Featured resources
From "Down To Write You This Poem Sat" at the Oakville Gallery
- Charles Bernstein, "Phone Poem" (2011) (1:30): MP3
- Caroline Bergvall, "Love song: 'The Not Tale (funeral)' from Shorter Caucer Tales (2006): MP3
- Christian Bôk, excerpt from Eunoia, from Chapter "I" for Dick Higgins (2009) (1:38): MP3
- Tonya Foster, Nocturne II (0:40) (2010) MP3
- Ted Greenwald, "The Pears are the Pears" (2005) (0:29): MP3
- Susan Howe, Thorow, III (3:13) (1998): MP3
- Tan Lin, "¼ : 1 foot" (2005) (1:16): MP3
- Steve McCaffery, "Cappuccino" (1995) (2:35): MP3
- Tracie Morris, From "Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful" (2002) (3:40): MP3
- Julie Patton, "Scribbling thru the Times" (2016) (5:12): MP3
- Tom Raworth, "Errory" (c. 1975) (2:08): MP3
- Jerome Rothenberg, from "The First Horse Song of Frank Mitchell: 4-Voice Version" (c. 1975) (3:30): MP3
- Cecilia Vicuna, "When This Language Disappeared" (2009) (1:30): MP3
- Guillaume Apollinaire, "Le Pont Mirabeau" (1913) (1:14):
MP3
- Amiri Baraka, "Black Dada Nihilismus" (1964) (4:02): MP3
- Louise Bennett, "Colonization in Reverse" (1983) (1:09): MP3
- Sterling Brown, "Old Lem " (c. 1950s) (2:06): MP3
- John Clare, "Vowelless Letter" (1849) performed by Charles Bernstein (2:54): MP3
- Velimir Khlebnikov, "Incantation by Laughter" (1910), tr. and performed by Bernstein (:28) MP3
- Harry Partch, from Barstow (part 1), performed by Bernstein (1968) (1:11): MP3
- Leslie Scalapino, "Can’t’ is ‘Night’" (2007) (3:19): MP3
- Kurt Schwitters, "Ur Sonata: Largo" performed by Ernst Scwhitter (1922-1932) ( (3:12): MP3
- Gertrude Stein, If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1934-35) (3:42): MP3
- William Carlos Willliams, "The Defective Record" (1942) (0:28): MP3
- Hannah Weiner, from Clairvoyant Journal, performed by Weiner, Sharon Mattlin & Rochelle Kraut (2001) (6:12): MP3
Selected by Charles Bernstein (read more about his choices here)
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Posted 12/2/2024
Today we dip into our archives to revisit Lytle Shaw's 2008 lecture, "Olson's Archives: Fieldwork in New American Poetry," delivered at the Kelly Writers House as part of the Theorizing series.
Delivered on October 22nd of that year, "Olson's Archives" would eventually appear as a chapter in Shaw's 2013 book, Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics (here referenced under its working title, Field Authorities). In the essay Shaw examines "site-specific poetry and art as forms of experimental historiography and ethnography," tracing the shift from "a future-oriented poetics of place" (as seen in Williams and Olson) to a contemporaneously lived aesthetic (he cites Creeley, Baraka and Snyder as examples). In particular, Shaw is "interested in the way that poets who wanted to account for actual empirical places found themselves having to trespass beyond poetry proper to poach some of their authority from other disciplinary fields."
Posted 11/29/2024
Today we explore our author page for beloved proto-modernist misanthrope Charles Baudelaire, which brings together resources related to the poet scattered throughout our archives.
First up, we have Ariana Reines reading and discussing Baudelaire's "My heart laid bare" as part of a 2009 Segue Series Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club. That's followed by Keith Waldrop reading "To the Reader," "The Bad Glazier," "The Dog and the Flask," and "Invitation to the Voyage" at Harvard University in 2009 as part of a launch event for Poems for the Millenium Vol. III. Waldrop returns to read eleven of his translations in a 2006 recording session engineered by Steve Evans.
Charles Bernstein also makes two appearances on the Baudelaire page, first presenting a bilingual reading of "Be Drunken" with Pierre Joris at the aforementioned 2009 Harvard event, and also reading "Venereal Muse," his take on "Muse Venale" at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2006. A twenty-seven minute video of Sean Bonney reading Baudelaire in English in London's Abney Park during the winter of 2008 round out our collection, though we've also included a brief bonus clip of Marjorie Perloff discussing Eliot and Baudelaire's concepts of evil, from a 2012 talk on "The Waste Land."
Posted 11/27/2024
With the US celebrating Thanksgiving this week, it's time to revisit a perennial PennSound Daily tradition that started way back in 2010: a mini-mix of poems of thanks and thanksgiving — some old, some new — taken from the PennSound archives. In a classic recording of "Thanksgiving" [ MP3] from the St. Mark's Poetry Project, Joe Brainard wonders "what, if anything Thanksgiving Day really means to me." Emptying his mind of thoughts, he comes up with these free associations: "first is turkey, second is cranberry sauce and third is pilgrims."
"I want to give my thanks to everyone for everything," the late John Giorno tells us in "Thanx 4 Nothing" [ MP3], "and as a token of my appreciation, / I want to offer back to you all my good and bad habits / as magnificent priceless jewels, / wish-fulfilling gems satisfying everything you need and want, / thank you, thank you, thank you, / thanks." The rolicking poem that ensues offers both genuine sensory delights ("may all the chocolate I've ever eaten / come back rushing through your bloodstream / and make you feel happy.") and sarcastic praise ("America, thanks for the neglect, / I did it without you, / let us celebrate poetic justice, / you and I never were, / never tried to do anything, / and never succeeded").
