PennSound Daily

Stacy Szymaszek: New Author Page

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:22:46 EDT

Today we're highlighting yet another new author page featuring another fantastic poet — this time, it's Stacy Szymaszek, author of the just-released collection, Hyperglossia, and Artistic Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery. A little less than a month ago, we highlighted Szymaszek's recent Segue Series reading with Patrick Durgin, and since then we've worked with the poet to gather together from the PennSound archives and elsewhere to create a broad retrospective of Szymaszek's work.

Moving backwards from that May 30th reading, we have Szymaszek's contribution to "The Shape of Discourse: George Oppen Centennial Symposium," organized by Poets House, then no less than four recordings dating from 2007. First, we have her appearance on Cross-Cultural Poetics' program on Litmus Press, during which she read from Emptied of All Ships, followed by short performances as part of the kari edwards Memorial Reading at Zinc Bar and the "Queering Language" Launch Reading at Philadelphia's Robin's Books, as well as a reading as part of the Just Buffalo Small Press Reading Series at Rust Belt Books.

Next, there's a January 15, 2006 Segue Series Reading (also at the Bowery Poetry Club), featuring the poems "Shift at Oars," "Radio Silence," "Emptied of All Ships" and a lengthy excerpt from "Hyperglossia," and finally, our earliest reading, dating from April 2003 as part of the Discrete Series in Chicago, features selections from Pasolini Poems, as well as "A Walk With a Cup of Jasmine Tea" and "Roman Evening," before concluding with "Some Mariners."

We at PennSound have a tremendous appreciation for Stacy Szymaszek's work — both as a poet and at the Poetry Project — and so are very happy to be able to share this modest survey of her work with our listeners and her fans throughout the world. From her earliest chapbooks through to Hyperglossia, and looking forward to a new project inspired by New York City's modern potter's field, Hart's Island, you'll be sure to find something you'll love on PennSound's Stacy Szymaszek author page.

Tina Darragh: New Author Page

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:19:50 EDT

As the summer slowly unfolds, our astounding army of interns — Rebekah Caton, Rebekah Larsen and Anna Zalokostas — continue to process tapes at an impressive clip, resulting in a slew of new recordings and new author pages, including our new Tina Darragh page, which we launched today.

Bringing together thirty years' worth of recordings, our Darragh page brings together a number of recordings that were already available on PennSound, along with a few new additions. We begin with a trio of Segue Series readings, including sets at the Bowery Poetry Club in 2009, 2007 along with a vintage reading at the Ear Inn in 1987. There's also a 2001 recording from the Lytle Shaw-curated Line Reading Series at New York City's Drawing Center, and a 1998 appearance on the fourth episode of PhillyTalks alongside Jena Osman, which is available as fourteen individual files (alongside a PDF transcription of the program). Finally, we've added a link to Charles Bernstein's miniature video portrait of Darragh, shot in 2006.

To this already-ample body of work, we've added two new additions. First, there's Darragh's 1994 reading at SUNY Buffalo as part of the Wednesdays @ 4Plus series, which includes the poems, "Scale Sliding," "A Pefect One of Those" and "The Adverb Fan," all three of which, in varying ways, "juxtapos[e] narrative explorations with dictionary transcriptions." We've also added the 1979 Widemouth Tapes release, Xa, which also features Doug Lang, and have also created a Doug Lang author page to house his half of that recording and a 1978 Segue Series Reading at the Ear Inn. Xa contains a number of poems which were eventually published in the 1981 Sun and Moon collection, on the corner to off the corner, which interested listeners can read in its entirety at Eclipse.

We're proud to be able to present a career-spanning selection of recordings from this influential poet, and encourage you to click on the title above to start exploring.

Laura Elrick: New Author Page

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:43:41 EDT

We're closing out the week with a just-completed author page for poet Laura Elrick, who's currently at Naropa University as part of the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Over the years, we've accumulated a number of recordings featuring Elrick, and are glad to have finally brought them together in one place, together with a number of additional recordings provided by the poet.

Most recently, we have "Stalk," a compelling 22-minute video/poem commissioned for the Positions Colloquium at Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing last August, which traces the motions of an anonymous figure dressed in the manner of a Guantanamo Bay detainee as it filters through daytime street traffic in Manhattan, accompanied by excerpts from Department of Defense interrogation logs.

This is followed by an appearance on Ceptuetics Radio in April of the same year, in which she shares five multivocal audio pieces distilled from the text of her 2005 collection, Fantasies in Permeable Structures and chats with host Kareem Estefan about "constraint, chronologies and positioning the subject in permeable structures." Elrick also reads from that volume as part of her 2004 appearance on tangentradio, hosted by Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff, while the poet's 2005 appearance on Cross-Cultural Poetics, hosted by Leonard Schwartz, showcases readings from from her earlier collection, Skincerity.

Finally, our archive is rounded out by a pair of pieces taken from the second issue of the online journal, textsound — "Zoon" and "Spool" — and Elrick's contribution to the Segue Series' 2006 Eco Panel at the Bowery Poetry Club, which also featured Ed Roberson, Jill Magi and Karen Anderson. We've also included a link to video of a wonderful performance of Hannah Weiner's "Romeo and Juliet" by Elrick, Kaplan Harris and Rodrigo Toscano, staged as part of the 2007 celebration of Hannah Weiner's Open House, edited by Patrick Durgin. We're happy to have formally added Elrick to our roster of poets, and look forward to adding new material from her in the future.

Anne Tardos: Refrigerator Defrosting and Cross-Cultural Poetics

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:25:18 EDT

Today, we're very happy to present a number of new recordings by Anne Tardos — a newly recovered audio experiment from the mid-70s, and the poet, artist and composer's recent appearance on Cross-Cultural Poetics, where she reads a selection of her latest work.

Tardos recently sent us an MP3 digitization of a tape she'd made in 1975, transforming the mundane work of defrosting her refrigerator into a wonderful experiment in found sound, which revels in the icebox's deep metallic resonances and the steady tinkling syncopation of the freezer's dripping. On top of this incidental soundtrack, Tardos recorded a layer of vocal improvisations which waver between soprano drones and phonomenic pulses. Both the original audio of the defrosting alone and her duet with the refrigerator are included here, as well as a drawing she made of the recording setup, ("the score as it were"), an excerpt of which is seen at left. It's also worth noting that this raw track also served as the foundation of "Refrigerator Defrosting-Pseudoglossolallia," a track featuring Tardos and her husband and longtime collaborator, Jackson Mac Low, taken from the CD which accompanied Mac Low's 2006 Granary Books collection, Doings: Assorted Performance Pieces 1955-2002, which you can hear on Tardos' PennSound Author Page as well as a special page we've put together for that disc.

Our second new recording is Tardos' March 8, 2009 appearance on episode #186 of Leonard Schwartz's Cross-Cultural Poetics, "You and I," where she appeared alongside Charles Simic. In this program, Tardos discusses her latest collection, 2008's I am You (Salt Publishing) and reads from all three longform poems in the collection, starting with "Going Away" (the fourth and final section of "The Aim of All Nature is Beauty"), which is followed by the first six sections from "Letting Go" (the hundred-page centerpiece of the book), before she concludes with two excerpts from the final poem, "The Letter: A Bloodbath."

Earlier this spring, Tardos sent us a link to the scores of her 1992 performance work, Among Men, which you can also hear on her PennSound author page, along with numerous other readings, performances, musical compositions and interviews, spanning more than thirty years of her creative output, and we're very proud to have so grand a collection of her work available for our listeners. Click on the title at the top of the page to start exploring.

Two New PennSound Podcasts: Dan Saxon and George Oppen

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:42:25 EDT

Last Monday, as part of our write-up on Tony Green's visit to the Kelly Writers House, we mentioned that his conversation with PennSound co-director Al Filreis had been released as the fourteenth episode in the PennSound Podcast series. Since then, Filreis has put together two more podcasts, which we're proud to announce today.

We begin with episode #15, featuring Dan Saxon (above), a UPenn alumnus with many continued connections to the school, who is perhaps best known to fans of avant-garde poetics as the editor of the germinal rexographed journals, Poets at Les Deux Mégots and Poets at Le Metro. The history of these magazines, which chronicled the lively poetry scene in two venues predating the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, paralleled the explosion of mimeographed journals such as Ted Berrigan's "C", Lewis Warsh and Anne Waldman's Angel Hair, and Ed Sanders' Fuck You / a magazine of the arts, is recollected in Daniel Kane's marvelous All Poets Welcome: the Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. Here, in conversation with Filreis, Saxon recollects his youthful inspirations as a poet, his introduction to the downtown poetry scene, the process of assembling each issue of the journal, and the eventual end of his publications. It's compelling testimony, which provides new insights into this tremendously important moment in the development of 20th century American poetics. You can read more about this podcast on Filreis' blog.

Next, we have episode #16, a 23-minute condensed version of one of the more exciting events at the Kelly Writers House in recent memory: our George Oppen Centennial Celebration in April 2008. Organized by Thomas Devaney, the evening featured recollections, meditations and poetry by an all-star lineup including Michael Heller, Tom Mandel, Ann Lauterbach, George Economou, Stephen Cope, Ron Silliman, Filreis and Devaney himself. The podcast presents the evening's contributions by Rachel Blau DuPlessis ("Section 9: Of Being Numerous") and Bob Perelman ("Oppen's Knowledge") in their entirety, with an introduction by Filreis. You can hear audio of the entire event, as well as see photos from the evening and scans of contemporary documents brought by Mandel and Economou on our Oppen Centennial Page, and read Filreis' write-up of this new podcast on his blog.

Allen Ginsberg: New Recordings Courtesy of Robert Creeley

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:13:12 EDT

In the past week or so, we've added a pair of vintage recordings of Allen Ginsberg to the site, both of which were uncovered during our continuing archival of Robert Creeley's personal collection of reel-to-reel tapes.

We begin with Ginsberg's complete historic reading at the Vancouver Poetry Conference in July 1963 — a raucous and entertaining eighty-minute set which finds the poet both settling into his role as one of America's preeminent poetic voices, and exploring the full breadth of more than fifteen years of poetic output. Indeed, he begins with a number of pre-"Howl" compositions, first collected in 1961's Empty Mirror: Early Poems (published by Hettie and LeRoi Jones' Corinth Press), such as "How Come He Got Canned at the Ribbon Factory," "The Brick Layer's Lunch Hour," "Marijuana Notation" and "The Archetype Poem," before launching into a number of his most-beloved poems from Howl and Other Poems, Kaddish and Other Poems and Reality Sandwiches, including "Sunflower Sutra," "A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley," "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound," "The Green Automobile" "Transcription of Organ Music," "My Sad Self" and ""Psalm III." While he reads a lengthy excerpt from one of his contemporary masterpieces, "Kaddish," to close the set, it's interesting that he only half-heartedly gets five lines into "Howl" before abandoning it, citing his lack of desire to read his best-known work.

The second recording — more esoteric, perhaps, but no less interesting — features the poet in conversation with Robert Creeley, who'd invited him to read as part of the Just Buffalo reading series in October 1978. While we have not yet been able to salvage the recording of the reading itself, due to its poor quality, this two-hour discussion is undoubtedly of far greater cultural value, offering listeners an insider's view of the friendship between these two titans of American arts and letters. Starting with a brief exploration of California's Proposition Six (also known as the Briggs amendment, which would ban homosexuals from working in the state's public schools, and which was eventually defeated by the efforts of Harvey Milk, among others), the two continue, touching upon topics including the relationship between poetry and politics, and a long history of American censorship of literature.

We're very glad to be able to add these two recordings to our Allen Ginsberg author page, where you'll also find a pair of 1950s readings from the Poetry Center at the San Francisco State University, the poet's three-night residence at the Knitting Factory in 1995 (where he read his epic poetic works, "Howl," "Kaddish" and "Wichita Vortex Sutra") and his 1970 LP of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, among other recordings.

Bernadette Mayer and Lee Ann Brown: KWH 2007, Now Segmented

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:13:20 EDT

Today, we're proud to announce that one of our favorite Kelly Writers House events in recent memory is now available as individual MP3 files. On September 13, 2007, friends and long-time compatriots Bernadette Mayer and Lee Ann Brown kicked off a marvelous year of programming at the Writers House with a joint reading, which featured new works, classic poems and a new collaboration, "You'll Be Hearing from Me" (a "very New York-sounding" title, as Brown notes). Because the two poets decided to read by alternating poems, rather than in two discreet sets, we'd originally left their seventy-minute performance (which also features lengthy, intimate introductions by Charles Bernstein and Jessica Lowenthal, and a guest appearance by CAConrad, who reads Mayer's "Sonnet: You Jerk, You Didn't Call Me") intact, however we've now gone back and carefully edited the session, marking individual titles and readers, so that listeners can find their favorite selections instantly.

Highlights from the reading include a number of favorites from Mayer's latest book, Poetry State Forest (including "Rural Drama," "Chocolate Poetry Sonnet," "Images and Phrases from Shakespeare's Sonnets and Jack Kerouac's Desolation Angels" and "Inky-Dinky Parlez-Vous: Variations on SpongeBob SquarePants") along with a few classic pieces ("Failure in Infinitives" and "Sci-Fi-ed Lee Ann"), however the real treat here is hearing as-yet unreleased work from Mayer and Brown, and in particular hearing these two process-driven poets, who've consciously made poetry an integral part of their process of daily living, describe the methods by which their works are composed. Both poets recorded individual Close Listening conversations with Bernstein earlier in the day, in which they discuss their own idiosyncratic poetics and projects both old and new.

We've put together a special page for this day's events, which contains both the reading and the two Close Listening programs, as well as portraits taken by Bernstein (seen above), and you can visit that page by clicking on the title above. Also be sure to visit PennSound's individual author pages for Bernadette Mayer and Lee Ann Brown, where you'll find a treasure trove of recordings by the two, dating from the late seventies to the present, including an October 15, 1988 Segue Series reading at the Ear Inn which also features the pair reading together.

