PennSound Daily

New "Public Access Poetry" Videos on PennSound

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:56:07 EDT

Last fall, we were tremendously proud to be able to partner with the fine folks at the St. Mark's Poetry Project to make thirty-one episodes of the groundbreaking television program Public Access Poetry available to audiences worldwide (you can read the original PennSound Daily announcement from September 30th here). Today, we're just as proud to announce the launch of a second set of videos, which now completes the restoration project begun in 2009. To refresh your memory, here's a brief description and history of the program:

Even if you were watching the innovation called cable TV in 1977 and 1978, what are the chances that you saw a show titled Public Access Poetry? Produced by Poetry Project stalwarts Greg Masters, Gary Lenhart, David Herz, Didi Susan Dubelyew, Daniel Krakauer, Bob Rosenthal and Rochelle Kraut, PAP programs featured half-hour readings by a wide range of poets and performers who could roughly be categorized as "downtown," more often than not linked in one way or another with the Poetry Project. The cable TV series lasted two seasons (one live, the other recorded for later airing) and was produced with little-to-no broadcasting experience by the PAP personnel.

This new batch of programs includes performances from a number of PennSound authors, including Michael Lally, Eileen Myles, Charles Bernstein, Hannah Weiner, Tony Towle, Jim Brodey, Bob Holman, Alice Notley and Simon Pettet, among others, and while those poets are already represented to varying degrees within our archives, the real treat here is getting to put a face (as well as a voice) to a name for some important downtown poets of the era, who are making their first appearance through PAP: Tom Savage, Bob Rosenthal, Greg Masters, Rochelle Kraut, Bob Heman, Barbara Barg, Michael Scholnick and Gary Lenhart to name a few.

You can watch the first set of PAP videos here, and you'll find the new additions discussed above here. We'll be back on Wedneday with news of even more exciting videos added to our archives.

"Gertrude Stein's War Years: Setting the Record Straight" on Jacket2

Thu, 10 May 2012 18:17:28 EDT

Wednesday morning got off to an energetic start over at Jacket2, with the launch of a fascinating new feature by Charles Bernstein entitled "Gertrude Stein's War Years: Setting the Record Straight."

"Over the past several years," Bernstein begins, "Gertrude Stein's war time record has been subjected to a stream of misinterpretations, distortions, and disinformation in the mainstream press. Most of these articles are written by authors who are hostile to Stein's literary works and who admit to their inability (and unwillingness) to read her work, including the works by Stein that directly address the issue at hand." In an effort to address this problem, Bernstein has assembled a dossier containing "key documents ... that refute the sensational tabloid accounts of Stein's activities, views, and affiliations during the war years, when she and Alice B. Toklas lived in Bilignin, France (near Lyon and Geneva)." "Stein's connection to the Vichy government is complex," he concludes, "and these complexities are fully explored in the essays and articles linked here."

Inside, you'll find a wide array of materials that do exactly that, starting with Edward Burns' "Gertrude Stein: A Complex Itinerary, 1940-1944, originally a talk delivered at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art last month in conjunction with the exhibit, "The Steins Collect." From Burns and Ulla E. Dydo (editor of PennSound's Gertrude Stein author page), we have both a 1987 letter to The Nation, written in response to Natalie Robin's article, "The Defiling of Writers," and an appendix from their co-edited The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder that details Stein's experience in Europe between September 1942 and September 1944. Joan Retallack contributes the "Stein and History" section from her introduction to the "Poets for the Millennium" edition, Gertrude Stein: Selections, along with a new commentary. Bernstein debunks Steinian disinformation while invoking Spike Jones, Donald Duck and the Marx Brothers in "Gertrude Stein Taunts Hitler in 1934 and 1945,", and finally, Marjorie Perloff offers a pointed response to Alan Dershowitz's recent Huffington Post article on Stein.

In addition to these substantive texts, Bernstein has also gathered links to additional writings on the controversy from Douglas Messerli and Renate Stendhal, along with an authoritative list of a dozen articles, both old and new, denouncing Stein.

New Segue Series Readings from the Bowery Poetry Club

Tue, 08 May 2012 01:49:02 EDT

Here's a great way to start the week off — a handful of newly added recordings from the Segue Series, recorded at the Bowery Poetry Club this spring.

First up, from March 24th, we have sets from Rodney Koneke and John Godfrey. They were followed on March 31st by the dynamic pairing of Laura Elrick and Carla Harryman.

Jumping ahead to April 7th we have sets from Katie Degentesh and Brian Kim Stefans, and we've also added audio from a non-Segue event at the BPC featuring Anne Tardos and Norman Fischer, which was recorded on April 11th. Finally, from this past Saturday, May 5th, we have two fantastic readings from Tao Lin and Mathew Timmons.

You can listen to all of these recordings and many more on PennSound's Segue Series at the Bowery Poetry Club homepage, and stay tuned as we'll continue to add recordings from this spring's Segue events in the near future. As always, we're grateful to the series organizers as well as the BPC's tech staff for making it possible for us to share these wonderful recordings with our listeners.

PoemTalk 52: on Cole Swensen's "If a Garden of Numbers"

Thu, 03 May 2012 17:12:04 EDT

Today, we release the fifty-second episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series. Here's the opening of host Al Filreis' write-up of the new show from the PoemTalk blog on Jacket2:

Cole Swensen's book Ours is a sequence of poems — or is perhaps best described as a poetic project. Andre Le Nôtre (1613-1700) was the principal gardener of King Louis XIV; he designed and led the construction of the park of the Palace of Versailles. The poems in Swensen's book indicate a range of interests in Le Nôtre's work and beyond, but his Gardens of the Chateau de Vaux-le-Vicomte are of special interest, and they are the topic of the poem we chose to discuss, "If a Garden of Numbers." The poem, and our talk about it, raised a number of compelling questions. Are historical research and the lyric compatible? (Yes, we agreed. But what are the varieties of integrating the two? And how does a scholarly methodology knowingly bespeak what was once super-elite art — namely, Le Nôtre's?) Can the hyper-rational garden be truly "ours," ever? (The master landscape designer's name is a pun on that possessive form of liberalism's favorite pronoun from the French Revolution onward. This pun is a key to understanding Swensen's poem and indeed the whole book.) If — to quote Swensen channeling Louis XIV — "it was an age that felt that nature could be corrected," does such an urge extend to the formalities of poetry? If Le Nôtre "couldn't stand views that end," what effect should that have on a poetics? The idea that the garden includes everything you can see from the garden has some kind of political valence: progressive if what's beyond the garden can and must be welcomed in, if natural emigration is really possible (by virtue of its design, notwithstanding the exclusivity of its original patron); conservative if Le Nôtre's act of inclusion colonizes nature beyond its border. If the latter, then is form as a kind of artifice inherently conservative? Le Nôtre's "jar in Tennessee" problem means that form takes dominion everywhere, even if the slovenly wilderness grows up all around it. One needn't beat it back. One need only place the form in its midst. Finally: If art is an idea as distinct from nature, and if the "real exceeds the ideal," then can a poem of ideas about nature be aligned with the real? We're back to hyper-rationality. These gardens are beautifully excessive, and so — Swensen seems to contend, but arguably — they get at humanity because indeed they produce a version of reality rather than (merely) ideality. Subjectivity is affirmed. Every slight shift in perspective matters a great deal. The garden (the poem too?) is a way of making nature account for the mind.

