PennSound Daily

Kit Robinson: Canessa Gallery Reading and Conversation, 2011

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:28:41 EST

One of our latest additions to the PennSound archives is this wonderful event featuring Kit Robinson and hosted by Avery Burns, recorded at San Francisco's Canessa Gallery on July 25, 2011. Here's Kit's own description of the seventy-minute career-spanning set, which took the form of an extended and informal conversation between Robinson, Burns and the audience, punctuated by poems: "Readings from The Dolch Stanzas (1976), Train I Ride (2009), The Crave (2002), Determination (2010) and recent work. Discussion of Mad Magazine, prose and verse forms, the language of the workplace, salsa lyrics and book design."

In addition to this latest addition, Kit was kind enough to take a look over his PennSound author page and send along several corrections. Most interesting among these is the proper attribution of what was previously identified as a July 1982 Segue Series reading, which is now included as the first part of a recording at Amsterdam Avenue — featuring Charles Bernstein, Susan Bee, Alan Davies, Erica Hunt, Bruce Andrews, Ted Greenwald, Michael Gottlieb, Peter Seaton and George-Therese Dickinson — that ends with a group reading of the play "Collateral." As the person who originally processed this recording not long after I started working at PennSound, I'm very glad to see this error (due by the scant markings on the original cassette tape) corrected!

Likewise, I'm equally glad to have the opportunity to listen to this marvelous new survey of Kit's work and am sure that many of you will feel the same. Click on the title above to be taken directly to our Kit Robinson author page.

Charles Bernstein and Kenneth Goldsmith: Ropes Lecture Series 2012

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 22:27:51 EST

As I mentioned in our last PennSound Daily post, we were lucky to have Charles Bernstein and Kenneth Goldsmith in town last week to take part in the University of Cincinnati's Ropes Lecture Series in Digital Humanities — an exciting and exhausting visit that featured these two preeminent theorists discussing a wide variety of topics with faculty, students and members of the local poetry community.

The day began with a morning workshop for grad students in this year's Ropes class — "Adventures in the Digital Trade: Collecting and Distributing the Unpopular Arts, with Special Reference to the Strange Attractors Ubuweb & PennSound, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Web, Baby!" — which is presented in two parts. In the first set, running close to eighty minutes, the two poets discuss their groundbreaking archival work through PennSound, the EPC and UbuWeb; outline the ideological differences between their respective projects; and address key contemporary issues surrounding technology and creativity. The second segment, almost an hour long, continues this dialogue, guided by student questions. Later that evening, the two delivered back-to-back lectures — starting with Goldsmith's "Uncreative Writing," followed by Bernstein's "The Present of the Word" — then took questions from the audience. You'll find segmented recordings of the evening lectures, as well as the morning workshop, on our homepage for the Ropes series events, along with photographs. You'll also find a link for more information on the year-long Ropes Lecture Series, co-organized by Laura Micciche and Jennifer Glaser, which features talks and workshops by N. Katherine Hayles, Ryan Trauman, Lisa Nakamura, Lewis Ulman, Siva Vaidhyanathan and Alan Liu.

Finally, the evening before the Ropes events, Charles Bernstein gave a reading across town at Xavier University, and a partial recording of that event is available on the poet's readings page. Highlighting recent work, the set includes "A Theory's Evolution," "The Sixties, with Apologies," "Every True Religion is Bound to Fail," "Strike!" and "Dea%r Fr~ien%d," ending with translations of Baudelaire's "Be Drunken" and Goethe's "Der Erlkönig."

In Memoriam: Stacy Doris (1962-2012)

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:09:18 EST

In a day that seemed overwhelmingly full of deaths in the creative community — including poets Dorothea Tanning, Wisława Szymborska, and Morgan Lucas Schuldt, artist Mike Kelly and Soul Train host Don Cornelius — we wanted to single out Bay Area poet and translator (and PennSound author) Stacy Doris, who passed away late Tuesday evening.

Our own Charles Bernstein — here in Cincinnati for a series of events with Kenneth Goldsmith — paid tribute to Doris in his reading last night, dedicating his closing poems to her and later posting on Facebook about the "unspeakably sad news" of her passing. Over on the Poetry Project blog, we find another memorial: "The poetry community has lost someone who touched many lives through her work as a teacher, through her poetry, through the person that she was. We are with heavy heart tonight, and sending love to those closest to her."

You can browse through a variety of materials on PennSound's Stacy Doris author page, including Segue Series readings at the Bowery Poetry Club from 2008 and 2010, a 2007 reading in Paris for Double Change, a 2004 appearance on Cross Cultural Poetics and a 2001 reading at SUNY-Buffalo among other recordings. Over at the EPC you'll find a complete html version of Doris' 1994 Roof book Kildare while on Jacket2 you'll find recent commentaries by Bernstein, Eric Baus and Oana Avasilichioaei addressing Doris' work.

Our thoughts are with Doris' family in this trying time, as well as her many friends in the world of contemporary poetry who'll miss her greatly. Also, we've just learned that Laynie Browne is collecting written responses to Doris' life and work for Volta, where she is a contributing editor. Those interested in contributing can send submissions to info@poetryproject.org.

Brian Ang on PennSound

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:44:54 EST

We've been talking a lot about Oakland-based poet, editor and scholar Brian Ang recently, and with good reason: aside from contributing our most recent set of PennSound featured resources, he's also just completed a marvelous run of "PennSound and Politics" commentaries for Jacket2.

With all this focus on Brian's curatorial and critical work, however, we wanted to make sure that our listeners didn't miss out on his new author page, where they can acquaint themselves with his own writing. The page is anchored by a December 2011 reading on KChung Radio, Los Angeles, which, though brief, provides an excellent introduction to his work both old and new, containing selections from his two publlished books, Paradise Now (Grey Book, 2011) and Communism (Berkeley Neo-Baroque, 2011), along with pieces from the forthcoming Pre-Symbolic (Insert Press, 2012) and the sequence-in-progress, The Totality Cantos.

In addition to this reading, you'll also find a recording of "Forced Feminisms," from the 2011 MLA Off-Site reading in Los Angeles and handy links to the aforementioned PennSound featured resources and "PennSound and Politics" commentaries. We're grateful to Brian for his thoughtful and incisive responses to the work of other poets, and are glad that our audience will now have the chance to interact with his work.

New PennSound Classics Recordings from John Richetti

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 20:25:40 EST

It's always a true pleasure to have John Richetti join us for a new recording session, and this week we were graced by his presence once again with the results yielding two new PennSound Classics pages.

Having already joined us last spring to record more than three-and-a-half hours of excerpts from Paradise Lost (as discussed on PennSound Daily here), Richetti has augmented our Milton holdings with a new set of selected poems, which features thirteen tracks, including "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso" and "Lycidas."

Richetti also recorded a dozen poems by Andrew Marvell, creating the foundations for a new author page for the metaphysical poet. Al Filreis has posted a new entry celebrating this latest addition on Jacket2, which lists its contents, including "On a drop of dew," "Bermudas," "To His Coy Mistress," "The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers," "The Definition of Love" and "The Mower Against Gardens."

You can hear these recordings by following the respective links above, and don't miss out on Richetti's other sessions spanning the past seven years, including recordings of Pope, Swift and Dryden, his Paradise Lost selections, selections from Shakespeare's sonnets and perhaps his most impressive contribution, The PennSound Anthology of Restoration & 18th-Century Poetry. All of those pages, along with many more, are gathered on our PennSound Classics homepage.

PoemTalk 49: P. Inman's "reception. theory." and "lac[e]y."

