PennSound Daily

As summer chugs along we've got another new episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series for your listening pleasure. Program #79, released today, focuses on Joanne Kyger's poem "It's Been a Long Time: Notes from the Revolution," with a panel of Julia Bloch, Pattie McCarthy, and Stephen Ratcliffe joining host Al Filreis.

In a post on the PoemTalk blog, Filreis gives some context for the poem, which he describes as "part of — and also a collage of voices from — the Bolinas (California) poetic counterculture of the early 1970s." He continues, "Steve Ratcliffe, who spoke at length with Joanne Kyger before traveling east to join us for this conversation, is able to confirm some of those details, as it is apparent that the poet was listening intently to the 'company' or community of — and the very rhythms of — the 'other beats' around her. And so the poem carries forward the ambivalence of this poetic community about the machine and its relation to the making of the poem, and about the efficacy of chanting, and about the importance, or possible irony, of 'the vibe' as a empyrean, communitarian and anti-imperial source of a new music." 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.

We recently put together a new author page for poet and translator, David Rattray, who died at the age of 57 in 1993 after a battle with brain cancer.

On this page you'll find readings that highlight Rattray's diverse talents, beginning with a February 1992 event at NYC's Granary Books featuring a generous selection of translations from Black Mirror: The Selected Poems of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte (Barrytown/Station Hill, 1996). That's followed by two December 1990 readings celebrating the release of Rattray's sole volume of his own poetry, Opening the Eyelid (Diwan, 1990) — the first at Mona's in the East Village, the second at the St. Mark's Poetry Project — which total more than an hour in length. Moving backwards, we have four more recordings of considerable length (each running 30-40 minutes) from in and around NYC in the early-to-mid 1980s: a 1987 set from the Bridge Bookshop, 1986 readings from the Tompkins Square Library and the Neither Nor Series, and finally, a 1984 Segue Series Reading from the series' original home, the Ear Inn.

Given the recent resurgence in interest in Rattray's work — cf. last spring's tribute events at the Poetry Project — and the relative unavailability of his poetry, we're very happy to be able to share this treasure trove of recordings with our listeners.

Kelly Writers House Director Jessica Lowenthal recently discovered DAT tapes for a very exciting event hosted at KWH in the spring of 2001, which have been missing for more than a dozen years.

Dubbed "Un-American Poetry," this reading — which featured sets from Ammiel Alcalay, Ben Hollander, and Murat Nemet-Nejat — originally took place on March 22, 2001, and was described as such in the KWH calendar: "An evening of UN-AMERICAN POETRY at the Writers House. A conversation about writing, translation, globalization, politics in the Middle East, the foreign poet's relation to language, the foreigner's relation to nation, contemporary American, Israeli, Turkish and Bosnian poetry, and more." After brief sets of fifteen to twenty minutes from each poet there's a lengthy discussion between the poets and audience members.

You can listen to this long-lost recording by clicking on the title above to be taken to our Un-American Poetry event page.