Inside PennSoundFeatured resources
Selected by Charles Bernstein (read more about his choices here) |
In Memoriam: James M. Cory (1953–2024)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:
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. Lorenzo Thomas, "Ego Trip," 1976Posted 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. You can listen to this smoldering track on PennSound's Lorenzo Thomas author page along with a slew of readings and talks from 1978 up until just a few years before his death in 2005. Celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving with "North of Invention'Posted 10/14/2024.svg/1200px-Flag_of_Canada_(Pantone).svg.png) Today our neighbors to the north celebrate their Thanksgiving Day, and we can't think of a better way to mark the occasion than revisiting the marvelous North of Invention: A Canadian Poetry Festival, which was co-organized by Sarah Dowling and Charles Bernstein, at the Kelly Writers House. Extensive audio and video documentation from the multi-day event is available on PennSound's homepage for the event. Here's a description of the festival's aims, taken from its event page on the KWH website: 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. PoemTalk #200: on Two by Evie ShockleyPosted 10/11/2024 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. Charles Reznikoff, "Day of Atonement"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. In Memoriam: Roy Miki (1942–2024)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." In Memoriam: Robert Coover (1932-2024)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. Congratulations to T. S. Eliot Prize Nominee Peter GizziPosted 10/5/2024 We close out this week with congratulations to poet Peter Gizzi, who was recently named to the shortlist for the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize for his 2023 collection Fierce Elegy. He joins nine other poets chosen from among 187 submitted collections by judges Mimi Khalvati, Anthony Joseph and Hannah Sullivan. Now in its 31st year, the Eliot Prize is perhaps the preeminent honor for poets published in the UK and Ireland, with Sir Andrew Motion naming it "the prize poets most want to win." Writing in World Literature Today, Nicholas Skaldetvind described Fierce Elegy as "an impactful rumination of sixteen poems on the transformative capacity of myopic observations and the inherent shifts in perspective that carry these verses." "The poems are unsurpassed," he continues, praising their language, which "is fired at the reader with deadly aim and intent, rooted in the senses with a contemporaneous language that silences and omits and invites us to engage with the subject matter in concrete clarity," along with "their weird and delightful imaginings of the moon, fields, art, night, and the unseen." You can listen to Gizzi read from Fierce Elegy on his PennSound author page as part of his 2023 visit to Boise State University, one of nearly two dozen recordings spanning more than thirty years housed there. Once more we congratulate Gizzi for this great honor and will excitedly wait to see who's named the winner at the January 2025 ceremony. In Memoriam: Michael Brownstein (1943–2024)Posted 10/2/2024Today we mark the passing of poet and novelist Michael Brownstein, whose influences and affiliations bridged the Beat Generation and the New York School. According to his obituary, Brownstein died unexpectedly on September 18th at the age of 81. It continues:
We're proud to be able to share a broad selection of audio and video recordings on our Michael Brownstein author page, spanning from the 1979 S Press Tonbandverlag cassette release Brainstorms to a 2018 video of Let's Burn the Flags of All Nations being read in Woodstock, NY. In-between, you'll find a number of readings, an interview conducted by Joanna Harcourt-Smith, the 1979 lecture ""Imagination for Adults," a 1977 appearance on Public Access Poetry, a 1989 reading at the Library of Congress, and the 2006 short film Healing Dick. We send our condolences to Brownstein's family and fans. Click here to start exploring the artistic legacy of Michael Brownstein. Happy 80th Birthday to bpNicholPosted 9/30/2024 This September 30th would have been the 80th birthday of iconic Canadian multiform poet bpNichol, who passed away far too soon at the age of 43 in 1988. PennSound's bpNichol author page — edited by media archeologist Lori Emerson — is testament to Nichol's diverse talents and affinities, and it's telling that it would take a media archeologist to construct a proper archive, given that it collects work