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:52:19 EST

Earlier today, we released the forty-ninth episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series. Here's host Al Filreis' write-up of the new show from the PoemTalk blog on Jacket2:

Michael Golston, Danny Snelson, and Sarah Dowling joined Al Filreis this time to talk about two short poems by P. Inman from his book at.least. (published by Krupskaya in 1999). The poems are "lac[e]y." — dedicated to Tom Raworth — and "reception. theory." — which is "for Diane Ward." The text of the poems is available as a downloadable PDF, and the book is described and available here. Recordings of Inman reading the two poems, made in 2005, are available at Inman's PennSound page and as follows:

- reception. theory., for Diane Ward (1:06): MP3
- lac[e]y., for Tom Raworth (0:44): MP3

Sarah and Al in particular found Inman's presentation at PhillyTalks #14, curated by Louis Cabri and produced by Aaron Levy in November 1999, to be relevant to the at.least. poems. Inman's paper, presented on that occasion (a double reading and talk pairing Inman and Dan Farrell), is called "Notes on Slow Writing." The text is available, and here are several propositions from "Notes" that seemed to help us understand the "overpunctuation" of the poems.

Michael was fascinated with the title "lac[e]y." — noticing, as Sarah also did, that it's in part a reference to the saxophonist Steve Lacy (who has collaborated with Tom Raworth) and in part a way of describing the form of the poem: "almost like a lacing," Michael says, "there's a sense that you could visualize this as laced, the lines lace together and unlace, and so on." Danny, interested as always in textual variants, identifies possible vertical readings. Yes, the poem can be read downward. "What's nice about the poems," says Danny, "is that they leave a space open for readers to read the poem as they would like." That the poems, as printed, sit close to the gutter and "hang on the page" in a certain manner, "further destabilizes things."

Steve McLaughlin is our editor, as always, and James LaMarre was the director and engineer for this forty-ninth episode. PoemTalk is a collaboration of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, and the Poetry Foundation. We are grateful to Michelle Taransky, Jessica Lowenthal, Mingo Reynolds, Chris Martin, Chris Mustazza, Stephanie Hlywak, and Catherine Halley.

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. Thanks, as always, for listening!

2012 MLA Offsite Reading

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:05:16 EST

Contemporary American poetry is quite lucky to have not one, but two perennial favorite epic readings to look forward to every winter: the St. Mark's Poetry Project's New Year's Day marathon reading and the MLA Offsite Reading, held in conjunction with the annual conference. Thanks again to Aldon Nielsen and his Heatstrings archives, we're very proud to present this year's event from Seattle.

Held January 7th at Town Hall Downstairs and running nearly three hours, the event featured mini-sets by Greg Bern, Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover, Julia Bloch, Amaranth Borsuk, Rebecca Brown, Don Mee Choi, Merrill Cole, Matthew Cooperman, Crystal Curry, Maria Damon, Christine Deavel, Sarah Dowling, William J. Harris, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Joel Felix, Sandy Florian, Jaime Gusman, Joseph Harrington, Jeanne Heuving (also heard as MC at beginning), Anna Maria Hong, Yunte Huang, Grant Jenkins, Erica Kaufman, Myung Mi Kim, Gregory Laynor, Karen An-hwei Lee, Alex Leslie, Stacey Levine, Suzanne Jill Levine, Sarah Mangold, Ezra Mark, John Marshall, Bryant Mason, Joe Milutis, Robert Mittenhal, Laura Moriarty (also heard in opening announcements), Laura Mullen, Paul Nelson, Melanie Noel, A.L. Nielsen, Doug Nufer, Vanessa Place, James Reed, Summer Robinson, Judith Roche, Linda Russo, Leonard Schwartz, Kathy Lou Schultz, Evie Shockley, Monica Storss, Daniel Tiffany, Nico Vassilakis, Catherine Wagner, Christine Wertheim, David Wolach, Deborah Woodard, Maged Zaher, and Julie Brown.

On our homepage for the MLA Offsite Readings, you can listen to recordings from ten of the twenty-two years that readings have been staged, from recent marathons from Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, D.C., to vintage events, including the very first Offsite from 1989.

The Threads Talk Series: Two New Recordings

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:16:13 EST

One of my favorite ongoing series, and one that we're honored to be able to share with PennSound's listeners, is the Threads Talk Series: Steve Clay and Kyle Schlesinger's NYC-based collection of lectures, performances and conversations "devoted to the art of the book," which seeks "to build on the discourse within book arts to explore and enrich relationships between various strands of book culture that are often approached in isolation," such as "poetry and writing, visual and performing arts, collaboration, design, printing, independent publishing, literary history, critical theory, and material culture to name a few."

While the eventual destination of these talks is a volume published by Granary Books, it's fascinating to be able to see that collection come together in real-time and hear the discussions that will shape the finalized versions of these essays. Today, we're highlighting the two latest additions from this past fall.

First up is a November 20th talk by artist, author and bookmaker, Keith Smith, entitled "Struggling to See." "Like every artist," he begins, "I was born blind. It was not easy learning to see. It is still a struggle, constantly." Smith's talk begins with the simple childhood joy of drawing and its role as a language in and of itself, hindering his speech development, and his imaginative evolution after his parents closed that avenue to him.

We also have bookbinding scholar and book artists, Richard Minsky's December 3rd talk, "Material Meets Metaphor,", which starts with his formative childhood experiences with printing — starting at ten with a Superior Cub Rotary Press, soon followed by Kelsey Platen Press, allowing him, at the age of thirteen, to start his own printing business — then jumping to his collegiate experiences (at Brown and the New School) with economics, aesthetics and material culture.

You can listen to previous events featuring Alan Loney, Charles Alexander, Simon Cutts, Buzz Spector, Jerome Rothenberg, Cecilia Vicuña, Jen Bervin Kathleen Walkup and Johanna Drucker, on PennSound's Threads Talk Series homepage and follow the links above to listen to these two newest recordings.

Jerry Rothenberg: Xavier Reading Plus KWH Fellows Interview Transcript

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:32:58 EST

Today, we're proud to unveil a new recording from the inimitable Jerry Rothenberg, along with complementary content on Jacket2.

Recorded April 13, 2011 at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Rothenberg's reading was held in a celebration of the college's new Jewish Studies minor in collaboration with Hebrew Union College, featuring introductory comments from noted poet, scholar and XU professor Norman Finkelstein and HUC dean Rabbi Ken Ehrlich. Fittingly, Rothenberg's career-spanning set focused on Jewish identity, drawing primarily from the three diverse volumes collected in Triptych (2007) — Poland/1931 (1974), Khurbn & Other Poems (1989) and The Burning Babe (2007) — with excursions into A Big Jewish Book: Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to the Present (1977), Gematria (1993) and "A Book of Concealments" from his latest collection, Concealments & Caprichos (2010).

These texts and ideas were also a central part of Rothenberg's 2008 visit to UPenn as a Kelly Writers House Fellow — both his Monday evening reading and the following day's discussion with Al Filreis — and today on Jacket2, we've posted Katie L. Price's transcription of the latter event, which also features audience questions and conversations from CAConrad, Bob Perelman, Thomas Devaney, Lee Ann Brown, Robert Sward and Murat Nemat-Nejat, among others.

You can listen to the new Xavier recording here, while segmented audio from both KWH Fellows events can be found here and the Jacket2 transcript is here.

PoemTalk 48: on Poe's "Dream-Land"

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:15:02 EST

Earlier this week, we released the forty-eigth episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series. Here's host Al Filreis' write-up of the new show from the PoemTalk blog on Jacket2:

Read Edgar Allan Poe's "Dream-Land" even just once and discover that it's not at all clear if this land of dreams is the place from which the speaker has come, or is, rather, his longed-for destination — or if indeed it is the very mode and means and route endured along the way. Subject and object, both; content and form likewise; it is the process that demonstrates the importance of desired ends. "Thule," a northerly, arctic/Scandinavian sort of zone, is apparently an origin "from" which the speaker has traveled, but it is also apparently "it" — a "wild clime" neither geographical nor temporal, "Out of SPACE— out of TIME." And "it" is also a space through which one passes.