Tony Green: New Author Page

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:02:30 EDT

After a long academic year of wonderful programming at the Kelly Writers House, we often settle into an uneasy lull over the summer months — suddenly, there are far less readings to go to, far less opportunities to convene with our community of fellow writers and readers. For those reasons and more, the June 4th performance by Tony Green (who came to Philadelphia all the way from New Zealand, his first visit in two decades) was greatly appreciated by a packed Writers House audience. We've now constructed a new PennSound author page for Green, where you can listen to his complete presentation, view selected video excerpts, and also hear a new PennSound Podcast featuring Green in conversation with Al Filreis.

Green reads nearly a dozen pieces during the course of the forty-five minute set, including poems such as "Rough Draft," "Picasso's Portrait of Gertrude," "An Accumulative Text" and "Circumference Center," as well as a number of his word sculptures or poem-objects, like "Big Mug Vodka Maker," "Loopy Almost" and "Blue Bottle Nos. 28-32," for which both video and audio clips are available. While Green's opening comments and introductions to individual pieces shed some light upon his creative process, you'll definitely want to listen to his lengthy conversation with Filreis for a thorough history of his development of these poetic pieces, his career in (and out of sorts with) the academy and his long friendship with Robert Creeley. Their discussion has also been released as PennSound Podcast #14, for those of you who've subscribed to the series through iTunes.

Green's visit has been the subject of quite a bit of blog chatter recently: Filreis has written two recent entries celebrating Green's visit, one brief recollection of the reading and a meditation on "Big Mug Vodka Maker,", a piece Green presented to him after he'd admired it from afar for years. Meanwhile, on the PhillySound blog, poet CAConrad shared an enthusiastic write-up of the event, which begins as such:

Magic is a word I want us to reclaim from rolling eyes. It's a word we can use everyday, make it everyday to us in every way in making poetry strong enough to need no other magic. It's my extreme pleasure to have met an elder who has been cooking all the best sense of magic for many decades, strengthening poetry for us all, everyday. Tony Green needs little prompting from us to pay attention, as once he gets going we truly are in his realm, we're right with him. And he's never asking that we orbit him, but orbit poetry with him.

If you'd like to view Green's work in person, local poet and puppeteer par excellence Ish Klein has donated the poem-tube in the photo above to the Penn Book Center at 34th and Sansom so that those unable to attend Green's reading can still see his work. If you're not anywhere near Philadelphia, however, you'll still be able to get a thorough introduction to Green's word sculptures by clicking on the title above

PoemTalk 18: Lydia Davis' "A Position at the University"

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:57:45 EDT

Earlier this week, we released the eighteenth episode in the PoemTalk podcast series: a discussion of Lydia Davis' prose poem (or short-short, or "poetic parable in prose," in Filreis' words), "A Position at the University." Joining host Al Filreis for this latest program are two first-time PoemTalkers — Adrian Khactu and David Grazian — along with veteran panelist Jessica Lowenthal.

Filreis begins by asking Khactu to qualify his statement that Davis' piece is reminiscent of "mundane SF" (a science fiction genre which eschews aliens and monsters for more quotidian horrors), which leads into a discussion of whether "A Position at the University" even qualifies as poetry — Lowenthal deems the program the inaugural episode of "PoemProseTalk" — or why Davis is included among the poets on PennSound. Sociologist Grazian is asked whether splitting hairs over genre matters, and he adds a third possibility, seeing it as an ethnographic field note in which Davis "draw[s] on her own personal experience to try to make a larger argument about the way that the world works," and more specifically, as "an argument about authenticity [...] essentially the idea that authenticity is based on the imagination, it's based on a set of characteristics that we attribute to things in the world as opposed to the way things actually are," namely the stereotypical caricature of professorhood and one's idiosyncratic expression thereof.

Lowenthal challenges this presumption, citing Davis' ambiguous and un-gendered language as a potential stand-in for numerous potential positions, and ultimately a subject-position relationship which determines identity, which leads to Filreis asking his panelists how comfortable they are with avowing that they have a position at the University of Pennsylvania and what baggage that might bring with it. He then broadens this question to a more general sense of identity and one's self-awareness of it, and the ways in which that might or might not fit with the characteristics of one who holds a position at a university before moving into a consideration of Davis' language, its "striking [...] turnings [and] commonplaces repeated in different arrangements" (which are reminiscent of Gertrude Stein). Lowenthal sees the piece's movement not only forces us to confront our associations with the titular phrase, but also mimics the speaker's own recursive process of coming to a decision as to what this phrase, this identity, means to her. Khactu points out not only the repetition, but also the effects of the piece's multiple layered variations, citing a recent interview in Bomb with Francine Prose in which Davis avers that "all rhythms are seductive." For Filreis, this density is mesmerizing in the same way that Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations are, thus the repetitions both musically pleasing, but also subtly trying to convince readers of something.

Grazian believes that both Davis' subject matter and use of language betray her knowledge of her audience, who are likely not only college-educated but also members of the academy, causing Lowenthal to partially recant her earlier statement (that one's "position at the university" could as easily be that of janitor as professor) due to the way in which Davis makes use of "the language of the university [...] formal argument, fact analysis, conclusion synthesis," and Filreis agrees, seeing the piece as a deconstruction and subversion of this sort of logical discourse and finding much pleasure there.

The panelists then listen to Davis' post-script to the piece, shared with the Kelly Writers House audience at her 1999 reading, to see whether it helps them better understand her aims in this piece. Grazian and Filreis ultimately feel that it seems to skirt the broader identity implications present here, while for Khactu its dynamic between high and low culture, its disavowal of conservative cultural roots, is emblematic of the "wanting to have it both ways" which is a central part of life in the academic sphere. Using this as a springboard, Filreis is able to bring the program to a close by framing Davis in comparison to many of the other writers featured on PoemTalk — while they often exist within the university, they like to see themselves on the fringe of that discourse, even as they engage with it, and in "A Position at the University," Davis is able to elegantly capture that relationship as well as "the philosophical problem of being and seeming" in a work which itself exists in the interstitial space between genres.

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 seventeen episodes, please visit the PoemTalk blog, and don't forget that you can subscribe to the series through the iTunes music store. Our next episode will feature a wonderful panel of Al Filreis, Sarah Dowling, Tom Mandel and Rodrigo Toscano discussing Bob Perelman's "The Unruly Child," while future programs in the series will include conversations on Amiri Baraka, Charles Bernstein, Louis Zukofsky and Cid Corman and Barbara Guest.

Charles Bernstein: Segue Series Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, 2009

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:31:39 EDT

Here's another wonderful Segue Series reading from this past spring at the Bowery Poetry Club — Charles Bernstein's March 14, 2009 reading alongside Adeena Karasick, which is presented here as separate MP3s for each poem.

Introduced as "the CFO of the Center for Avant-Garde Comedy and Stand-Up Poetry," in a lavish introduction by Gary Sullivan (read by Nada Gordon), which also compares his work to both the Firesign Theatre and the Clash, Bernstein kicks off a set of new material with "Manifest Aversions, Conceptual Conundrums, & Implausibly Deniable Links," a manifesto published in last February's Poetry, and "Pompeii," published in the magazine last June. Texts to two of the other poems read here, "The Sixties, With Apologies" and "Death Rides a Pale Horse," were published on Jerome Rothenberg's Poems and Poetics blog last August, while the breathtaking "Morality" appeared in onedit #12.

In addition to these pieces, Bernstein's set also includes "The Moment is You," "Won't You Give Up This Poem to Someone Who Needs It?," "If You Say Something, See Something," "Today Is the Last Day of Your Life Until Now" and "Election Day," among others. He concludes with his translation of Charles Baudelaire's "Be Drunken," which he also read as part of the March 29th reading celebrating the launch of Poets for the Millennium III: the University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry, edited by Rothenberg and Jeffery C. Robinson. We'll be making a recording of that event available in the near future. For the time being, however, those of us who've been eagerly awaiting the follow-up to Girly Man and Blind Witness can enjoy this set of brand-new Bernstein material.

Patrick Durgin: Segue Series Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, 2009

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:58:29 EDT

We closed out last week by highlighting a number of recordings from this spring's Segue Series readings at the Bowery Poetry Club which unfortunately suffered from technical difficulties, and promised to focus on several of the unaffected recordings this week. Today, we begin that process by taking a look at Patrick Durgin's May 30th reading with Stacy Szymaszek — the final event until the fall.

After telling the audience about his recent detention by the Department of Homeland Security — attributable to, Durgin surmises, someone else with the same name "who's a very evil man" — his set begins with "More Familiars," followed by "More Familiars (coda)," an appropriate choice given the poem's assertions of identity and talk of sedition. From there, he moves on to "Everything From Surfaces," subject of a recent essay concerned with the difference between motive and intention, and "What Woe," inspired by a challenge to write lines as long as possible. He concludes with a pair of longer pieces: first, two excerpts from an untitled triptych, and finally "Color Music," first published by Cuneiform Press in an edition illustrated by Eric Troolin in 2002.

On Durgin's PennSound author page, you'll find a pair of brief readings from March 2008, recorded at Chicago's Myopic Books and the legendary Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee, as well as two individual poems taken from the MLA Offsite Readings in 2004 and 2006. There's also a wonderful appearance on KHSU's Mad River Anthology, Hannah Weiner's Open House, and shares his own creative work, both poetry and music.

You can listen to Durgin's reading and all of the aforementioned recordings by clicking on the title above. To hear Stacy Szymaszek's marvelous reading, which draws from her just-published book, Hyperglossia, and a new work-in-progress, Hart Island, click here.

Spring Segue Series Readings at the Bowery Poetry Club

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:56:55 EDT

Now in its seventh year of residence at the venerable Bowery Poetry Club, and its thirty-second year of existence overall, the Segue Reading Series is still going strong, as evidenced by a particularly strong schedule of weekly readings this spring, organized by Nada Gordon and Gary Sullivan in February and March, and Tim Peterson and Kristen Gallagher in April and May.

Unfortunately, due to unforeseeable technical difficulties, our recordings of a number of these fantastic events were damaged, rendering them almost unlistenable at times. Given the cultural relevence of these readings and the great many listeners who were unable to see them in person, we wanted to try to salvage as much as possible, and so over the past few weeks, our intern Rebekah Caton has been engaged in the painstaking work of editing these files to make presentable MP3s. Some recordings begin in the middle, or cut off abruptly halfway through, while we've only been able to preserve a few poems from others, however we think you'll agree that, in this case, anything is better than nothing.

Starting on Valentine's day, we have the pairing of Stephanie Young and Steve Benson, presented in its entirety, however at a low recording quality. Two weeks later on February 28th, the featured readers were a historic pairing of Brian Kim Stefans and John Giorno — three poems are presented from Stefans' set ("The New," two excerpts from "Third Season, Harold and Sonia," and "The Card Players"), while four were preserved from Giorno's set ("It Doesn't Get Better," "The Wisdom of Witches," "A Bad Tree" and "Thanks for Nothin'"). Next, we have the March 7th reading by Rachel Zolf and Jerome Sala: we're able to post Sala's reading in its entirety, while Zolf's begins in medias res.

While Adeena Karasick's reading one week later, also begins midway through, we're also able to provide a link to her video for "I Got a Crush on Osama," which concluded her set. Similar technical difficulties affected the subsequent readings by K. Silem Mohammad (on March 21st), James Sherry (on March 28th), though the recordings for their respective partners, Charles Bernstein, Cecelia Vicuña and Lytle Shaw were minimally affected, and so are presented in their entirety. Finally, though the same issues were present in the recording of Jennifer Bartlett and Ron Silliman's April 4th reading, we were able to salvage sizable chunks of each poet's set.

While we greatly regret that we're unable to present clean and complete recordings of all of these marvelous readings we're nevertheless glad to have an incomplete artifact from each, and are equally happy that these issues do not affect this spring's final six readings. PennSound and the wonderful staff at the Bowery Poetry Club have been working together on a new system of electronic transfers, which means that we'll now be able to post each week's reading within days of the event itself, rather than having to wait weeks or months to post an entire season's programming — welcome news for poetry lovers who can't be in New York City to witness the Segue Series in person. Next week, we'll shine a spotlight on highlights from this spring that weren't affected by these technical difficulties.

In Memorium: David Bromige (1933-2009)

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:28:55 EDT

PennSound is terribly sorry to have learned of the passing of poet David Bromige early this morning at the age of seventy-five. Ron Silliman remembers him as "a unique poet, mostly due to his great powers of observation and keen wit," and also "the finest reader of his own poetry aloud I have ever heard," before adding a more personal note, "I dearly loved the man & learned more from him than I ever could hope to pay back."

When confronted by the death of an author who's become a part of our cultural (let alone personal) lives, there's perhaps some comfort in knowing that their work carries on, and so we humbly direct you to PennSound's David Bromige author page, where you can listen to a broad sampling of his writing spanning more than thirty years.

We begin with a trio of early Segue Series readings at the Ear Inn dating from 1978, 1984 and 1985. Paired with Carole Korzeniowsky for the first, recorded on December 2, 1978, he read eight pieces, including "In the Restroom at the Grand Piano," "Seven Postcards from Seven Who Know Best," "In the Kitchen with the Norwegian" and "The Romance of the Automobile." A brief set from March 3 1984 (which is comprised of "Red Hats" and "Lazy Susan") is followed by a much longer performance from October 5, 1985, during which Bromige read two excerpts from "UC or You See" and "Geographist's History." There's also a fifteen minute recording from an undated Segue Series reading at HERE.

Next, we have an otherwise unidentified recording dating from 1980 in New York City — a treasure trove of material including twenty-two pieces, such as "This Second Kind of Happiness," "Nevertheless the Winter Wears On," "You Discovered That There Was a Fork in the Road," "Hence the Air of Joyful Resignation," before concluding with a masterful twenty-seven minute rendition of "My Compensations (Glurk)."