Ann Seaton, Michelle Taransky, and Gregory Djanikian joined Al Filreis for this discussion. We went hard at all the questions enumerated above, expressing doubts about the progressive claim implicit in the pun on "ours." We pondered the aesthetics and ethics of the garden that includes everything one can see from the garden. Annie offered a political reading, and the others responded, both agreeing and pressing back. Fortunately for us and for PoemTalk listeners, Cole Swensen was interviewed about this work by Leonard Schwartz for one of his "Cross-Cultural Poetics" shows, and so our varying interpretations can benefit from a rich context of resources and responses.

PoemTalk is a co-production of PennSound, the Kelly Writers House, Jacket2 and the Poetry Foundation. If you're interested in more information on the series or want to hear our archives of previous episodes, please visit the PoemTalk blog, and don't forget that you can subscribe to the series through the iTunes music store. Thanks, as always, for listening!

Caroline Bergvall: Charles Bernstein Class Visit, 2012

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 23:41:20 EDT

Here's one of the latest additions to the PennSound archives: a ninety-minute recording of Caroline Bergvall's visit to Charles Bernstein's experimental writing seminar on "constraints and collaborations" last Monday.

Bergvall begins by briefly discussing the role of transcription in her recent collection, Meddle English. "I engage with exercises of transcription in this book and otherwise ... it's a form of thinking about documents that I find very interesting. Some of the documents in this book ... deal with transcription and deal with a way of rethinking documents, and from then what are you going to do with those documents, how are you going to address your approach to the documents?" Specifically, she discusses the role of failure and restriction in her writing, as well as her experiments with film and recorded sound, focusing on "off-page environments" — "there's the textual impact, there's the methods used and there are the methods used when you move into other environments, whether there's sound recordings, whether there's sight, whether it's a live reading . . ." and so forth. After her opening explication, she opens the floor to questions from the students and others present, leading into a long and fascinating exchange.

You can hear this recording and many others on PennSound's Caroline Bergvall author page, and keep an eye on Jacket2, where a new discussion between Bergvall and Rozalie Hirs will close out a.rawlings' "Sound, Poetry" feature in the near future.

David Buuck: New Author Page

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 10:05:38 EDT

Our latest author page is for Bay Area poet, editor and somatic provocateur David Buuck, and is anchored by a quartet of new recordings that come to us courtesy of the marvelous Andrew Kenower of A Voice Box fame.

Our most recent addition is a 2011 set at Condensery, and this is joined by a 2010 set at Erin Morill's house and two readings from 2009 — one as part of The (New) Reading Series and the other at Books & Bookshelves. These four recordings, totaling two hours of new materials, are joined by two full-length Segue Series sets recorded at the Bowery Poetry Club in 2005 and earlier this year, as well as the 2004 MLA Offsite Reading in Philadelphia.

In our PennSound Daily announcement of last February's Segue set, we directed our listeners to check out Thom Donovan's Jacket2 commentary on the reading and it's also worth mentioning Donovan's essay, "Somatic Poetics" (also at J2), in which Buuck's work is discussed. We couldn't be happier to have Buuck's work as part of the PennSound archives, and look forward to further additions in the future.

Cross Cultural Poetics: Nine New Programs, 2012

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:59:18 EDT

We're starting this week off in grand fashion with nine new shows from Leonard Schwartz's groundbreaking radio program, Cross Cultural Poetics, including a landmark 250th episode.

We begin with Episode #243, "Zaher/Foster," broadcast on January 5, 2012, which features Maged Zaher discussing his collection Portrait of the Poet As an Engineer and Talisman House founder Ed Foster talking about the newest releases from his press. Next, from January 12th, we have Episode #244, "Dhompa/Schultz," with Tsering Wangmo Dhompa and Susan Schultz reading from their latest books, my rice tastes like the lake and Memory Cards 2010-2011, respectively.

January 17th brings us Episode #245, "In Translation," where Andrea Lingenfelter reads her translations of Zhai Yongming and Raul Zurita reads Daniel Borzutsky's translations of his own work, and translation also features into the following week's episode, "Locomotrix," where Jennifer Scappettone read her translations of Amelia Rosselli alongside Schwartz's conversation with Vit Horejs, director of the Czek Marionette Theater.

February's lone program, Episode #247, "Burning City," showcases Jed Rasula, who discusses the new anthology he coedited with Tim Conley, Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity. In March, Schwartz returned with Joseph Donahue (who read from his latest, Dissolves) and Seattle Opera Orchestra conductor Gary Thor Wedow (who discussed their recent staging of Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice) in Episode #248, "Of Voice." Two more dynamic pairings followed — playwright Jim Findley and poet Mike Basinski in Episode #249, "What the Plants Said/Trailers, and poet Charles Alexander and essayist Christopher Merrill in Episode #250, "Water and Tree" — before our new additions close with Episode #251, "Paris Views," in which Michael Joyce reads from and discusses his recent book of the same name.

You'll find hundreds of previous episodes from the series on our Cross Cultural Poetics homepage, and don't forget to keep an eye on on Jacket2, where Schwartz has been posting commentaries on shows from the Cross Cultural Poetics archives since the start of the year.

Heatstrings: Louisville Conference Reading at Alan Golding's House, 2012

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 02:08:01 EDT

Thanks to Aldon Nielsen, we're able to bring you a recording of this year's reading at Alan Golding's house, traditionally held in conjunction with the University of Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture After 1900 (which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year).