"Can beauty save us?" wonders Maggie Nelson in "Thanksgiving" [ MP3], a standout poem from her marvelous collection, Something Bright, Then Holes, which revels in the holiday's darker edges and simplest truths: "After dinner / I sit the cutest little boy on my knee / and read him a book about the history of cod // absentmindedly explaining overfishing, / the slave trade. People for rum? he asks, / incredulously. Yes, I nod. People for rum."
Yusef Komunyakaa gratefully recounts a number of near-misses in Vietnam — "the tree / between me & a sniper's bullet [...] the dud / hand grenade tossed at my feet / outside Chu Lai" — in "Thanks" [ MP3], from a 1998 reading at the Kelly Writers House.
"I miss everything / all the time, even / what's in front of me," Kate Colby reflects in "Home to Thanksgiving (1867)" [ MP3], ably mimicking the sense of loss that simultaneously haunts and heightens the holiday season for many of us.
Kenneth Irby begins his 1968 poem, "Thanksgiving Day and Lowell's Birthday" [ MP3] with a succinct synopsis of the holiday's meaning: "This is / the day set aside / for public harvest's / gratitude, / giving back of all the energies of devotion /for an instant equal / to the energies gathered / of earth's sustenance given / or what was attended / watching the slow shift of season / knowledge thankful for to have gathered /before the shift — not so slow and more like a / sudden awareness come on too late — / before cold winter." You can read along with Irby at Jacket2, where the poem was published as part of the career-spanning 2014 feature, "On Kenneth Irby."
While many might be familiar with Charles Bernstein's delightfully-thorny "Thank You for Saying Thank You," I'm offering up a recording of his 2015 mutation of that poem, "Thank You for Saying You're Welcome" [ MP3], which inverts the sentiments of the original: "This is a totally / inaccessible poem. / Each word, / phrase & / line / has been de- / signed to puz- / zle you, its / read- / er, & to / test whether / you're intel- / lect- / ual enough — / well-read or dis- / cern- / ing e- / nough — to ful- / ly appreciate th- / is / poem."
Finally, we turn our attention to the suite of poems that concludes Mark Van Doren's Folkways album, Collected and New Poems — "When The World Ends" / "Epitaph" / "Farewell and Thanksgiving" [ MP3] — the last of which offers gratitude to the muse for her constant indulgence.
Posted 11/25/2024
We start off this week on a sad note, bidding farewell to poet, novelist, painter, and anti-apartheid activist Breyten Breytenbach, who passed away yesterday at the age of 85. In early 1960s South Africa, Breytenbach emerged as the leader of the Sestiger movement of young white dissidents that sought to explore the literary potential of Afrikaans while rejecting its colonial associations. As he explained to The New York Times in 1986, "I'd never reject Afrikaans as a language, but I reject it as part of the Afrikaner political identity. I no longer consider myself an Afrikaner." Breytenbach would eventually settle in France, but during a 1975 trip home to provide support to the outlaw African National Congress, he was arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison, requiring the intervention of President François Mitterrand to negotiate his release. We were lucky to play host to Breytenbach in December 2008, when he read at the Writers House as part of the Writers Without Borders series. His seventy-five minute reading includes the titles "A Black City," "Letter to a Butcher from Abroad," "In a Burning Sea," "Goya," and "The Way Back," among others, ending with a long Q&A session. You'll find a segmented recording of that event on PennSound's Breyten Breytenbach author page, along with his 2005 appearance on Leonard Schwartz's program Cross-Cultural Poetics, during which he discussed his essay "The Middle World" and his then latest collection, Lady One: Of Love And Other Poems. Click here to start listening. We send our deepest sympathies to Breytenbach's family and his fans worldwide.
Posted 11/23/2024
Yesterday saw the debut of the newest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which addreses "Chasing Dirt" from Harryette Mullen's latest, 2023's Open Leaves / poems from earth. Host Al Filreis was lucky to be joined for this program by Mullen herself, along with Laynie Brown and Simone White.
This section of Open Leaves — published by London's Black Sunflowers Poetry Press — includes "two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each." In his program notes at Jacket2 Filreis also notes that "Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read 'Chasing Dirt' at the start of the recorded session."
You can listen to this latest program, read the poems discussed, 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.
Posted 11/20/2024
It was a big deal back in 2011 when the legendary Bay Area-documentarian Kush shared footage online for very first time, and we were proud to be the venue to share it. Presented under the title Larry Eigner: Sacred Materials, this trio of videos include nearly two hours of footage from the end of Eigner's life, including his last public reading on November 17, 1995, and two videos shot on February 6, 1996, which document his burial and his work environs.
A vital part of San Francisco's poetry scene since the 1970s, Kush is the proprietor of the renowned Cloud House Poetry Archives, which "is distinguished from any other by the comprehensive depth of its audiovisual collection and the high fidelity of its field recordings. It is a week-by-week, month-by-month, and decade-by-decade living record of the avant-garde practice of poetry in the San Francisco Bay Area. It represents entire communities of poets and affiliated artists that we identify as the 'poet genome' of Northern California/Pacific Rim."
