taken from a poem by Vasily Kamensky, points to the sense of hilarity and irreverence you'll hear in these startlingly original 'beyonsense' poems. Our page of recordings compliments the extensive media collected online at the Getty's website. There, you can find programs, essays, video footage, full scans of the Futurist books, and even a fully interactive slideshow of key books from the exhibition! 

Our archive of sound recordings comes in two parts: first, Tango with Cows features Oleg Minin's bilingual readings of essential poems found in book art projects from poets such as Alexei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Pavel Filonov. By reading from the Russian before the accompanying English translation, Minin offers listeners the pleasure of sound before recognition — an ideal situation for the revolutionary poetics on display here.

However, the real highlight of this great resource sounds from the second half: we're pleased to present high quality recordings of Explodity: An Evening of Transrational Sound Poetry held on February 4th, 2009. This blockbuster reading casts the zaum' poetries of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh in the parallel light of historic and contemporary sound poetry, as presented by Christian Bök and Steve McCaffery. After virtuoso performances of English translations of historical Russian poems, Bok and McCaffery present personal selections from the history of sound poetry alongside their own original compositions. On the short list are works by Aristophanes, Raoul Hausmann, F.T. Marinetti, Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, and R. Murray Schafer, just to mention a few.

You can hear more work in this vein on PennSound pages for Christian Bök, Steve McCaffery, Jaap Blonk, Tomomi Adachi, and The Four Horsemen. Additionally, we'd like to suggest our historic pages for F.T. Marinetti and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Our partner UbuWeb offers a huge index of this exciting brach of poetry; we suggest in particular that you visit a companion set of Russian Futurist recordings from the GLM Collection.

Special thanks to Nancy Perloff and everyone at the Getty Research Institute for making this resource possible. We hope these recordings lend the same vision of language that mystified Benedikt Livshits in 1911 (from Nancy Perloff, Curator's Essay): "I saw language come alive with my very own eyes. The breath of the primordial word wafted into my face."

[S]ound is movement. It interests me that the words "momentary" and "moments" come from the same Latin: "moveo, to move. Every statement exists in time and vanishes in time, like in alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy's famous statement about music: "When you hear music, after it's over it's gone in the air, you can never capture it again." That has gradually become more of a positive value to me, because one of the great things about the moment is that if you were there in that moment, you received that moment and there's an intensity to a moment that can never be gone back to that is somehow more memorable. Like they used to say, "Was you there, Charlie?" 

Kerouac said, "Nothing is muddy that runs in time and to laws of time." And I can’t resist putting next to that my favorite statement by Maurice Blanchot: "One can only write if one arrives at the instant towards which one can only move through space opened up by the movement of writing." And that’s not a paradox.

"Old Angel Midnight" is only the beginning of a lifelong work in multilingual sound, representing the haddalada-babra of babbling world tongues coming in thru my window at midnight no matter where I live or what I'm doing, in Mexico, Morocco, New York, India or Pakistan, in Spanish, French, Aztec, Gaelic, Keltic, Kurd or Dravidian, the sounds of people yakking and of myself yakking among, ending finally in great intuitions of the sounds of tongues throughout the entire universe in all directions in and out forever. And it is the only book I've ever written in which I allow myself the right to say anything I want, absolutely and positively anything, since that's what you hear coming in that window... God in his Infinity wouldn't have had a world otherwise — Amen."