Recorded on February 25th, the informal and intimate reading includes brief sets by Norman Finkelstein (reading the work of Paul Bray), Joseph Donahue, Alan Golding (reading the work of Ed Dorn), Aldon Nielsen, Peter O'Leary, Jennifer Ruppert, Mark Scroggins, Laura Richardson and Tyrone Williams, before concluding with Finkelstein reading his own work.

You'll find segmented MP3s for this event on our Heatstrings archive homepage, along with a special sub-page for the annual readings at Golding's house. On the latter, you'll also find sets from the previous two years, which also include sets by cris cheek, Pat Clifford, Michael Davidson, Carla Harryman, Michael Heller, Cathy Wagner and Barrett Watten, among many others.

Ron Silliman: Kelly Writers House Fellows Programs, 2012

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 15:26:09 EDT

We're starting off this new week with recordings from Ron Silliman's recent tenure as one of 2012's Kelly Writers House Fellows. We're proud to be able to bring our listeners both audio and video footage from these intimate events, recorded this past March 19th and 20th.

First up, we have Silliman's Monday night reading, which featured excerpts from Ketjak and Ketjak 2's shadow text, "Carnival of Affect," along with a fifteen-minute Q&A session with the audience. As with all Kelly Writers House Fellows visits, the reading was preceded with lavish introductions from Al Filreis, Rivky Mondal and Jamie-Lee Josselyn.

The following morning, Filreis and Silliman convened for a ninety-minute conversation, which touched upon a wide variety of topics, including the role of spontaneity and obsessiveness, embodiment and disembodiment within his writing, radical pedagogy, and the influence of Pound, Williams, Stein, Marx, Cage, Eigner, Grenier and Silliman's grandmother.

Silliman was the second of this year's Kelly Writers House Fellows, following Karen Finley's February appearance, and preceding John Barth's visit later this month. You can watch and listen to the events mentioned above (all of which have been segmented into individual audio tracks) by clicking on this entry's title, and for more information on the Kelly Writers House Fellows program (including how you can see the Barth events in person or live via KWH-TV), click here.

Jerry Rothenberg Eightieth Birthday Tribute Video

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 12:52:00 EDT

Thanks to the extraordinary director and producer Colin Still (of Optic Nerve/Rockdrill Recordings/No More to Say & Nothing to Weep For: An Elegy for Allen Ginsberg 1926-1997 fame), we're very glad to be able to bring our listeners complete video coverage of the equally extraordinary Jerry Rothenberg's Eightieth Birthday Tribute, co-orgainzed by Charles Bernstein (to whom we wish a very happy birthday) and Pierre Joris at the CUNY Graduate Center last December.

Broken into four segments, the evening's event featured papers on and celebrations of Rothenberg's work by an all-star cast that included Ammiel Alcalay, Bruce Andrews, Mónica de la Torre, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Al Filreis, Michael Heller, Susan Howe, Rochelle Owens, George Economou, Carolee Schneeman, Anne Tardos, Lee Ann Brown, Anne Waldman and David Antin (whose tribute was read by Bernstein), among many others. Rothenberg closed out the evening himself with a reading.

In addition to the aforementioned videos, on the special page we've put together for this event, you'll also find links to Bernstein's announcement of the celebration on Jacket2, along with full texts of the tributes offered by Antin, Filreis, Robert Kelly, Jeffrey Robinson, George Quasha, Mark Weiss and Ernesto Livon-Grosman.

Larry Eigner: "around new sound daily means Selected Poems" (S Press, 1974)

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:34:10 EDT

One of our newest additions is a 1974 cassette by Larry Eigner, issued by Germany's S Press under the title around new sound daily means Selected Poems.

Al Filreis has more information on the recording's history over on Jacket2:

On July 1 and again on July 11 in 1974, Michael Koehler recorded Larry Eigner reading twenty-seven of his poems in Swampscott, Massachusetts. The recordings were later released by S Press, as tape number 37 in their series, under the title Larry Eigner: around new / sound daily / means: Selected Poems. A number of university libraries — and of course individuals — own copies of the recording; but it is fairly rare at this point. Among the libraries with a copy is the special collections archive at the University of Connecticut, where the tape was apparently part of the materials Cid Corman gave them to form the Corman Papers there. I located the Eigner recording in the Corman finding aid, asked the UConn librarians to copy it for us at PennSound. (Many thanks for Melissa Watterworth Batt, curator of Literary, Natural History and Rare Books Collections there.) Soon after, with permission from Richard Eigner, Larry's brother and the executor of the poet's literary estate, we digitized, uploaded and then segmented the recording into individual poems. They are now available for both streaming and downloading at PennSound's Eigner page. We wish of course to acknowledge S Press for having made this recording available originally.

In Memoriam: Adrianne Rich (1929-2012)

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:04:12 EDT

It's a very sad day in the world of poetry, as the Los Angeles Times reports that Adrienne Rich has died at the age of 82 from complications of long-term rheumatoid arthritis.

It would be difficult to list all of the accolades that Rich accumulated in the more than sixty years since her debut collection, A Change of World, was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1950, but they include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1952), the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1960), the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award (1970), the National Book Award (for Diving into the Wreck, 1974), the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1986), admission to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991), the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (1992), the Frost Medal (1992), a Academy of American Poets Fellowship (1992), a MacArthur Fellowship (colloquially known as the "genius grant," 1994), the Wallace Stevens Award (1996), the National Medal of Arts (1997), and the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award (2010). Among these, it is perhaps the penultimate honor that is the most important, as Rich refused it, citing the government's hostile policies towards culture. "I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House," she stated, "because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration . . . The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate. A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored."

This impassioned gesture serves as one very public and high-profile culmination of the process of radicalization that began in the early 1960s, as Rich, along with the nation at large, underwent tremendous cultural, political and social transformation. These preoccupations — the rights of women, the civil rights movement, stopping the war in Vietnam (and others since), ending poverty, and championing queer identity — were freely espoused in a number of celebrated volumes, including Leaflets, The Will to Change, Diving into the Wreck, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far and An Atlas of the Difficult World, and also in a prodigious body of non-fiction writing, where Rich found a second life as a groundbreaking feminist theorist. Rich's deeply-held beliefs only grew stronger in the new millennium, where she faced troubling political times with a strong faith in poetry's remediative powers. Writing in The Guardian in 2006, she evoked Shelley's oft-quoted appraisal of poets as "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," observing "I'm both a poet and one of the 'everybodies' of my country. I live with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion and social antagonism huddling together on the faultline of an empire." These sentiments were explored masterfully in later volumes such as Fox, The School Among the Ruins, Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth and her latest collection, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, and while Rich is often hailed as an exemplary feminist poet, or queer poet, or political poet, perhaps now we can all agree that we've lost an extraordinary (but otherwise adjective-less) poet.