We are grateful to Kush for his ongoing generosity in sharing these and many other films through the PennSound archives. To watch Larry Eigner: Sacred Materials, click here.
Posted 11/18/2024
I first met Bob at John Ashbery's reading at Haverford College in February 2008, not long after I started working here at PennSound, and one of the first topics we discussed was his piece for the forthcoming ESC special issue and his desire for the essay to be accompanied by a number of brief excerpts and composite tracks from William Carlos Williams' two readings of "The Sea-Elephant." Eventually, I'd step in at the last minute as sound editor for the issue and put together a CD of tracks to complement the various articles, but even with footnote-esque prompts in the text to indicate when readers should listen to a particular track, this was not the ideal presentation we'd imagined. That's why we're very glad that the essay can finally be read as it was originally intended.
The Jacket2 reprint includes 50 embedded streamable MP3s, which allow readers to hear illustrative snippets of Williams without having to leave the document. It's a truly marvelous piece, and even more so when made available in this fashion, so head on over to Jacket2 right now (by clicking here) to start reading and listening.
Posted 11/13/2024
Today we're revisiting a marvelous pair of videos of Julie Patton performing her poetry, which were made by Ted Roeder circa 2013. Filmed in an intimate domestic setting, traffic noises and birdsong drifting through open windows, Patton sits comfortably in a chair before the camera, reading from typescript pages, a pen poised in one hand. She performs in a fluid sprechtstimme, easing in and out of accents and personas, casually adding various musical accompaniments from time to time: she forces the knob on a toddler's toy music box, galloping through the lullabye at a hectic gait, then backs off, plinking it forward in little tonal constellations; she reaches down, offscreen, to plunk a guitar note or stroke the strings behind the nut, producing glassy little accents; her foot settles into a restless and insistent rhythm that resonates through the room. Papers flutter as pages turn, her hands trace and stretch notes through the air. She stares you down, then returns to the poem. These remarkable clips demand and reward your attention, whether you're watching or simply listening in, the various sonic elements creating one sort of experience with their visual counterparts and a different one without. You'll find these two films here on PennSound's Julie Patton author page, which is also home to a wide variety of audio and video recordings of readings, performances, panel discussions, interviews, and more, from 1997 to the present.
Posted 11/11/2024
Today, we revisit "A Tribute to David Bromige," produced by Katherine Hastings, which first aired on KRCB-FM (a public radio station serving the Northern San Francisco Bay Area) on August 26, 2009. Here's a brief description of the hour-long program: The author of dozens of books and the recipient of many literary honors, David Bromige was also a former Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, a professor at Sonoma State University, and a mentor to many. His experimental style and sharp wit translated to a large collection of work so varied that the poems could easily be mistaken as the work of many. Born in London in 1933, Bromige died in Sebastopol in June of this year. Participating in tonight's program will be his wife, Cecelia Belle, their daughter, Margaret, and others. Recordings of Bromige reading his work will also be featured. You'll find the program on PennSound's David Bromige author page, along with a pair of 2018 all-star launch readings for if wants to be the same as is: The Essential David Bromige, and a vast array of recordings of the poet from 1998 as far back as 1964 that includes readings, talks, conversations, radio programs, and more. Click here to start exploring.
Posted 11/9/2024
On the 106th anniversary of his death, we explore our author page for Guillaume Apollinaire, which is home to the earliest artifacts in our archives, documented on lacquer discs some fifteen years before the advent of magnetic tape.
Recorded on December 24, 1913 at the laboratory of Abbé M. Rousselot, these three brief recordings offer a rare opportunity to experience the work of germinal Surrealist author Guillaume Apollinaire through his own voice. "Le Pont Mirabeau," "Marie" and "Le Voyageur," all taken from his first significant volume of poetry, 1913's Alcools, reveal both a strengthened sense of rhythm and a lyrical, elegiac tone, when presented in the original French.
Posted 11/7/2024
In light of the truly horrifying news that the whole world woke up to this morning, I thought it best to revisit two PennSound Daily posts from Trump's first term in hopes that poetry might live up to the power embodied in William Carlos Williams' beloved dictum, "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there."
In the aftermath of election day in 2016, we chose to post Muriel Rukeyser's "Poem" (1968), which had been making the rounds of social media as a reminder of our vital humanistic duty in the face of wearying injustice. You can listen to a recording of the poem released on the 1977 album The Poetry and Voice of Muriel Rukeyser here: MP3Poem
I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane, The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories, The news would pour out of various devices Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen. I would call my friends on other devices; They would be more or less mad for similar reasons. Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values. As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened, We would try to imagine them, try to find each other, To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other, Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, To let go the means, to wake.
I lived in the first century of these wars.
Not long after the inauguration, as the administration closed our borders to immigrants from a number of nations and started the systematic deportation of refugees, we turned to Emma Lazarus' sonnet "The New Colossus" as "a reminder of the high-minded ideals of acceptance that we, as a nation of immigrants, should hold ourselves to." We also quoted the organizers of a 2004 Library of Congress exhibit on America's "century of immigration" who explain that that: "Lazarus, who had worked with East European immigrants through her association with the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, composed 'The New Colossus' in 1883 as part of a fundraising campaign for erecting the Statue of Liberty." The story then jumps forward thirty years to 1903, when "a tablet with her words — 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free' — was affixed to the statue's base." As the curators note, "These words remain the quintessential expression of America's vision of itself as a haven for those denied freedom and opportunity in their native lands."