originally released on flexi-disc, LP, cassette, and even floppy disc, in addition to traditional formats. That last piece, 1984's "First Screening: Computer Poems" — initially written in Apple's BASIC programming language and converted into a Quicktime emulation in 2007 by a team of poets and media specialists — is a clear highlight of the collection. Another is a series of lengthy recordings (totaling nearly six hours) from Nichol's unfinished magnum opus, The Martyrology, made in 1983 and 1987. Our most recent addition, from the spring of 2023, is Nichol and bill bissett's 1967 interview with Phyllis Webb on the CBC television program Extension (read the PennSound Daily write-up here) You'll find these and many more recordings from the late 1960s through to posthumously-released work by clicking here. Listeners will also want to check out our author pages for The Four Horsemen and Owen Sound — collaborative projects in which Nichol participated — as well as the 1979 Six Fillious reading at the Ear Inn (which features Paul Dutton reading Nichol's contributions to the book). Finally, we'd be remiss if we didn't point you in the direction of the official bpNichol archive, which is a truly marvelous resource. Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant Garde, 1910-1917Posted 9/27/2024 Today we look back at "Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant Garde, 1910-1917," a groundbreaking exhibition that ran through the spring of 2009 at Los Angeles' Getty Center. PennSound Senior Editor Danny Snelson was responsible for seeing this remarkable multimedia resource through to fruition, and so we thought it fitting to have him provide our listeners with an introduction. Here's what he had to say: PennSound has been working in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute to present this remarkable collection of historical and contemporary transrational poetry, centered on an exhibition of Russian Futurist book art held at the Getty earlier this year. The exhibition's title — "Tango with Cows" — taken from a poem by Vasily Kamensky, points to the sense of hilarity and irreverence you'll hear in these startlingly original 'beyonsense' poems. Our page of recordings compliments the extensive media collected online at the Getty's website. There, you can find programs, essays, video footage, full scans of the Futurist books, and even a fully interactive slideshow of key books from the exhibition! Our archive of sound recordings comes in two parts: first, Tango with Cows features Oleg Minin's bilingual readings of essential poems found in book art projects from poets such as Alexei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Pavel Filonov. By reading from the Russian before the accompanying English translation, Minin offers listeners the pleasure of sound before recognition — an ideal situation for the revolutionary poetics on display here. You can start browsing our PennSound page for this event by clicking here. PennSound and Jacket2 Resources on Australian PoetryPosted 9/26/20245.jpeg) There's no better place to start than our Australian Poets anthology page, which is home to a comprehensive anthology of contemporary Australian voices, organized by the indispensable Pam Brown and first unveiled in 2013. In addition to links to preexisting author pages for Kate Lilley and John Tranter, it includes (then-)new recordings from a total of twenty-five poets: Adam Aitken, Ali Alizadeh, Judith Bishop, Ken Bolton, Bonny Cassidy, Stuart Cooke, Laurie Duggan, Kate Fagan, Michael Farrell, Liam Ferney, Duncan Hose, Jill Jones, Kit Kelen, John Kinsella, Peter Minter, Tracy Ryan, Jaya Savige, Pete Spence, Amanda Stewart, Ann Vickery, Corey Wakeling, Alan Wearne, Fiona Wright, Tim Wright, and Mark Young. This astounding collection of recordings is amazing in and of itself, but even more so when you realize that it's a supplement to an even more momentous Jacket2 feature: "Fifty-One Contemporary Poets from Australia", also organized by Brown, which was released in five installments over the course of 2012. Here's how she she opens her preface to the collection: When it comes to poetry anthologies, I agree with David Antin's long-ago quip — "Anthologies are to poets as zoos are to animals" — and I think that journals and magazines are probably better indicators of what's current in any country's poetry than grand, often agenda-driven anthologies. Here I am presenting the work of fifty-one contemporary poets from Australia. My aim was to make it broadly representative by including innovation and experimentation alongside