PennSound Daily

It's the 206th birthday of Walt Whitman, "the Good Gray Poet," who rests eternally across the river from us in Camden, NJ.

While Whitman left behind no recordings of his poetry — you might be familiar with a wax cylinder recording of excerpts from the late poem "America" that's been deemed 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. Bunting's recording was featured in PoemTalk #74 in 2014. You can click on any of the links above to be taken right to the mentioned recordings.

Introducing her 2024 interview with Notley as part of The Paris Review’s “Art of Poetry” series, Hannah Zeavin observes that “Experimentation is the hallmark of Notley’s poetry; in nearly every book, a new method or idea arrives by which to channel her voice. Her work, which draws on traditional lyric forms but abandons their strictures when they fail to aid the poet, is often described as difficult,” noting that “some of her finest poems were written in the wake of loss.” “I am conscious of the facts of grief and poverty,” Notley tells Zeavin, “and I think that no one should ever forget that they exist. No poet has the right to.” 

PennSound’s Alice Notley author page offers up a snapshot of her dizzying evolution across the breadth of her writing life, starting with a 1971 reading in Bolinas that showcases many of the poems that would appear in her C Press debut, 165 Meeting House Lane (a.k.a. Twenty-Four Sonnets, which was printed and assembled during Notley and Ted Berrigan’s trip to California), right up to an October 2023 reading at Hemingway Center at Boise State University, where she read from The Speak Angel Series, published that same year by Fonograf editions. While she started off writing sonnets addressing (to borrow the title of another early Notley collection) Incidentals in the Day World, by her final book she saw herself writing “international, interplanetary” epic poetry in the tradition of Virgil that was “reshaping the myth and defining the world.” Between those two points, listeners will find recordings of more than thirty events, including readings, talks, interviews, and class visits from New York City, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Boulder, Buffalo, Albany, Hoboken, as well as Paris and the University of Essex in the UK (where, improbably, Berrigan succeeded Robert Lowell as Poet in Residence).

I only had the pleasure of meeting Notley once, at the astounding Tulsa School Conference organized by Grant Matthew Jenkins way back in 2009, where she was a featured guest alongside Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, and her sons, Anselm and Eddie Berrigan, who I am thinking of now as they feel grief that's exponential compared to what we, her legions of fans worldwide, are feeling.

In May 1972, the artist Gordon Matta-Clark installed a dumpster in front of 98 Greene Street in Soho (Manhattan). The work was called both Open Space and Dumpster. The Dumpster was filled with construction debris and other material, formed into three corridors. For Ted Greenwald's contribution to the installation, he created a special audio work. Greenwald installed a tape recorder on the delivery truck for the Village Voice, his long-time day job. Six reels were recorded. One of the tapes, featuring the most dramatic action of the day, was stolen from the cab of the truck: in the middle of Times Square, mounted police galloped up to a subway entrance, tied their horses to the entrance, and ran down into the subway. The other five reels survived and are being made available by PennSound for the first time (one of those cassettes is listed below in two parts)."

We kick off this week by taking a look at our author page for poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib.

This modest collection of recordings begins with his virtual reading at our own Kelly Writers House on April 19, 2021. Video footage from that event is available, along with segmented MP3 audio that you can stream or download. In the first half, Abdurraqib reads the ten-part poem "All the TV Shows Are About Cops," which is split into individual tracks. The Q&A session that followed has also been split into thematic segments, such as "on the writing process," "on making an office space," "tips for aspiring cultural critics," "on being influenced by his favorite books," and "on sneakers."

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.