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Faithful PennSound Daily readers will recall that this wasn't the last time we'd discuss "The New Lazarus" in this space, and perhaps that last post will serve as both a little well-needed levity today, but also a potent reminder that the indignities of the first Trump administration, no matter how great or small, were swiftly met with fervent resistance as we gear up to do the same again.
Posted 11/4/2024
Here's an incredible document of a once-in-a-lifetime reading held during the early years of the Segue Series at the Ear Inn. Taking place on Februrary 7, 1979, we have a live staging and celebration of Six Fillious — a collaborative, homophonic work by bpNichol, Robert Filliou, Steve McCaffery, George Brecht, Dick Higgins and Dieter Roth, published by the Membrane Press in 1978. Organized by Higgins, this performance features McCaffery and his Four Horsemen compatriots, Paul Dutton and Rafael Barreto-Rivera, along with Charles Bernstein and Alison Knowles reading various selections from the volume.
Six Fillious has its origins in Robert Filliou's "14 Chansons et 1 Charade," a collection of "salty" rock lyrics penned in 1968, which inspired English-language translations (of varying faithfulness) by Georges Brecht and bpNichol, along with a German version by Dieter Roth. McCaffery then performed a homolinguistic translation of Brecht's text (i.e. an "English to English" translation, per Bernadette Mayer's famous experiments list), while Higgins translated Roth's translation into English, guided by the same puckish spirit. All six permutations are included in the volume, its convoluted lineage diagrammed on the image above, which comes from the book's back cover.
The work's cross-linguistic origins are made evident in a number of different ways: Higgins and McCaffery begin by each reading an example of homophonic translation, which is followed by a six-way reading of "No. 2 Rock," progressing line-by-line through each version, and individual readings of "No. 4 Blues" from all six sources. McCaffery reads two of his own translations, "Red No. 4" and "In to Lose," before Higgins concludes with the ultimate piece, translated as "Slut."
Simultaneously hilarious and serious, elegant and vulgar, Six Fillious is a germinal document in the history of language writing, which weds the sweaty fervor of youth culture to a high-minded conceptualism and transnational parlance. This ambitious performance not only commemorates the book itself, but also vivifies it, giving it an amplified voice, and an appreciative audience cheering for more. Appropriately enough, these rollicking lyrics might find their way into your playlist between a few favorite tunes. Click here to visit PennSound's Six Fillious event page, where you can start listening.
Posted 11/1/2024
We recently announced PoemTalk Episode #200, which served as a celebration of poet Evie Shockley, and celebration is certainly in order, as Shockley was recently announced as this year's winner of the Academy of American Poets' Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement. Awarded in memory of James Ingram Merrill, "the Academy of American Poets Fellowship was the first award of its kind in the United States," and has been presented since 1936. It includes a stipend of $25,000 and a stint as writer-in-residence at the Eliot House in Gloucester, MA (n.b. the T. S. Eliot Foundation endows the award).
In their citation, Academy Chancellor Ed Roberson observes that Shockley "uses the persons of history in the way that other writers and landscape painters use the colors of the light on things to create space and time." He continues, "Shockley here has rewritten the textbook on mythological and historical poetic allusions, among her other innovations in American poetry. In her biographical and genealogical poems, the identity which is writing itself into existence does not have to fabricate a simulacrum of the immensity of its pain or achievement, no need for virtuosic figures of speech," before concluding with the notion that "Her figures speak for themselves and more; she makes these identities larger than both history and our individual selfies, and makes them speak for the total of us."
You can explore nearly twenty years' worth of recordings on Shockley's PennSound author page, starting from a 2005 appearance on the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics (her first of two), and including readings for the Segue Series, Belladonna,* and Penn State University, plus several conference panels, and a pair of MLA Offsite readings. Click here to start listening.
Posted 10/30/2024
With Halloween coming up tomorrow we're sharing our annual playlist of poems celebrating the spookier side of life. With a mix of poets both old and new you're bound to find something to set your nerves on edge.
Lee Ann Brown, "Witch Alphabet, Mistranslation of Mayakovsky, Pledge & Love" MP3
Posted 10/29/2024
Hailed as the first collection of its kind, Troubling the Line was — as Matthew Cheney noted in rain taxi — "big and vehemently eclectic," in order that "the diversity of writers and poems across its pages is animated by such a rich diversity of identities that generalizing about them becomes impossible." Stacey Balkun, writing for the University of Arizona Poetry Center's blog 1508, echoes this sentiment. She singles out Peterson's framing of the book as "'an opening gesture to provoke what TC and [she] both hope will be a long and productive conversation' about genderqueer poetics" and praises its open-ended curation, saying of Peterson's introduction: She rejects definition, proving instead how genderqueer poetics is no one thing (except that it's definitely not binary). Rather than set out to rigidly delineate the term genderqueer, Peterson offers us a refreshing sense of possibility. She discusses how the editors chose trans and genderqueer as "the most inclusive umbrella terms" they could find to describe "lived identities that challenge gender norms," building bridges between rather than walls around the terminologies of identity.