Thomas Devaney, John Timpane, and Jerome McGann greatly admire what Poe achieved here. For them it is a matter of a sort of wild control. The poem seems to go where it will (and that's its point) but the speed — as matter of tongue, teeth and lips saying its words — is managed at the level of the line. The poem is intensely languaged, as is the selfhood of the "I" whose journey is always already the poem. And so this work, as an act of writing, far transcends its Gothic conventions.

Jerry McGann visited the Kelly Writers House to give a talk on Poe, decentered culture and critical method, and also to record a session of "Close Listening." We at PoemTalk took advantage of his proximity to our studios, as well as of Philadelphia's Poe-centricity, and (unusually for PoemTalk) gave our fair city's visitor his choice of which Poe poem to feature. He selected — as he explains briefly during our talk — a typical but less well-known piece. Emerging from the urban corners of the Poe-known world were John Timpane of the Philadelphia Inquirer, where poetry actually continues to have something of a foothold among daily journalism, and, from further south and west, Tom Devaney, who ventured in from Haverford College where he teaches his share of Poe along with a great deal else. It should be noted here that Tom wasn't always at the bucolic edge of William Penn's town. In 2004, for instance, he spent several afternoons at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site (Poe's house, in other words) performing "The Empty House Tour" as part of the ICA's series called "The Big Nothing."

Of course we have no recordings of Poe reading this poem, and we're not even certain he ever performed it in public, although Jerry and Tom assure us that Poe did give readings and was even, for a time, avid about it. PoemTalk's featured poems are always drawn from PennSound's vast archive, but in this case, fortunately, we were able to make use of PennSound Classics, a page featuring links to guest performances of Blake, Chaucer, Wyatt, Spencer, Homer, Sappho, Langland, Milton, Pope, Swift, Dryden, Shakespeare, Whitman, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, as well as from among archaic Greek poems and Scottish ballads. "Classics" also include Poe, as selected and performed by our own Jerome McGann. Here is his recording of "Dream-Land."

Our director and engineer for this show was James LaMarre, and our editor this time, and indeed for all 48 shows, has been Steve McLaughlin. We note with pride that Steve is now also the Director of PennSound Radio. If you tune in you will occasionally hear Steve's voice announcing the playlist, but know, in any case, that he's the DJ behind the selections.

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. Thanks, as always, for listening!

PennSound and Politics: Ron Silliman, 2009

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 01:02:17 EST

We wanted to draw your attention to Brian Ang's latest PennSound & Politics commentary, over at Jacket2, which focuses on a 2009 celebration of Ron Silliman's The Alphabet at our own Kelly Writers House.

After parsing through the evening's "deluxe set of introductions" — by Jessica Lowenthal, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman — that establish the contexts for The Alphabet and offer appraisals of its scope and technique, Ang makes his way through Silliman's set, which begins, appropriately enough, with a pair of firsts: "Albany" (the first poem in the book) and "Force" (the first poem written for the book). From there, Silliman moves on excerpts, first from from "Non" ("In Gargoyle 32/33, Dan Beaver writes...,"), "Paradise" (first section and last two sections) and "VOG" ("For Larry Eigner, Silent"). Here's Ang's discussion of the final selection:

Silliman concludes with "For Larry Eigner, Silent" from "VOG," "an attempt to actually write a series of 'normal poems,'" and "note[s] that Larry did not learn to speak... until he was in his thirties, even though he was publishing books before then and even though the books he was publishing align him with people like Robert Creeley and Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, for whom, you know, the text on the page was a score for speech. He was writing these scores for speech in fact before he had some surgery that allowed him to participate." The second line of the poem, "The poem is a field of action," is an allusion to William Carlos Williams' essay "The Poem as a Field of Action" (1948), but operates as an allusion in a tighter production of meaning in the poem's specificity of details about Eigner than how allusions operate more antically in the oceanic assembly line of "Paradise." Williams' "The Poem as a Field of Action" is another iteration of his frequent polemics against tradition, represented here by T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, with the prescription for a new measure, symptomatically speech-normative in its argumentation but before speech was overtly valorized in "Projective Verse." Drawing these gestures into relation with the biography and work of Eigner recuperates these gestures consonantly with Silliman's poetics challenging tradition and speech-centered poetics. The poem closes with a quote, "Oh yeah / you're // one of the ones // who can write in the dark," which also appears attributed to Eigner in Tjanting. Silliman's selection of this poem in the Alphabet reading corresponds to the importance of Eigner in Silliman's work, such as the dedication to Eigner in In the American Tree.

The commentary concludes with an analysis of Silliman's process of choosing the evening's readings, working within the constraints of a 48-minute set, and offers up "a reading of equal length with different selections ... understood to be a complement to this one," along with an invitation for "Silliman to provide reflections about new selections from the Alphabet as valuable illuminations to the work, and also invite readers to reflect on selections on their own platforms."

Stay tuned for Ang's next commentary, addressing the four episodes of Short Range Poetic Device — an internet program hosted by Stephen Collis and Roger Farr as part of Vivo Media Arts' "Safe Assembly" project protesting the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, BC — which promises to be a truly fascinating piece of criticism. You can read that and all of his other "PennSound and Politics" commentaries on Jacket2

Now: PennSound Radio

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:38:22 EST

Today we're pleased to announce the launch of PennSound Radio, a 24-hour stream of readings and conversations from the PennSound poetry archive. Our daily schedule includes rebroadcasts of such series as Live at the Writers House, Charles Bernstein's Close Listening, and Leonard Schwartz's Cross-Cultural Poetics, as well as a curated selection of our favorite performances. You can play PennSound Radio through iTunes on your computer, or by installing the free TuneIn app on your iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android device. Listen at work! At home! At the gym! While rebuilding a transmission! And while you're at it, follow us on Twitter (@PennSoundRadio) to keep up with all of our new programs and special features.

Happy Birthday to Rachel Blau DuPlessis!

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:07:43 EST

Today is a milestone birthday for one of our favorite poets (and favorite people), Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and we're celebrating with a treasure trove of new material at both PennSound and Jacket2

First up, we have a new Studio 111 Session that I recorded last December while in town for Poetry in 1960 &mdash: a Symposium. Running more than an hour, this set includes nine poems: five from her most-recent collection, Pitch: Drafts 77-95 and four newer pieces ("Draft 96: Velocity," "Draft 98: Canzone," "Draft 99: Intransitive" and "Draft 104: the Book"). Rachel is, without a doubt, one of my favorite people to record, not just because she understands the process and always turns in an astounding performance — projecting an intimacy and warmth that makes one feel as if they were actually there in the same room at a private reading — but also for the conversation that fills the space between takes. This time around, Rachel, Jeff Boruszak (who assisted with the recording) and were having so good a time that we had to keep reminding ourselves that there was work to be done (and should future generations of DuPlessis scholars be interested, I've kept the tapes).

Of course, it was painful to keep this wonderful session under wraps for a year, but the reason we did so was because it was intended as a complement to "Drafting Beyond the Ending," Patrick Pritchett's exhaustive feature on DuPlessis and her life's work, which we're very proud to unveil today. The feature brings together work from sixteen contributors, including Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Thomas Devaney, Chris Tysh, Alan Golding, Catherine Taylor, Libbie Rifkin and more, as well as a new poem from DuPlessis, "Draft 109: Wall Newspaper". This massive undertaking, many months in the making, is a fitting tribute to Rachel's considerable talents, and a fantastic birthday present to boot. You can click the title above to listen to the new recordings, and head over to Jacket2 to start reading.

