Inside PennSoundFeatured resources
Selected by Charles Bernstein (read more about his choices here) |
Lila Zemborain Reads from Her 9/11 Poem, 'Rasgado/Torn'Posted 9/11/2024 Today we mark the anniversary of the September 11th terror attacks by revisiting Argentinian poet and critic Lila Zemborain's 2021 reading of selections from Rasgado/Torn (Buenos Aires: Tse-Tse, 2006), her poetic diary written one year after 9/11. As this predated our Zemborain author page, Charles Bernstein first shared the video in a Jacket2 commentary post. This footage was shot at a reading in New York City on August 25, 2021 presented by Rebel Road. Zemborain is accompanied by Lorenzo Bueno, her son and also translator (with Rosa Alcala) of Rasgado/Torn. You can watch their performance below. Poet and critic Lila Zemborain (Argentina) is the Director of Creative Writing in Spanish at NYU. She is the author of several poetry collections: Abrete sésamo debajo agua (1993); Usted (1998); Guardianes del secreto (2002), translated into English as Guardians of the Secret (2009/2015); Malvas orquídeas del mar (2004), translated into English as Mauve Sea-orchids (2007); Rasgado (2006), translated into French as Déchiré (2013); El rumor de los bordes (2011); Diario de la hamaca paraguaya (2014); Materia blanda (2014); and the chapbooks Ardores (1989) and Pampa (2001). 'Alcheringa' Audio Inserts: 1971–1978Posted 9/9/2024
Not long after the debut of our sister site Jacket2, its Reissues section announced the launch of an archive of Alcheringa, the groundbreaking ethnopoetics journal that was edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock and ran from 1970–1980. This massive undertaking was commissioned by Tedlock and Jon Cotner with site design and information architecture by PennSound senior editor and Jacket2 Reissues editor Danny Snelson. In conjunction with that project, we unveiled a new Alcheringa page on PennSound edited by Snelson. It's home to the flexidisc inserts that accompanied nine of the journal's issues from 1971 to 1978. These "audio inserts" include work from a number of PennSound poets including Rothenberg, Jackson Mac Low, Armand Schwerner and Anne Waldman (whose 1975 reading of "Fast Speaking Woman" at New Wilderness Event #20 at New York City's Washington Square Church is shown above), along with myriad other recordings, from the Reverend W.T. Goodwin's "Easter Sunrise Sermon" and bluesman Son House's "Conversion Experience Narrative" to Somali folktales, "Songs of Ritual License from Midwestern Nigeria" and Jaime de Angulo's "The Story of the Gilak Monster and his Sister the Ceremonial Drum." You can read more about the Alcheringa discs on Jacket2, and explore the journal's archives here. To listen to the audio inserts, click here to visit PennSound's Alcheringa audio page. 'Mark Van Doren: Portrait of a Poet' (1994)Posted 9/6/2024.jpg) You can watch this documentary on PennSound's Mark Van Doren author page, alongside recordings from several sources, including a 1935 set of three poems for Columbia University's Speech Lab, a 1960 set of four titles for the Spoken Arts Treasury and the 1967 Smithsonian Folkways album, Mark Van Doren Reads from His Collected and New Poems, whose twelve tracks encompass thirty-two poems in total. Listen in to any and all of these recordings by clicking here. George Quasha Reads 'laryngeal uterus of the word,' 2024Posted 9/4/2024
Today we are highlighting the latest installment in Chris Funkhouser's ongoing project to document the work of his prolific friend and neighbor, George Quasha. Regular PennSound listeners have been following this endeavor through periodic releases that trace all the way back to 2017. This newest session — recorded in Barrytown, NY on June 17th of this year — presents the whole of laryngeal uterus of the word in a single ninety-six minute MP3. You'll find this new track and many more recordings on PennSound's George Quasha author page, along with lengthy selections from many of his books including strange beauty by stranger attraction, waking from myself, gnostalgia for the present, not even rabbits go down this hole, dowsing axis, hearing other, the ghost in between, verbal paradise, glossodelia attract: preverbs, the daimon of moment: preverbs, scorned beauty comes up behind: preverbs, things done for themselves: preverbs, and polypoikilos: matrix in variance: preverbs, among others. Click here to start listening. For Labor Day: Steve McCaffery's "Wot We Wukkers Want"Posted 9/2/2024