For all these reasons and more the anthology was rightly celebrated at a pair of launch readings we're proud to be able to share with our listeners. The first of these was held on May 8, 2013 at New York's Bureau of General Services—Queer Division and runs over two hours, including sets by Peterson, Ariel Goldberg, Ely Shipley, Aimee Herman, Jake Pam Dick, Maxe Crandall, Joy Ladin, Jamie Shearn Coan, Eileen Myles (reading John Wieners as well as their own work), and Kit Yan. Seven months later, Peterson presided over a December 11th reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project that featured Ching-in Chen, Joy Ladin, Jaime Shearn Coan, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Dawn Lundy Martin, Samuel Ace, Trish Salah, Zoe Tuck, and Emerson Whitney along with Raymond Foye reading John Wieners and Peterson reading both reading kari edwards (as well as her own work). Click here to start exploring.
Posted 10/25/2024
Earlier this week we released the newest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which focuses on a pair of poems by Arab Canadian poet Trish Salah — "Interlude 4: The Voice" and "Detoured Come Tomorrow" — both of which can be found in Salah's 2017 Metonymy Press collection, Lyric Sexology Volume 1. The panel convened by host Al Filreis for this program consisted of Kay Gabriel, Syd Zolf, Levi Bentley (shown below, from left to right).
You can listen to this latest program, read the poems discussed, 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.
Posted 10/23/2024
Today we dig deep into the archive for a remarkable document that only some of our listeners will be able to enjoy fully. We created our Edmond Jabès author page back in February 2017 to house one recording: a 1974 documentary on the Egypt-born French author made by Jean-Pierre Prevost. Originally broadcast on French television, the film features Jabès in conversation with Claude Royet-Journoud and Lars Fredrikson. As our own Charles Bernstein noted at the time of its addition, the film had gone unseen for more than four decades. It's presented as it originally aired, i.e. in French and without subtitles, so if you are a native speaker or your quarantine hobby was trying to work on bettering your rusty high school French, you're in luck. In any case, this film is too important a document not to share with our listeners. Click here to start watching.
Posted 10/21/2024
Fifty-five years ago on this day, Beat Generation legend Jack Kerouac finally succumbed to the slow alcoholic suicide that had occupied much of his last decade. While we don't have permission from the Kerouac estate to share recordings of the poet's work — multiple albums, including collaborations with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, along with polymath Steve Allen, are widely available — we do have a few noteworthy recordings of others reading him within our archives.Perhaps the most exciting recent addition to the site is Vivien Bittencourt and Vincent Katz's short film documenting a 1988 tribute reading of Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, which took place at the Knitting Factory. This stunning half-hour video includes live performances by Barbara Barg, Charles Bernstein, Lee Ann Brown, Maggie Dubris, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Hell, Bob Holman, Lita Hornick, Vicki Hudspith, Vincent Katz, Rochelle Kraut, Gerard Malanga, Judith Malina, Eileen Myles, Simon Pettet, Hanon Reznikov, Bob Rosenthal, Jerome Rothenberg, Tom Savage, Elio Schneeman, Michael Scholnick, Carl Solomon, Steven Taylor, David Trinidad, Lewis Warsh, Hal Willner, and Nina Zivancevic, while Mark Ettinger, Dennis Mitcheltree, Charlie Morrow, and Samir Safwat, among others, providing live, improvised accompaniment. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure also appear in brief interview segments. You can watch here.
Then we have another old favorite from the archives: Clark Coolidge and Michael Gizzi reading Kerouac's iconic spontaneous prose piece, " Old Angel Midnight," taken from a 1994 recording session at the West Stockbridge, MA home studio of Steve Schwartz. Coolidge is, of course, well-known for, as Al FilreisAl Filreis phrases it, "his advocacy for Kerouac as properly belonging to the field of experimental poetry and poetics." Here's how he lays out his sense of what he refers to as Kerouac's "babble flow": [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. Here's how Kerouac himself described the project (which famously appeared in the premier issue of Big Table, along with excerpts from William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch — content liberated from the suppressed Winter 1958 issue of The Chicago Review): "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." You can listen to Coolidge and Gizzi's rendition of this classic here, and might also want to check out PoemTalk #124, wherein Coolidge and Filreis, along with J.C. Cloutier and Michelle Taransky, discuss their recording of the poem.
Posted 10/18/2024
Sadly, we bring this week to a close with news of another member of our poetic community lost: James L. Cory, a pioneering queer author known to many in Philadelphia and beyond, passed away after a heroic battle with cancer on Saturday, October 12th.
Cory's good friend (and longtime Electronic Poetry Center managing editor) Jack Krick broke the news, and offered this remembrance: "He was an inventive, reflective, and earnest poet and writer, one whose work was often comic, but sublimely so. He was an inveterate reader and collector of books, a studied and discriminating listener to both jazz and classical music, and a sterling friend. I will miss him very much, as, I'm certain, so will his many, many friends and admirers." Cory offered up this beguiling autobiography in the collaborative online anthology Elective Affinities that bears witness to his diverse passions and influences, as well as his character: Born 1953 in Oklahoma, grew up in NYC suburb (of Connecticut) and a few years in the Midwest. My father sold carpet and made a science of non-communication. Seven brothers and sisters, most of them difficult. Learned about modernist poetry and how to read same when a house painter came down off his ladder one afternoon and explicated a Wallace Stevens poem in the anthology I was reading, circa age 14. Studied European history at Penn State. Wrote poetry beginning late teens. Active in radical politics. The most interesting person I’ve met was a threadbare and anonymous gentleman who one afternoon in the late 80s appeared to give me an impromptu, room-by-room tour of the Art Institute of Chicago, then the architectural treasures of the Loop, full of ingenious explanations and insights, before vanishing around a corner. I believe this was Louis Sullivan’s ghost. Recently I stopped watching television.