You can listen to a variety of recordings spanning four decades on PennSound's Adrienne Rich author page, which is anchored by audio from the poet's 2005 visit to UPenn as a Kelly Writers House Fellow. In addition to the segmented tracks from her reading and morning conversation with Al Filreis, you'll also find a 2000 reading from SUNY-Buffalo, a 1985 set from Cornell University and an unidentified recording from 1974. Rich was also the subject of the second episode of the PoemTalk Podcast series, as well as PennSound Podcast #11.

PoemTalk 51: on Linh Dinh's "Eating Fried Chicken"

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:47:04 EDT

Today, we're releasing the fifty-first episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series. Here's host Al Filreis' write-up of the new show from the PoemTalk blog on Jacket2:

Linh Dinh playfully and bitterly engages food, war, and race in a poem called "Eating Fried Chicken." The poem appeared in his book American Tatts, published by Chax in 2005. For PoemTalk's 51st episode, Tom Devaney, Susan Schultz (visiting from Hawai'i), and Leonard Schwartz (visiting from Olympia, Washington) joined Al Filreis to talk about this work of apparently straightforward address yet tonal complexity.

During the discussion Tom especially wrestles with the problem of tone. There's plenty of humor in the poem, he notes, but one can also read the speaker as a person who has "taken all the trouble inside of him and he's internalized it." Thus the "debts you owe me" — debts presumably the "brother" of line 1 owes the speaker — remind Tom of a tonal double strategy (particularly on questions of race) that Linh Dinh has learned from the early Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and from Etheridge Knight: "going on the offensive," as Tom puts it, "and yet implicating himself fully."

Pressing his reading of the poem's antagonist as a Vietnam War veteran, Al asks someone to describe how matters of family, honor, country (and "blood") pertain to food, whereupon Susan, thinking about Hawai'i, notes Asian American funerary practice which entails bringing comestibles to the deceased. Dinh doesn't want to be marked, she says, as an Asian American writer per se but "he's willing to play with that identification between food and identity precisely to call it into question." "'I dare you,'" Al summarizes, "'to make me mean something by what I eat.'" So what in the poem is the significance of the crispy chicken as alluringly "fast," so alluring as to disallow expectation and erase memory? Leonard observes that here Dinh is a poet who "steps from the street into the curb" and "looks down at formless stuff, and picks it up and starts playing with it" in the (modernist) tradition of Walter Benjamin (the "ragpicker who collects urban detritus only to turn it into poetry" — a key phrase from The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire), except that here, in Dinh's world, the supposed junk "has been manufactured to look like that," as Leonard puts it, "manufactured to appear formless, junk in its very origins." And so junk food is obviously part of the aesthetic of the poem.

Clearly this is an occasion when the speaker is ostentatiously yet blithely willing to lick and consume food that is "not generally available to mankind." But "there are also times" when he (on principle? because of his sense of racial and international justice? because of a traumatic experience with people in war?) will "refuse" this easy, thoughtless gluttony. Such an ethical stance then puts his poem in mind of the scarcity of fresh food — the apples of line 12 — and of the riots non-ritualized (literal) privation causes. Yet, again, the showiness of the speaker's consumption in the first lines of the poem carries the intrepid but blithe conversationalism of the language all the way through until the very end when the breathing of the poet brings him up short, for the air enabling these utterances conjures the memory of war, from which eating fried chicken is presumably a great distance: lungs of "gun powder and smoke." Listen very closely to this audio recording — turn the volume way up — and you should be able hear Linh Dinh's special kind of breathing: a subtle although very basic form of urgency.

Dinh's PennSound page includes several performances of "Eating Fried Chicken." The recording we used was made during an extensive "Studio 111" reading in Philadelphia in December of 2007. We invite PoemTalk's audience to compare the nuanced ethical tone of this poem with those of several other American Tatts works performed at the same time: "Sudden Death Overtime" and "Bearings," for example. And for the context of Linh Dinh's critique of commodification and political power — and for a sense of his recent movement somewhat away from poetry — we recommend the hour-long talk he gave at the opening event launching an exhibit of his photographs in January 2011 and also his ongoing photographic blog, State of the Union.

The editor of this episode of PoemTalk was, as always, Steve McLaughlin.

PoemTalk is a co-production of PennSound, the Kelly Writers House, Jacket2 and the Poetry Foundation. If you're interested in more information on the series or want to hear our archives of previous episodes, please visit the PoemTalk blog, and don't forget that you can subscribe to the series through the iTunes music store. Thanks, as always, for listening!

Anne Waldman: "Poetic Symbiosis" Talk and Belladonna* Recording

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:36:13 EDT

Today we're highlighting two recently-added recordings from the inimitable Anne Waldman.

First up, we have a February 29th video from our own Kelly Writers House, where Waldman delivered a talk on "Poetic Symbiosis" as part of the Sylvia Kauders lunch series. After opening statements from Jessica Lowenthal, CAConrad introduce Waldman, framing the poet's political and poetic interoperability as embodying the role of "outrider" (borrowing from the title of one of her books). The proceedings are split between Waldman discussing her own poetic process and the influences that shape it, and a lengthy Q&A session where she interacts with the audience in a more discursive fashion.

We've also recently added new audio from last December, recorded at the annual Belladonna* benefit reading at New York's Hi! Art Gallery, where she was joined by her son, Ambrose Bye. You can hear both of these recordings — and many, many more — on PennSound's Anne Waldman author page, and stay tuned for a new PoemTalk podcast featuring Waldman (recorded on the same day) in the near future.

Maureen Owen: New Author Page

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:33:36 EDT

Our latest author page — for poet and Telephone Books editor Maureen Owen — is already receiving an enthusiastic response from the poetry community.

This new archive of Owen's recorded work includes eight complete readings spanning five decades. Her two most recent volumes, Edges of Water (Chax Press, 2012) and Erosion's Pull (Coffee House Press, 2006) are well represented in readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project (in 2011), POG Sound (2007), the Belladonna* Reading Series (2007 and 2000) and at the Kelly Writers House (2004). These sets are joined by vintage readings from SUNY-Buffalo (in 1985) and the Segue Series' original home, the Ear Inn (from all the way back in 1978), and our collection concludes with video of Owen's 1978 appearance on Public Access Poetry, alongside Robin Messing.

While this page is long overdue, we couldn't be happier to finally have it as part of the site. Click on the title above to start exploring.