Bromige was a guest on the first episode of the PhillyTalks program, appearing with Laura Moriarty. Recorded October 31, 1997, the show includes Bromige reading ten poems, including "T as in Tether," "The Signifier Known as George Bowering," "Another Refusal to Mourn," "Vulnerable Bundles Number Ninety-Two" and "Voracious Orifice I Cannot Express." A PDF transcript of the show, including all of the poems, is available on the program page.

For those looking to know more about the man and his work, we direct you to his EPC author page, and an excellent Bromige feature in Jacket 22 (2003) — which includes a selection of his writings, an interview by Doug Powell, and tributes by Robert Grenier, Gary Sullivan and Kathleen Fraser, among others — and Bromige's Wikipedia entry, which contains both biographical and bibliographical information. Tributes will be forthcoming on both Silliman's Blog and Charles Bernstein's Web Log, and the Bromige family has set up a blog where friends and fans can pay their respects. Our thoughts are with them in this very difficult time.

Six Poets Each Teach One Short Poem to High School Students

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:19:00 EDT

At PennSound, we pride ourselves on being able to provide our listeners with thousands of recordings of poets reading their own poetry, as well as numerous lectures, interviews and symposia, which grant the authors an opportunity to discuss their work with their audiences. It's a far rarer treat, however, to hear poets discussing the work of their peers and predecessors — the PoemTalk podcast series is one venue where we can witness this sort of discourse, and our latest addition, titled "Six Poets Each Teach One Short Poem to High School Students," is another.

On the morning of May 12th, eleven eleventh graders from Liza Ewen's English class at Friends' Central School visited the Kelly Writers House, at the invitation of Al Filreis, and met with a group of Philadelphia poets, including Sarah Dowling, Michelle Taransky (shown at left), John Timpane, CAConrad, Randall Couch and Thomas Devaney. Filreis challenged the poets to choose a short work by a favorite poet — something which would provide insights into both their love of poetry and their own lives as poets — and teach that poem to the students in a twenty-minute session.

The poets' choices — Dowling picks Lorine Niedecker's "[I married . . .]," Taransky chooses Robert Creeley's "The Sentence," Timpane speaks on Helen Chasin's "The Word Plum," Conrad chooses an excerpt from Frank Sherlock's "Wounds in an Imaginary Nature Show," Couch discusses Harryette Mullen's "Zombie Hat," and Devaney pairs John Ashbery's "37 Haiku" with one of Basho's haiku — offer us not only a glimpse into their own reading processes and inspirations, but also a wonderful opportunity to witness six distinct pedagogical approaches to poetry in action with an engaged and appreciative audience. Moreover, this spirited session serves as a rejoinder to those who think it's impossible to get students interested in poetry, or that "difficult" poetry makes for difficult teaching.

We've created a special page for this event, where all six poets' discussions are presented both in streaming MP3 audio and downloadable QuickTime video formats. Clicking on the title above takes you directly there.

Charles Bernstein: Class Remasters Now Complete

Thu, 28 May 2009 23:50:21 EDT

In February, we announced that three tracks from Charles Bernstein's 1982 Widemouth Tapes release, Class had been made available in newly remastered stereo versions, as overseen by PennSound Contributing Editor, Danny Snelson — you can refer to our earlier PennSound Daily entry for a full discussion of the tracks "My/My/My," "Goodnight" and "Class." Today, we're very excited to release the final two tracks from Class: a full stereo realization of "Piffle (Breathing)," and a remastered version of "1-100" taken directly from the original reel-to-reel tape.

As the lead track on Class, "Piffle (Breathing)" serves as an overture of sorts, preparing listeners for many of the techniques that will be taken up throughout the album: a three-track stereo collage (with separate discursive elements panned hard left, hard right and center) exploring the potential of the human voice, and more specifically the textures produced when they overlap with one another. In his liner notes on our Class page, Bernstein describes "Piffle" as "the most formally self-reflective, trying to bring the process of making the piece to the fore: it's me breathing and making the commentary." The piece unfolds slowly, beginning with thirty seconds of the poet's slow and mindful breathing in the center channel before Bernstein and Greg Ball's running meta-discussion on the tapepoem's composition begins on the right channel, replete with technical details (i.e. stereo vs. mono recording preferences and how many feet of tape are left before the necessary recording time has been met) and expressing aesthetic concerns which take an ironic posture, yet seem to reveal real vulnerabilities. A statement like, "We should sense ourselves as if talking for posterity, and try to focus on what would be the most deep, most profound, most resonant statements or conversations or thoughts that we have, that we would want to see preserved for time immemorial," appearing in a contemporary Bernstein poem would strike us as the poet's characteristic exploration of the myriad rhetorics bombard us in our day-to-day experience of language, however when uttered by a 26 year old author of two self-released books, still one year away from the launch of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and not yet the iconic figure we know today, it takes on a different tenor.

Fifteen seconds after Bernstein and Ball's discussion begins, the left channel track, featuring Bernstein's interrogation of Susan Bee (Laufer) cuts in. Setting up a competing dialogue, it also serves as a commentary upon the initial track (she finds it "too personal" and "tedious"), before devolving into spontaneous singing and scanning the radio dial for weather bulletins and top 40 hits (which are deemed more interesting than recordings of breathing). As with Robert and Bobbie Creeley's performance of the 1972 radio play, Listen, we can't help but let our foreknowledge of the couple's relationship shade our interpretation of their interaction, and so even the more aggressive questioning seems charming.

Undoubtedly, "Piffle (Breathing)" is a challenging listening experience as one tries to engage with and sort through the two competing dialogues simultaneously, aided and hindered by Bernstein's basso continuo (which threads them together, encouraging elision even as it keeps each conversation distinct), and by the poet's close mic-ed breathing (which seems to obscure key words and draw our attention back towards the middle). As in "Goodnight," Susan Bee's voice emerges as the secret weapon here, cutting mellifluously through the accumulation of male timbres and providing listeners with a clear focal point. Moreover, when Bee and Ball make brief cameos in one another's track, this already vividly three-dimensional piece takes on added depth.

Finally, we're very happy to be able to present a (p)remastered version of "1-100," the iconic 1969 performance piece which is the earliest known recording of the poet (composed during his sophomore year at Harvard). Stripping away years of static and tape hiss, which appear to have sanded down its rougher edges, Bernstein's visceral emergency language becomes even more harrowing here, taking on a buzzsaw intensity as the more whimsical tones earlier in the piece give way to distressing yelps. Surprises emerge in this cleaned-up version as well: not only the diegetic soundtrack of background music and conversation that are now audible, but also notable differences between this take and the digitization previously made available in 2003. Aside from running longer than that original version (and also, perhaps, slightly slower), we can make distinctions between effects on the overall fidelity of the piece due to multiple-generation transfers and the limitations of the recording equipment itself — most notably, the metallic modulation and reverb effects on Bernstein's voice are present in the master track, and the clipping distortion created as he overloads the microphone has an even more elemental effect upon listeners here.

Our now-complete remastering of Class serves as a preview for an extensive collection of Bernstein's early recorded works which we'll be unveiling later this summer, so be sure to stay tuned to PennSound Daily for news on this project, and for now, click on the title above to start listening.

Caroline Bergvall: Three New Additions

Tue, 26 May 2009 15:54:01 EDT

Today, we're very happy to announce three new additions to our PennSound author page for Caroline Bergvall, including a vintage Segue Series recording from Double Happiness, and one of the poet's latest sound collaborations.

We begin with 2005's Via: Poems 1994-2004, volume number eight in the Rockdrill series of compact discs chronicling some of the most exciting voices in contemporary poetry and poetics. Combining previous sound collaborations and tracks recorded specifically for this disc, Bergvall's collection brings together eight selections from Goan Atom (I. Doll) (2001) and Fig (Goan Atom, 2) (2005), including "Ambient Fish," "Rapid Eye Movement, Part 2," "About Face" and "8 Figs."

Next, we have Bergvall's November 18, 2000 reading at New York's Double Happiness, which also showcases poems from Goan Atom (I. Doll), starting with "Jets-Poupee," and continuing through "Ambient Fish" and "Flesh a Coeur," among others. It's one of two Segue Series recordings available on Bergvall's PennSound author page, joining her November 9, 2002 reading at the Bowery Poetry Club.

Finally, we conclude with "Invocation (after Ingeborg Bachmann)," Bergvall's collaboration with sound artist Zahra Mani, composed specifically for the PhonoFemme Festival of Sound Art in Vienna late last month. While maintaining continuities with the poet's past work, this piece hints at exciting, new directions in Bergvall's work, and in the coming months, we'll be working together with her to make a number of new recordings available to our listening audience. In the meantime, however, these three recordings, as well as many others archived on her PennSound author page will be more than enough to hold her fans over. Click on the title above to start exploring.

Tim Peterson: New Author Page Plus "Poetry and Architecture" Event

Fri, 22 May 2009 16:45:18 EDT

We thought it fitting the bring this week to a close with a very exciting new addition to our roster of author pages. As editor of EOAGH, and co-curator (with Kristen Gallagher) of the Segue Series Readings at the Bowery Poetry Club, Tim Peterson has likely been responsible for some of your favorite recordings on PennSound, however, until now very few recordings of his own work were available through the site. We're glad to be remedying that today, as we unveil our new Tim Peterson author page.

At the heart of this collection of recordings are three full-length readings, the oldest one being Peterson's Segue Series debut in March 2005, showcasing selections from two early chapbooks, Cumulus and Trinkets Mashed into a Blender, including "Light Flooding the Aperture," "Embarrassment of Riches," "The Spinal Vocal Animal," "A Commons" and "The Age of Advertising," before wrapping up with a masterful rendering of "Trans Figures," a key poem in 2007's Since I Moved In.

Next comes a February 2007 reading as part of the Belladonna series, which begins with a trio of shorter poems — "My Organelles Monitored as a Single Unit," "A Casualty" and "Brickey" — before concluding with "Sites of Likeness," a longer poem about his mother's family and the development of suburbs. Finally, we have a brief set recorded at Chax Press' studios last October, marking (belatedly) their 2007 publication of Peterson's Since I Moved In, winner of the first Gil Ott Memorial Book Award. The twenty-minute reading begins with "Spontaneous Generation," taken from that volume, and continues with a number of newer poems, including "Junk Tropics," "Nocturne" and "Hydro-Powered Turbines."

In addition to these three readings, you'll also find shorter recordings of Peterson, taken from the Queering Language launch readings in New York City and Philadelphia (celebrating EAOGH #3: Queering Language), Chax Press' New York City Book Launch and the kari edwards Memorial Reading at New York's Zinc Bar, all of which took place in 2007.

In conjunction with our new Peterson author page, we're also launching a special page for one of Tim's latest curatorial efforts: the April 25th Poetry and Architecture event at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the Segue Series. Featuring presentations by Robert Kocik, Benjamin Aranda and, Vito Acconci, "Poetry and Architecture" seeks to "reach across the strange gap between [these two discourses] and attempt a conversation with interdisciplinarity as a mutually resonant theme." We've very proud to be able to present this ambitious and engaging two-hour symposium in both audio and video formats, augmented by a link to Peterson's illustrated report on the event on his blog, Mappemunde. You'll find a link to "Poetry and Architecture" on Peterson's PennSound author page, and clicking the link above will take you directly there.

Lee Harwood: New Author Page

Wed, 20 May 2009 15:34:10 EDT

Yesterday afternoon, we put the finishing touches on our newest author page, for British poet Lee Harwood, anchored by a pair of recent recordings sessions which provide a thorough survey of more than forty years of work.

First, we have The Chart Table: Poems 1965-2002, another compilation from the marvelous Rockdrill series of compact discs published by Optic Nerve and Birkbeck College's Contemporary Poetics Research Centre. Disc number three in the series, The Chart Table was released in 2004, and contains selections from germinal volumes such as 1965's Title Illegible (published by Bob Cobbing's Writers Forum) and 1966's The Man With Blue Eyes (released by Lewis Warsh and Anne Waldman's Angel Hair Press) through to work Harwood's first poems of the new millennium. Many of these books were out of print until the publication of 2004's Collected Poems, and the opportunity to hear these twenty poems — including "As Your Eyes Are Blue," "Animal Days," "Gorgeous," "October Night," "Salt Water" and "Hampton Court Shelter" — read by the poet is a true delight.

Next, there's a reading with Nathaniel Tarn as part of the Shearsman Reading Series at London's Swedenborg Hall last June. Hardwood's twenty-seven minute set features a half-dozen titles, including "Comparative Anatomy," "Old Bosham Bird Watch," "Summer Solstice" and "Late Journeys."

We're very proud to be able to add Lee Harwood to our roster of poets, and hope that you'll enjoy this opportunity to hear his work. Click on the title above to listen to all of the poems mentioned above and many more.

John Ashbery: Staged Reading of "The Compromise," Paris, 2007

Mon, 18 May 2009 17:01:26 EDT

On Friday, we announced the latest additions to Jerome Rothenberg's already-massive archive of recordings, and today, we're doing the same for another one of our favorite poets, John Ashbery. In both cases, we're particularly proud of the broad scope of these collections, and while Rothenberg's Rockdrill CDs were a veritable "greatest hits" of well-known poems, today's Ashbery offering is a lesser-known work from early in his writing life: a staged reading of his play, The Compromise, performed at Paris' Theatre Metropole on March 5, 2007.

Originally advertised as "a new comedy . . . in the style of the silent screen, inspired by Rin-Tin-Tin," The Compromise was first performed at The Poets' Theater in Cambridge, Mass. from April 4-21, 1956, with a cast including Frank O'Hara and Bunny Lang. Indeed inspired by the 1923 Rin-Tin-Tin feature, Where the North Begins, as well as Christian Deitrich Grabbe's play Parody-Jest-Something-Else-and-Higher Meaning and Gilbert Murray's translations of Greek drama, the play was collected in Three Plays (published by Kenward Elmslie's Z Press in 1978), along with The Heroes and The Philosopher. Previously, it had been published in Alfred Leslie's one-shot review, The Hasty Papers in 1960, alongside another play, To the Mill, and the poem "America." As staged here, the play is presented in three files approximately thirty minutes long each, corresponding to the play's three acts. There's also a brief introduction in which the cast members are introduced.