Today is Labor Day in the US and there's no better listening to commemorate the day than Steve McCaffery's "Wot We Wukkers Want" b/w "One Step to the Next," This album was released on LP and cassette in 1980 by the Underwhich Audio Collective, a small Canadian independent label (based in Toronto, Ontario and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) that also issued small run releases (usually about 100 copies) by the likes of Owen Sound, the Four Horsemen, Paul Dutton, Bob Cobbing, Susan Frykberg, Larry Wendt, and DUCT, among others. Better known by its full title, The Kommunist Manifesto or Wot We Wukkerz Want Bi Charley Marx un Fred Engels, the leadoff track is McCaffery's translation of The Communist Manifesto into the dialect of West Riding of Yorkshire, or, as he puts it, "Redacted un traduced intuht’ dialect uht’ west riding er Yorkshuh bi Steve McCaffery, eh son of that shire. Transcribed in Calgary 25 November to 3 December 1977 un dedicated entirely to Messoors Robert Filliou and George Brecht uv wooz original idea this is a reullizayshun." You can read the piece in its entirety here as part of the PECP Library. Side A also includes "Mid●night Peace" ("a nostalgic translation of the Dadaphony of hell") and "A Hundred And One Zero S One Ng," which is McCaffery's translation of Brecht's translation of the closing section of Robert Filliou's 14 Chansons et Charade. Side B starts with "One Step Next to the Next," co-created with Clive Robertson, which centers around turntable manipulations of a National Geographic flexi-disc on the Apollo space flights. The closing track, Emes1 in which "a phrase is intercepted, reversed, synthesized, and obsessively repeated as a stolen micro-unit." As the liner notes explain, "it represents McCaffery's first theft from himself." Listen in to all of these tracks here. On Bill Berkson's 85thPosted 8/30/2024 Our Bill Berkson author page is an impressive tribute to both the longevity of his creative life and his diverse talents. Our holdings there start in 1969 with a joint reading in New York City with Kenward Elmslie and continues with dozens of readings and talks — at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, San Francisco's Intersection for the Arts, the Grand Piano, 90 Langton Street, Bolinas, The Kootenay School of Writing, the Bowery Poetry Club, Paris' Double Change Reading Series, our own Kelly Writers House, the CUE Art Foundation, Berkeley's Moe's Books, Slaughterhousespace, Maison de la Poésie in Paris, and Dia Art Foundation — along with a handful of wonderful radio appearances. There's also a 2015 Close Listening program with Charles Bernstein, and two marvelous recent films: Mitch Temple's The Air You Breathe from 2017 (on Berkson's collaborations with his painter friends) and Citizen Film's Bill Berkson, School of Poets from 2016. You can explore the numerous wonderful recordings mentioned above, and many more, by clicking here. PoemTalk #199: on Two by Edwin DenbyPosted 8/28/2024 Filreis' brief write-up of the new episode notes that both poems can be found in Random House's Edwin Denby: the Complete Poems (edited by Ron Padgett), and offers the provenance of the tracks under consideration, which "were recorded and edited by Jacob Burckhardt between the years 1976 and 1983, on a CD originally issued on disc in 2004." He also points out that "'Ciampino: Envoi' in fact recalls Jacob as a young child in Rome and New York." 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 a decade, by clicking here. 'Hanuman Presents!' dir. Vivien Bittencourt and Vincent KatzPosted 8/26/2024 Today we are checking out Hanuman Presents!, a filmic tribute to Raymond Foye and Francesco Clemente's influential press of the same name, directed and produced by Vivien Bittencourt and Vincent Katz. The performances that form the heart of this film took place at the St. Mark's Poetry Project that took place on May 18, 1989. Introduced by Foye, the film was edited by by David Dawkins and Henry Hills, and features an impressive line-up of poets spanning two generations — Gregory Corso, Elaine Equi, Bob Flanagan, Amy Gerstler, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Hell, Herbert Huncke, Katz, Taylor Mead, Cookie Mueller, Eileen Myles, Rene Ricard, David Trinidad, John Wieners — reading from their work. As Foye notes in his opening comments, all of Hanuman's living authors are included in the event. While the poets and the poems are wonderful enough on their own, the performances are cleverly accompanied by abstract images from the films of Rudy Burckhardt. Running just shy of forty-three minutes, Bittencourt and Katz's film is both a stunning time capsule and testimony to the power of Foye and Clemente's innovative press. You can start watching by clicking here. Be sure you don't miss Bittencourt and Katz's tribute to Jack Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, filmed at the Knitting Factory in 1988, which is also available on the same page. Messerli to Be Honored at Beyond Baroque GalaPosted 8/23/2024 We wrap up this week with congratulations to Douglas Messerli, poet and founder of the influential presses Sun and Moon and Green Integer, who will be honored by legendary bookstore Beyond Baroque at this year's Beyond Gala. Messerli will receive the Distinguished Service award alongside Ashaki M. Jackson, cofounder of the organization Women Who Submit and publisher of The Offing. They'll join George Drury Smith Award winner Sesshu Foster and Exene Cervenka and John Doe of the band X, who'll receive a special recognition at the November 2nd event. On PennSound's Douglas Messerli author page you'll find a wide array of recordings — of readings, interviews, podcasts, panel discussions, and more — spanning five decades, including forty years of Segue Series events from its original home, the Ear Inn. A