quasi-romanticism, elegy, and the almost-pastoral. No one in this group writes like another. The common link is simply that each poet is an Australian whether by birth, residence or citizenship. She continues: "This collection could probably be read as an anthology, and so I grant a comment on omission. There are many other poets writing and publishing in Australia, probably around four hundred, who aren't included here. A problem for any editor assembling a collection of writing from Australia is the inclusion of multiracial poetries. At the outset, I should say that there are no Australian indigenous nor Torres Strait Islander poets in this selection of poems." That omission, however, is answered somewhat by Robbie Wood's astounding 2012 Jacket2 feature "On Australian Aboriginal Poetry: 'The Last Evening Glow Above the Horizon.'" Unlike typical Jacket2 features, which publish all of their content in one shot, Wood has filed new addenda to his anthology in 2015, 2016, and 2017, and I presume we might have further installments to look forward to in the future as well. Taken together, these features represent some of my favorite PennSound and Jacket2 content over my long tenure with both sites. They also serve as an important reminder of the tireless work done by John Tranter — through Jacket, but also long before that through various publishing and broadcasting ventures — that both helped foster Australia's thriving poetry scene and also brought worldwide attention to it. Click on any of the links above to start browsing. William Bronk: on 'Poems to a Listener,' 1984 and 1989Posted 9/23/2024 We start off this new week by highlighting a pair of appearances by poet William Bronk on Poems to a Listener, a pubic radio program hosted by Henry Lyman, which was produced for 88.5 WFCR-FM in Amherst, Massachusetts between 1976 and 1994. Bronk's two appearances took place in 1984 and 1989, and these half-hour programs certainly make for pleasurable listening. Both shows are content-dense yet remarkably intimate, with Bronk offering poems at his own pace and Lyman posing questions, often hinging on a certain turn of phrase or image, as they come to him. Sometimes they're quick exchanges, sometimes protracted. Lyman isn't afraid to needle, and Bronk is willing to tussle as well — at one point, he says "I'm not going to tell you what the light is," then, after a pregnant pause, adds, "you know what the light is!" — and occasionally, if the edit's a bit too tight, it almost feels like Bronk offering his dissension to the line of questioning by moving on to the next poem, but that only makes the back-and-forth more charming. Both are fine examples of why we find public radio compelling, and, of course, recorded poetry as well: there's nothing more than human voices and the breathing space between them, and that's enough. Play one (or both) of these programs through a good set of speakers, sit back, and get carried away for half an hour. Click here to start listening. Congratulations to National Book Award Longlist Poets Willis, LauxPosted 9/20/2024 We close out this week by celebrating PennSound poets Elizabeth Willis and Dorianne Laux, who were both named this week to the longlist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry. In their announcement of this year's preliminary list of nominees, the National Book Foundation touted the diversity and pedigree of the included poets, noting that it "includes poets in all stages of their publishing careers, and nine of the ten poets on the Longlist are first-time National Book Award honorees," among them "five Guggenheim Fellows and two Pulitzer Prize winners" as well as winners of "the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award, the Pushcart Prizes, and more." It's also worth consideration that "[f]ive of the books come from independent publishers and two come from university presses, including one publisher that is appearing on the National Book Award Longlists for the first time: Texas Review Press."   