While you're on PennSound's John Ashbery author page, be sure to browse through the dozens of readings and other recordings available, spanning nearly half a century, from with the poet's September 1963 homecoming reading at The Living Theatre through to very recent recordings including this spring's New York Review of Books Podcast and his appearance as part of last fall's State of the Union: a Poetry Reading.

Jerome Rothenberg: Two New Rockdrill Collections

Fri, 15 May 2009 15:20:56 EDT

This time last spring, we were wrapping up the academic year in grand fashion with a visit from Jerome Rothenberg, the third and final of last year's Kelly Writers House Fellows. You can read about that visit on PennSound Daily here, and listen to recordings of Rothenberg's reading and question and answer session with Al Filreis on Rothenberg's PennSound author page.

Today, we're excited to announce the two latest additions to PennSound's collection of Rothenberg recordings, both taken from the Rockdrill series of CDs, produced by Colin Still of Optic Nerve for Birkbeck College's Contemporary Poetics Research Centre.

We begin with Sightings: Poems 1960-1983, Rockdrill CD #6 originally published in 2004. Starting with his debut collection, White Sun, Black Sun, this disc also contains selections from classic Rothenberg volumes such as Poland/1931, A Seneca Journal, That Dada Strain and Vienna Blood & Other Poems, including "The Wedding," "Cokboy," "Old Man Beaver's Blessing Song," "The Chicago Poem" and "That Dada Strain." Next comes Seedings: Poems 1984-2003, Rockdrill CD #7, also published in 2004, picks up where the previous disc leaves off, with favorites from later collections (A Paradise of Poets, Seedings & Other Poems, The Lorca Variations and Khurbn, among others), including "Peroration for a Lost Town," "A Paradise of Poets," First Night Poem, for Jackson Mac Low," "Three Paris Elegies" and "Autobiography 1997."

In addition to straightforward readings, a number of the poems included here are presented in multiple variations. Poland/1931's "A Wedding," for example, appears three times: Rothenberg reading along, Rothenberg performing the poem with musical accompaniment by Bertram Turetzky and in a Yiddish translation by Amos Schauss. Turetzky also scores renditions of "That Dada Strain," "A Glass Tube Ecstasy for Hugo Ball," and Ball's germinal sound-poem, "Karawane." Frequent Rothenberg collaborator Charlie Morrow provides music for a number of poems on the second disc, including "Dos Oysleydikn (The Emptying)," "Dos Geshray (The Scream)" and "In the dark world, khurbn," and there are also pieces featuring George Lewis and Richard Johnny John.

Taken together, these two volumes provide a wonderful introduction to the prodigious written output of Jerome Rothenberg, who's just one year away from the fiftieth anniversary of his first book's publication. If you're eager to dig deeper into his work, please be sure to visit his PennSound author page, where you'll find recordings spanning nearly thirty-five years, from his 1975 album, Horse Songs & Other Soundings through last fall's 40th Anniversary Celebration of Technicians of the Sacred at the Bowery Poetry Club. Aside from many readings and performances, you'll also find a 1996 appearance on LINEbreak, and a pair of podcasts: PennSound Podcast #1 and PoemTalk #7. Click on the title above to start exploring.

PoemTalk 17: Rodrigo Toscano's "Poetics"

Mon, 11 May 2009 17:11:13 EDT

Today, we're very proud to launch episode number seventeen of the PoemTalk podcast series: a discussion of Rodrigo Toscano's "Poetics." Joining host Al Filreis for this latest program are a pair of PoemTalk veterans — Randall Couch, Linh Dinh — and a first-time panelist, Emily Abendroth.

The discussion begins with a consideration of Toscano's recurring alusion to Pyongyang, which Couch sees as "the intrusion of the non-European world into this psycho-acoustic jam session," and Filreis considers ideologically as "the return of the has-been Stalinism." Abendroth considers this move as emblematic of Toscano's broader poetics, which she characterizes as, "seating people together at the table who are not necessarily seated there generally, and to take it into different registers and ranges that don't coincide well or easily or without friction," and Dinh agrees, citing North Korea's presence as a gadfly "minor threat" amongst the so-called Axis of Evil. Couch segues from political oppression to aesthetic oppression, as North Korea is also a "society which resists the imperialism of the Pomomomo," where "Pomomomo" represents the postmodern, poetry, MOMA, mama, etc. Moreover, Toscano's idisyncratic compound words reinforce his aesthetic of juxtaposition on a microscopic scale.

From there, the panelists shift gears to consider Toscano's namedropping Thelonious Monk's classic, "In Walked Bud," which Couch interprets through Abendroth's idea of "clashing registers," noting Monk's dissonant sense of harmony, which "suggests the kind of possibilities you get when you throw [...] the North Korean and Latin American notes into this jam session here [...] they complicate the Eurocentric Pomomomo." Dinh wonders whether "the primary pleasure of this poem [is] a sonic pleasure, a textual pleasure," since its politics are hard to sort out. Filreis agrees that jangling is the predominate mode, however he sees this clash of geographically disparate voices precisely as the site of its political ideology. "Rodrigo Toscano is a leftist in a post-communist era and he's not uncomfortable with that, but we're supposed to be uncomfortable with it" he states, implying that any public argument for the social good (versus the EU's focus on the individual good) places one in cahoots with Pyongyang.

Next the panelists consider the poem's relationship to the postmodern tradition, which carries similar social liabilities in the aesthetic realm as Toscano's left-leaning ethos does in the political realm. Dinh sees a disparity here, as well as "a decadence" — though Toscano is a union organizer with "very direct experience with common people," this poem is "meant for the poetry community, for a certain sophisticated audience, it's not meant for your average reader," and therefore somewhat "exclusive and elitist," which he sees as "off-putting." Abendroth agrees with much of what Dinh says, but points out snippets of the vernacular in Toscano's diction, which don't come from lofty, academic places (further stressing juxtaposition), and furthermore believes that a self-critical awareness is a key component of Toscano's poetics. Filreis concurs, finding affinities with Amiri Baraka's poetry, in that the liveliness of its sound (particularly in performance) is welcoming to listeners of all backgrounds, even if they might not necessarily be able to parse out the finer points of its politics. Couch then focuses on the inclusion of the Mesoamerican deity, Quetzalcoatl, to suggest that "there's a lot of potential clash of culture, colonial/postcolonial energy being brought into this discussion, too — I don't think it's just the European question of communism versus Adam Smith, I think this is a lot about a global set of relationships that may not fit into that dynamic."

In their closing thoughts, Dinh speaks of his worries of the irrelevance of poets and poetries in increasingly dire times. Couch sees "Poetics" as a successful evocation of jazz in poetry, not as a poem about jazz, but rather a performance of (and through) jazz aesthetics. Abendroth notes a difference between the poetic space versus political space, in that one can be less cohesive and more exploratory in the former than the latter, which leads nicely into Filreis' final thought, that "radical poetics [...] is going to have to do more than provide radical content — it's going to have to test the formal limits and risk being called inaccessible and risk being unavailable. And one of the ways in which he reaches out beyond just lexical meaning of politics is by playing with the sound of these politically charged words, and thus refreshing them."

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 sixteen episodes, please visit the PoemTalk blog, and don't forget that you can subscribe to the series through the iTunes music store. Our next episode will feature Al Filreis, Jessica Lowenthal, David Grazian and Adrian Khactu discussing Lydia Davis' short short, "A Position at the University," and future programs in the series include conversations on Bob Perelman, Amiri Baraka, Charles Bernstein, Louis Zukofsky and Cid Corman.

In Memorium: Robin Blaser (1925-2009)

Fri, 08 May 2009 14:34:09 EDT

We at PennSound were devastated to learn of the passing of Robin Blaser yesterday morning, weeks shy of his 84th birthday. Charles Bernstein paid tribute to the late poet in a blog entry reposting his afterword to The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser yesterday afternoon. That essay begins by noting, "Robin Blaser's poems are companions on a journey of life, a journey whose goal is not getting someplace else, but, rather, being where you are and who you are — where you is always in the plural."

In The Globe and Mail, Judith Fitzgerald echoes Bernstein's praise, calling Blaser, "an important voice in the experimental movement whose influence still sings in the works of some of the greatest poets of both his and subsequent generations," and observing, "[o]ne of our greatest has passed away." In the same article, Erin Mouré gives her estimation of Blaser's import: "Robin's death leaves an irrevocable hole in our poetic lives. A man of grace and with a deep philosophical and social conscience and relationship with language, he leaves shoes that can't be filled."

A worthwhile summation of Blaser's poetic career, The Holy Forest was selected as a Canadian Griffin Prize Winner in 2008, though, as the judges warned, "[t]here is an irony in the presumption that the universe contains the 'collected' poems of Robin Blaser." Their citation continues, "Whitman was not fooling when he said that a poet, an extraordinary poet, can himself be a cosmos. But as sidereal as Blaser's lines become, we never forget that the purpose is human living every day inside what is." Undoubtedly, the loss of so influential a figure will continue to be felt by poets throughout the globe for quite some time.

Of course, there's no better way to honor Robin Blaser's life than by re-engaging with his work, and so we encourage you to visit his page at the Electronic Poetry Center, as well as PennSound's Blaser author page. On the latter, you'll discover four decades' worth of recordings, beginning with a 1965 reading in Vancouver, BC, which features "The Moth Poem" and "The Translator: a Tale." There are also readings from the University of British Columbia in 1970 and 1995, SUNY Buffalo in 1987, Universita d'Annunzio in 1997, Vancouver's Cultural Centre in 2003, and finally at Milwaukee's Woodland Pattern bookstore in 2004, as well as three appearances on Cross-Cultural Poetics in 2003, 2004 and 2007. These readings are complemented by a handful of recorded lectures (on Charles Olson and Robert Duncan), discussions and talks from throughout his life. Click on the title above to start exploring.

Magdalena Zurawski and Julian T. Brolaski: Segue Series Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, 2009

Wed, 06 May 2009 11:50:02 EDT

Here's the most recent pairing of authors to grace the stage of the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the Segue Reading Series — Magdalena Zurawski and Julian T. Brolaski, recorded this past Saturday afternoon, May 2nd.

Zurawski begins her reading with "Memory is a House You Can't Live In," a translation of a Brian Evanson story, "The Father Unblinking." She continues with two excerpts from an untitled work-in-progress, before concluding with a "The Hum" and "Daphne," two excerpts from her 2008 debut novel, The Bruise.

Brolaski's set starts with a series of translations from Catullus, which are followed by selections from recently-completed manuscript, Gowanus Atropolis: "Not Quite Cows in Texas," "Gowanus Atropolis," "Washtub in the Gowanus" and "Your Inner Fish." The reading concludes with a series of recent poems, including "The Boar's Head in Hand," "Rules for Bones," "What is My Anatomy?," "Gotham in Arrears," "Coming Up Porn," "Some Say an Army of Horse-People" and "Of Mongrelitude."

We've also just created a new PennSound author page for Magdalena Zurawski, where you'll find this recording, as well as previous Segue Series readings from 2000 and 2003, a 2006 roundtable discussion on "Bay Poetics," taken from The Philly Sound: New Poetry Weekend event, and her introduction of Brenda Coultas as part of Three Contemporary Women Writers, from January of the same year.

To listen to Zurawski and Brolaski's readings from this weekend, click on the title above, and keep an eye out for more recent Bowery Poetry Club recordings from the Segue Series in the near future.

Ron Padgett and Tom Veitch: Antlers in the Treetops (1970)

Mon, 04 May 2009 15:50:28 EDT

You already know that PennSound is a tremendous resource for poetry audio and video (with nearly 17,000 files and archives that are growing day by day), but did you know that you can find honest-to-goodness texts on the site as well? On the PEPC (the Penn Extenstion of the Electronic Poetry Center), you'll find dozens of texts for browsing of download, including individual poems, translations, essays, scholarly writings, pedagogical guides, online anthologies of digital and visual poetry, and whole books, many of which are digital editions of long-out-of-print small press publications. Today, we're very happy to announce the latest addition to the site: Ron Padgett and Tom Veitch's 1970 appropriative collaboration, Antlers in the Treetops, originally published in 1970 by Coach House Press.

This 132 page novel is presented in its entirety as a downloadable, high-resolution PDF, or in a series of three smaller low-res files, accompanied by introductory notes by Padgett, in which he explains their compositional process: "each of us collected paragraphs that we happened to find in our ordinary reading, snippets from fiction, nonfiction, journalism, letters, whatever. Choosing whatever struck our fancies, we made no distinctions between high and low literature. After one of us had "enough" of these, he mailed them to the other, whose job it was to select and arrange them in a sequence that seemed to make sense and to lightly revise them for continuity." On the PEPC page for Antlers in the Treetops, you'l also find a listing of errata present in the first edition, and carried over into the second edition in 1973.

Unfortunately, PennSound only has one recording featuring Tom Veitch (a February 23, 1979 appearance on In the American Tree) however, on our Ron Padgett author page, you'll find a number of recordings from throughout the poet's career. In addition to a 1973 recording of "The Music Lesson" (taken from The World Record: Readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, 1969-1980), you'll also find a 2006 appearance on miPOradio, hosted by Amy King, and two readings from 2003 — one at the Kelly Writers House, the other as part of the Line Reading Series — which showcase selections from Padgett's memoir, Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers and his 2002 poetry collection, You Never Know.

To read more about or download Antlers in the Treetops, click on the title above, and don't forget to take a look at the PEPC's Table of Contents, where you'll find many more rare delights from PennSound authors.

PennSound Classics: Richetti Reads Dryden, McEvilly Reads Sappho

Fri, 01 May 2009 13:17:47 EDT

While PennSound constantly strives to bring our listeners the newest developments in American (and international) poetics, we're just as happy to look backwards through poetry's long and storied history, and so we're closing out this week by highlighting a pair of new additions to our PennSound Classics page.