great starting point for listeners is Charles Bernstein's three-part 2008 Close Listening program with Messerli, which includes more than thirty individual poems, along with an extensive interview. A great many electronic copies of Sun and Moon publications can also be found on various author pages at our sister-site, the Electronic Poetry Center, thanks to Messerli's generosity. We applaud Messerli once more for this well-deserved honor. In Memoriam: Russell Atkins (1926–2024)Posted 8/21/2024 Today we share the sad news that beloved Cleveland poet, playwright, and composer Russell Atkins passed away at the age of 98 on August 15th. Kevin Prufer — editor of both the 2012 essay collection Russell Atkins: On the Life & Work of an American Master and 2019's World'd Too Much: Selected Poetry by Russell Atkins — shared the news and posted a tribute this weekend. Prufer notes Atkins' centrality and commitment to Cleveland's poetry scene, serving as "a playful and wry presence, a figure of kindness and piercing intelligence, a questioner of the status quo and a rigorous intellectual force," before noting some of the honors that his hometown had bestowed upon him, including "an honorary doctorate from Cleveland State University as well as the Cleveland Arts Prize for Lifetime Achievement," as well as the dedication of "Russell Atkins Way" in 2017.  "He was a poet of enormous significance," he writes, "often complexly at odds with the Black Arts Movement of his time, a figure who embraced playful typography, complex musicality, and often sinister and gothic content, a writer in love with the sonic and visual complexities of language," attesting that "No history of the intersection of African American poetry and the avant garde can be written without careful attention to Russell Atkins' work." He concludes by noting:
While we do not have a PennSound author page for Atkins, there are a few related video recordings in our archives, which our own Charles Bernstein details in this Jacket2 commentary post. They include footage of the poet reading "Night and a Distant Church," "Train Yard at Night," and "It’s Here in The" for TV20 Cleveland in 2017, and Julie Patton performing Atkins' work with accompaniment by guitarist Paul Van Curen as part of a 2019 Cleveland Book Week tribute to the poet. You'll find both of those clips, along with links to numerous Atkins books at Eclipse by clicking here. PennSound ItalianaPosted 8/19/2024 Today we shine the spotlight on our PennSound Italiana anthology page, lovingly edited by Jennifer Scappettone, which offers our listeners a stellar survey of contemporary Italian poetry. When we launched the page many years ago, Scappettone offered an introduction to the collection in an essay published at Jacket2. Here's how she starts off: We seek over the course of this ongoing project to offer a broad sense of the field, filling in the substantive gaps in global access to Italian poetry (as both written and sonic text — even within Italian borders), and expanding awareness of its range of practitioners, with an emphasis on marginalized and experimental voices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is an effort — a unique one, in our reckoning — to "liberate" the spectrum of Italian poetry for as broad a public as possible through audio and video recordings, given that the publishing industry and the translation market are endangered and/or blinkered enough to condemn a significant swath of both historical and contemporary innovation to oblivion. As such, this live archive extends the task of PennSound writ large.Regular updates have been made to the page over the intervening years and we're always eager to have more work from Scappettone to share with our listeners. At present, the page has recordings from Gian Maria Annovi, Mariasole Ariot, Maria Attanasio, Luigi Ballerini, Gherardo Bortolotti, Franco Buffoni, Maria Grazia Calandrone, Alessandra Cava, Laura Cingolani, Corrado Costa, Elisa Davoglio, Milo De Angelis, Alessandro De Francesco, Antonella Doria, Giovanna Frene, Florinda Fusco, Samir Galal Mohamed, Marco Giovenale, Milli Graffi, Mariangela Guatteri, Giulio Marzaioli, Andrea Inglese, Eva Macali, Enzo Minarelli, Tommaso Ottonieri, Angela Passarello, Jonida Prifti / Stefano Di Trapani (a.k.a. Acchiappashpirt), Laura Pugno, Andrea Raos, Marilena Renda, Lidia Riviello, Amelia Rosselli, Rosaria Lo Russo, and Andrea Zanzotto. Click here to start browsing PennSound Italiana, and don't forget that Scappettone's Jacket2 intro includes some of her highlights from the collection, including background information on the historical nature of each recording. Happy Birthday to Lew WelchPosted 8/16/2024 The centerpiece of our Lew Welch page is an April 1967 reading at Santa Barbara's Magic Lantern — a luxuriously long performance in which the poet reads practically all of his major works (save, perhaps, his "Taxi Suite"), including "Chicago Poem," "A Round of English," "Winter," "Graffiti," and "Maitreya Poem," as well as the entire sequence of Hermit Poems and most of its complementary volume The Way Back. Many of the poems are preceded by lengthy introductions (often longer than the poems themselves) in which Welch gives background information on his works and discusses topics as varied as politics, linguistics and popular music (some listeners might be familiar with Welch's stepson Hugh Cregg, whose stage name, "Huey Lewis," honors the father figure who took him to his first rock concerts). Welch's musical interests — he was a former music major, and loved everything from Charlie Parker to James Brown to the Quicksilver Messenger Service with equal fervor — are on full display here, in pieces performed a cappella like "Graffiti" and "Supermarket Song," as well as sung portions of poems such as "A Round of English," which are marked off by musical notes (♪) in the printed texts. In one section of that poem, a somewhat unremarkable passage:
yields a breathtaking performance when Welch sings it to the tune of "Frère Jacques," going so far as to emulate the effect of multiple voices singing the lines in a round: "Shakespeare Milton / Shakespeare Milton / Shelley as Milton / Shelley as Milton / Shelley as Well / Sarah something Shelley as / Sarah something Shelley as / Sarah something Teasdale / Sarah something Teasdale / Edith M. Bell / Edith M. Bell." For Welch, poetic language was purely a spoken vernacular full of idiosyncratic American rhythms and melodies. He tells us: "A poet has his material absolutely free. It's coming out of the mouth of every American in the world. All he has to do is clean his ear out, listen to it, and put down what he has on his mind out of that material, because there is no other material." Also included in the Magic Lantern set is Welch's epic "Din Poem," an ambitious pastiche of poetry, prose and song which most completely achieves his poetic goals, ventriloquizing numerous parallel discourses — the language of business and patriotism, of faith and lust, of marriages in disrepair and psychological breakdowns, along with virulent hate-speech — which are eventually woven together into a thunderous wave of American noise, against which he sets a parable of hope and escape. In this raw and uncompromising masterpiece, we see a complex portrait of America at numerous societal crossroads, as well as the personal hells Welch eventually sought to escape. Our other recording at launch was made at San Francisco's Renaissance Corner in the spring of 1969. In that set in which Welch reads his collection, Courses, in its entirety. This suite of micro-poems, each named after a different academic subject, showcases both the poet's wit as well as his propensity for potent and memorable phrasing, honed during his years working in the advertising industry. Both of these recordings came to us through the reel-to-reel collection of Robert Creeley. We also recently added a third recording of Welch, which comes from the Mad Mammoth Monster Poetry Reading organized by Auerhahn Press that took place on August 29, 1963. At this event Welch also read excerpts from his Hermit Poems series. Inspired by the optimism of poet Tom Mandel, I'd like to think that Welch is still out there in the wilderness, living on locusts and wild honey and "wear[ing his] hair / as long as [he] can / as long as [he] can." As a New American Poet that embodied the spirit of San Francisco poetics, had one foot in the Beat era and the other squarely set in the Summer of Love, and looked forward to the advances of Language poetry, Welch is endlessly fascinating. Click here to start listening to his work. Bergvall Named 2024 Henry Moore FellowPosted 8/14/2024 to ask how a book can and does function in relation to notions of transit, of temporary shelter, in a material, textual and artistic way, and also symbolically. How it can provide a safe yet critical space. How it can live and work in and also out of time, and create between artist and reader a space of material connection, critical complicity, discovery and urgency. "All this sits hand in hand with Bergvall's deep interest in fugitive forms and materials, and mutating linguistic forms," the description continues, and speaks to our contemporary moment "when loss of refuge, shelter and protection, literally and culturally, are so virulent." In this context, the book "carves out its own space like a moveable zone, a protected area for inner travelling and interconnective imagination that can equip us to rethink or meet again the worlds that we are each a part of and contribute to." You can read more about "The Book as Transitory Shelter" here, and be sure to check out PennSound's Caroline Bergvall author page, where you'll find many fascinating recordings documenting the poet's most recent trilogy of Meddle English, Drift, and Alisoun Sings, along with earlier works including Fig and Goan Atom. Click here to start exploring. Melvin B. Tolson on PennSoundPosted 8/12/2024 The heart of this collection is a two-part career-spanning reading at Washington, D.C.'s Coolidge Auditorium, on October 18, 1965 — an event held in coordination with the Library of Congress — which serves as a fitting tribute to the influential poet, politician, and pedagogue, who'd pass away less than one year later. After a lavish introduction, Tolson starts with his debut collection, Rendezvous