PennSound and Politics: Charles Bernstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, 2005

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:34:34 EST

We start the week off with a new PennSound & Politics commentary from Brian Ang: Charles Bernstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, 2005, which focuses on the latter poet's appearance on a two part Close Listening program in April of that year.

DuPlessis reads a broad selection of poems from the Drafts project — from recent pieces like "Draft 61: Pyx," "Draft 63: Dialogue of Self & Soul" and "Draft 64: Forward Slash" to earlier works including "Draft 20: Incipit" and "Draft 25: Segno" — and begins the conversation segment by "describing Drafts' formal motivations stemming from 'my impatience with the lyric, my resistance to the short contained poem... [having] something to do with gender issues and something with the iconic poem for gender; the short poem often is invested in female figures.... Drafts are like many modernist long poems... [that collect] almost an encyclopedic array [of sources]... and I repeat that gesture because of an encyclopedic urge.'" Ang continues, "She acknowledges Drafts' formal decision of adding notes as historically being the gesture of The Waste Land, but specifies Marianne Moore's practice of citation as 'much more to my taste, she simply says that she cites because people said things and you can't possibly say them better, you can't possibly paraphrase them. So the gesture is in her case democratizing. In Eliot's case it seems to close off and make arcane the move to write a long poem.'"

After addressing issues of political grief and agency, aesthetic citizenship and gender considerations, Ang concludes by observing "Drafts as a work of exemplary dynamic thought patiently composed through a long duration of changing political conditions implicitly argues for its continued dynamism of thought in the changing political conditions ahead, or at least enables a lengthy historical perspective for reflecting on the relation between poems and changing political conditions. As DuPlessis' aesthetics are augmented by a political ethics to 'act in a civic manner,; the political paradigm shift of the referent of United States protest from Iraq to an alignment with the civic space itself necessitates renewing this model;s particularity for the present."

You can read that and all of Brian's other "PennSound and Politics" commentaries on Jacket2, and stay tuned for his next post, which will focus on Ron Silliman's 2009 reading from The Alphabet at the Kelly Writers House.

Cy Press Reading Series: Thom Donovan and cris cheek, 2011

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:00:46 EST

Just before heading back east for Thanksgiving, I had the pleasure of catching Thom Donovan (shown at left) and cris cheek read as part of Dana Ward's Cy Press reading series at the Thundersky gallery.

Though a Cincinnati local for seven years, cheek notes that this is his first proper reading in the area. His set for the evening consists of "almost completely new work," roughly divided in thirds between the in-progress manuscripts Hungry Ghosts and Is No Nearer, along with very recent material written over the past few days. "It's going to be the most conventional reading I've ever given in my life," he notes, adding "maybe" after a pregnant pause. These pieces are punctuated by a handful of older work, including "We Are One" — a piece dating from 1980 which cheek has never before read or published, however aside from sounding utterly contemporary, it offers a "semblance of a sense of the procedural things I'm up to" — and the phonemic duet (or perhaps trio) with pre-recorded glottals (issued by two large speakers held head-high) that concludes the reading.

Similarly, Donovan's set is largely brand new, with many of the pieces inspired by his tireless participation in the Occupy Wall Street movement, including his stunning opening poem, which effectively channels Hannah Weiner's "Radcliffe and Guatemalan Women," juxtaposing Mayor Bloomberg's speech defending his eviction of the Zuccotti Park occupiers with the protestors' demands. Speaking of Weiner's poem, he observes that it "provides a really interesting use of appropriation and for arranging texts in particular ways, even just putting them beside one another in a very crude way." While much of the set is political in tone, there are also a number of pieces inspired by Donovan's interest in dance, movement and somatics, including "Two Dances for Leavening" and "Dumps (after Jennifer Scappettone)."

You can listen to two other events from the Cy Press series, including recordings of Stephanie Young, Brandon Brown, Arlo Quint and John Coletti on our homepage for the series.

PennSound Classics: "Burd Ellen," Performed by Ruth Perry

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 02:04:53 EST

The latest addition to our PennSound Classics page takes us to eighteenth century Scotland for "Burd Ellen," a exemplery ballad by Anna Gordon Brown, transcribed by her nephew, Robert Scott. Over at Jacket2, Al Filreis discusses the origins of the new recording and how it came to PennSound:

Ruth Perry of MIT [shown at left] has written a chapter for a volume being edited by Ellen Pollak, A Cultural History of Women in the Age of Enlightenment, to be published by Berg/Palgrave. This work will be part of an illustrated, six-volume Cultural History of Women being assembled with a general audience in mind. Ruth Perry's topic is Anna Gordon Brown, whose repertoire of English ballads was the first to be tapped and written down by antiquarians and literary scholars in the eighteenth century, at a time when scholars feared that the oral tradition was in danger of disappearing forever. It turns out that Ruth Perry, aside from being an eminent scholar of the ballad tradition in English, is a talented ballad singer herself. As of today, PennSound has added to its "Classics" page a studio recording of Perry performing "Burd Ellen," generally deemed to be one of the most beautiful of Brown's ballads. Ruth transcribes "Burd Ellen" in her forthcoming chapter, and discusses it as well. It is the hope of Ellen Pollak that the published book will refer to the PennSound URL so that readers can have easy permanent access to the recording, without the need of a CD inserted into the book. We at PennSound are happy to help with this project and any similar endeavor.

You can read more about the history of the piece in Filreis' J2 commentary, and to listen to "Burd Ellen" and many more interpretations of pre-recording poetry — from the ancient Greeks to Walt Whitman — be sure to visit PennSound Classics.

PennSound and Politics: Barrett Watten, 1999

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:32:21 EST

Earlier this week, Brian Ang posted his latest PennSound & Politics commentary, focusing on a 1999 reading by Barrett Watten at the Kelly Writers House, which collages poetry and criticism from 1-10 (1980), Bad History (1998), Poetics Journal 10: 'Knowledge' (1998), and criticism eventually collected in The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2003)."

After cataloguing the various excerpts, Ang considers each in greater detail:

Watten begins with "Mode Z," the first poem in 1-10, the book strategically chosen to begin the non-chronological Frame (1971-1990). Watten adapts this organizational gesture to the composition of the poetry reading. 'Mode Z' consists of New Sentences calling for the clearing of the past and the present agency to construct the future: 'Could we have those trees cleared out of the way? / And the houses, volcanoes, empires?' 'Prove to me now that you have finally undermined / your heroes.... Start writing autobiography.' Its repetition in 1999 reaffirms its permanent revolution, self-critically exceeding Watten's own subjectivity, since in the nineteen years since 1-10 a new generation of poets has developed with Watten as a hero to be potentially undermined, evidenced by the adulatory introduction by the younger Carine Daly.

Here's how Ang concludes the commentary:

The alternation of "Non-Events" and Bad History is a superb pairing to close the reading considering its obsession with history. Bad History's back cover reads, "the poem looks back on the decades previous and forward toward — a duration of events, which, because the poem is in history, do not cease to occur. The poem, too, becomes the event of its own recording." Within the poetry reading's special temporality, sections of Bad History's "event of its own recording" and the "duration of events" that were its occasion and the "Non-Events" "generating meanings that would be extended, I hoped, almost indefinitely" can be seized by their organization for their possibilities of knowledge. The reading, too, becomes the event of its own recording, and because it and its contents are in history, they do not cease to occur, as expressed by "Non-Events" and reading's final line: "The manual is rewritten one word at a time."