Recently-retired UPenn professor John Richetti has graced us with his presence twice before for Studio 111 Sessions in 2005 and 2007, during which he read favorite selections from Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Last month, he returned to record eight poems by John Dryden, including "Song for St. Cecelia's Day," "Alexander's Feast, or The Power of Music," "To the Memory of Mr. Oldham," "Epistle the Third, to My Honoured Friend Dr. Charleton" and "Mac Flecknoe." His set concludes with an hour-long performance of Dryden's 1681 political satire, "Absalom and Achitophel." These masterful renditions are sure to please listeners of all stripes, from old fans to those just coming to Dryden's work. Click here to read our PennSound Daily announcement of Richetti's 2007 Studio 111 Session, and be sure to visit his PennSound author page, where you can listen to these Dryden tracks, plus more than a dozen recordings of Swift and Pope.

Poet, scholar and translator Thomas McEvilley has joined us once before in 2006, for a Close Listening reading and conversation with Charles Bernstein, during which he shared works from Homer, Sappho, Aeschylus, and Meleajer — both in the original Greek and in translation — providing commentary along the way. Earlier this spring, he sent us a new recording, featuring a half-dozen fragments from Sappho, once again presented in both Greek and English, taken from his latest book, 2008's Sappho. In the near future, we'll be adding the original texts along with McEvilley's translations, but for the time being, you'll certainly relish the opportunity to hear these texts brought to life. On McEvilley's PennSound author page, you'll find all of the recordings mentioned above.

Also be sure to visit our PennSound Classics homepage, where you'll also discover links to recordings of everything from ancient Greek songs to William Blake, as interpreted by the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Caroline Bergvall and David Wallace, among others.

Jean-Michel Rabate: Close Listening Conversation, 2009

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:09:50 EDT

We've recently brought you updates on a number of new programs in Charles Bernstein's Close Listening series, including shows dedicated to Wystan Curnow, Michael Davidson and Alan Loney, and today we're proud to announce the latest in a stellar spring series of shows: an April 7th conversation with Bernstein's University of Pennsylvania colleague, Jean-Michel Rabaté.

Rabaté's recent books include 1913: The Cradle of Modernism, The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, The Future of Theory and Lacan in America; he's also written on Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Roland Barthes and Marjorie Welish, among many others.

Bernstein begins the conversation by asking Rabaté to compare America's intellectual culture to that of his native France: in his homeland, he sees a broader interest in theory and cultural studies, particular centered around Paris and the universities, however that theoretical bent is currently suffering from what he calls a "crisis of legitimacy" as many of the dominant figures who've recently died (Derrida, Deluze et al.) have not yet been replaced. Moreover, he feels that the salon culture centered around aesthetics in Paris have fallen behind the discourse in cities such as London and Berlin. Rabaté then goes on to discuss differing notions of literary theory and his experience as a pedagogue of theory (which he sees as "philosophy for non-specialists") in both French and American circles. The two then consider the futility of naming or deliniating "theory," citing the clashing perspectives of Derrida (who Bernstein sees as "not aesthetic enough") and Foucault (who is "ultimately aesthetic"), which segues the conversation into Duchamp's avant-garde tendencies (along with the Arensberg collection, housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art), as well as the idea of literary theory as "a kind of conceptual or performance art."

In the second half of the conversation, the two consider, as Rabaté's most recent book is titled, The Ethics of the Lie, beginning with Slavoj Žižek's invention of dreams to please his psychoanalyst, which leads to discussion of personal integrity, the dynamic relationship between truth and lies ("we always tell the truth when we lie," Rabaté states) and the distinction between lies and bullshit, as defined by Harry Frankfurt's 2005 book On Bullshit. The conversation then turns to Ezra Pound, and Rabaté's long romance with the poet's work, in part due to his fearless antagonism of readers and willingness to take risks, as well as his omniverous cosmopolitanism: "he invented the right meaning of 'comparative literature,'" he observes.

In the near future, we'll be addressing the the last two programs in this most recent series of Close Listening readings and conversations, featuring Hank Lazer and Eileen Myles. You'll also want to check out PennSound's Close Listening home page, where you can listen to more than forty programs recorded between 2003 and the present, as well as links to PennSound's page for LINEbreak, the 1996 series which preceded Close Listening.

Emergency Reading Series: Buffalo Poetics Extravaganza, March 2009

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:37:37 EDT

Since its launch in the fall of 2006, the Emergency Reading Series has sought to answer the question, "What does it mean to be an emerging poet in America today?" by "highlighting perspectives on the current state of American poetry through the diverse experiences of its practicing poets." Original organizers Julia Bloch and Scott Glassman — winners of the 2006-2007 Kerry Sherin Wright Prize — were joined by Sarah Dowling this year, and brought another trio of marvelous readings to the Kelly Writers House.

This year's final event, held on March 2nd, showcased four up-and-coming writers from SUNY Buffalo's esteemed Poetics program. Dubbed the "Buffalo Poetics Extravaganza," the evening featured readings by Andrew Rippeon, Chris Sylvester, Divya Victor and Steven Zultanski. After brief individual sets, the quartet takes part in a lengthy question and answer session with an enthusiastic audience. Thanks to KWH-TV, there's streaming QuickTime video of this reading in addition to downloadable MP3 recordings of each poet.

On the Emergency Reading Series homepage, you'll find recordings of this year's previous two readings, featuring Sueyeun Juliette Lee and Christopher Stackhouse (from last October), and Emily Abendroth and Justin Audia (from last November), as well as a half-dozen more from years past, featuring (among others) Matthew Rohrer, Dorothea Lasky, erica kaufman, Thomas Devaney and Jena Osman. Click on the title above to start listening.

Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant Garde, 1910-1917 at the Getty Center

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:45:19 EDT

Today, we're very proud to announce a new page for "Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant Garde, 1910-1917," a groundbreaking exhibition which ran through last Sunday at the Getty in Los Angeles. PennSound contributing editor Danny Snelson was responsible for seeing this remarkable multimedia resource through to fruition, and so we thought it fitting to have him provide our listeners with an introduction:

PennSound has been working in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute to present this remarkable collection of historical and contemporary transrational poetry, centered on an exhibition of Russian Futurist book art held at the Getty earlier this year. The exhibition's title — "Tango with Cows" — taken from a poem by Vasily Kamensky, points to the sense of hilarity and irreverence you'll hear in these startlingly original 'beyonsense' poems. Our page of recordings compliments the extensive media collected online at the Getty's website. There, you can find programs, essays, video footage, full scans of the Futurist books, and even a fully interactive slideshow of key books from the exhibition!

Our archive of sound recordings comes in two parts: first, Tango with Cows features Oleg Minin's bilingual readings of essential poems found in book art projects from poets such as Alexei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Pavel Filonov. By reading from the Russian before the accompanying English translation, Minin offers listeners the pleasure of sound before recognition — an ideal situation for the revolutionary poetics on display here.

However, the real highlight of this great resource sounds from the second half: we're pleased to present high quality recordings of Explodity: An Evening of Transrational Sound Poetry held on February 4th, 2009. This blockbuster reading casts the zaum' poetries of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh in the parallel light of historic and contemporary sound poetry, as presented by Christian Bok and Steve McCaffery. After virtuoso performances of English translations of historical Russian poems, Bok and McCaffery present personal selections from the history of sound poetry alongside their own original compositions. On the short list are works by Aristophanes, Raoul Hausmann, F.T. Marinetti, Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, and R. Murray Schafer, just to mention a few.

You can hear more work in this vein on PennSound pages for Christian Bok, Steve McCaffery, Jaap Blonk, Tomomi Adachi, and The Four Horsemen. Additionally, we'd like to suggest our historic pages for F.T. Marinetti and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Our partner UbuWeb offers a huge index of this exciting brach of poetry; we suggest in particular that you visit a companion set of Russian Futurist recordings from the GLM Collection.

Special thanks to Nancy Perloff and everyone at the Getty Research Institute for making this resource possible. We hope these recordings lend the same vision of language that mystified Benedikt Livshits in 1911 (from Nancy Perloff, Curator's Essay): "I saw language come alive with my very own eyes. The breath of the primordial word wafted into my face."

Wystan Curnow: New Close Listening Programs Plus Writers Without Borders Recordings

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:24:57 EDT

Earlier this month, poet, curator, art critic and essayist (not to mention UPenn alumnus) Wystan Curnow traveled from his native New Zealand to Philadelphia to take part in a number of programs at the Kelly Writers House. Today, we're proud to present a number of recordings taken from those events.

We begin on April 7th, when Curnow delivered the lecture "Curating as a Cultural Practice" as part of the Writers Without Borders series, and in conjunction with "Let Us Possess One World," an exhibition the poet curated featuring New Zealand painter Colin McCahon, Spanish painter Antoni Tapies, Croatian artist Mangelos, and the American expatriate, Cy Twombly: "four contemporaries who committed the literary heresy of adding language to abstraction." Curnow also discusses his work as advisor to and collaborator with conceptual artist Billy Apple.

Earlier that afternoon, Curnow sat down with Charles Bernstein to record a two-part program for the Close Listening series. In the first, he reads a trio of long-form poems dating from the 1970s and 80s — "On Volcanoes," "The Western" and an excerpt from "The Astronauts: An Autobiography" — and links to all three texts are provided. The second program begins with a discussion of he ways in which Curnow's New Zealander identity forms a central part of his approach to poetry, particularly the philosophical and ideological implications of the nation's imposing and isolated geographical location, as well as its colonial links to England and America, which leads to a discussion of Curnow's transnational influences and inspirations in both the literary and visual realms.

We conclude with another Writers Without Borders event which took place a week later on April 14th. This forty-minute reading, introduced by both Al Filreis and Bob Perelman, showcases work from throughout Curnow's writing life. He begins with "Keeping to Myself," then reads a number of excerpts from his Cancer Daybook, followed by a new piece published as part of a new book by conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner. Next comes a group of poems from his latest collection, Modern Colours, along with a complementary series, "The Art Hotel," which pay tribute to Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. He concludes with a longer piece, entitled "Max."

You can hear all of these recordings, and watch streaming video of the two Kelly Writers House events, on Curnow's PennSound author page, where you'll also find a 2007 reading at New York's Saatchi & Saatchi, as well as a vintage Segue Series reading, recorded at the Ear Inn in the winter of 1988. It's also worth noting that Curnow's visit concludes the Writers Without Borders series' first full year of programming, which began last April with a reading by Cecelia Vicuña. Be sure to visit our Writers Without Borders homepage for recordings of that event, as well as readings by Li Zhimin, Breyten Breytenbach and the New European Poets book launch.

Jennifer Scappettone: New Author Page, Plus KWH Recordings

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:50:04 EDT

We recently created a new author page for Jennifer Scappettone, bringing together readings both old and new, along with a pair of wonderful conversations to provide listeners with a thorough introduction to this poet, translator and photographer's work.

We begin with Scappettone's newly-segmented Segue Series reading at the Bowery Poetry Club. Recorded January 31, 2004, her thirty-minute set includes the titles "Misuse," "An Abeyance," "The New War I & II," "Beauty," "More Like Liverpool" and "These Poppies," along with a translation of Italian poet, Amelia Rosselli, a major influence upon her writing.

Our next recording is of a February 26, 2009 lunchtime lecture and conversation at the Kelly Writers House between Scappettone, Lyn Hejinian and the afternoon's host, Rachel Levitsky, which showcases a reading from one of her many projects-in-progress: Exit 43, an archaeology of the landfill and opera of pop-ups. That manuscript, along with another forthcoming critical volume, Lagoon/Lacuna: Venice and the Digressive Invention of the Modern are but two of many topics discussed with PennSound co-director Al Filreis in the latest PennSound Podcast, which was recorded last week, also at the Writers House.

On that same day, Scappettone was invited to read a selection of her work for PennSound's listeners. She begins with a number of poems from her recent Litmus Press collection, From Dame Quickly, starting with the nearly decade-old "Bull Desuetude," and moving through titles including "Thing Ode," "Derrida is Dead" and "da s." Next comes a pair of poems from the Goat Island performance collective's The Last Performance [dot org]: "Concerning Lasts Made (In Illinois)" and "In Exion." After reading a translation of Amelia Rosselli's "Innesto nel vivere," Scappettone concludes with a pair of lengthy excerpts from Exit 43.

We're particularly glad to have had Scappettone join us several times this spring as a member of the Writers House community, and are equally happy that we can share these recordings with our listeners all over the world. To start exploring the work of Jennifer Scappettone, click on the title above.

PennSound Congratulates Pegasus Award Winners Fanny Howe and Ange Mlinko

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:43:08 EDT

Earlier this week the Poetry Foundation announced this year's winners of their prestigious Pegasus Awards — Fanny Howe and Ange Mlinko — and we couldn't be more proud that both are PennSound poets.

Fanny Howe is the recipient of this year's Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize bestowed upon American poets "whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition." Christian Wiman, Poetry's editor marked the occasion by observing, "Fanny Howe is a religious writer whose work makes you more alert and alive to the earth, an experimental writer who can break your heart. Live in her world for a while, and it can change the way you think of yours."

On Howe's PennSound author page, listeners can sample a broad array of her work, both creative and critical, including Segue Series readings from 1991 and 2003, a 2000 reading at the Kelly Writers House, a 1978 talk on Justice (part of Bob Perelman's famed San Francisco Talks series), and recordings from Radio Poetique's Poetic Brooklyn and the 2003 Poetry and Empire: Post-Invasion Poetics event at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art. There's also a six-part recording of Howe's Tis of Thee, complete with musical accompaniment, which originally accompanied that 2003 release from Atelos.

Ange Mlinko is this year's winner of the Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism, presented for "poetry criticism that is intelligent and learned as well as lively and enjoyable to read." In honoring Mlinko, the Poetry Foundation described her unique and entertaining perspective: "From Sappho to the Language poets, from Nicolas of Cusa to The Brady Bunch, Ange Mlinko's criticism is brilliantly wide-ranging; it is eclectic and astringent yet always lucid and generous. We are pleased to recognize a young critic whose distinctive sharp wit and formidable power have helped revitalize the art of writing about poetry."