While we don't have a proper PennSound author page for Cory, we wanted to highlight two recordings from him that you can find in our archives. First, from 2003's landmark The Philly Sound: New Poetry Weekend you can hear Cory's contributions to the opening event, the "9x9 Panel," hosted by CA Conrad, which featured Cory along with Jim Behrle, Edmund Berrigan, hassen, Sofia Memon, Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, Deborah Richards, Molly Russakoff, and Prageeta Sharma. Next, there's Cory's brief set from a 2007 launch event for EOAGH issue #3 ("Queering Language") at Philly's legendary Robin's Books, which includes the poems "Chat," "He," and "Memory at 53."
We send our condolences to Cory's family and friends, in Philadelphia and worldwide, and mourn his passing.
Posted 10/16/2024
If you need a little energy boost to get you through this week, allow us to humbly offer up a raucous collaboration from the late, great Lorenzo Thomas. "Ego Trip" features Thomas performing with the Texas State University Jazz Ensemble and was originally released on the album 3rd Ward Vibration Society (shown at right) on the SUM Concerts label in 1976. Lanny Steele is the composer for the track, which rubs shoulders with a cover of Carole King's "Jazzman" and the amazingly-titled suite, "Registration '74. The Worst I've Ever Endured / The Girl on the Steps / Drop and Add."
Internet commenter John Atlas provides a little context for the recording: "The TSU Jazz Ensemble was directed by Lanny Steele, who also founded and directed a nonprofit called Sum Arts. During the 70's and 80's, Sum Arts produced shows by, among others, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, The World Saxophone Quartet, Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, The Leroy Jenkins Octet, Old and New Dreams, and a host of notable poets. In the process he exhausted an inheritance from his parents, and more."
Thomas' solo voice starts us off riffing on "Stormy Monday"'s litany of days — "Every dog has his day. / Monday is my day / even if it is blue. / Come trifling Tuesday / that's my day too ..." — and is soon joined by congas and funky wah-wah guitars, then a defiant bassline, Rhodes piano, and a fuzzed out lead, before the full ensemble kicks in as Thomas' final syllable echoes out ("I ... I ... I ... I ..."). After a series of solos and some stop-start time changes Thomas returns over the band — "Let me testify! / Every day his his dog, / but I'm tired! / I want the sun shine just over me. / I want the wind blow just over me. / I want your policemen to be just to me." — which leads into the track's closing section.
Posted 10/14/2024
North of Invention presents 10 Canadian poets working at the cutting edge of contemporary poetic practice, bringing them first to the Kelly Writers House, then to Poets House in New York City for two days of readings, presentations and discussion in each location. Celebrating the breadth and complexity of poetic experimentation in Canada, North of Invention features emerging and established poets working across multiple traditions, and represents nearly fifty years of experimental writing. North of Invention aims to initiate a new dialogue in North American poetics, addressing the hotly debated areas of "innovation" and "conceptual writing," the history of sound poetry and contemporary performance, multilingualism and translation, and connections to activism. Poets involved in the festival include Lisa Robertson, M. NourbeSe Philip, Stephen Collis, Christian Bök, Nicole Brossard, Adeena Karasick, a.rawlings, Jeff Derksen Fred Wah and Jordan Scott, and the full schedule includes both readings and presentations from all participants. You can start exploring this wonderful resource by clicking here. A companion feature of the same name, edited by Dowling, was published by Jacket2 in 2013, and is likewise well worth your time.
Posted 10/11/2024
Today we are proud to release a landmark 200th episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which has come a long way since its debut way back in 2007. There are a number of things that make this episode special, starting with the panelists — host Al Filreis, plus William J. (Billy Joe) Harris, Tyrone Williams, and Aldon Nielsen, who have "been convening nearly every year (minus two pandemic years) for a long while, each time inviting a poet the group admired to join us." This time around, they invited Evie Shockley to be their guest, and as Filreis bittersweetly notes in his write-up of the new episode, "This gathering will be the penultimate session. Not long after these people spent a day and night at the Writers House — sharing meals, recording an interview in the studio, holding impromptu seminars — our friend Tyrone Williams passed away." He continues, "The episode, now released to keep in sequence for the 200th, serves as a memorializing of sorts. It was the last of Tyrone’s many, many visits to the Writers House. Penultimate, because — the group will gather again one last time not long after this episode is published, to record a PoemTalk on Tyrone's poem 'Charon on the Potomac,'" which will be followed by "a poetry reading in his memory" at the Writers House.
Returning to the present episode, which discusses two poems by Shockley — "My last modernist poem, #4 (or, re-re-birth of a nation)" from The New Black and "studies in antebellum literature (or, topsy-turvy)" from Semi-automatic — Filreis fondly recalls that it was recorded live in front of an audience in the Writers House's Arts Café, and that while recordings of both poems were already archived on Shockley's PennSound author page, the poet kindly performed both live as part of the session.
You can listen to this latest program, read the poems discussed, watched unedited footage of the entire proceedings, 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 a decade, by clicking here.