John Richetti Reads Donne and Herbert

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 09:44:38 EDT

Back in January, we announced new PennSound Classics recordings from UPenn professor emeritus, John Richetti — selected poems from both John Milton and Andrew Marvell — and today he's back with two new sets of readings.

First, we have a set of twenty-five poems from John Donne, taken from John Hayward's Donne: Complete Verse and Selected Prose (the Nonesuch Press, 1967). Along with well-known poems like "The Flea" and "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," you'll also find titles including "Go and Catch a Falling Star," "Loves Deitie," "A Lecture upon the Shadow" and "The Indifferent," along with a selection of seven of Donne's Holy Sonnets.

Joining these new recordings, we have a new author page for George Herbert (shown above at left), featuring nineteen selections chosen from Arthur Waugh's The Poems of George Herbert (Oxford University Press, 1958). Here, you'll find readings of "Redemption," "The Church Floor," "Vanite," "Vertue," "The Pearl" and "The Forerunners," among others.

For seven years now, Richetti has been making recordings of British poets for PennSound. In addition to the four authors mentioned above, don't miss his earlier sessions, including recordings of Pope, Swift and Dryden, his selections from Paradise Lost, selections from Shakespeare's sonnets and perhaps his most impressive contribution, The PennSound Anthology of Restoration & 18th-Century Poetry. All of those pages, along with many more, are gathered on our PennSound Classics homepage.

Charles Bernstein and Ben Yarmolinsky: "Blind Witness: Three American Operas" Videos

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:11:31 EDT

Today, we're highlighting new videos for Charles Bernstein and Ben Yarmolinsky's early-90s operatic collaborations. Augmenting the audio recordings of the original productions and video from a 2008 launch event for Factory School's collection of Bernstein's libretti, Blind Witness: Three American Operas, already archived on Yarmolinsky's PennSound author page — you can read the original announcement of those recordings here — we now have complete videos of the original productions of The Subject (1991) and The Lenny Paschen Show (1992), and an excerpted promotional video for Blind Witness News (1990).

In a recent post on Jacket2 announcing the new videos, Bernstein reprinted Yarmolinsky's preface to the Factory School volume in its entirety, and this resource, along with a New York Times review of Blind Witness News are also linked on the PennSound page. Here's Yarmolinsky describing how he came to work with Bernstein after being commissioned by Grethe Holby of American Opera Projects to write what would become Blind Witness News:

The next question was who would write the libretto. With only about three months until the scheduled performance, I thought I'd better farm the job out. I remembered the name of Charles Bernstein. The summer before in Tangier, my friend Rodrigo Rey Rosa had mentioned him to me as the leader of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement — a movement about which I knew nothing. Still, it sounded intriguing, and I knew that Charles lived in New York. So, I looked up all the Charles Bernsteins in the phone book and hit on the right one after a few tries.

Charles was immediately receptive to the idea of writing the libretto and we met a few days later to talk it over. By the end of our first meeting we had decided on a cast of four singers: Jack James & Jill Johns — anchorman and woman respectively, Jane Jones — weatherwoman, and John Jacks — sportscaster. We also decided on a four-part format of International News, Local News, Weather and Sports. My original title for the piece was "News Songs," but Charles felt that this title was — in his words — "too bland." I deferred to his judgment.

Looking back on the three operas, nearly twenty years later, he concludes, "These three operas (if they are operas) from the early 1990s represent my ideas about how contemporary American English ought to be sung. There is a consistent attempt in the text-setting to follow the rhythms and cadences of our language as it is spoken. Although I collaborated on the scenarios, suggested some verse forms, occasionally asked for slight changes to the original text, and sometimes asked for a second verse or a refrain, ultimately, the music was evoked by the words."

100+ New 1990s Recordings from the Ear Inn

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:37:06 EST

Here's something to keep you happily occupied this weekend (or for the next few months): today PennSound co-director Charles Bernstein announced the release of more than one hundred early-to-mid-1990s recordings from the Ear Inn on Jacket2. Some of the names included in this avalanche of new audio: Cabri, Child, K. Davies, A. Davies, Derksen, Dewdney, DiPalma, DuPlessis, Farrell, Fitterman, Fodaski, Foster, Fyman, Gander, Gizzi, Goldsmith, Frim, Heller, Hixon, Hoover, Inman, Kalendeck, Killian, A. Kim, Kocik, Kraut, Levy, Lewis, Lubeski, Lusk, Lyons, Mac Low, Matthews, Messerli, Myles, Neilson, O'Brien, Pearson, Price, Raworth, Regan, Rettallack, Richard, Roberson, Rosenfeld, Rower, Sala, Shaw, Sirowitz, Smith, Tillman, Toscano, Venuti, K. Waldrop, R. Waldrop, Wallace, Wheeler, C.D. Wright, J. Williams, Ziolkowski, Zivancevic, Zurawski.

In his J2 post, Bernstein relates a little of the Segue Series' history at the Ear Inn, its first home:

The Ear Inn, a small bar on Spring Street near Tribeca (just before it turns into the Hudson River), has been the home of arguably the best reading series in New York City over the past two decades. Ted Greeenwald and I started the Saturday afternoon series in the Fall of 1978 with a reading by John Ashbery and Michael Lally. Over the many Saturdays that followed, the audience has shifted in size, the PA system has worked and had conked out, the noise from the bar has sometimes become intrusive.

But the commitment to a continuing renewal of the art of poetry has never faltered; a commitment, that is, to a spectrum of writing that places its attention primarily on language and ways of making meaning, that takes for granted neither vocabulary, grammar, process, syntax, program, or subject matter — indeed where all these dynamics remain at play.

Over the years, the Ear Inn series has been able to retain its vitality because of the energy and judgment of the poets who have curated the program, for sometimes just a month and for sometimes several years; in particular Mitch Highfill, Jeanne Lance, Andrew Levy, Rob Fitterman, Laynie Brown, James Sherry of the Segue Foundation, George Peck of the Ear Inn have all been crucial to keeping the series going.

George Peck, "long-time barkeep at the Ear" and "a huge support for the series over the years" also plays an important role in the release of these new recordings, sharing a box of his own tapes with PennSound that complement the recordings taken from Bernstein's own archives. Last, but by no means least, special thanks go out to the inimitable Jeff Boruszak, who tirelessly digitized, edited and organized this treasure trove of recordings.

So that these newer additions won't get lost amidst the hundreds of recordings already posted on our main Ear Inn page, we've created a separate index for your browsing pleasure.