On Mlinko's PennSound author page, you'll discover a 2000 Segue Series reading at Double Happiness, along with a segmented 2001 reading as part of the Line Reading Series, "Poem Bejeweled with Proper Nouns" (from Frequency Audio Journal) and her contribution to the 1998 Bernadette Mayer celebration at the Kelly Writers House.

PennSound congratulates Howe and Mlinko for their achievements, and invites listeners to experience some of the work which merited these venerable poetry awards.

Bruce Andrews: Reading and Interview on "Destination Out," hosted by Tom Orange, 2008

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:30:50 EDT

Last spring, poet and scholar Tom Orange brought Bruce Andrews and Sally Silvers to Nashville, Tennessee for a reading and performance at Vanderbilt University. The following day, Andrews was his guest on "Destination Out," Orange's program on WRVU-FM, and today, we're very happy to be able to present that April 26, 2008 broadcast to our listeners.

Andrews begins with a pair of pieces, "Black" and "Improvisation," the latter dating from the first Gulf War. This is followed by a brief conversation which begins with talk of John Cage (a brief excerpt from his "Sonata I" from Sonatas and Interludes introduces the segment), segues into a brief history of Language poetics, and ends with a discussion of Andrews' writing methods.

The readings continue with two older pieces — "Mistaken Identity 1," taken from The East Village, and "Stalin's Genius," from Andrews' 1992 collection, I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) — which are followed by a pair of recent politically-inspired pieces, "Blood: Full Tank" and "October Surprise." Next comes a series of excerpts from two newer long-form pieces, The Millennium Project and Cone Melt, and Andrews wraps up the set with a manuscript-in-progress, "Uncle Abe," which explores Appalachian linguistics, following in the footsteps of "white dialect" poetry of the 19th century.

Click on the title above to listen to this wonderful program, along with many other readings, conversations and radio appearances, from 1977 to the present on Andrews' PennSound author page. We'd also like to thank Tom Orange, not only for facilitating Andrews' reading and interview, but also for making this recording available to us.

Tan Lin and Jena Osman: Segue Series Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:23:14 EDT

If you weren't able to make it down to the Bowery Poetry Club for this week's Segue Series reading by Tan Lin and Jena Osman, we've got it for you right here, ready for listening or download.

The afternoon's events begin with a set by Jena Osman, who reads a two longer poems from her forthcoming Essay press collection, The Network: "Mercury Rising (A Visualization)," and an excerpt from "Financial District." On Osman's PennSound author page, you'll find this reading, along with a 1995 appearance on LINEbreak, a 2005 recording from Mills College, and readings as part of the Emergency Series, the Line Reading Series and the Segue Series, among many others.

Tan Lin's set begins with "Diary Blog," a piece inspired by an assignment for his students involving Twitter and blogs. This is followed by Heath: Plagiarism/Outsource, and two excerpts from 7 Controlled Vocabularies constructed from restaurant reviews of New York City's WD50 and Per Se, respectively. He concludes with a lengthy excerpt from a work-in-progress "ambient novel," which concerns Lin's father, magician David Blaine and "a guy named Mr. Shoe, who is ordered by the housing authority to get rid of exactly 50% of his possessions." On Lin's PennSound author page, you'll also find a Close Listening reading and conversation with Charles Bernstein, an appearance as part of Line Reading Series as well as Ceptuetics Radio. There are also a pair of recently-added video compositions, "Eleven Minute Painting" and "Disco Eats Itself (Broken Disco Parameter)."

Click on the title above to listen to both performances, and while you're on Segue Series at the Bowery Poetry Club homepage be sure to check out the dozens of additional recordings from the influential series' most recent venue.

Sherlock and Mirakove at the Kelly Writers House, April 2, 2009

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:31:53 EDT

We're very happy to wrap up this week with audio and video from Frank Sherlock and Carol Mirakove's reading at the Kelly Writers House last Thursday, April 2, 2009.

Mirakove begins her set with a number of works written in the aftermath of September 11th, a time, "when everybody was kinda confused and trying to make sense of what was going on and how to survive." In this setting, Mirakove chose to explore human intimacy, resulting in a series of poems — including "Gigantic," "Epic of Empathy" and "Love Kills Hate" — which serve as love letters to everyone around her, even if they couldn't help but be "love letters of doom." She continues with, among others, "The Recent History of Water in Bolivia" and "The Origin Myth of Her Butt" before concluding with a second poem titled "Love Kills Hate." You can hear Mirakove's reading on her brand new PennSound author page, which also includes a pair of Segue Series reading at the Bowery Poetry Club from 2002 and 2006, as well as Mirakove's 2004 reading at St. Mary's College, released as part of Narrow House Records' double-CD set, Women in the Avant Garde.

There's rarely a poetry reading at the Kelly Writers House when you can't count on Frank Sherlock's presence — he's usually sharing the bench in front of the fireplace with CAConrad — however it's a rarer delight to have him up front at the microphone. Celebrating the recent release of his latest collection, Over Here, he reads two of that volume's strongest pieces, "Daybook of Perversities & Main Events" and its title poem, along with a number of newer poems, including "No Such Thing As Unchanged Value," which opens the set. Sherlock also reads a lengthy excerpt from his 2008 collaboration with Brett Evans, Ready-to-Eat Individual, which he introduces with a lovely dedication to the late Antoinette K-Doe, widow of soul singer Ernie K-Doe and proprietress of New Orleans' Mother-in-Law Lounge. You can hear much more from both Over Here and Ready-to-Eat Individual on Sherlock's PennSound author page, as part of his Studio 111 Session and a Segue Series reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, both recorded in 2007, along with a number of earlier recordings.

Click on the links above to visit each poet's author page, and please remember that, in addition to MP3 files of both readings, you can also watch streaming video of this event through the Kelly Writers House's new KWH-TV page.

PoemTalk 16: Robert Creeley's "I Know a Man"

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:33:52 EDT

Today, we're very happy to announce the sixteenth and latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series: a discussion of what is perhaps Robert Creeley's best-known poem, "I Know a Man." Joining host Al Filreis for this program are three veteran PoemTalkers: Bob Perelman, Randall Couch and Kelly Writers House director, Jessica Lowenthal.

The show begins with two of the many recordings of "I Know a Man" available on Creeley's PennSound author page, one from 1966, the other from 1975. Looking for differences between the renditions — the first a live reading, the second a studio recording — Lowenthal sees the former as more syncopated and rhythmic. Perelman picks up on this idea, citing Creeley's careful placement of enjambments, which is evident in the poet's idiosyncratic performance style, a tone Filreis deems "existentialist," noting that "the darkness is in the voice, the fear of the darkness is in the voice." That fear, however, is tempered by a comic grace provided by the contradicting voice that ends the poem, as evidenced by the audience's laughter at the conclusion of the live recording. Presence is key here as well, whether it's self-preservation, pragmatism or, as Couch suggests, a Buddhist mindfulness.

For Perelman, the poem originates in Creeley's 1950s ambitions to be a prose writer, seen here with the multiple layers of narrative frames, intrusions and over-dramatizations, all of which pay off in the closing punch-line. Lowenthal disagrees, finding instead, an isolated I which underscores the poem's terror. Creeley's asking "what // can we do against [...] the darkness [that] sur- / rounds us," strikes Filreis as an emblematically 1950s question, leading the panel to consider the poem's implications in light of a Beat Generation ethos: "[is] driving across the country on amphetamines and stopping for cherry pie a solution" or is there nothing one can do? Couch believes that "buying the car is the alternative to despair, in action," and introduces the mid-century synergy between driving and writing, envisioning the poem as an ars poetica with links to William Carlos Williams' "To Elsie." Their conversation wraps up with each panelist pinpointing the personal pleasures they take from the poem.

Instead of the traditional "gathering paradise" segment which concludes each program, Filreis surprises the panelists by asking them to "gather a little hell," or discuss "the one thing about poetry and poetics today that irritates the hell out of [them]; the pet peeve [they're] most like to vent about when someone at a cocktail party this weekend asks [them] about the state of poetry." You'll have to listen to the program to find out exactly what angers our PoemTalkers, however take note that apes in cages are involved. In closing, Filreis thanks Creeley's son, Will for providing PennSound with dozens of reel-to-reel tapes from his father's archives — which have not only significantly augmented our Creeley author page, but also provided rare and historic recordings by Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Alice Notley, Lew Welch and many others —, and on the PoemTalk blog, Will responds: "It's a real pleasure for me, Hannah, and our mother to know that Dad's recordings are where he would have wanted them to be: online! As his many e-mail correspondents knew well, Dad was thrilled by the possibilities presented by the internet's ability to facilitate access and discussion — the power of inclusion! — and podcasts like PoemTalk demonstrate exactly the reasons for his excitement."

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 fifteen episodes, please visit the PoemTalk blog, and don't forget that you can subscribe to the series through the iTunes music store. Future programs in the series will include conversations on Rodrigo Toscano, Lydia Davis, Bob Perelman, Amiri Baraka, Charles Bernstein and Louis Zukofsky.

Finally, this is a good time to mention another new addition to our site: Ben Friedlander, editor of Robert Creeley, Selected Poems 1945-2005 and Steve McLaughlin (editor of our Creeley author page) have assembled a new Creeley Selected Poems page, using the table of contents for that volume, which is cross-referenced with all extant recordings of the texts available on PennSound, which we hope will be a valuable resource, both for longtime fans of his work and those just discovering Creeley's work.

John Ashbery: New York Review of Books Podcast, 2009

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:32:31 EDT

On February 21, 2009, John Ashbery, visited the offices of The New York Review of Books to record a selection of favorites from the more than forty poems that he's published in the magazine's pages over the last four decades. This podcast, introduced by Jana Prikryl, was originally broadcast on April 1st, as part of the Review's podcast series.

Running more than thirty minutes, the podcast begins with a quartet of as-yet-uncollected poems which first appeared in The New York Review of Books in 2009 ("Structures in Sand," "Working Overtime") and 2008 ("Episode," "Summer Reading"). This is followed by a pair of poems each from Ashbery's most recent books, moving backwards from 2007's A Worldly Country ("Pavane pour Helen Twelvetrees," "Image Problem") to 2005's Where Shall I Wander ("Days of Reckoning," "Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse") and 2002's Chinese Whispers ("Mordred," "Random Jottings of an Old Man"). Skipping As Umbrellas Follow Rain, he next reads "Crossroads in the Past" and "This Room" from 2000's Your Name Here, then concludes with "By Guess and by Gosh" (from 1995's Can You Hear, Bird?), "On the Empress's Mind" and "From Estuaries, from Casinos" (both from 1992's Hotel Lautréamont) and finally, jumping back more than a decade, "Qualm" from Shadow Train.

We're grateful to The New York Review of Books — for recording this marvelous set of latter-day Ashbery masterpieces, and for granting permission to share this podcast — as well as to John Ashbery and David Kermani, who very enthusiastically wanted to this reading to be added to PennSound's Ashbery author page. Click on the title above to listen in to this podcast, and be sure to sample the dozens of recordings you'll find there, which span not only the globe, but also nearly five decades of Ashbery's life in writing.

Charles Bernstein on the Joe Milford Radio Show, 2009

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:37:16 EDT

At 10:00 this morning, PennSound co-director Charles Bernstein was the guest of Joe Milford on his radio program. The complete seventy-minute program — which features both readings and conversation — is now available for listening and download on our Bernstein Radio page.

Bernstein begins by sharing a number of poems from his 2006 collection, Girly Man, which he doesn't often read in public — most of which are contained in that volume's "In Parts" section. First up is "Reading Red," a series of twenty-five short poems written in conversation with an exhibition by painter Richard Tuttle. Bernstein describes Tuttle's paintings and discusses the collaborative process by which the two produced the poems and an accompanying artist's book. This is followed by "Pomegranates" (whose many fragmented two and three-line sections are likened to the fruit's seeds by Milford), which takes the conversation to topics as diverse as Henry David Thoreau's Walden and this week's G-20 summit in London.

Next up is "12²," which leads to a discussion of form in relation to the work of John Cage (particularly his emphasis on silence) and considerations of pitch and tempo in poetry performance. "Photo Opportunity" follows (with a nod to Tom Raworth's speedy reading style and the single-word lines of Robert Creeley and Ted Greenwald), with Bernstein reconfiguring the poem (which features two parallel columns, the second being the first in reverse) in a way he'd never done before, reading across from column to column. "They're all the same poem, it's just different ways of sampling the same poem," he notes.

The program concludes with a selection of poems from "Girly Man," the book's final section, starting with "There's Beauty in the Sound of the Rushing Brook as It Forks & Bends in the Moonlight," which Bernstein notes is the earliest poem in the collection. The resulting discussion of politics and poetic responses to current events segues nicely into "A Poem Is Not a Weapon" and "Death Fugue (Echo)." His final two poems, "The Beauty of Useless Things: A Kantian Tale" and "Emma's Nursery Rimes," are dedicated to his children, Felix and Emma, respectively.

On PennSound's Bernstein Radio homepage, you'll find broadcast appearances spanning thirty years, beginning with a 1979 appearance on Susan Howe's Pacifica Radio program with Bruce Andrews. Likewise, on the EPC's Girly Man page, you'll find links to online texts from the book, recordings from the PennSound archive, visual references, critical responses, notes on individual poems and much more.

Tom Raworth: Ace, Poems 1966-1979 (Rockdrill 4)

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:21:02 EDT

Everyone at PennSound is very excited about the latest addition to our archives: the Rockdrill CDs, a series of innovative audio recordings commissioned by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at London's Birkbeck College and produced by Colin Still, founder of Optic Nerve (responsible for, among other films, the Modern American Poets series and No More to Say & Nothing to Weep For: an Elegy for Allen Ginsberg).