with America and hits many of the high points of his prestigious career, including his magnum opus, Dark Symphony, and Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, written during his time as that nation's poet laureate. Running just short of eighty minutes, Tolson's reading includes the poems "Sometimes," "The Gallows," "If You Should Lie to Me," "The Primer for Today," "The Dictionary of the Wolf," "Harlem Gallery," "The Birth of John Henry," "Ballad on Old Satchmo," and "The Sea Turtle and the Shark," among others, with commentary provided along the way. This retrospective performance is nicely complemented by a second recording of excerpts from Dark Symphony, for which, unfortunately, we have no information regarding its recording date and location. Nevertheless we're grateful to be Tolson's estate and the Library of Congress for the opportunity to present these materials to our listeners. Click here to visit PennSound's Melvin B. Tolson author page. Lee Harwood on PennSoundPosted 8/9/2024 When Harwood passed away in the summer of 2015, he was remembered by The Argus for his dedication to both poetry and politics, serving "as a union official and as a member of the Labour Party during its most radical years." John Harvey offered up a recollection of his long friendship with Harwood, including the memory of an event in the last year of the poet's life when they both read their work with jazz accompaniment, conjuring up memories of Harwood's formative experiences in New York during the 1960s. Finally, Enitharmon Press, publishers of Harwood's most recent collection, The Orchid Boat hailed him as "not only a highly gifted and skilled poet, but a man of immense kindness and thoughtfulness." The heart of our Lee Harwood author page is his career-spanning Rockdrill album The Chart Table: Poems 1965-2002, which showcases twenty titles from across his career, including "As Your Eyes Are Blue," "Linen," "Animal Days," "Summer Solstice," "African Violets" and "Gorgeous." Another highlight is "Chanson Tzara," a twenty-seven minute audio composition that serves as an ambitious and fully-dimensional tribute to both Tzara and the chaotic spirit of Dada made contemporary, starting with a hectic sound collage of found samples, ring modulated radio noise, music, and text-to-speech voice generation, which eventually gives way to a touching and elegiac voiceover by Harwood that weaves together memories, translations, and the young poet's conversation with Tzara. Finally, we have Harwood's half hour set from the Shearsman Reading Series at London's Swedenborg Hall in June 2008. You can listen to all of the aforementioned recordings by clicking here. PoemTalk #198: on Three Poems from Larry Price's '1/0'Posted 8/8/2024 Filreis' brief write-up of the new episode notes that "Larry's PennSound page at the time of our conversation did not yet include recordings of this new writing, so we asked Larry to perform these poems toward the start of the episode. Earlier on the day of the session Larry spent time in the Wexler Studio at the Kelly Writers House recording more poems from 1/0 and other selections from his previous books." He also gives a preview of the next program's subject and guests, but we won't spoil that here. 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 a decade, by clicking here. Happy Birthday, Tim DlugosPosted 8/5/2024 PennSound's Tim Dlugos author page has been greatly augmented by the generosity of Christopher Wiss and David Trinidad, who've shared a number of key recordings with us. The earliest of these recordings is a 1974 from Mass Transit Bookstore in Washington, D.C., where he read alongside John Ashbery (Trinidad notes that you can hear Ashbery in the background reacting to Dlugos' poems). Dlugos notes that he's only going to read one poem "from the book" (High There, his debut chapbook published by Some of Us Press in 1973) in this nearly forty-minute set, which includes a number of early favorites like "American Baseball" and "Gilligan's Island," along with "Great Art," "So Far," "Flaming Angel," "Poem for Jeanne," "Dream Series," "President Truman," and "As It Is." This recording also includes a number of unpublished early poems ("Sexual Postures," "Gypsy," and "The Eyes of Our Hearts") as well as a shorter draft version of "Stanzas for Martina" (written for Tina Darragh) than what was eventually published. An undated home recording made by Dlugos in D.C. appears to be from not long thereafter. Running twenty-six minutes, this set begins with a bold proclamation, "from high above DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C. to your machines, this is Tim Dlugos . . . and this is 'John Tongue,'" before launching into the poem of the same name. He also reads "Poppers," "Great Books of the 1950s," and "Some," along with some titles from the previous recording ("As It Is," "American Baseball," "Stanzas for Martina"). This tape also includes a few unpublished pieces: "Dream With You In It," excerpts from a January 1975 dream journal similar to "Dream Series," and a piece from the series Music (for Maurice Sendak) based on Rachmaninoff's second symphony. Last, but