PennSound Daily

Here's a wonderful reading by Rosmarie Waldrop, taken from her recent visit to our own Kelly Writers House last fall. You'll find both audio and video recordings of this forty-minute reading, recorded on November 6, 2014, on our Rosmarie Waldrop author page.

As Waldrop explains in her brief introduction, her reading consists of three different sequences. The first and longest of these sequences — taken from her latest collection, Driven to Abstraction (New Directions, 2010) — was written in memory of John Cage, and takes its name from a quote by the composer: "Music Is an Oversimplification of the Situation We Are In." That's followed by a more recent sequence "Otherwise Smooth," before Waldrop concludes the reading with poems from "In Pieces," an homage to Robert Creeley.

We're wrapping up this week with a new entry in the PennSound Podcast series — the forty-sixth overall episode — which is entitled, "On Reading & Teaching the Modern Long Poem, with Reference to Williams's 'Paterson' & Two Passages from Eliot's 'The Waste Land.'"

Here's a write-up of the new program, taken from Jacket2's Podcasts page:

"Eric Weinstein and Al Filreis spent some time in the Wexler Studio of the Kelly Writers House talking about the problematics of the modern long poem. Can it be taught? Why is it so challenging, despite its central importance? The discussion is intentionally general at first, but soon Eric and Al turn to Eliot's The Waste Land, and in particular to two modally quite distinct passages from the poem."

You can browse through the complete PennSound Podcast archives here.

Here's a new addition to the author page of the always-astounding Cecilia Vicuña: "mtChondrial Eve (Mother of Threads)," performed at MoMA's P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center on March 16, 2008 as part of "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" and broadcast on Clocktower / WSP1 on March 31, 2008.

While, given Vicuña's multimodal performance style — this performance included poetry, textiles, and new media — there's obviously something missing in a recording that's strictly audio, I'm nonetheless struck by how effectively she's able to create an immersive and immediate experience through this (incidental) medium, even across barriers of language.

This recording — along with many other performances, interviews, talks, and more spanning twenty years — can be found on PennSound's Cecilia Vicuña author page.