PennSound Daily

Today we're happy to showcase two recent albums of poetry and music by A.L. Nielsen: Sometimes I Wonder Can a Cigar Box Hold My Blues (2021) and Spidercone — More Blues, Rage and Hollers (2022). Both albums have been available to purchase through online streaming platforms, but now, thanks to Nielsen, marks the first time they're freely available to the public, and with a handful of bonus tracks to boot.

The two jazz–poetry albums primarily feature music and poetry composed entirely by Nielsen, with the exception of "Self-Organizing Networks," where the music and performance is by Christopher Reiner (and included with permission).

You can find the full tracklisting for both albums at Nielsen's PennSound page.

Today we're spotlighting a newly archived podcast series here at PennSound affectionately dubbed Love Jawns: A Mixtape. Originally published between 2019 and 2020 in conjunction with Philadelphia Contemporary, Love Jawns: A Mixtape—or LJAM—was produced by Yolanda Wisher, Jaléssa Savage, and Wayv Wilson, and comprised two seasons, along with a collection of special episodes that effectively serves as a third season.

A love letter to the city of Philadelphia and a self-proclaimed "soundtrack of the city," each episode begins with an ethereal announcement from Wisher—"Doors are closing," a proclamation that should be instantly recognizeable to anyone who's ever taken the El in the past thirty years. An overarching soundtrack by a featured DJ then accompanies each episode, punctuated by readings by local and near-local figures, including a number of Philly's recent Poets and Youth Poets Laureate (including two former Kelly Writers House alumni, Husnaa Hashim and Wes Matthews, the latter of whom segmented audio recordings for PennSound as an undergraduate).

The full podcast series of twelve episodes, along with hi-res cover images and program notes, is available here.

Another exciting reading series has come to us thanks to Michael Cavuto and Tessa Bolsover, poets and PhD students in the English Department at Duke University. The series, called Solarities, ran for three years from 2023 to 2025 at the Nelson Reading Room at Duke, and was funded by the Franklin Humanities Institute, with support from the English Department, Gender, Feminism and Sexuality Department, Duke Arts, and the Center for Caribbean and Latin American Studies.

Included among Solarities's featured guests some familiar names: Joseph Donahue, Nathaniel Mackey, Will Alexander, Hoa Nguyen, Alice Notley, and Stacy Szymaszek. The series comprises five entries and the full collection is available at the Solarities Reading Series page.

Today’s massive new entry comes to us by way of series organizer Robert Mittenthal, who has generously supplied us with a vast collection of recordings from the Seattle-based Subtext Series. Our selection ranges from 1996 to 2009, during which the Subtext Series called three Seattle venues home: Speakeasy Cafe, Richard Hugo House, and the Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center.

Mittenthal writes:

We came up with what turned out to be a sustainable format for the series. Two person readings, once per month, on the same day, for example, the 3rd Thursday, at the same venue. One local writer, and one from out of town. Regardless of what was raised via donations at the door, we would pay the readers a nominal fixed amount, plus a small travel stipend for the visitor. We had no budget and no funding, so we focused primarily on the west coast, & tried to coordinate with writers who were traveling thru the Northwest.

Mittenthal’s “we” refers to series curators Laynie Browne, Jeanne Heuving, Herb Levy, Ezra Mark, Bryant Mason, C.E. Putnam, and Nico Vassilakis, with guest curators including Curtis Bonney, Daniel Comiskey, Joseph Donahue, Kreg Hasegawa, Drew Kunz, Will Owen, and Lou Rowan. Recordings were created for roughly half of the readings over the course of the fifteen years of the Subtext Series by Herby Levy and Bryant Mason.

You can explore the whole collection, which features 93 of the readings, split into sections based on performer, here.

We at PennSound are pleased to announce the launch of the new Eric Mottram Centennial Collection. Courtesy of Geoff Browell, Manuela Pallotto Strickland, and the Archives at King’s College London’s Libraries and Collections, the Mottram Collection comprises hundreds of recordings from Eric Mottram’s personal collection, including interviews he conducted, his own readings and lectures, readings by others, and several BBC recordings (of which we’ve only selected the most relevant).

The publication of the Mottram Collection culminates a nearly three-year process which began with the rather tedious digital transfer of about 330 GB of WAV files from the King’s College London collection to PennSound, a huge sum of data which was then sorted, labeled, converted, and posted over two summers by PennSound interns Madeleine Song and Madeline Chun.

The new collection is truly a treasure trove of newly public recordings, with too many names to list here—but highlights include Charles Olson, Jerome Rothenberg, Muriel Rukeyser, Wallace Stevens, Anne Waldman, and Louis Zukofsky, to name just a few. And thanks to Hannah Judd, many of the recordings in the Mottram Collection already have segmented versions available on their individual author pages.

Labor Day Weekend is upon us, and there's no better time to start digging in!