PennSound Daily

Today, we're very proud to properly unveil a rare treat from poet, Ron Padgett — a home recording of the poet reading his collection, The Big Something (The Figures, 1990), in its entirety.

James Schuyler's back cover blurb for The Big Something praises Padgett for writing "poems [that] are remarkably clear, almost invisibly so, like a refreshing glass of cold water — poems in which he goes nit-picking with the OED, uses Tulsa plain-speak in the diction of Blaise Cendrars, turns and looks back at the food he has set out and sees it is a painting by Fairfield Porter, which is Fairfield Porter, builds his wooden dream house, and all a little askew, as the world is." Indeed, within, we discover the sharp philosophical observations and clever wit that we all know and love in Padgett's work, taking the form of hometown remembrances ("Oklahoma Dawn," "Coors"), travelogues ("The Rue de Rennes," "At Apollinaire's Tomb," "The Human Being and the Human Nothingness"), domestic scenes ("The Salt and Pepper Shakers," "Indian Territory") and writerly statements ("First Drift," "Poem"). We also sense a formal shift taking place, with the open-field construction present in the poet's earlier work almost non-existent, replaced by experiments in prose poetry, along with two longer sequences that were first published as individual volumes ("How to be a Woodpecker" and "Light as Air").

Most poignantly, we find long shadows cast by the recent deaths of close friends such as Ted Berrigan, Edwin Denby and Frances LeFevre Waldman (mother of Anne Waldman), shaping devastating poems like "Dog" and "Each and Which" — the latter, after a hilarious litany of "Teutonic belching" occasioned by browsing through the Oxford English Dictionary (which is marvelous to hear in the poet's own voice), wounds us with its closing observation, "[t]hus I spend my days, / waiting for friends to die." Given the subsequent passing of compatriots Joe Brainard and Kenneth Koch (who appears here in "Goethe"), the weight of this grief is made even more acute.

On Padgett's PennSound author page, you'll also find a pair of 2003 readings (one at the Kelly Writers House, one as part of the Line Reading Series), highlighting selections from his then-recent books, You Never Know (Coffee House Press, 2002) and Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers (University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), along with a lengthy interview with Amy King on miPOradio and the single track "The Music Lesson," from The World Record: Readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, 1969-1980, while in the PEPC Library, you'll find a PDF version of Padgett's 1970 collaboration with Tom Veitch, Antlers in the Treetops. It's not often that we can present audio recordings of a book in its entirety, and so we're particularly grateful to Ron Padgett that we're able to do so with The Big Something, and look forward to sharing more recordings of his work with our listeners in the future.

Last week, we released the twenty-nineth episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, a discussion of Kit Robinson's 2002 poem, "Return on Word." Host Al Filreis is joined for this program by first-timer Rae Armantrout, and a pair of repeat panelists: Thomas Devaney and Linh Dinh.

Filreis begins the conversation by asking Armantrout to address the free-associative resonance of "all we need is a few good words" — which takes one to the armed forces marketing slogan, "a few good men" — and she's quick to agree that this poem is riddled with "pat phrases gone bad," leading towards a marked break in tone and sentiment in the final stanza, which the panelists consider at length. Armantrout then parses through the economic and marketing parlance that seeks an identity: "I think that kinda words both ways, because obviously that could be branding in a corporate sense [...] but also poets sorta brand themselves, or get branded — poets are labeled." Therefore, for Filreis, while there's a satirical take on the business world here, there's also an equally pointed critique of the poetry reader.

Dinh points out the flat diction and shares his desire for more conflict or an individualized voice here, and throughout Robinson's contemporaneous work, which Armantrout describes as exploring the "conjunction where writing and being a writer meets being a businessperson." She also points out the sinister potential of the final stanza's image of "words / thought has taken a contract out on," though the panel comes around to a more positive reading embracing a Poundian ethos of newness, a liberation of hackneyed phrasings. Devaney returns to the poem's title, envisioning a sort of dividend on poetic capital, and concluding that the poem is, at its heart, "about values being at odds with each other."