We congratulate both Willis and Laux, along with their fellow longlisted poets: Anne Carson, Fady Joudah, Gregory Pardlo, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Octavio Quintanilla, m.s. RedCherries, Dianne Seuss, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Finalists will be announced on October 1st and the winner will be crowned in exactly two months at the 75th National Book Awards Ceremony on November 20th. H.D. Reads from 'Helen in Egypt,' 1955Posted 9/18/2024 As Aliki Caloyeras observes in her notes that accompany these recordings, "H.D. made these recordings of Helen in Egypt in Zurich in 1955. In a letter dated February 3, 1955, to her friend and literary executer, Norman Holmes Pearson, H.D. describes the recordings: 'I am so happy about the disk-work [sic], went in yesterday by car and E[rich Heydt] came along and helped me. I did just 21 minutes this time, some of the first section with captions. It came up quite well — the first set, of Jan. 26, sent surface, is really the second disk, in time. The first one I did is more lyrical and has sections from Eidolon; this one of Feb. 2 has Egypt and Some Leuke; one side of disk is Achilles, the other, Paris. . .'" She continues, "Since these recordings were made before Helen in Egypt was completed and published, the ordering of the sections read does not exactly coincide with the subsequent published text version. The prose sections were not yet written (as H.D. came up with the idea of adding the prose sections while making the recordings). So, in the recordings, the lyrics are interspersed with H.D.'s preliminary commentary, which she later reworks into the published prose sections." Thanks to Caloyeras, we're also able to provide page numbers for each excerpt in New Directions' edition of Helen in Egypt. You can read more about the recordings and listen in by clicking here. Selections from Helen in Egypt from this session were the subject of PoemTalk # 84, which you can listen to here. Madeline Gins on PennSoundPosted 9/17/2024 Our earliest recording, from the archives of Robert Creeley, is a 1979 seminar with Gins and her long-term creative (and romantic) partner, Arakawa at SUNY-Buffalo. That recording is nicely complemented by the pair's two-day appearance at the school in 2000 as part of the Wednesdays at 4-Plus series, along with "Blank and Other Relatives of Indeterminacy," a lecture given in the spring of 1984 as part of the New York Talk series. We also have a number of readings by Gins, from throughout the long history of the Segue Series, with a 1992 set at the Ear Inn (featuring excerpts from "To Not to Die" and Helen Keller or Arakawa), a 2001 set at Double Happiness (including "Poetics or Architectonics," "Electron Transport Chain One," "Spaghetti A," "Spaghetti A,'" and "Krebs Cycle"), a 2007 set at the Bowery Poetry Club (with selections from Making Dying Illegal, Architecture Against Death: Original to the 21st Century and parts one and two of "A Work of Procedural Architecture"), and finally a 2013 set at Zinc Bar (including "This Poem Precedes Its Title," "Why Don't I Have The Courage of the Wind of My Bones," "Krebs Cycle," "This Deeply Poignant Poem," "An Introduction to Elementary Biotopology," and "What The President Will Say and Do," along with excerpts from Hellen Keller or Arakawa). Finally, we have Gins' 1995 appearance on LINEbreak, where she read the "Th" section from Hellen Keller or Arakawa, and a brief track, "Reversile Destiny Decaration," recorded circa 2013 by Léopold Lambert. You can check out all of the recordings mentioned above by clicking here. Bernstein Wins America Award for Lifetime Contribution to International WritingPosted 9/13/2024 We couldn't be more proud of PennSound co-founder Charles Bernstein, who has been named as the 2025 recipient of the America Award, given for "lifetime contribution to international writing" by Contemporary Arts Educational Project, Inc., in memory of Anna Fahrni. The award is given annually, with selections made by a panel of six to eight judges (including poets, prose writers, playwrights, and literary critics) led by Green Integer publisher Douglas Messerli. Previous recipients of the award, conceived in 1994 as an alternative to the Nobel Prize in Literature, include Aimé Cesaire, Friederike Mayröcker, Jacques Roubaud, Eudora Welty, Adonis, John Ashbery, Edward Albee, Tom Stoppard, Haruki Murakami, Nicole Brossard, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Rosmarie Waldrop, just to name a few. You can read more about the prize and last year's recipient, Chinese author Can Xue, on Green Integer's website. Meanwhile, those eager to learn more about Bernstein and experience his work should head to his PennSound author page, where you can browse a diverse array of readings, talks, interviews, panel discussions, podcasts, short films, and more, spanning fifty-five years. Once more, we at PennSound congratulate our dear colleague for this momentous and well-deserved achievement. 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. Want to read more? Visit the PennSound Daily archive. |
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