Today, we begin with the fourth CD in the series, Tom Raworth's Ace, Poems 1966-1979, which contains nearly fifty poems from early and out-of-print collections such as 1971's Moving, 1973's Act, 1975's Cloister and 1976's Ace. The set includes the longform title poem of that volume, "Ace," as well as "Anniversary," "I Better Put a Pattern around This if They're Going to Call it a Poem," "My Face is My Own, I Thought," "Funeral Cards" and "A Blue Vacuum Cleaner" among many others.

Taken together with the other recordings on Raworth's PennSound author page — which include a Close Listening reading and conversation with Charles Bernstein, Segue Series readings at the Ear Inn and the Bowery Poetry Club, and recordings from SUNY Buffalo and as part of the Line Reading Series, along with the 1993 cassette release, Big Slippers On: Fourteen Poems by Tom Raworth — Ace makes an already-thorough survey of Raworth's poetic life even more complete. Better still, we'll soon be adding a second Rockdrill CD, Writing, Poems 1980-2003, which will augment our collection even further.

Over the coming weeks and months, we'll also announce Rockdrill offerings by Robert Creeley, Jerome Rothenberg, Caroline Bergvall, Maggie O'Sullivan and Alice Notley, among others. We're grateful to Colin Still and Optic Nerve for their foresight in creating such encyclopedic documents of some of the most important poetic voice of the 20th century, as well as their assistance in sharing them with an even wider audience through PennSound. Click on the title above to listen to our first Rockdrill offering, and stay tuned for even more, coming soon.

Hannah Weiner: Segue Series Reading at the Ear Inn, 1993

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:45:15 EDT

Today, we're highlighting a recently-added recording of Hannah Weiner reading at the Ear Inn on November 20, 1993. This Segue Series event celebrated the release of her Tender Buttons collection, Silent Teachers / Remembered Teachers, and showcases a number of poems from that volume, including "introdico," "silent teachers" and "the Comm a capitol ma." Weiner begins the reading with a brief explanation of her "clair style" and describes the "silent teachers" who reveal poetic language to her both visually and aurally.

Recorded four years prior to her death, it's clear how beloved a figure Weiner was to New York's poetry community, both from the poet's playfully intimate interactions with her audience and the spontaneous chorus of "Happy Birthday to You" that breaks out when it's revealed that her birthday is only a few days away. Moreover, while Weiner's work challenges and intrigues readers in its printed form, with its adventurous typography and complex dialogues, it works surprisingly well in a spoken mode, anchored by her repetitions, verbal fragments and a fervent interest in sound and speech.

On Weiner's PennSound author page, you'll find a thorough survey of her recorded work from the late 70s through to the early 90s, including several multi-vocal performances of selections from her best known work, Clairvoyant Journal. There are also readings from Little Books, Weeks and Spoke, and interviews with both Charles Bernstein (as part of the LINEbreak series) and Ernesto Livon-Grosman (as part of the Radio Readings Project). Finally, you'll find Phil Niblock's 1975 short film Hannah Weiner and video and audio recordings of the November 2007 celebration of Hannah Weiner's Open House at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, hosted by that volume's editor, Patrick F. Durgin. To hear all of these recordings and more, click on the title above.

Alan Loney: Close Listening Reading and Conversation, Plus New KWH Recordings

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:02:24 EDT

The second of three new programs in Charles Bernstein's Close Listening series of readings and conversations features New Zealander poet and printer James Loney.

In the first show, he reads two longer poems for listners: "Rise," which has recently been set to music (for soprano and two violas da gamba) by David Loeb (Loney notes that he's meeting with the composer later that afternoon), and a selection from his latest book, Day's Eye (which takes its name from Chaucer's idiosyncratic spelling of "daisy").

The second show begins with Loney discussing his lifelong relationship to books and book culture: "I've never had what many people call a love of books or a passion for books, it's been more like a kind of weird, uncontrollable, dogged obsession," he tells listeners, noting that he grew up in a household with "no interest in education or books or music or culture or anything," and that he didn't start seriously reading until his early twenties — guided, in part, by his father-in-law, who was a librarian and avid book collector. In addition to taking an interest in literature, he also developed a love for books as objects unto themselves, having worked closely with letterpress printing as a newspaper proofreader, and this experience would shape his later work as a printer.

From there, the discussion turns to Loney's early influences, which included musicians and painters among his peers, as well as poets. While he began as an "absolutely overtly Romantic poet," his tastes would change in time, through the influence of Charles Olson's writing (specifically The Maximus Poems) which he found in the university bookstore in the early 70s, initially attracted by its cover. "It changed everything for me," he tells Bernstein. "There was all this air and space inside the poem, and it looked to me like [...] a musical score that told you what to sound and when." From Olson, he moved on to other Black Mountain poets such as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, and the influential journal, boundary 2, was another early favorite.

These American and British voices were not as rabidly appreciated by New Zealand's poetry community at the time, which left Loney feeling somewhat isolated among his peers, save friends such as Wystan Curnow, Roger Horrocks and Tony Green. Much of the program's final section consists of Bernstein and Loney exploring the latter's relationship to his homeland's cultural discourse, including various postwar aesthetic shifts and Loney's history as a publisher. Bernstein also questions the role of ecology, landscape and the pastoral in Loney's work and Oceanian poetics in general. Foregrounding a personal "ethics of perception," a need "to see clearly," he notes that "[l]andscape is simply, or has been, both simply and complexly, the place where I've been when I'm writing — sometimes you're in a room, sometimes you're in a landscape, sometimes you're outside, and I used to write anywhere, [however] as I get older, the number of places in which I feel comfortable about writing is shrinking, and I tend to write mainly at home." The show ends with a discussion of the relation between printing and Loney's creative process, specifically the ways in which his hands-on work with typography has shaped his compositional and revision habits.

A few days before the New York City session that yielded these programs, Loney visited the Kelly Writers House, where Al Filreis recorded him reading two poems: "Testament: Tenth Muse" and "Emailing Flowers to Mondrian. You'll find those tracks on Loney's PennSound author page, along with a November 2003 reading at the Writers House, in which Loney reads from the collections Katalogos and Nowhere to Go. Taken together, these recordings provide a fine introduction to the poet's work.

Michael Davidson: Close Listening Reading and Conversation

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:12:27 EDT

Today, we're showcasing the first of three new programs in the Close Listening series of readings and conversations, hosted by Charles Bernstein, and broadcast on Art International Radio — two episodes featuring poet and scholar Michael Davidson.

In the first of two shows, Davidson provides listeners with a comprehensive survey of his published work, reading selections from 1981's Prose of Fact ("Title," "Summer Letters" and "Untitled"), 1985's The Landing of Rochambeau ("The Dream Dream," "The Landing of Rochambeau" and "Cloud"), 1990's Post Hoc ("The Second City," "Troth," "Century of Hands" and "The Terror") and 1998's The Arcades ("2-12-91," "2-15-91," "2-28-91," "Zombies" and "Translation"). He concludes with a number of new and unpublished poems, including "Aninversary," "Rebarbative," "Bad Modernism: Intertices" and "Bad Modernism: The White City."

For the second show, Bernstein begins by asking Davidson about his earliest inspirations. He cites his mother's occasional poems, followed by his junior high exposure to Beat poets in his native San Francisco (the subject of his 1989 book, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century), which allowed him access to an intoxicating alternative cultural scene. In college, these influences would broaden, as the official curriculum of Theodore Roethke, W.H. Auden, Karl Shapiro and Dylan Thomas was tempered by then-SFSU librarian Robin Blaser's recommendations of Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer.

The two then use the idea of community as a way to transition to Davidson's recent work in disability studies, stemming from his own struggles with hearing loss. Davidson pinpoints his interests as "the function of literature as a communal formation — little magazines, coteries, groups of poets who would get together, sometimes to do political work, and sometimes to do publishing work, and sometimes to read their own poems," concluding, "[t]hese were extremely important moments for young writers to gain an audience and also to develop senses of resistance that were by no means just literary, but [also] political resistance." In particular, he notes the prevalence of homosexual voices among the leading mid-century poets, including Duncan, Blaser, O'Hara and Ginsberg, which challenged readers to engage with this commingling of the political and the aesthetic, without letting it overshadow other equally-important considerations.

Returning to the present, Davidson laments that "there hasn't been a great deal of treatment of modern art movements and modern poetry from the standpoint of disability," and sees this as a necessary and vital discourse, noting that "the aesthetic [...] is blown open when you start to take into consideration the public spaces in which art is produced, the physical bodies of the producers themselves, the nature of the voice, and all those kinds of material factors." Bernstein then invites him to explore the various ways in which these concerns play out in his own poetry, and this eventually leads into a discussion of "The Landing of Rochambeau" — its origins and inspirations, as well as the sources and the processes behind it. The program concludes with Davidson briefly discussing the interplay between his poetry and his scholarly prose work.

To listen to both of these programs — as well as Davidson's 2005 appearance on Cross-Cultural Poetics, all of which can be found on his new PennSound author page — click on the title above, and keep an eye out for new Close Listening programs featuring Alan Loney and Hank Lazer.

Nathaniel Tarn: Two New Mexico Readings, 2008

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:21:19 EDT

While PennSound's Nathaniel Tarn author page is relatively new, we've recently added a pair of readings recorded in New Mexico this past fall.

First, we have a September 7th reading at Albuquerque's Acequia Booksellers, largely showcasing material from Tarn's latest collection, Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers, published by New Directions that same month. Titles from that volume include "Coachwhip," "Mathis at Issenheim," "Year's End Chiasmas," "Ascending Flight, Los Angeles" and "The Asphyxiation." Tarn dedicates the reading to Albuquerque-based poet Gene Frumkin, opening the reading with the late poet's "Cibola, or the Cities of Gold."

Next, there's an October 5th reading in Magdalena, NM, the setlist of which is largely drawn from the poet's 2001 collection, Three Letters from the City: The St. Petersburg Poems, 1968-98 — Tarn reads parts one and seven from "The Second Letter: 1995," and "The Third Letter: 1998" in its entirety. These selections are bookended by the poems "Birdscapes with Seaside" (inspired by the bird-watching in Tarn's Philadelphia garden and in the New Jersey shore town Cape May), and "Palenque" (written about "the greatest of all the Mayan archeological sites" in Chiapas, Mexico, and dedicated to Dennis Puniston, an archaeologist struck by lightning there in 1978), and the set is concluded by a twenty-minute reading of "Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers."

You'll find both of these recordings on Tarn's PennSound author page, which is anchored by a November 2002 reading with Tony Olson at the Kelly Writers House , and we hope to add more readings by the the poet in the near future. Click on the title above to start listening.

Leonard Schwartz and Zhang Er at NYU, 2006

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:08:07 EDT

This afternoon, we added a reading by husband-and-wife duo, Leonard Schwartz and Zhang Er, recorded November 20, 2006 at New York University.

Leonard Schwartz's reading is drawn exclusively from last year's A Message Back and Other Furors, a constraint-based long-form work whose guiding ethos, the poet tells us, was that "for one year, anything I wrote needed to go into this poem, and if it didn't fit into the poem, it didn't fit anywhere." Schwartz also reads a smaller excerpt from that collection during his Segue Series reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, two days earlier, along with 2005's Ear and Ethos, and a selection of new poems. You can hear those recordings, along with a 2000 reading from the University of Hawaii at Manoa on Schwartz's PennSound author page, and of course, there are more than 180 Cross-Cultural Poetics programs hosted by Schwartz available on PennSound as well.

Zhang Er's reading, which is entirely in Chinese, draws upon her recent collections Verses on Bird and Because of Mountain. On Er's PennSound author page, you'll also find a 2005 Segue Series reading at the Bowery Poetry Club (during which Er reads her poems in Chinese and Schwartz reads translations by Eleni Sikelianos), along with a 2000 reading from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and a 2008 appearance on Cross-Cultural Poetics, where she is joined by her translator Bill Ransom.

We're very happy to be able to share both of these recordings, and particularly glad to add to our small (yet growing) body of works recorded in a language other than English. Click on the links above to listen to either reading

Tenney Nathanson: New Author Page

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:09:13 EDT

Earlier this week, we launched a new author page for poet Tenney Nathanson, bringing together a trio of full-length readings and a recent radio appearance to provide a thorough portrait of his contemporary work, as well as snapshots of where he's been before.

We begin with Nathanson's April 28, 2007 Segue Series Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club: a thirty-five minute set in which he draws equally from the earlier collections Erased Art and Home on the Range, as well as the manuscript-in-progress, Ghost Snow Falls Through the Void (Globalization). Nathanson also shares excerpts from this nearly-completed book-length poem in a pair of readings at the Poetry Center of the University of Arizona, recorded almost exactly a year apart in November of 2007 and 2008 — the former as part of POG and Chax Press' POG Sound reading series (Nathanson notes in the latter that only about 50% of that evening's reading overlaps the earlier one). Finally, we've included a three-minute appearance on KXCI-FM's "A Poet's Moment" program, in which Nathanson reads "Bad Zen Boy," also from Ghost Snow Falls Through the Void (Globalization).

We're very happy to be able to share our material with our listeners — especially since so much of it is not yet available elsewhere — and hope that it will help to keep Nathanson's fans satisfied until Ghost Snow Falls Through the Void (Globalization) is eventually published. Click on the title above to start listening.

LA-Lit: Three New Episodes

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:12:37 EDT

We've just added three new episodes from LA-Lit, a series showcasing "poets, novelists, hybridists, and non-genre text authors hailing from, relocated to, or visiting Los Angeles." In these latest additions to PennSound, co-hosts Mathew Timmons and Stephanie Rioux continue to engage with some of the most exciting voices in contemporary poetry, balancing long reading segments with thoughtful conversations.

We begin with episode #31, featuring poet Thérèse Bachand, who shares work from her two latest collections, luce a cavallo and Daughter of the Ephemeral World, among others in a ninety-minute, two part session. Dan Machlin joins Timmons and Rioux for episode #32, reading extensively from his debut collection Dear Body in a seventy-five minute program. Finally, in episode #33, Kristin Palm explores her former hometown, Detroit, in excerpts from The Straights, which is also her debut volume.