Posted 10/11/2024
On March 27, 1975 Charles Reznikoff was a guest on Susan Howe's WBAI/Pacifica radio program — the first of three sessions he'd record over the course of six months that year. After Howe's biographical introduction, Reznikoff begins his set with "Samuel" from "A Fifth Group of Verse." Next he asks his host, "may I read a group of verse about two or three holidays, which, though Jewish, are often mentioned in current newspapers?" He then reads from "Meditations on the Fall and Winter Holidays," starting with "Hanukkah," then "New Year's," before coming to the poem that, appropriately enough, we are highlighting this evening, "Day of Atonement" (listen here: MP3).
"Yom Kippur has always been rich terrain for Jewish writers," an unattributed 2002 article in The Washington Post observes, "but secular modern and contemporary American Jewish poets have given the subject a particular metaphorical resonance. They seize upon the holiday as an opportunity to meditate about forgiveness and unrepentance, or about the rival claims of solitude and community, or about the nature of suffering and affliction." Reznikoff's "Day of Atonement" is hailed as one of the author's "own short list of good contemporary Yom Kippur poems" alongside work by Adrienne Rich, Robert Mezey, Robin Becker, and Jacqueline Osherow.
Yom Kippur had greater significance for the poet, however, than its religious symbolism. Reznikoff's Poetry Foundation bio (written by Milton Hindus) recalls a history of "violent and traumatic incidents" that marked his upbringing in Brooklyn, including one incident that "took place at the conclusion of the evening prayers on the Day of Atonement, when his grandfather and his uncle were unexpectedly late in returning from the synagogue in Brownsville to which they had walked." An anxious Charles went looking for them, only to find "his grandfather coming down the street alone, tears streaming down his face, unable to answer 'where's uncle?' And his uncle appeared 'without his new hat and the blood running down his face.'" Hindus fills in the details: "As they were passing a bar a little boy, encouraged by a gang of young ruffians, had brandished a stick at them. The uncle had taken the stick away, and some of the gang jumped the old man and sent him sprawling in the gutter."
"There can be no doubt," he concludes, "that his direct and indirect observation of violence (and his sense of its perpetual immediacy) as a Jewish child in a hostile urban neighborhood lies behind the lifelong concern in much of his work with the continual possibility, potential, and actuality of violence between human beings." And yet, in the face of this threat, Reznikoff is able to find grace in "Day of Atonement": "All wickedness shall go in smoke. / It must, it must!," he vows. "The just shall see and be glad. / The sentence is sweet and sustaining; / for we, I suppose, are the just; / and we, the remaining." Let us hope that that might be true.
Posted 10/10/2024
Today we mark the passing of Canadian poet, editor, and activist Roy Miki, CM OBC FRSC, who rose from a childhood of forced relocation and internment to become one of the nation's most decorated and beloved literary figures. Miki died earlier this week at the age of 81.
A prolific author, Miki published a half-dozen volumes of poetry and one essay collection, edited compilations by Muriel Kitagawa and Roy Kiyooka, and published critical volumes on William Carlos Williams, bpNichol, and George Bowering. His most influential book, however, was 2004's Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice, which complemented his passionate activism to seek acknowledgment and retribution for the more than 20,000 Japanese-Canadian citizens that were sent to internment camps during WWII. This work was acknowledged with numerous honors including being made a Member of the Order of Canada, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Member of the Order of British Columbia, along with the Gandhi Peace Prize.
While we don't have a proper author page for Miki, you can find two readings from The Kootenay School of Writing on their series page, the first from 1992 and a 2002 launch reading for Miki's Governor General's Literary Award-winning collection Surrender in two parts. Miki can also be heard on our bpNichol author page in conversation with the Nichol, Bowering, and Sharon Thesen after a reading the poet gave at Simon Fraser University in 1983 at Miki's invitation. Miki is also responsible for several key recordings on our Nichol page.
We'll give the final word to Talonbooks, Miki's longtime publisher, who posted a tribute that concludes as follows: "His passing will be widely mourned and his presence sorely missed. Our condolences to all who knew him, loved him, and were enriched by his words, wisdom, and activism."
Posted 10/7/2024
We start this week off with the sad news that postmodern novelist Robert Coover passed away on Saturday, October 5th at the age of 92.
In his New York Times obituary, John Williams situated Coover "along with Donald Barthelme, John Barth and others" as "the vanguard of postmodern American fiction in the 1960s and 1970s" and hailed his "long and prolific career writing and teaching" at Brown University. The tribute also quoted Michiko Kakutani, who "called Mr. Coover 'probably the funniest and most malicious' of the postmodernists, 'mixing up broad social and political satire with vaudeville turns, lewd pratfalls and clever word plays that make us rethink both the mechanics of the world and our relationship to it.'" While best known for the workshop staple "The Babysitter" (no, I had no clue that the Alicia Silverstone film was an adaptation) or The Public Burning, his critique of wrongheaded American politics from McCarthyism to Watergate, but my favorite will always be The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., which I taught many times in my Baseball Literature course over many spring semesters.
While not many novelists have PennSound author pages, Coover does. It houses audio and video footage from the his two-day visit to UPenn as one of the 2009 class of Kelly Writers House Fellows. The February 23rd reading includes excerpts from The Public Burning, Pinocchio in Venice, and Noir, along with "The Grand Hotel Nymph Light" from The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell), "In Anticipation of the Question 'Why Do You Write?,'" and "The New Thing." You can also listen to his complete conversation with Al Filreis from the following day, as well as a condensed version and several excerpts cut from the longer conversation. Click here to start exploring.