C.T. Funkhouser: "New Directions in Digital Poetry" Launch Event, 2012

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:06:05 EST

We've just added audio from the launch event for C.T. Funkhouser's newly-released volume, New Directions in Digital Poetry (Continuum, 2012), recorded February 5, 2011 at the Bowery Poetry Club. Several authors whose works are highlighted in the book — Alan Sondheim, Francisco J. Ricardo (who edits Continuum's series in and wrote New Directions in Digital Poetry's Introduction), Angela Ferraiolo, John Cayley, Mary Flanagan, and Stephanie Strickland — made presentations at the event.

Sondheim opened the show with a musical performance, playing cobza with Azure Carter (vocals), Chris Disparra (baritone sax), and Funkhouser (flute). Funkhouser spoke about writing the book, and Ricardo shared his reflections about the volume's preparation and significance. Angela Ferraiolo screened her video subway (2011). John Cayley read a poem concerning the reign of Google titled "Pentameters Toward the Dissolution of Certain Vectoralist Relations" (2011). Mary Flanagan performed her works [theHouse] (2006) and [xyz] (2009). Strickland (accompanied by Funkhouser) read from her eco-poetic collaboration with Nick Montfort, Sea and Spar Between (2011).

In addition to recordings of these sets, Funkhouser has provided external links to many of the texts read, along with a gallery of photos from the event and a link for further information on the volume. Our New Directions in Digital Poetry page joins our page for his 2008 Machine series lecture at the Kelly Writers House, "IBM Poetry: Exploring Restriction in Computer Poems" as exemplars of his groundbreaking critical work. Don't forget, however, that you can also hear plenty of recordings of his poetic and musical output on his PennSound author page and browse recordings from his extensive archives on our Funkhouser recordings page

Susan Howe and David Grubbs: "Frolic Architecture," 2011

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:32:30 EST

Over the past two years, we've been able to bring you a wide variety of audio and video from the fruitful and long-running collaboration of poet Susan Howe and musician/composer David Grubbs (Squirrel Bait, Bastro, Gastr del Sol) and today we're happy to present footage of a recent performance of their latest piece, Frolic Architecture, recorded at Harvard University on November 1, 2011.

The stunning center section of Howe's latest book, 2011's That This (New Directions, 2010), Frolic Architecture was "inspired by Susan Howe's experience of viewing various manuscripts, sermon notebooks, books, and pamphlets of the eighteenth century American Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards in the vast collection of Edwards family papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven, Connecticut. Especially by the folder in Box 24 titled 'Wetmore, Hannah Edwards, 1713?1773, Diary, 1736?39, copy in the hand of Lucy Wetmore Whittelsey, with commentary/n.d.'" The texts were composed "using multi-purpose copy paper, scissors, 'invisible' scotch tape, and a Canon copier PC170 [to] collage fragments of this 'private writing' with a mix of sources from other conductors and revealers in the thick of things — before." Howe and Grubbs released a studio version of Frolic Architecture on Drag City subsidiary Blue Chopsticks (home to their previous albums, 2008's Souls of the Labadie Tract and 2005's Theifth) last August, which further develops the collaborative nature of the piece — aside from Howe's appropriation of Hannah Edwards Wetmore's diary, Frolic Architecture was originally published as a limited-edition artist's book by Grenfell Press, featuring ten photograms by James Welling (also reproduced in That This).

Working in a similar mode to their earlier collaborations, Grubbs creates an airy and haunting bed of sound, consisting of laptop manipulations of Howe's pre-recorded voice — rhythmic and chaotically scattered phonemes that mimic the poem's collaged scraps and flutter around the poet's live performance — wed to modulated Hammond organ drones. Much like Souls of the Labadie Tract, the two artists' interaction on Frolic Architecture began at a very early and unpublished stage in the text's development, and as Howe acknowledges in the Q&A session that follows the performance, her association with Grubbs has shaped her approach to writing and language in general. While, at first, she deemed Frolic Arcitecture to be an "unperformable poem," Grubbs' efforts to "match [his] fragmentation to [her] fragmentation" yield fantastic results once again.

PoemTalk 50: on Tom Raworth's "Errory"

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 19:32:51 EST

Earlier today, we released the landmark fiftieth episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series — one that I was honored to be a part of alongside my PennSound co-directors. Here's host Al Filreis' write-up of the new show from the PoemTalk blog on Jacket2:

For our 50th episode, Charles Bernstein, Michael Hennessey, and Marjorie Perloff gathered at the Kelly Writers House to talk about Tom Raworth's poem, "Errory." The poem was published in Clean & Well Lit in 1996, and has been reprinted in the Carcanet Press Collected Poems (2003). Our recording of "Errory" comes from audio material produced in 2004 by the Contemporary Poetics Research Center (CPRC) at Birkbeck College of the University of London, and we thank Colin Still for making these recordings available to PennSound.

Here is the CPRC/PennSound recording of Raworth performing "Errory," at somewhat more than his usual breakneck speed. Listen to "Out of a Sudden," for instance — from the same recording session — and you'll notice a more deliberate pace. The 32-minute recording of "Writing," read at typical Raworthian canter, is certainly worth hearing for similarities to the aural feel of "Errory": urgent, converging, phrases "clawing back," "free-falling into mind," "vibrations of division," "small notes to the rhythm of the train," "things whiz past." These are all, of course, phrases from our poem, which is, in a sense, in addition to everything else that it is, a poem about the urgency of its soundings. The pace of Raworth's delivery is clearly a crucial aspect of the signifying, and, as if anyone needed further evidence, underscores the importance of close listening in the sound archive.

Michael and Marjorie are especially interested in "Errory" as a war poem of some sort. Michael reminds us of Raworth's childhood experiences of the Blitz. All the talkers comment on the use of a vocabulary and diction of martial industrial (not post-industrial) mechanism. Al sees, as well, a embedded sequence of landscapes, and Al and Charles note that, if the poem is slowed way down (Charles performs this briefly), we'll hear little seemingly set-piece nature lyrics — lyrics that are, of course, challenged by the ubiquitous presence of "landing sites" and "transmitting unit[s]." The "scanty pastures" with which the poem ends are sites on which communication is destroyed "more easily" than otherwise.

PoemTalk is a co-production of PennSound, the Kelly Writers House, Jacket2 and the Poetry Foundation. If you're interested in more information on the series or want to hear our archives of previous episodes, please visit the PoemTalk blog, and don't forget that you can subscribe to the series through the iTunes music store. Thanks, as always, for listening!