Stay tuned for Ang's next commentary on Bruce Andrews' Segue Series reading at Double Happiness in April 2001. You can read that and all of his other "PennSound and Politics" commentaries on Jacket2

PoemTalk 47: Inalienable Writes

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 21:09:44 EST

Late last week, we released the forty-seventh episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series. Here's host Al Filreis' write-up of the new show from the PoemTalk blog on Jacket2:

Rosmarie Waldrop's book Shorter American Memory consists of prose poems collaged from documents collected in Henry Beston's American Memory, a book of the late 1930s evincing an Americanist zeal for early documents. Beston's historicism seemed a liberal effort to restore and include in the American story, as it was being retold during the Depression, a wide range of Native American as well as both obscure and classic "founding" or "first encounter" Euro-American writings. By appying various constraints to these documents, Waldrop rewrites Beston by "taking liberties" — an intentional pun on her part — with the gist of the anthology and its very length. In doing so, she (to quote her publishers at Paradigm Press) "unearths compelling clues into America's perception of its own past, developing a vision of America vital for its intelligence, wit & compassion."

We at PoemTalk decided to take a close look at one of these prose poems, "Shorter American Memory of the Declaration of Independence." A performance of this poem, preceded by a short introduction, was recorded at Buffalo in 1992. The main work of that reading was to present many chapters from Key into the Language of America, a project related to that of Shorter American Memory in several ways we mention in our discussion. As a warm-up to Key, she read three of her writings-through Beston: ours on the Declaration, a second on Salem, and a third on "the American Character According to [George] Santayana." Here is a link to Waldrop's PennSound page, where these and many other recordings are linked.

Al felt especially pleased to be joined on this occasion by Jessica Lowenthal (the poet, Director of the Writers House, and former student of Waldrop at Brown), Julia Bloch (co-editor of Jacket2), and Johanna Drucker, who was visiting us from Los Angeles that day for a talk on materiality and aesthetics, which turned out, unsurprisingly, to be stunningly suggestive and exciting.

This episode of PoemTalk was, we think, masterfully edited and sound-adjusted by our long-time editor, Steve McLaughlin. Thanks to the digitorial work of Danny Snelson, Shorter American Memory has been made available in its entirety as a PDF downloadable from Ubu Editions.

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. Thanks, as always, for listening!

Nick Piombino and Toni Simon: "Contradicta: Aphorisms," 2011

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:17:38 EST

We'll stay with the spirit of cine-poetics as we close the week out with a new video from Nick Piombino.

This past January, Piombino read from his latest book, Contradicta: Aphorisms, at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, where he was accompanied by his wife, Toni Simon, who projected new drawings inspired by her collages from that collection. Complete audio from that event is available on PennSound's Piombino author page, however it's missing the charming collaborative interplay between word and image. That's why we're happy today to highlight a new video, created by Simon, which combines a brief excerpt from that event with the artist's illustrations.

Contradicta: Aphorisms was published by Green Integer in 2010. On the publisher's page for the book, we find the poet's explanation of the collection's concept and construction:

"Inspired by the notion of the dialectic in the work of philosophers such as Hegel and Bachelard, Piombino created his idea of paired aphorisms he calls contradicta, recasting the classic form of the great aphorists such as La Rochefoucauld, Blake, and Emerson in a contemporary context.

Instead of presenting a single point of view, the pairs reflect on and resonate with each other, and sometimes even contradict one another. Piombino has said that the contradicta replicate some aspects of psychoanalysis in which two individual viewpoints are juxtaposed, working together to achieve understanding and insight. Piombino's poetic, wise and witty aphorisms are well complemented by the humor, warmth and lyricism of Toni Simon's collages, which offer a telling slant on the contradicta, as well their own vivid visual dimension."

You can watch this video, and listen to the complete reading, along with many other recordings spanning four decades on Piombino's PennSound author page.

Anya Lewin: How to Be European

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 01:54:20 EST

Over the past few weeks, we've highlighted a number of recent video offerings, from Henry Hills' Money and new additions from George Kuchar to Public Access Poetry and the Paul Violi memorial reading, and today we continue that trend with Anya Lewin's short film, How to Be European.

How to Be European, created during a three-month residency at InterSpace in Sofia, Bulgaria (as part of the At Home in Europe Project) was inspired by Lewin's lessons in Bulgarian with Boris Angelov. "The lessons question who learns and who teaches and whether European identity exists for anyone but Americans?," she explains. "The work uses a mixed methodology of pre-written Socratic dialogues, bad acting, experimental visual techniques, educational television, obscure references and poetic news reading and covers concepts such as time, language, economics, flow and mobility, dog watching, and cultural presentation."

Lewin then considers the broader implications of these ideas: "Imagine a school where one learns how to be European in a changing Europe. Migration flows from East to West to East again. The EU is growing, yet doesn't include every 'European' country. It is getting more and more complicated to understand what European is and most importantly how to act European? In 1974 the sociologist Erving Goffman published his book Frame Analysis, which examined the way behaviour changes depending on the context. In a classroom we know how to act as teacher and student; can we extend this idea to Europe? When countries enter the frame of the EU do they become European?"

You can watch How to Be European on Lewin's PennSound author page, where you'll also find a number of supplemental links, including her homepage, where more of her work is on display.

PennSound and Politics: Henry Hills, 1985

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 00:01:38 EST

Brian Ang continues to explore the Language poetry scene of the late-70s and early-80s in his latest PennSound & Politics commentary for Jacket2, tackling one of my favorite pieces in our archives — Henry Hills' Money (1985), which he describes as "a fourteen minute collage film of split second shots of performances by and conversations with experimental musicians, poets, and dancers in public and intimate spaces of Manhattan."

"The indiscriminate and energetic mix of music performances, poets reading from books, and dancing combined with performers' conversations and the bustle of the streets enacts the mutual conditioning of cultural production with the structures of lived experience," he continues. "The confluences of lived experience, peculiarly intense in urban areas, form the consciousness for producing music, poetry, and dance which in turn materially constitute culture's institutions in the superstructure and the subjects produced out of them." Ang then goes on to discuss the "atomized" aesthetics — in terms of both gesture and language — that Hills' quick-shifting cinematography yields before offering, as a final appraisal, "Money is a formal and representative joyous affirmation of counter-hegemonic experimental arts culture: 'the' 'analysis of this' 'you know' 'I don?t know' 'you know' 'anti' 'capitalist society.'"

You can read that and all of his other "PennSound and Politics" commentaries on Jacket2 and stay tuned as Ang jumps forward in his next post to address Barrett Watten's November 1999 set at the Kelly Writers House.

Susan Schultz: 2011 KWH Reading and Talk, Plus J2 Interview

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 16:06:38 EDT

We close this week out with a treasure trove of new materials from the marvelous Susan Schultz, including audio, video and an interview transcript over at Jacket2.

Schultz traveled from her home base of Hawaii to our own Kelly Writers House for a multi-day "mini-residency" this fall, which included a September 14th reading of new poems from the forthcoming collection, Memory Cards, and a September 15th lunchtime talk with Al Filreis. Audio and video from each of these events has been posted on Schultz's PennSound author page.

We're also very happy to launch "Insistent Memory" today on Jacket2, a transcription of a classic Cross Cultural Poetics conversation with Leonard Schwartz, recorded December 22, 2008 and aired as part of program #180 in the series, "Dura/Dementia" (one of five Cross Cultural Poetics shows featuring Schultz that you can hear on PennSound). Schwartz was serendipitously visiting Philadelphia during Schultz's visit and the two took part in a PoemTalk recording session, a neat reciprocation of sorts, since Schultz's Dementia Blog was the subject of PoemTalk #40, for which Schwartz was one of the panelists. Schultz also edited an ambitious feature on Pacific Poetries, which was a major part of Jacket2's launch.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Whenever We Feel Like It Reading, 2011

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:16:40 EDT

Today we're highlighting recently posted audio and video from Rachel Blau DuPlessis's March 3, 2011 reading at the Kelly Writers House as part of the Whenever We Feel Like It reading series.