Filreis then asks Armantrout to speak for herself (and by extension for Robinson) in regards to a common criticism of work like theirs: that while it ably captures the din of societal discourse, it lacks a subjective center, an anchoring identity. She points out the fact that "we learn to speak from others and we learn to speak in their phrases," and wonders "when does one's own voice come in?" concluding that, perhaps, "everyone's voice is a composite that they make unique by the way they compile all the voices that are out there." Hence here, it's only through the language of marketing that Robinson can so effectively debunk the false optimism, the empty slogans, offered by that industry. Playing off of Robinson's background on the stage, Devaney sees sympathies with the work of David Mamet.

Asked to address his earlier comment that the poem doesn't go far enough, Dinh situates the poem in its historical contexts (at the precipitous end of the dot-com boom) and comments on the language of optimism and the prevalence of slogans throughout the poem as a symptom of a larger bankruptcy (which is both material and spiritual). Filreis picks up on this idea, noting, "he's inviting us to say something [...] he's basically militarizing happy marketing talk." Devaney responds by offering that, to him, "the idea of words for hire doesn't shock me as much as the idea of thought for hire — that's the more menacing part that he pivots into." The panelists then consider the variation between the poem's final line as performed here (in a 1999 reading at the Kelly Writers House) versus the version published in 2002 — finding a shift away from optimism into ambiguity, and a lost opportunity to address critiques of Language poetry — before offering up their final comments.

PoemTalk is a co-production of PennSound, the Kelly Writers House and the Poetry Foundation. If you're interested in more information on the series or want to hear the previous twenty-eight episodes, please visit the PoemTalk blog, and don't forget that you can subscribe to the series through the iTunes music store. For our next episode, Filreis will be joined by Bob Perelman, Charles Bernstein and Robert Grenier discussing two brief William Carlos Williams poems selected by Grenier: "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "Flowers by the Sea." Stay tuned also for future programs in the series which will address poems by Robert Grenier, Susan Howe, Fanny Howe and Sharon Mesmer and Charles Olson. Thanks, as always, for listening!

We're wrapping up the week by highlighting a pair of new Close Listening programs, recorded by Charles Bernstein at the Banff Center as part of "In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge" on February 21, 2010.

First up is a two-part program featuring Montreal poet and translator, Erin Mouré, which begins with a 23 minute reading segment featuring excerpts from Mouré's recent book, O Resplandor. That's followed by a conversation segment which begins with the poet discussing the structure of that collection and continues to address Mouré's motivations behind her work as a translator and the dynamics that exist between her foundations in multiple languages and the creative act itself. In the program's second half, Bernstein asks Mouré how her Canadian identity shapes her work, along with her sense of her writing community and her influences, and from there, the conversation shifts to address the ways in which the reader's awareness of her own contexts affects her experience of a given work. The program ends with the poet talking about the ways in which she approaches an embodied performance

The first of two programs featuring Fred Wah showcases poems from his latest, Is a Door, published last month by Talon Books, including "Discount Me In," "I Need to Apply," "Defend the Zero," "Naturalized Citizen Peeled" and "Loki Sniffs the Floods." In the second program, Bernstein and Wah have a wide-ranging discussion which begins with some of Wah's formative experiences as a poet (including early interactions with Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan), the importance of community to his aesthetics and how he defines his own personal poetics. Towards the end, the two discuss the evolving relationship between U.S. and Canadian poetics — the correspondences and boundaries that exist between these two neighboring nations — and end by considering whether an ethical or political aspect is necessary to one's poetics.

You can listen to both of these sets of programs on our newly-created author pages for Erin Mouré and Fred Wah, and don't forget to check out PennSound's Close Listening homepage for dozens of fascinating readings and conversations with a diverse array of figures from the world of contemporary arts and letters.