We send out our heartfelt condolences to Coover's family and friends, as well as his generations of fans worldwide.
Want to read more? Visit the PennSound Daily archive.
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New at PennSound
- Jerome Rothenberg memorial program, June 24, 2024
- Rachel Blau DuPlessis's complete grid of Drafts, 1988–2024
- George Quasha reading the laryngeal uterus of the word, Barrytown, NY, June 17, 2024
- Piotr Gwiazda reads from Grzegorz Wróblewski's Dear Beloved Humans, February 7, 2024
- Adam Fieled reading from Something Solid: Portal-Ways
- Leonard Schwartz with Simon Carr at Bowery Gallery, 2024
- Michael Ruby reading from Close Your Eyes, Visions, 2023
- David Shapiro reading and talk for UMass Amherst Visiting
Writers Series, Spring 2004
- Anne-Marie Albiach reading ÉTAT, Hotel de Ville, Neuilly, France, October 10, 2007
- Spring 2024 Boise State Reading Series: Christina Piña, CAConrad, Jennifer Moxley, Endi Bogue Hardigan, Rob Schlegel, and Ian Dreiblatt
- Belladonna* GIST #2 featuring Kaleem Hawa and Rachelle Rahmé, Center for Brooklyn History, March 23, 2024
- George Quasha reading strange beauty by stranger attraction, Barrytown, NY, March 18, 2024
- Richard Foreman at Segue / Artist Space, New York City, March 16, 2024
- Belladonna* GIST #1 featuring Peter Myers and Jameson Fitzpatrick, Brooklyn Central Library, February 24, 2024
- Six Poems by Giovanni Fontana
- Barbara Henning reading with Jaime Manrique, St. Mark's Poetry Project, January 27, 1993
- George Quasha reading crossroads angelics, Barrytown, NY, December 30, 2023
- Charles North reading for the William Corbett Poetry Series, MIT Virtual Event, April 21, 2022
- VOX Audio Collection, 2005–2011
- Fall 2023 readings at Boise State University's Hemingway Center: Peter Gizzi,
Dan Beachy-Quick, Srikanth Reddy, and Alice Notley
- New author page: Davide Balula
- Hugh Seidman: New Author Page
- Paul Dutton's Oralizations, actuellecd, 2005
- Richard Foreman's production of John Zorn's Astronome,
2010, film by Henry Hills
- Jena Osman and Adam Pendleton reading for the launch of A Very Large Array, Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore, October 21, 2023
- The Swan 20: Dorota Czerner, September 2, 2023
- Tracie Morris and Tongo Eisen-Martin performing for the Flow Chart Foundation, Hudson, NY, September 22, 2023
- Harryette Mullen on Morton Marcus's "The Poetry Show," KUSP, March 18, 1987
- Ann Lauterbach reading at 'T' Space, Rhinebeck, NY, July 8, 2017 and July 16, 2023
- Ron Padgett reading for the Yale Literary Magazine, November 1, 2022
- A reading with Chris Martin and Adam Wolfond, February 15, 2023
- Julia Bloch reading Valley Oak for PoemADay, August 12, 2023
- Clark Coolidge, The Painter's Poet: a talk on Philip Guston, Poets House, April 4, 2013
- Philip Whalen reading at National Poetry Festival, Allendale, MI, July, 1971
- Lew Welch reading The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings, Planning and Conservation League, date unknown
- Philip Whalen reading at the Unicorn Bookshop, Santa Barbara, February 6, 1967
- Performance of Louis Zukofsky's "A"-24 Act I at UCSD New Writing Series, April 11, 1986.
- Leslie Scalapino reading in the USCD New Poetry Series, May 9, 1979
- Jerome Rothenberg and Bertram Turetzky Performing For Poet's Voice and Contrabass, 1984
- Hoa Nguyen reading at Kelly Writers House, February 28, 2023
- Joan Retallack reading and conversation for Kelly Writers House Fellows Program, February 20–21, 2023
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- Barbara Henning and Maureen Owen reading from Poets on the Road, May 27, 2023
- Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian reading, November 6, 1995
- Robert Creeley reading for Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles, April 16, 1990
- Thin Air Lectures with Ron Silliman, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, and Ron Padgett, St. Marks Church, May 1988
- Kass Fleisher interview on The Bear River and the Making of History, Access Utah, Utah Public Radio, June 25, 2004
- Cliff Fyman reading, San Francisco, CA, June 11, 2023
- Charles Olson reads from Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, c. 1969
- The Marginalization of Poetry, Segue Series at Double Happiness, NYC, March 22, 1997
- Adam Fieled reading from Equations: The Thesis Episodes, Carriage Hill, Plymouth Township, 2023
- New videos for Aaron Kramer
- Thomas Devaney reading at Wexler Studio, Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, May 30, 2023
- New video of Joan Retallack for Alternative Poetries and Alternative Pedagogies Reading and Discussion at the Kelly Writers House, February 28, 2001
- Clark Coolidge reading from A Book
Beginning What and Ending Away for 80 Langton Street Writers In Residence Readings,
October 15–21, 1979
- Vincent Katz reading at Green Arcade, SF, November 18, 2022
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