Segue Reading Series at the Bowery Poetry Club: Corinne Fitzpatrick and Ish Klein, 2012

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 14:52:10 EST

Nada Gordon and Corina Copp's tenure as Segue Series coordinators — which runs through February and March — carries on with this weekend's event at the the Bowery Poetry Club, which featured sets by Ish Klein and Corrine Fitzpatrick (shown at left in their finest winter regalia).

Corinne Fitzpatrick was up first, reading a wide variety of work old and new, concluding with a new piece finished "today and yesterday and a little bit the day before," entitled "Everyone Looks Good in High-Contrast," and another new piece, dedicated to Anna Gustavi, called "Honestly, I Want to Live with Fucking Freedom."

After a brief intermission, poet and filmmaker Ish Klein took the stage reading new poems and old favorites, including "Flight Path Consulting, Incorporated," "No Soldier's Story," "Fairy Tales from the Web," "I'm Amazing, I'm a Fireman," "People Come and Stay" and "Line of Reality" before ending with "In the Beginning."

On PennSound, you can listen to hundreds of Segue recordings from the series' current home, the Bowery Poetry Club, as well as earlier venues, Double Happiness and the Ear Inn, and stay tuned for next Saturday's reading, which will feature Ariel Goldberg and James Hoff.

David Jhave Johnston's PennSound MUPS: A Poetry Mash-Up Engine

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:22:36 EST

Today, we're very proud to announce the launch of poet-programmer David Jhave Johnston's PennSound MUPS — a Flash-based mash-up engine whose source material is 1,260 files from our poetry archives. Here's Al Filreis' write up of Johnston's project on Jacket2:

Working with our PennSound audio files, Jhave Johnston has created a prototype mashup machine that enables on overlay of poets' sounds, with an option to turn on WEAVE, which senses silence (e.g. between lines or stanzas in a performance) and automatically intercuts from one short file segment to another, creating a flow of shifting voices. "I always figured," says Charles Bernstein, my co-director at PennSound, "that once we had a substantial archive of sound files, the next phase would be for people to use them in novel ways." "Reminds me," says Michael S. Hennessey, PennSound's editor, "of one of my favorite things to do with the site before we switched to the current streaming codec, which doesn't allow for simultaneous play: pull up a few author pages — best of all Christian Bök — and start layering tracks over his cyborg opera beatboxing." Jhave adds: "My motivation for building it is similar to Michael's: a joy in listening to things overlap."

Johnston offers his own caveat in his introduction to the site: "in spite of the playful tone of this intro, MUPS is intended as a digital augmentation in the study of prosody. As computational analysis advances it is feasible to foresee cultural heritage archives such as PennSound operating as sites where digital tools permit innovative explorations into the evolution of poetics. In MUPS, remote users can on one webpage, hear 1260 poems speak to each other and with each other. This is both fun and informative."

Fun and informative, indeed! To start creating your own poetic mash-up, click on the title above.

In Memoriam: Jorge Santiago Perednik (1952-2011)

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:38:22 EST

Over on Jacket2, Charles Bernstein has revisted his notice of the passing of Jorge Santiago Perednik (originally noted late last December):

Jorge Santiago Perednik (1952-2011) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. An influential poet and literary critic, he was also a publisher and a translator of English and American poetry. He founded several literary journals, two of the most influential being XUL and Deriva. The former was an important poetry journal that started publishing during Argentina's last military dictatorship in 1980; it continued until 1997 with the printing of its 12th issue. As a journal, XUL provided regular compilations of some the most innovative poetry of its time. The journal was also one of Argentina's best sources of new critical writing. It was dedicated to publishing the most diverse poetics within the experimental tradition. Perednik's work as a poet and editor reflected his interest in many of the poetics included in the journal: visual poetry; John Cage's mesostics; sound and performative texts — along with the most serious experimental works in Spanish American poetry. Perednik's writing was primarily associated with his always expanding interest in exploring language and its relation to poetry rather than with any particular literary school. He had a long career as a teacher and through time became an important interlocutor for multiple generations of poets. His reading of American poetry became the departure point for some of the most striking Spanish translations of poets such as T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummmings and Charles Olson. In the 1990s, he developed a series of editorial projects with Mexican and American poets. His poetry books include: Los mil micos (1978), El cuerpo del horror (1981), El Shock de los Lender (1986), El fin de no (1991), El gran derrapador (2002), La querella de los gustos (2007) among others.

Bernstein has also gathered a number of online resources related to Perednik, including an hour-long appearance on the Radio Reading Project recorded in 1998, where he reads from his work and is interviewed by host Ernesto Livon-Grosman. Additionally, you'll find bilingual archives of XUL and two more recent videos of Perednik reading, also made by Livon-Grosman.

Segue Reading Series at the Bowery Poetry Club: David Buuck and Anne Tardos

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 01:00:16 EST

Last Wednesday, we brought you up to date with all of the Segue Series readings for 2012. Today, we kick off a new week with this past Saturday's event at the Bowery Poetry Club, featuring the dynamic duo of David Buuck and Anne Tardos.

First up was Buuck, whose set is the subject of Thom Donovan's most recent Jacket2 commentary, "Someplace other than what he read and the video he showed: David Buuck and the reenactment of Occupy Oakland." After a general introduction, he frames the scope of Buuck's Segue appearance: "While I have long admired David's performances, which blend constraint-based writing with movement, dance, and music, this Saturday had an added urgency as he addressed conflicts between participants in the occupy movement and police in his native Oakland."

After a brief intermission, Tardos took the stage, reading from her latest book, Both Poems (Roof, 2011), which, as host Nada Gordon pointed out, was wholly appropriate since the Segue Series had served as an incubator of sorts for "Nine 1-63," one of that volume's two series (organized by the simple and symmetrical constraint, "Nine words per line and nine lines per stanza").

During February and March, Nada Gordon and Corina Copp will be Segue's organizers, and their marvelous tenure continues this coming Saturday with readings by Ish Klein and Corrine Fitzpatrick. Additionally, photographer extraordinaire, Lawrence Schwartzwald, has posted a wonderful set of photos taken before, during and after the reading, including the performance shot of Buuck shown at left. You'll find that gallery here.

Murat Nemet-Nejat: New Author Page

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 17:40:59 EST

Our latest author page is for Turkish poet, translator and critic, Murat Nemet-Nejat (shown at left between George Economou and Bob Perelman).