certainly not least, we have Dlugos' 1984 reading with Dennis Cooper at Venice, CA's beloved Beyond Baroque. This forty-minute set consists of ten poems in total, starting with "Pretty Convincing," and moving on to "Close," "Sonnet ["Stevie Nicks walks into the Parisian weather"]," "The Nineteenth Century is 183 Years Old," "Octavian," "Not Stravinsky," "Green Acres," "Summer, South Brooklyn," and "The Morning," before concluding with the long poem "Cape and Islands." When sending the recordings along, Trinidad reminisced, "I was there; it was a spectacular reading," and I agree with him wholeheartedly. You will too. These three recordings join those already in the PennSound archives, including his 1977 appearance on Public Access Poetry and a segmented 1978 Segue Series reading from the Ear Inn where Dlugos reads "Sonnet for Eileen Myles," "Je Suis Ein Americano," and "A Day for Don and Vladimir," along with several of the perennial favorites listed above. Once more, we thank Christopher Wiss for his kindness in letting us share these recordings, and David Trinidad for sharing them with us. You can listen to all of the aforementioned recordings by clicking here. Six Poems by Giovanni FontanaPosted 8/2/2024 We wrap up this week by highlighting a recent addition from Italian multimodal poet and performance artist Giovanni Fontana: a sampler of six recordings from his prodigious career. Titles include "Per Segrete Stanze," "Sento Dunque Suono," "Pressing," "Vesunna," "Di Bocca in Bocca," and "Le Tombeau D'Amadeus." "In Fontana's work, the voice becomes inexhaustibly sound, word, phrase, speech, and it does so in its own rhythmic continuity. Poetry is not only with the voice and in the voice, but behind the voice, within one's body, where are also chants and sighs, and everything else beyond the saying word is a sign of inexpressible, primordial conscience of the existence," Paul Zumthor writes. "Fontana refers to the human body as a primitive and final reality, where the voice emanating from the whole body, confirm (our) corpus and spiritus as one only thing, that is a sort of primitive cry, a sonority destined to end with the last breath, identified by a gesture of the body, by the most simplest and radical gesture: that of living." Sean McCann offers a similar appraisal, noting that "In one light, Fontana's voice erects a brutal and guttural effigy of man, primitive and hermetic. Yet, stepping to the side, one can see the thin strands of support bolstering such combustibles." McCann expands his focus to Fontana's full spate of creative endeavors, concluding, "The interconnection between Giovanni's visual and audio artwork is significant. Words twist and dissolve; blotted with ink, soaring across an empty score." This reinforces Fontana's own assertion that "Usually in art, the signifier is much more important than meaning. Because in art it is important not what is said, but how it is said." You can listen to these six recordings on PennSound new Giovanni Fontana author page. Kathy Acker: SUNY-Buffalo Talk and Creeley Interview, 1979Posted 7/31/2024
Today we're highlighting a fascinating meeting of two seemingly incongruous minds: on December 12–13, 1979, Kathy Acker was a guest of Robert Creeley's at SUNY-Buffalo. Over those two days she read from her own work, delivered a talk on French novelists, and was interviewed by Creeley. Both events have been segmented, and are available on our Kathy Acker author page. After introductory comments by Creeley, Acker begins with "Tangier," a long chapter (the recording is forty-six minutes long) from Blood and Guts in High School about meeting Jean Genet in Tangiers. She and Creeley then talk briefly about Erica Jong before the first day's event ends. The second day begins with Acker offering introductory comments on the pair of French novelists "whose work I'm absolutely fascinated with" that she'll be discussing in this session: Pierre Guyotat and Laure (the pen name of Colette Peignot). "You can't get these books in this country. Don't even try," Acker warns, however she explains that "I wanted to present what I'm doing with their work to you" — even though her translations are rough first drafts and "my French is very bad," ("I knew it enough to know I didn't know it," she later tells the audience) — because of how captivated she became with these authors on a recent trip to France. Specifically, this interest ties into language: both her experience of their language and mediation inherent to encountering a foreign language of which one only has a basic knowledge, but also concerns that have followed her for much longer: "It seemed to me that more and more — I've lived in New York for the last seven years — [that] language is almost impossible now. It's as if ... to have a language, to be able to really speak to someone, seems to be almost like total freedom, in my mind." She then reads brief translations from each author's work: an excerpt from Guyotat's novel, Eden, Eden, Eden, followed by a piece by Laure about her childhood. A half-hour lecture on the two authors comes next, with a discussion session of about the same length wrapping up the event. That conversation has been segmented into five thematic parts: "on self-expression," "on self-reflection," "on subjectivity and perception," "on the writer's perspective," and "on the divided self." You can listen in by clicking here. 