The poet was introduced by series co-curator, Michelle Taransky, who begins by observing that, "If Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a theater and a library, she is that library where strategy is strategies, and reading and writing happen in halls that are doors that are windows, and Drafts are the stage directions of the furniture and the characters, and in ever already-existing hole there is a 'how' — that reason to write towards, towards a feminist practice that may disrupt other practices, may render another order, where the other writes these Drafts to an other." "The Drafts are pieces," she continues, "The Drafts are our ancestors and the figure about to be figured. It might sound like what is owned is owed and what is marked is marred. Within the who as a how and the how is hero here. Drafts is a built place, always being built again, where reflection and invention keep the unsettled observation and make these texts at once perfect and incomplete. Drafts identify the problem of how to write and how to keep writing. That there is a process here where autobiography, textual analysis and revision make sites of struggle that are also sites of revelation and remaking, and difference is cast across every page and breath."

Due to a last-minute cancellation by Elizabeth Robinson, DuPlessis' set goes for the full hour alloted, and she begins with a number of selections from her absent reading partner before moving on to her own recent work. You can listen to and download the complete event, or watch streaming video on DuPlessis' PennSound author page.

DuPlessis was recently honored with a day-long celebration of her life and work at Temple University, and while promoting that event on Jacket2, we also announced and previewed a forthcoming J2 feature on DuPlessis, organized by Patrick Pritchett. As a PennSound tie-in to that impressive body of work, we hope to have recordings from the Temple conference, as well as a special Studio 111 session of new poems that I recorded with Rachel last winter. Keep an eye out for all of those very exciting things in the near future.

PennSound and Politics: LEGENDs in Their Time

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 14:42:01 EDT

Today, Brian Ang posted his latest PennSound & Politics commentary: "Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Ron Silliman, 1981", which addresses two recordings made in Bruce Andrews' apartment during the spring of 1981: a March 6th conversation between Andrews, Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman, and a group reading from LEGEND featuring four of the book's five authors (Andrews, Bernstein, Silliman and Ray DiPalma), recorded four days later.

Here's Ang's introduction to that latter recording, framed through the poets' self-reflexive appraisal of the Language poetry scene that concludes the former conversation:

The LEGEND book and reading can be understood as expressions of such intransigent multiplicity: strategies for poetic communization. LEGEND consists of twenty-six sections in systematic compositional groups: five single-authored sections by each of the five authors, ten double-authored sections by every combination of the five authors, ten triple-authored sections by every combination of the five authors, and one section by all five authors. The recognizability of each author's contributions is consistently effaced by the sublimation of subjectivity to each collaborative section's unifying formal characteristics, which enables complementary group performance strategies. The book's systematicity is reflected in the logic of the selections for the reading: two double-authored sections, three triple-authored sections, and the quintuple-authored section.

Ang's next commentary will continue to mine the Language poetry scene during this time period, focusing on Henry Hills' 1985 film, Money. You can read that and all of his other "PennSound and Politics" commentaries on Jacket2

Frank Samperi: New Author Page and Four Complete Books

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:42:31 EDT

We close the week out with a new author page for Frank Samperi, featuring a number of his out-of-print books as well as a rare recording of the much-esteemed poet.

In this forty-seven minute reading — recorded at New York City's Ear Inn in 1987 — Samperi offers a wide-ranging survey of his poetic output, sharing selections from The Fourth (1973), The Prefiguration (1971), Morning and Evening (1967), Branches (1965) and Of Light (1965), among others. Gil Ott describes this historic event in an interview with CAConrad on the Philly Sound blog: "He gave a once in a lifetime reading at the Ear Inn. It's funny, because sometimes you meet people at the Ear Inn and you expect something from them that they're not. I guess that's true of many things. I expected this guy to look like a monk. And he shows up with his wife, who is wearing a frilly outfit, with fur around the edges. Everything I saw in them bespoke a struggle to maintain a middle class existence. Anyway, he sat down and read, and he read very softly. I have long-sought a recording of that reading, but apparently, due to the Ear Inn's technological failures, no recording is available. But it was beautiful! You really had to listen hard, because his voice was so soft, and the microphones weren't working."

We've also recently added four collections of Samperi's poetry to the PEPC Library: Quadrifariam (1971), The Prefiguration (1971), Lumen Gloriae (1973) and Day (1998), which was posthumously transcribed from 1970 notebook. Charles Bernstein enthusiastically announced these new additions on Jacket2 — the last three books earlier this month, and Quadrifariam just a few days ago.

These texts and recordings come to us through the generosity of Claudia Samperi Warren, the poet's daughter, who runs a wonderful blog dedicated to her father's life and work. Aside from the many wonderful resources there, we'd also like to refer listeners interested in learning more about the poet to Jamie Townsend's 2008 essay, "Spiritual Man, Modern Man: the Poetics of Frank Samperi, published in Jacket #36.

Martin Corless-Smith: New Author Page

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 03:00:36 EDT

Our latest author page is for British-born poet Martin Corless-Smith. Intrepid audio technician Jeff Boruszak was visiting Idaho — where Corless-Smith runs the MFA program in Creative Writing at Boise State University — and made plans for an informal and intimate recording session at the poet's home earier this month, and today, we unveil the results.

The poet reads exclusively from his latest collection, English Fragments: A Brief History of the Soul (Fence Books, 2010), sharing twenty-eight selections altogether, including "Hic Jacet," "Song of the Swallow," "M's Dream," "A solemn game" and "Diurnal." Corless-Smith's author page is rounded out with three appearances on Cross Cultural Poetics. Most recently, episode #211, "Emblems of Desire," where he reads from "Rome Poems;" as well as episode #75, "Out of Authorship," where he reads from Swallows and episode #37, "The Other Tradition," in which he shares poems from Nota and discusses Rick Caddell's Writing In The Dark and the Collected Poems of Basil Bunting.

While in Idaho, Jeff also made arrangements for PennSound to host a variety of recordings from the Boise State MFA Reading Series, and we'll be posting them to the site in the near future. For now, however, here's a preview reading of our own Charles Bernstein, recorded this past March.

George Kuchar: Two New Films

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 11:32:12 EDT

Last month, we were saddened to have to report the news of iconic filmmaker George Kuchar's death. Today, we remember him in a happier light as we share two new additions to his PennSound author page

First up, we have Garden of Goodies (2006), which the filmmaker describes as follows: "This being an annual, Xmas holiday video, you can be guaranteed good cheer on a platter and maybe a plop in a bowl or two. In this video we visit a landmark hotel in Denver, Colorado, and then proceed to catch up on what's new with my mom in The Bronx (some BIG changes!). Sprinkled here and there are many happy goodies and a few spicy ones too. It's a video full of young, old and middle-aged mayhem on a positive spiral of delightful drainage."

The mood somewhat darker in Temple of Torment (also 2006). "There is so much to absorb," Kuchar tells us. "[T]he wetness from the sky. The hooded figure in the box. A big plate of pasta, and that chair on wheels. Messages of moral guidance clash with actions that are on a collision course with dilapidation. And through it all the water runs, the fridge is full and hearts yearn for that which mellows the melody of God's glockenspiel. For the winds of change rattle the bones of the grim reaper as he swings his scythe in rhythm to a cacophony of corruption intrinsic to this orchestra pit of purgatorial preludes and egg laying swan songs."

You can see both of these films and many others, along with several documentary videos on Kuchar and an expansive three-part Close Listening program with his close friend Charles Bernstein on his PennSound author page.

