PennSound Daily

Today at Jacket2, Charles Bernstein shared some very exciting news about a newly-launched project using PennSound audio. Here's the complete announcement:

It is my great pleasure to announce Robin Seguy's genetic edition of John Ashbery's great poem "The Skaters." This is the first in the newly created Text/works series, a digital library that intends to make freely accessible critical editions and analytic tools for an array of 19th to 21st century French and American poetry collections.

We are very grateful to John and David Kermani for making the typescripts, as well as the text of the poem, available.

In its current state, this edition offers:

• a plain text version of the poem, with optional display of the lines and stanza numbers;


• the transcription of two typescript drafts of the poem, as well as 20 poems and fragments — 18 of which are unpublished — pertaining to the first typescript's dossier. The genetic dossier is displayed, with all variants, in four formats: HTML and XML-TEI, along high-resolution image files and searchable PDFs of the original pages;


• three annotated versions of the text: one showing "referential" data such as names, places, time markers, etc., the second the use of personal pronouns, and the third thematic data such as sounds, colors and weather notations throughout the text;


• a full searchable index, with links to the poem lines;


• a few elements of quantitative analysis, such as number of occurrences and frequencies for lexical items, etc.

We'd like to wish a very happy birthday to Vincent Katz, the poet, translator, art critic, Vanitas editor, and curator, who also happens to be the subject our PennSound's newest author page.

This new page brings together a handful of recordings that already existed on the site with some well-chosen selections from Katz's own archives, and starts all the way back in 1978 with his appearance on Public Access Poetry alongside Paul Schneeman. That's followed by the first of three readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in 1986 (the others are from 1992 and 2005), a 1987 Boston University reading from New York Hello! (Katz's collaboration with Rudy Burckhardt published in 1990), and a 2003 reading at Brown University. Later readings include a 2004 set at the Bruno Maria Gallery, a 2005 appearance at the Bowery Poetry Club and a 2011 reading with Anna Moschovakis at the Gloucester Writers Center. Finally, the page is rounded out video footage of a 2011 Paris symposium on "Collaboration & the Artist's Book," which also featured Bill Berkson, Shirley Jaffé, Raphael Rubinstein, Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein. Each of the aforementioned audio recordings has been segmented, which means that you have nearly 200 individual tracks for your listening pleasure. To start exploring this expansive archive, click the title above.

Today we've launched the sixty-seventh episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which addresses Catherine Wagner's "This Is a Fucking Poem," from My New Job (Fence Books, 2011) and the chapbook Hole in the Ground (Slack Buddha Press, 2008). Joining host Al Filreis for this discussion is a stellar group of panelists that includes Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Laura Elrick and Rae Armantrout.

Filreis starts off his write-up of the episode on the PoemTalk blog by providing some context for the poem under discussion: "The Hole in the Ground poems form a sequence, even beginning with a poem setting out 'The Argument.' On their site, the Slack Buddha folks say mildly (but, to be sure, accurately) that these poems 'explore[...] the mores of interpersonal relationships.' The PoemTalkers say much the same thing of 'This Is a Fucking Poem' in particular, but perhaps, in the spirit of our poem, more bluntly. The fucking poem, which includes child sexualization through insectization and (self-)cannibalism or body mortification and brutal socialization ('Send her to school // ... her eyes will retract inside // ... nobody will hurtcha'), asks us right away not to 'expect too much' and then nevertheless 'go[es] into the / fucking human tunnel' headlong." You can read the rest of his introduction on Jacket2.


PoemTalk is a co-production of PennSound, the Kelly Writers House, Jacket2 and the Poetry Foundation. If you're interested in more information on the series or want to hear our archives of previous episodes, please visit the PoemTalk blog, and don't forget that you can subscribe to the series through the iTunes music store.