That photograph was taken on January 31, when Nemet-Nejat visited our own Kelly Writers House for a reading, and audio and video from that event serves as an anchor for the new page, where you'll also find audio from a 2008 KWH event — a Writers Without Borders showcase, New European Poets. We also have a 2007 appearance on episode #138 of Leonard Schwartz's Cross Cultural Poets, where he reads from and discusses his landmark Talisman House volume, Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, and the page is rounded out with a single track recorded by Chris Funkhouser in the summer of 2001.

2012 Offerings from the Segue Series at the Bowery Poetry Club

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 11:07:00 EST

Today, we're catching up with the Segue Series, highlighting readings during the months of January and February at the Bowery Poetry Club.

January was the second month of Josef Kaplan and Steve Zultanski's tenure as Segue curators, which had already included wonderful sets by Lanny Jackson Jordan and Kieran Daly (on December 3rd) and Trisha Low and Paal Bjelke Andersen (on December 17th). After the two-week holiday hiatus, the series returned on January 7th with the twin-billing of Noah Eli Gordon and Marianne Morris, who were followed on the 14th by Lauren Sporher and David Lau. January 21st saw the natural pairing of Steve McCaffery and Karen Mac Cormack, and Kaplan and Zultanski brought their time to a close with sets by Aaron Winslow and Chris Kraus on the 28th.

February marks the start of Nada Gordon and Corina Copp's curatorship, which began with a reading on the 4th by Lewis Freedman and continued last Saturday with sets from Dot Devota and Jon Leon. This coming Saturday brings the exciting pairing of Anne Tardos and David Buuck, and we'll have that recording posted as soon as we can.

As always, we're grateful to the Segue organizers for putting together such marvelous events, however the technical staff at the Bowery Powery Club also deserve recognition for their assistance in recording the readings and electronically transferring them to us so quickly. Longtime PennSound listeners will recall that in the past, we used to get (and upload) all of a season's Segue sets at once, often many months after the events took place, whereas now we sometimes are able to get a reading posted to the site before folks who actually attended it get home. We'd like to single out Nick Nace, who's been particularly helpful, not just in speeding the delivery of new readings, but also recovering several missing older recordings that we thought were permanently lost.

PennSound Radio's Valentine's Day Marathon

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:07:03 EST

PennSound Radio directors Steve McLaughlin and Jeff Boruszak are putting together a 24-hour love poetry marathon for Valentine's Day and want your help with programming.

"If you have any favorites on PennSound," Steve writes, "just send the links to psradio@writing.upenn.edu. And if you'd like to make your own recording (perhaps with a dedication to your sweetie), you can post it on SoundCloud or email us an mp3."

You can view PennSound Radio's daily broadcast schedule here, and be sure to follow the service on Twitter and Facebook for the latest programming updates, info on book giveaways and more.

New Cross Cultural Poetics, Plus Leonard Schwartz Commentaries on J2

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:46:16 EST

Here's something to keep you happily occupied all weekend long: four new programs from Leonard Schwartz's wonderful series Cross Cultural Poetics that first aired this fall.

We begin with Episode #239, "Two Masters," in which Cecilia Vicuña reads from and discusses her recently re-issued volume Saborami and Rikki Ducornet shares selections from her latest novel, Netsuke. Episode #240, "Around Town," starts with Ammiel Alcalay and Ana Bozičević talking about the Lost and Found chapbook series they coordinate at CUNY, after which Schwartz briefly reads from his latest volume, At Element, before sitting down with opera singer Hai-Ting Chinn. Episode #241, "Cross Country," keeps the operatic focus going with producer Beth Morrison, along with poet Andrew Schelling, who talks about his latest collection, From The Arapaho Song Book. Finally, we have Episode #242, "Illuminating the Breakage," in which Tim Roberts reads from Drizzle Pocket and Thomas Meyer reads from Kintsugi and talks about the passing of Jonathan Williams.

As if that wasn't enough, Schwartz has recently joined the roster of Jacket2 commentators, sharing insights on favorite guests from the show's eight-year run. Here's his full introduction/mission statement: "Cross Cultural Poetics has given me a unique opportunity to speak with American poets and international poets and writers for the last eight years, as well as with fiction writers, translators, editors, publishers, philosophers, theater people, and opera composers and singers making contributions to poetics. PennSound has given me a unique opportunity to archive these voices online. In this space I intend to think about what the existence of this archive makes it possible to say or think, to call attention to particular poets or recordings, to polemicize, to plan. I hope it can serve to advance the discussion." So far, Schwartz has posted three commentaries — on Lila Zemborain, Raul Zurita and Maged Zaher — and we can expect a new post from him shortly.

Finally, we'd like to draw your attention to "Poetry Beyond Borders", a just-published profile of Schwartz and published by Evergreen State College, where Leonard teaches and broadcasts Cross Cultural Poetics (on KAOS-FM, perhaps the best radio call sign ever).

Kit Robinson: Canessa Gallery Reading and Conversation, 2011

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:28:41 EST

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

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

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

Charles Bernstein and Kenneth Goldsmith: Ropes Lecture Series 2012

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 22:27:51 EST

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

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

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

In Memoriam: Stacy Doris (1962-2012)

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:09:18 EST

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

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

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

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

Brian Ang on PennSound

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:44:54 EST

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

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

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

New PennSound Classics Recordings from John Richetti

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 20:25:40 EST

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

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

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

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

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

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:52:19 EST

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

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

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

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

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

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

PoemTalk is a co-production of PennSound, the Kelly Writers House, Jacket2 and the Poetry Foundation. If you're interested in more information on the series or want to hear our archives of previous episodes, please visit the PoemTalk blog, and don't forget that you can subscribe to the series through the iTunes music store. Thanks, as always, for listening!

2012 MLA Offsite Reading

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:05:16 EST

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

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

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

The Threads Talk Series: Two New Recordings

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:16:13 EST

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

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

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

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

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

Jerry Rothenberg: Xavier Reading Plus KWH Fellows Interview Transcript

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:32:58 EST

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

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

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

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

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

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:15:02 EST

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

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

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

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

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

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

PoemTalk is a co-production of PennSound, the Kelly Writers House, Jacket2 and the Poetry Foundation. If you're interested in more information on the series or want to hear our archives of previous episodes, please visit the PoemTalk blog, and don't forget that you can subscribe to the series through the iTunes music store. Thanks, as always, for listening!

PennSound and Politics: Ron Silliman, 2009

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 01:02:17 EST

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

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

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

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

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

Now: PennSound Radio

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:38:22 EST

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