PennSound and Politics: Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, 1979

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:23:49 EDT

This week's focus on PennSound/Jacket2 cross-polination comes to a close with Brian Ang's latest PennSound & Politics commentary: "Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, 1979", which focuses on Andrews' and Bernstein's March 14, 1979 appearance on Howe's WBAI-Pacifica radio program.

"Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein's interview with Susan Howe captures their early poems and thinking about Language Writing poetics," he begins. "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was just over a year old with Number 7 to be published that month. I will investigate this formative moment for the ideas that continue to be crucial, that were effaced, and that enter into productive crisis in the present." He continues:

Andrews and Bernstein sketch the by-now-familiar program of Language Writing, an invocation of writing's "modernist project... an exploration of the intrinsic qualities of the media... which from our point of view is language... not some concocted verse tradition... through academic discourse and... book reviewers in The New York Times." The "repression of knowledge" through such academic and publishing institutions contributes to a deficiency in "people's awareness of what poetry and what other writing forms there are." In addition, Andrews and Bernstein interrogate the very idea of genre in writing and propose "less intrinsic reasons for [the novel, philosophy, and poetry to be] separate than for music to be thought of as separate from painting or painting from writing."

You can continue reading here and as Ang kindly points out, you'll find an edited transcript of the poets' conversation in L=A=N=G=U=A=G-E Supplement #3 over at Eclipse. Ang will continue to explore the work of these poets during this time period in his next commentary, which will focus on two of my favorite recordings we uncovered in the tape archives of Ron Silliman: a lengthy recording of a candid conversation between Andrews, Bernstein and Silliman from March 6, 1981, and the three poets, along with Ray DiPalma reading from their collaborative book, LEGEND, recorded four days later. Look for that at Jacket2 on Sunday.

Stephen Ratcliffe: New Audio and Video Plus Massive Jacket2 Feature

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:31:37 EDT

Our week of synchronized content on PennSound and Jacket2 continues with some very exciting new recordings from Stephen Ratcliffe and a tremendous and diverse career-spanning feature on the poet over on our sister site.

We begin with two videos dating from 1987, both recorded at San Francisco State University: a a fifty-minute April 30th interview with David Bromige and a thirty-five minute reading from October 15th. These are joined by "Ideas About Space," a March 9, 2011 lecture for Molissa Fenley's dance class at Mills College.

We're also very happy to unveil a complete performance of Ratcliffe's Remarks on Color / Sound, recorded on May 16, 2010 at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts and divided into twelve segments, which add up to approximately thirteen-and-a-half hours of material. These new recordings join several other recent additions, including, most notably, the "On Natural Language" series of conversations with Robert Grenier.

As if all of this wasn't more than enough Ratcliffian goodness for one day, then head over to Jacket2 for "Listening to Stephen Ratcliffe", an extensive feature organized by my co-editor Julia Bloch. Here's the opening of her introductory note:

In his 1951 preface to Paterson, William Carlos Williams writes that the long poem "is also the search of the poet for his language": in the long poem Williams found a form whose discursive capaciousness lends an ongoing quality to that search both in speech and on the page, a search whose desired object — a text, a kind of speech — is never completely bounded. We search for a certain kind of text, but Williams also seeks to draw upon the rushing, watery noise of the Passaic Falls, which he says "seemed to me to be a language which we were and are seeking." The Falls in their ongoingness mimic the modern search for language as much as they also teach us something about how we are constituted by that language.

This intersection of place and language could be said to inform the work of poet (and surfer) Stephen Ratcliffe, whose ongoing project to document, frame, and reframe daily detail now occupies thousands of pages in print and online, from 2002's Portraits & Repetition to 2011's CLOUD / RIDGE and in three 1,000-page books ? HUMAN / NATURE, Remarks on Color / Sound, and Temporality ? available at Editions Eclipse, and whose work Jacket2 here highlights in critical appraisals, reviews, interviews, photographs, and recordings.

Along with commentaries on Ratcliffe's poetry and critical prose by Vincent Broqua, Michael Cross, Norman Fischer, Ariel Goldberg, and Carol Watts, we offer conversational interviews between Ratcliffe and Linda Russo, Jonathan Skinner, and Jeffrey Schrader; two essays by Ratcliffe that offer extended meditations on sound and the materiality of the word; [and] poems by Ratcliffe from his forthcoming Selected Days (Counterpath Press)

You can start exploring this ambitious feature here and to browse through the complementary audio and video at PennSound, click on the title above to visit PennSound's Stephen Ratcliffe author page. Finally, I'd like to thank PennSound's wonderful Jeffrey Boruszak for his tireless work processing all of the recordings we're highlighting today, along with all of our other recent Ratcliffe additions.

New Recordings from Thom Donovan, Plus New Jacket2 Essay

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 01:02:59 EDT

We're very happy to kick this week off with a plethora of materials from the marvelous Thom Donovan — new recordings of Donovan reading, new recordings from Donovan of other poets reading, and a new essay on somatic poetics over at Jacket2:

First up are five new recordings of Donovan. Moving backwards from the most recent date, we start with a July 9, 2011 appearance (with Dana Ward and Joseph Bradshaw) as part of Philadelphia's Crescent Reading Series and a February 8, 2011 reading at Brooklyn's Zebulon Cafe (which also featured CAConrad). Next, we have a September 2010 set at the Kootenay School of Writing and a July 18, 2010 reading at Oakland's 21 Grand. Finally, we have recordings of an event with Steve Farmer at Los Angeles' Poetic Research Bureau in July 2010.

Donovan was also kind enough to send along a number of recordings he's made in his travels: several are related to Rob Halpern's September 2010 appearance at the Kootenay School of Writing, including reciprocal readings/talks with Taylor Brady (one gives a lengthy discursive introduction, the other reads, and vice-versa) and a talk on Amy Balkin. Finally, we have a September 2010 talk and Q&A session by Stephen Collis in Vancouver (which is part of our new Collis author page).

Over at Jacket2, we're proud to present "Somatic Poetics," Donovan's groundbreaking exploration of the form — "part essay, part proposition, part thinking in motion (provisional, unfinished, disruptive)" — that was written in response to Patrick Durgin's invitation in spring 2010 to address "somatics in regards to recent writing practices and poetics." "Through the following text I take excursions with various contemporaries," Donovan explains. "These excursions are not meant to be representative by any means (the following is not meant to be a definitive mapping of a field, manifesto, polemic, or 'last word') but the continuation of a discourse that has become visible to me in the past few years. All the propositions here are hopefully extendable."

PoemTalk 46: Writing Through Ezra

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:10:08 EDT

Today we released the forty-sixth episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series. Here's host Al Filreis' write-up of the new show from the PoemTalk blog on Jacket2:

PoemTalk travelled to Bard College, where we gathered with Charles Bernstein, Pierre Joris, and Bard's own Joan Retallack to talk about Jackson Mac Low's Words nd Ends from Ez (1989). The project was composed in ten parts, one part each for sections (sometimes called "decades") of Ezra Pound's lifework, The Cantos. We chose to discuss the penultimate part of Mac Low's diastic written-through work, a poem based on phrases, words, and letters drawn from — and in some sense about — Pound's near-final cantos, Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII. Mac Low's constraint, for which he preferred the term "quasi-intentional" to the term "chance," involved the letters forming the name E Z R A P O U N D. Words, phrases, and letters were extracted from the original cantos based on those letters and on their placement within words. Charles, Pierre, Joan, and Al Filreis explain this in detail, although we cannot quite agree as to whether Mac Low was being absolutely strict in the application of the diastic method. As Bernstein notes several times, this particular procedure is one of the more complex Mac Low used. Nonetheless, it's the sense of the group that when semantic meaning seems to be created, it has about it, as Pierre Joris happily notes, the special pleasure of serendipity, and means all the more. Thus the poem's commentary on Pound, its both aesthetic and ethical positioning with respect to Pound, is profounder than it might have been otherwise, had the poem been a "sincerely felt" subjective lyric response to the final Poundian ethos — an oscillation between stubborn repetition of earlier modes and mea culpa.

