PennSound Daily

Edited by Pam Brown, the multi-part feature, "Fifty-One Contemporary Poets from Australia", released in five installments over the course of 2012, is a classic Jacket2 publication, and one that stays true to the journal's roots on the other side of the world. As we worked together on the feature, I begged Pam to put together a companion feature for PennSound, and though she'd already done an astounding amount of curatorial work, she happily agreed to do so.

Today, we're very glad to unveil the fruits of her labor. PennSound's new Australian Poetry page features newly-added recordings from 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. The majority of these recordings were made over the past several years, and give outsiders an excellent sense of the reading series in Australia and New Zealand that are driving a vital poetry scene (in much the same way that the J2 feature stressed the network of journals sustaining the scene). We've also provided links to the pre-existing author pages for Kate Lilley and John Tranter, who also appeared in the feature.

I'd like to thank Pam for her tireless work putting both of these massive bodies of work together over the course of several years. You can begin exploring this new collection of recordings by clicking the title above, and if you haven't yet taken a look at the original Jacket2 feature, then this is a good opportunity for you to do so.

In October 2007, British poet Maggie O'Sullivan — who was in Philadelphia to take part in "'Suddenly Everyone Began Reading Aloud': A Celebration of Bob Cobbing" — visited Charles Bernstein's class to record a two-part Close Listening program. In the second segment, O'Sullivan read three older pieces from her recently-published Body of Work (Reality Street, 2006): "Most Incomplete" (section 3 of 1985's A Natural History in Three Incomplete Parts), "The Walks" (from 1986's Divisions of Labour), and "Malevich" (a previously-unpublished work from 1978's Tonetreks). Before that, she answered questions from Bernstein and a number of UPenn students. Today, a transcription of that program was published at Jacket2 under the title "Writing Is a Body-Intensive Activity".

In the early 60's the poet Lee Harwood heard for the first time, in a London cafe, a poem by Tristan Tzara. An "immediate convert" to Dada, Lee tracked down a few of Tzara's then difficult to find poems and translated them; he eventually also tracked down Tzara himself and met him in Paris. "Chanson Tzara" — with text, translation, and narration by Harwood, and sound and realization by Alexander Baker — is a sound work created around that encounter.

This twenty-seven minute audio composition is 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.

You can listen to this newly-added recording on PennSound's Lee Harwood author page, which is also home to his contribution to the Rockdrill series, The Chart Table, Lee Harwood: Poems 1965–2002, and a 2008 reading as part of the Shearsman Reading Series at Swedenborg Hall in London.