'Getting It Together: A Film on Larry Eigner, Poet' (1973)Posted 7/30/2024 Today we are very proud to highlight Leonard Henny's groundbreaking 1973 film, Getting It Together: A Film on Larry Eigner, Poet, which George Hart — co-editor with Eigner biographer Jennifer Bartlett of Momentous Inconclusions: The Life and Work of Larry Eigner — called an "astounding document of disability history." Our own Charles Bernstein shared Hart's "Context for Getting It Together: A Film on Larry Eigner, Poet" through his Jacket2 commentary series, a valuable resource for understanding the complex history surrounding the film's creation. The brief essay draws heavily upon Hart and Bartlett's research into Eigner's correspondence for their "two books, my ecocritical reading of Eigner and her bio," however as he notes, "we have only begun to understand the intersection of disability, ecology, poetics, Jewishness, place, and community contained in Eigner's life and writing." Eigner's "active social life in Swampscott, in the 1960s and early 1970s" frequently centered upon Frank Minelli's Parnassus Bookshop in nearby Marblehead, where he gave readings and attended workshops, so it was a natural choice for Henny to film Eigner there over the course of two days on March 19-20, 1971. Hart notes that "Eigner was resistant to the idea of being featured as a poet with disabilities because he had already seen a film on the Irish writer Christy Brown (whom Eigner once exchanged letters with)," however he eventually came around: Eigner was willing to do it, as long as he was not the "star," and as long as he could get to "as much relevance as possible." Eigner had no control over the aesthetics of the film (the time lapse flowers, musicbox, and doll indicate that); the narration includes inaccurate information (some of which was corrected by Eigner in annotations on the transcription made by Jack Foley); some of the subtitles are inaccurate or incomplete. But in the documentary sections that capture him reading, talking with his friends, sitting in his wheelchair, and so on, we can see Eigner asserting his will to make what choices he was able to. He didn't want to feature disability; he wanted to talk about ecological issues: pollution, food shortages, overconsumption, overpopulation. Allen Ginsberg lends a hand, providing both voiceover narration and performing Eigner's work, due to the poet's challenges communicating verbally. We're presenting this rare and fascinating document in two formats: the film in its entirety, and a leaner cut that eliminates the more whimsical touches to focus solely on Eigner's poetry. Choose from either by clicking here to visit PennSound's Larry Eigner author page. Anne-Marie Albiach Reads 'État,' 2007Posted 7/27/2024 On PennSound's author page for Albiach, there are a number of home recording sessions, including a 1993 recording of « H II » linéaires and a 2005 recordings of ETAT and UNE GÉOMÉTRIE (triptych), along with a 2000 reading as part of the Paris-based Steel Bar reading series, and shorter recordings made for Grey Suit and Kenning. We're also proud to be able to present a trio of broadcasts from France Culture Radio (from 1978, 2003, and 2004) as well as a 2015 tribute to the poet and translator held at the IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine) in Paris. Charles Bernstein's 2012 Jacket2 commentary post marking the poet's passing includes this appraisal of her talents, written on the occasion of her volume, Figured Image: "Anne-Marie Albiach's words are never alone on the page, having each other for company, just as they find here ideal companionship in Keith Waldrop’s translation. In Figurations de l’Image, Albiach pursues her rigorous investigation into the possibilities of measure, the perceptible, luminescence, vulnerability, memory, contour, ardor, breath, oscillation, remonstration, trajectory, disparity, abstraction, antecedence, disparity, refraction, trace, tapestry, rehearsal, reverberation, and the irreparable. In these poems, the figures refute image as they bank, relapse, surge, palsy, recollect. Albiach scores space to twine time, abjures rhyme to make blank shimmer in the mark." You can read more of Bernstein's remembrance here, and browse our Anne-Marie Albiach author page here. Revisiting the EPC@20 CelebrationPosted 7/24/2024 Today we're revisiting EPC@20, the two-day celebration of two decades of the Electronic Poetry Center, which was held at SUNY-Buffalo in the fall of 2014 to celebrate the archive's twentieth anniversary. EPC@20 featured readings, talks, and performances by poets who've had a close affiliation with the site over its lifespan. The proceedings on Thursday, September 11th began with an afternoon session that included talks by Steve McCaffery, Danny Snelson, Laura Shackelford, cris cheek, Elizabeth Willis, and Loss Pequeño Glazier. Evening performances followed in two sets: the first featuring Tammy McGovern, Snelson, and