We couldn't help thinking about John Cage's writings through Pound in connection with this work. During this part of the discussion Joan Retallack said the following:

Mac Low admired Pound more than Cage did. One of the things that was, to me, so always intersting about the way Cage worked was that he thought out his procedures very carefully in advance, not so that he would know what was going to happen in the parts of the structure that would allow chance operations to choose the points, as he would put it, in the text, but because he knew the way you choose your procedure has a lot to do with extremely formal elements ultimately. He chose to let more of Pound in [more, that is, than Mac Low does based on his procedure in our poem] and this was ultimately more unpleasant for Cage because he didn't like the Pound. I think the reason to continue reading Pound and to continue the agonistic relationship we all have to have with Pound when we read [him] is that it is such a presentation of the complexities and the horrifying things that can happen to a mind that is going in directions that are passionate without empathy, without contact with others.

Notwithstanding the agonism, and a non-Freudian/non-Bloomian version of anxiety of influence, Pierre Joris takes us back to the great pleasure we derive from the performance of this poem, with its multilinguistic melodrama, its playfully exaggerated accents — perhaps part of the rejoinder to Pound as a matter of sense but perhaps, too, a result of the joy of bespeaking words extracted from the languages of The Cantos, mostly liberated from its topical tyrannies. "This is sound work that frees the poem from a heavy logos," says Charles. "I think the important thing," says Pierre, "is that it has to be heard first. And it has to be read aloud. 'Hey read that. Get your mouth around it.'" And we agreed on the primacy of Mac Low's performance as a somatic experience.

We are grateful to Joan Retallack and her colleagues at Bard College for arranging our recording session, and to the audience of some 40 students, faculty, and others who made up a positively responsive live audience for only the second time in PoemTalk's run (the other was PoemTalk #10 on Stein). We also wish to thank James LaMarre, our longtime director-engineer, who travelled from Philadelphia to Annandale-on-Hudson to help us with the recording; and, as always, Steve McLaughlin, PoemTalk's original editor.

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. Thanks, as always, for listening!

Notes on PennSound: Unraveling Readings

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:02:59 EDT

While our last post celebrated the start of Brian Ang's new "PennSound and Politics" commentaries for Jacket2, I also wanted to make sure that our listeners didn't miss out on Eric Baus' final "Notes on PennSound" commentary, "Unraveling Readings," which "focuses on writers reading the work of other writers." "I was interested in recordings that did more than simply pay homage or celebrate an influence," he writes. "The experience of listening to the following recordings was often one of hearing some aspect of the text come loose through the reader's voice instead of hearing the text being inscribed into a fixed state."

This commentary addresses work from a trio of authors. First up is Rachel Blau DuPlessis reading from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land at a 1998 Kelly Writers House event celebrating the Poems for the Millennium anthologies. Next up, we have Caroline Bergvall reading from Via, her pastiche of English-language translations of the famous opening lines of Dante's Inferno, and Baus concludes by considering Amina Cain's readings from the work of Clarice Lispector.

I'd like to personally thank Eric for doing an outstanding job during his six-month tenure as Jacket2's first PennSound commentator — he's certainly set the bar high for those who'll follow him. You can read all of his posts here, and don't forget to visit his PennSound author page, where you can listen to a wide array of readings.

Two New "PennSound and Politics" Commentaries by Brian Ang at Jacket2

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:49:32 EDT

Last month we announced Brian Ang's selections for our latest set of PennSound Featured Resources and noted that he'd soon be coming onboard as a new Jacket2 commentator on recordings from the PennSound archives. Since then, he's posted two wonderful pieces and we wanted to make sure that our listeners had a chance to check them out.

Brian's first post focused on William Carlos Williams' May 16, 1952 lecture and reading to the Indiana College English Association Conference at Hanover College: "I inaugurate my column with William Carlos Williams," Ang writes, "his contradictory restlessness for the modern makes him a perpetually dynamic site for thought. I chose this fiery document of late Williams for the productive tensions of his long-standing commitments encountering new historical particulars, especially between his Americanism and America's emergent post-World War II international character."

Earlier today, Brian launched his second commentary, this one focusing on the work of LeRoi Jones, Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan in 1965: "The Berkeley Poetry Conference occurred from July 12 to July 25, 1965, organized by Donald Allen, Richard Baker, Robert Duncan, and Thomas Parkinson. LeRoi Jones was scheduled on the highest tier of participation, to deliver a lecture, a seminar, and a reading, but declined to participate and was replaced by Ed Dorn. I will investigate the divergence of thought of Jones and the Conference behind the refusal, and what might be achieved in thinking them in conjunction, by examining a contemporaneous recording of Jones, introducing his piece as 'ideas I have about theatre circa January 1965,' with recordings from the Conference. I have focused on the recordings of Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan for having the strongest social and political implications for this conjunction."

With these two fascinating and richly-detailed investigations, Ang's tenure as a Jacket2 commentator is off to a fantastic start. Check here for new commentaries every week and pay attention to the end of each post where Brian lets readers know what the focus of his piece will be, so that readers can listen ahead — next week, for example, he'll address Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews' 1979 appearance on Susan Howe's Pacifica Radio program.

John Kinsella: New Author Page

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 02:43:06 EDT

Al Filreis recently posted on Jacket2 announcing our new author page for Australian poet John Kinsella. There you'll find three recordings from the 1990s and the early part of this decade.

The earliest of these, and the one Filreis highlighted in his commentary, was a November 1996 reading at SUNY-Buffalo, where he was introduced by Susan Schultz. "On the face of it, John Kinsella seems to be leading the lives of several writers," she begins, citing his poetry, editing and work in prose and drama, before discussing his aesthetic diversity: "John is, on the one hand, a pastoral poet (or an anti-pastoral, as he would insist)," whereas his alter-ego "writes poems influenced by, but different from, American Language poetry." Kinsella's set consists of eight poems (including "Warhol at Wheatlands," "Aspects of the Pagan" and "Echidna") and concludes with a brief discussion of classical poetry in Australia and aboriginal genocide.

You can also listen to Kinsella's 1997 appearance on the BBC Radio Three program Night Waves, where, along with Robin Blaser, Denise Riley, Peter Blegvad and Iain Sinclair, he discussed "Relocating the High Lyric Voice." Our most recent recording is a 2003 appearance at the Kelly Writers House, which includes a number of discursive passages concerned with Australia and its culture, along with more than two dozen poems. To start exploring these recordings, click on the title above.

Paul Violi Memorial Reading at the Poetry Project

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:06:54 EDT

Last April, we reported the sad news of the death of Paul Violi and put together an author page for him, which housed an April 1979 Segue Series reading at the Ear Inn and pointing listeners towards his EPC page and his own homepage. Today, thanks to the efforts of Charles North, Tony Towle and the Poetry Project, we're very happy to be able to add video footage from a memorial reading held in his honor there this past June.

Hosted by North and Towle, who began and ended the evening, the tribute also included appearances from old friends and former students — including Bob Herson, Amy Lawless, Ed Friedman, George Green, Donna Brook, David Shapiro, Eileen Myles, Andrew McCarron, Michael Quattrone, Allison Power, David Lehman, Mark Statman, Reagan Upshaw, Karen Koch and Bill Zavatsky — who shared memories of Violi and read favorite poems from his collected works. Listeners who missed this event will be glad to know that Lehman has organized another tribute event for Violi, which will take place at the New School on December 2nd.