Be sure to check out PennSound's LA-Lit homepage, where you can listen to many more programs featuring readings and discussions with Will Alexander, Diane Ward, Sawako Nakayasu, Lee Ann Brown, Eileen Myles and Nada Gordon, among others, and keep an eye on PennSound Daily for news of new additions to this exciting series, which has its finger firmly on the pulse of contemporary poetics on the West Coast, the East Coast and all points in-between.

James Schuyler on PennSound

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:18:31 EDT

We're wrapping up another week by focusing on our small, but nevertheless important collection of recordings by the late James Schuyler. Originally released by Watershed Intermedia in 1989 (two years before the poet's death), Hymn to Life and Other Poems was originally recorded in November 1986 at Schuyler's apartment at New York's legendary Hotel Chelsea.

The six-poem set begins with the title poem, "Hymn to Life," taken from the 1974 volume of the same name. In that volume, it serves as a sweeping conclusion to a collection begun with "Beautiful Funerals" — here, running nearly thirty-five minutes, it draws listeners in, introducing them to the unique timbres of Schuyler's voice, his expert eye for images and the poem's gently meandering line lengths. Next comes "Unlike Joubert," from the same collection, followed by a pair of poems from his 1969 debut, Freely Espousing: "Now and Then (for Kenward Elmslie) and that collection's title poem, the classic "Freely Espousing." This is followed by the (as yet) unpublished poem, "Mood Indigo (for David Trinidad)," which would finally appear in the "Last Poems" section of 1993's Collected Poems. Finally, Schuyler closes out the set with "The Crystal Lithium," one of the poet's most beloved works, which subtly acknowledges the mental illness which plagued him through most of his adult life.

You'll also find a link to Schuyler's page at The Electronic Poetry Center, where you'll find a number of poems (selected by Charles North), letters and other writings on Schuyler including book reviews, interviews and essays. While we'd love to have even more material to share with our listeners, we're very glad to be able to make these recordings available so that a wider audience may know and appreciate this less well-known, but no less important member of the New York School's first generation.

Damon Krukowski at the Kelly Writers House, 2006

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:30:44 EDT

Today's offering is a newly added recording from the Kelly Writers House — a March 2, 2006 reading by Damon Krukowski, who appeared as part of Kenneth Goldsmith's "Writing and Culture" class. Introducing his guest — who, in addition to his own writing has forged influential careers as both a musician (in both Galaxie 500 and Damon and Naomi) and publisher (of Exact Change Books) — Goldsmith observes, "He's one of those people that anything he touches turns to art, somehow."

Krukowski shares a selection of prose poems from his 2004 collection, The Memory Theater Burned, beginning with the opening suite of six: "The War," "Kaddish," "Economy," "Song Without Words," "Mute" and the title piece, "The Memory Theater Burned." Speaking of the contextual relationship between these pieces, he tells the audience, "I sequenced them kind of the way I would an album. They were written independently of one another, but I felt that depending on how you heard them or read them in sequence, different themes get emphasized or echo with one another, so the sequence is rather deliberate." Moving on, he continues with a number of poems selected as a nod to the common elements of his and Goldsmith's aesthetics, including "The Copyist," "A Testamonial," "Into the Medina," "My Life as the History of a Town," before concluding with "The Virtuoso."

The second half of the recording is a conversation between the two poets, starting with the differences between Krukowski's experience as musician versus author, specifically in regards to performance, as well as the distinction between poetry and lyrics. Goldsmith challenges Krukowski to recite one of his lyrics from memory, which he has a difficult time doing, confessing that melody often serves as an aid to memory. He then reads another story from the collection, "Reading," which touches upon some of these differences, leading into a discussion of the power dynamic between performer and audience, as well as the role of religion in Krukowski's work.

On Krukowski's PennSound author page, you'll also find his November 2004 reading as part of the Line Reading Series, which features a number of the same poems read during his Kelly Writers House appearance. There are also links to Music Overheard, a two-disc set edited by Krukowski in conjunction with the marvelous "Super Vision" exhibition at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art (which ran from December 2006 to April 2007), as well as the Damon and Naomi MP3 Portal, where listeners can sample his musical output. Clicking on the title above takes you directly there.

PoemTalk 15: Lyn Hejinian's "constant change figures"

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:43:45 EDT

We're proud to launch the fifteenth episode of the PoemTalk Podcast Series — a discussion of an untitled (and as yet unpublished) Lyn Hejinian poem, here called "constant change figures," which will be included in her forthcoming collection, The Book of a Thousand Eyes. Joining host and PennSound co-director Al Filreis at the Kelly Writers House for this program are his colleagues Bob Perelman and Thomas Devaney, as well as first-time PoemTalk-er, Tom Mandel.

Filreis begins by questioning whether "figures" is to be taken as a noun or a verb. Mandel believes that it's a verb the first time, a noun the second, and "in the exact same pronunciation as when it was a noun as a verb the third time." As a verb, "figures" reminds us that "change is what decorates, presents and makes available to us the time we sense." Perelman continues this discussion of change and variation by marking the wildly varied experiences of reading, hearing and remembering the poem, which underscore the poem's "play between process and product, between fluidity and solidifying into a gestalt" He continues: "I think the poem contains the seeds of its own unfolding and self-undoing and redoing [...] It's trying to teach us, as it goes along, how to read, unread, re-read it."

Devaney continues, seeing Hejinian's repetitions in a Steinian mode, in which each iteration brings new meanings. Mandel then concisely unpacks the poem's groupings (as three sets of nine lines), repetitions and omissions, seeing a clear privileging of the first two lines as the seed from which the poem unfolds, as well as the ones most altered through its repetitions. Perelman concurs, seeing evidence not only of Stein's continuous present, but also a meta-commentary on the continuous present dealing with three different varieties of time: "sense, experience and memory." Filreis chimes in, noting how "experience is constantly qualified in this poem," and Mandel uses this as an opportunity to draw attention to the implied question of the nature of experience contained in the poem's final five lines.

At this point, Hejinian's own history is brought into the discussion — specifically a contextualization of this poem's content within her unique poetics, as well as the ways in which ideas touched upon here have developed over time. "We agree," Filreis writes on the PoemTalk blog, "that from the time of her great Stein talks and of Writing Is an Aid to Memory Lyn Hejinian has conceived of writing itself, an act that is at once a matter of forgetting and remembering, as a definition (or an 'aid' to the redefinition) of the past." This leads to a consideration of the double-entendre present in the poem, and the role of variation in shaping its myriad meanings. Mandel cites John Coltrane as a prime example, noting the ways in which his repetition "keeps more of the work in the present, it keeps more of the work in the mind of the listener/reader at any single time," and Perelman agrees, seeing "mid-range attention" as perhaps the most important factor in a poem such as this, trumping memory and sense. Filreis picks up this idea, likening Hejinian's larger project, The Book of a Thousand Eyes, to a cubistic attempt to engage with this sort of attention, à la "a thousand ways of looking at a blackbird."

PoemTalk is a co-production of PennSound, the Kelly Writers House and the Poetry Foundation. For more information on this program, along with all fourteen previous episodes, please visit the PoemTalk blog, and don't forget that you can subscribe to the series through the iTunes music store. Our next program will be a discussion of Robert Creeley's well-loved poem, "I Know a Man," featuring a panel of seasoned PoemTalk veterans — Randall Couch, Jessica Lowenthal and Bob Perelman — and stay tuned for future episodes on Rodrigo Toscano, Lydia Davis, Bob Perelman, Amiri Baraka and Charles Bernstein. Thanks for listening!

Richard Foreman: Segue Series Reading at the Ear Inn, 1990

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:19:40 EST

To wrap up the week, we've added a number of vintage Segue Series recordings from the Ear Inn — most from the late 1980s and early 1990s — and we'll be highlighting selections from this body of work over the next few weeks.

Today, we're starting with this January 13, 1990 reading by playwright Richard Foreman, in which he reads a lengthy excerpt from a work-in-progress that would eventually become Eddie Goes to Poetry City, which would win a Ford Foundation Play Development Grant that same year. "It may be a little too whimsical [...] for this setting," he warns the audience, however, "I wanted to read it because I don't know how I really feel about all of this stuff and the only point to me in staging plays, too, is just to do stuff that I think, when I start out, is impossible and pointless, and then see if I can possibly make it relevant."

This new reading is nicely complemented by the other recordings you'll find on our Foreman author page, which is anchored by a three-part appearance on Close Listening program: the first, a conversation with host Charles Bernstein, which is followed by half-hour programs dedicated to readings from Foreman's nonfiction works (including No-Body: A Novel in Parts), and his plays (including Bad Boy Nietzsche, Pearls for Pigs, Wake Up, Mr. Sleepy, Your Unconscious Mind is Dead and Permanent Brain Damage). You'll also find four appearances on Cross-Cultural Poetics, the first dating from 2004, as well as a link to our Henry Hills page, where you can watch his short film, King Richard, which follows Foreman and his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre in 1997 and 2004.

For Felix Bernstein's in-depth response to Foreman's latest production — a collaboration with John Zorn, entitled Astronome — click here, and click on the title above to listen to all of the recordings mentioned above.

Lew Welch: New Author Page

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:56:04 EST

Today, we're extremely proud to announce a new author page for the late San Francisco poet, Lew Welch, an immensely talented poet, whose work surpasses simple Beat Generation stereotypes to achieve something timeless. While Welch might not be as well-known as his friends and compatriots, such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder, it's our small hope that this new archive might bring him to the attention to a new audience of readers and listeners alike.

The centerpiece of our Lew Welch page is an April 1967 reading at Santa Barbara's Magic Lantern — a luxuriously long performance in which the poet reads practically all of his major works (save, perhaps, his "Taxi Suite"), including "Chicago Poem," "A Round of English," "Winter," "Graffiti" and "Maitreya Poem," as well as the entire sequence of Hermit Poems and most of its complementary volume The Way Back. Many of the poems are preceded by lengthy introductions (often longer than the poems themselves) in which Welch gives background information on his works and discusses topics as varied as politics, linguistics and popular music.

Welch's musical interests — he was a former music major, and loved everything from Charlie Parker to James Brown to the Quicksilver Messenger Service with equal fervor — are on full display here, in pieces performed a cappella like "Graffiti" and "Supermarket Song," as well as sung portions of poems such as "A Round of English," which are marked off by musical notes (♪) in the printed texts. In one section of that poem, a somewhat unremarkable passage:

♪
Shakespeare Milton
Shakespeare Milton

Shelley as well
Shelley as well

Sarah something Teasdale
Sarah something Teasdale

Edith M. Bell
Edith M. Bell
♪

yields a breathtaking performance when Welch sings it to the tune of "Frère Jacques," going so far as to emulate the effect of multiple voices singing the lines in a round: "Shakespeare Milton / Shakespeare Milton / Shelley as Milton / Shelley as Milton / Shelley as Well / Sarah something Shelley as / Sarah something Shelley as / Sarah something Teasdale / Sarah something Teasdale / Edith M. Bell / Edith M. Bell." For Welch, poetic language was purely a spoken vernacular full of idiosyncratic American rhythms and melodies. He tells us: "A poet has his material absolutely free. It's coming out of the mouth of every American in the world. All he has to do is clean his ear out, listen to it, and put down what he has on his mind out of that material, because there is no other material."

Also included in the Magic Lantern set is Welch's epic "Din Poem," an ambitious pastiche of poetry, prose and song which most completely achieves his poetic goals, ventriloquizing numerous parallel discourses — the language of business and patriotism, of faith and lust, of marriages in disrepair and psychological breakdowns, along with virulent racial hate-speech — which are eventually woven together into a thunderous wave of American noise, against which he sets a parable of hope and escape. In this raw and uncompromising masterpiece, we see a complex portrait of America at numerous societal crossroads, as well as the personal hells Welch eventually sought to escape.

Additionally, there's a second brief recording at San Francisco's Renaissance Corner, dating from the spring of 1969, in which Welch reads his collection, Courses, in its entirety. This suite of micro-poems, each named after a different academic subject, showcases both the poet's wit as well as his propensity for potent and memorable phrasing, honed during his years working in the advertising industry. To listen to both of these recordings — which come to us courtesy of Robert Creeley's reel-to-reel collection — click on the title above.

PennSound is Now on Twitter

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:43:28 EST

It's been less than 24 hours since we launched our PennSound Twitter page, and already we have 50 followers. Sign up to follow our feed to get micro-updates — from co-directors Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein, and managing editor Michael S. Hennessey — highlighting changes to the site, new additions and favorite recordings from our archives. Recent tweets have featured Bernadette Mayer & Lee Ann Brown, Tracie Morris, the PennSound Podcast series and our video page.

Are you getting the most out of your PennSound experience? Aside from Twitter, don't forget all of the other ways in which you can keep up to date with the site through the web or your cell phone: first, there's the PennSound Daily newsfeed, which automatically delivers entries like this one to your iGoogle page, Google Reader, or favorite feed reader. PennSound is also on FaceBook, along with pages for our sister sites, including the Kelly Writers House and the Electronic Poetry Center. One additional option is the Kelly Writers House's Dial-a-Poem service: just dial 215-746-POEM (7636), and aside from news on upcoming KWH events, you can also hear a recording from a past reading, courtesy of the PennSound archives.

Finally, for those of you who feel overwhelmed by all this new technology, and liked the world a lot more before it Twittered, Tumblred and Bloggered, we're currently beta-testing yet another, more traditional means of transmission. Utilizing homing pigeons equipped with state-of-the-art (well, state-of-the-art circa WWI) wire recording technology, PigeonSound ™ (see prototype at right) will be able to deliver three minutes of telephone-quality audio up to several hundred miles from our home base at UPenn's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (our apologies to the rest of the world). Though there have been numerous unfortunate setbacks to date, we hope to have the program up and running by the first of next month with our inaugural offering: The Selected Poems of Ern Malley (read by the author himself). From sites that tweet to birds that tweet, we have all of your poetry options covered at PennSound.