Wooden Cities with Ethan Hayden; the second with Joan Retallack, cheek, and Tony Conrad. Friday, September 12th began with afternoon readings and talks by Myung Mi Kim, Retallack, Charles Bernstein, and a panel talk featuring Bernstein, Glazier, Jack Krick, Shackelford, and Snelson. The celebration concluded with evening performances from Glazier, Willis, and Bernstein. Video and audio recordings of the proceedings are available here. The program for the celebration can be found here. From the Floating World: A Memorial Tribute to Jerome RothenbergPosted 7/23/2024 We're excited to start off this new week with a newly posted recording of "From the Floating World: A Memorial Tribute to Jerome Rothenberg," which was held at New York's Milton Resnick - Pat Passloff Foundation on June 24th of this year. Our own Charles Bernstein served as emcee for the memorial, which started off with a welcome from Alex Paul Chapin and Geoffrey Dorfman. Pierre Joris offered a eulogy and Charlie Morrow said the Kaddish, while Bruce Andrews, Susan Bee, Lee Ann Brown, Steve Clay, Michael Heller, Bob Holman, Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese, Nicole Peyrafitte, and Cecilia Vicuña shared remembrances and read favorite poems from Rothenberg. Both audio and streaming video of the event, running over one hundred minutes, is available now on PennSound's Jerry Rothenberg author page, were you'll also find well over 350 individual tracks taken from dozens of events spanning more than half a century. These include readings, interviews, panel discussions and talks, albums, performances, podcasts, films, and more. and don't forget about our Rothenberg holdings at Jacket2, where we were honored to host Jerry's commentary series, "Poems and Poetics," since our launch, and our Reissues section archives complete runs of the groundbreaking journals Alcheringa (1970–1980, co-edited with Dennis Tedlock) and New Wilderness Letter (1977–1984). Revamped Resources for Helen and Pat Adam's 'San Francisco's Burning'Posted 7/18/2024 We've long been proud to host Charles Ruas's production of the radio play for the Audio Experimental Theatre, which was first broadcast on New York City's WBAI FM on July 17th, 1977. In addition to the two Adam sisters, the radio play's cast also included Marilyn Hacker, Robert Hershon, and Barbara Wise in major roles. Those recordings have long been augmented by Kristin Prevallet's "Notes on San Francisco's Burning" taken from her excellent A Helen Adam Reader (2007), which features some charming anecdotes about the drama's production, including this recollection from musical director Rob Wynne regarding the "structured chaos" of the recording process: "It took a few months to pull it all together, often ending up after a session at Helen & Pat's apartment, surrounded by her collection of agates and stones, in which she saw images and stories. She always served celery filled with peanut butter, a bizarre but oddly delicious combination." That latter staging is now paired with another: a 1962 recording adapted from a 1961 production directed by Kermit Sheets for the San Francisco Playhouse, which features the drama's original electronic soundtrack, composed by Warner Jepson. Jepson, a wizard on the difficult-to-master Buchla synthesizer and a prominent figure in San Francisco's avant garde music scene, was kind enough to share these original recordings with us prior to his death in 2011. While we've only posted the production itself on Adam's page, there's also a link to additional photographs, press clippings, and other ephemera from the production on Jepson's PennSound author page. Finally, we've also added a link to Norman MacAffee's "Sixteen Drawings for Helen Adam's San Francisco's Burning" at Jacket2, which we mentioned in last week's tribute to the late artist. Taken together, these provide listeners the potential to truly immerse themselves in the Adam sisters' iconic and iconoclastic oddball drama. You can find all of the aforementioned resources, as well as more work from the poet on PennSound's Helen Adam author page. Piotr Gwiazda reads Grzegorz Wróblewski's 'Dear Beloved Humans,' 2024Posted 7/16/2024 Speaking of Wróblewski's collection, Wayne Miller notes that "The amazingly compressed poems in Dear Beloved Humans are constantly banging themselves against this world that makes no sense, but that most of us have nevertheless simply accepted, and Wróblewski has taken on the poetic task of jarring us into a renewed apprehension of the world's terrible, hilarious absurdity." In this brief clip, streamed on February 7th of this year, Gwiazda reads two poems from the volume in both Polish and English translation: an early untitled poem and a more recent piece entitled "Waterloo." On PennSound's Grzegorz Wroklewski author page you'll find this new video plus recordings from the 27th annual marathon reading at Woodland Pattern, a clip of five poems by Wroblewski, translated by 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," and 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. Want to read more? Visit the PennSound Daily archive. |
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