PennSound Daily

While we're justifiably proud of the diverse array of American voices represented in the PennSound archives, we're equally glad to be able to provide our listeners with the opportunity to interact with poetry outside of the English-speaking world, through programs such as UPenn's Writers Without Borders series, among others. Today, we turn our attention to Russia for the latest Writers Without Borders event, a new two-part Close Listening program featuring poet Dmitry Golynko.

In the first program, Golynko reads a selection of his poetry, assisted by Eugene Ostashevsky, who reads his (and others') translations in English to complement the poet's Russian, and provides cultural and technical contexts for the works. The second set — a forty-minute conversation — begins with host Charles Bernstein asking Golynko about the influence of post-Cold War culture on his work (n.b. the program was recorded on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall). His life almost perfectly bisected by this influential event, Golynko views that event as "a historic moment encompassing the highpoint of the heat of catastrophic socio-political changes, as well as a melting-pot moment characterized by a huge influx of novel cultural influences and vast amounts of knowledge that had been kept in secret by official party censorship in the previous epoch," however, he's quick to note that "this doesn't mean that the state of war and emergency was banished from Post-Soviet cultural process. Quite the opposite is true: language itself turned out to be a battlefield where a fierce contest between controversial layers of everyday speech resulted in the effect of immersion in incessant warfare." This leads to questions about the political stance of the poet's work, as well as the evolving gender-consciousness that's present there.

In the program's second half, Bernstein asks Golynko about his interest in "the tension between the poetry archive [...] and other non- or even anti-archival sites for poetic thinking and action." "I'm really fascinated with poetry archives like PennSound and consider this to be fruitful and fantastic work," he observes, however such projects force him to wonder whether "writing itself tend[s] towards the further archivization and retention in cultural memory or does it tend towards a spontaneous emergence from an inexplicable source?" His "dubious and controversial" answer is that "poetical utterance stretches between archivization and spontaneity and the site for its occurrence resides at the point of the elusiveness of poetry itself, which could disguise it in vernacular language or in the idiosyncratic voice of a phantom authority, but cannot be caught in its force field."

The show concludes with Golynko discussing his role as an art critic and its effects upon his writing. He sees "poetry and critical-academic activity [as] two completely separate professional fields, two crafts which in principal cannot be mixed together." In the early 1990s, he saw "art criticism as the most necessary form of intellectual production," due to art's role as "an instrument, on one hand, of daring and future-oriented aesthetic search, and on the other hand, of immediate reaction on social catastrophes," however he notes the increasing influence of the market upon the art world today, likening it to "a glamorous variety show." Returning to the role of poetry, he ends by observing that "[q]uite possibly, the reformist task now standing before poetry and art is one and the same: to produce a community, elite and at the same time dialogically open, which could respond to the problematic of the loss of the concrete human individual in the context of globalized cultural processes."

On Golynko's PennSound author page, you can also hear a reading (the date and location of which are unknown) featuring the poems "Springs of Joy," "Unfounded offences / some peculiarities / tense expectations" and "Elementary Things." To learn more about Writers Without Borders and listen to recordings of previous events, visit our Writers Without Borders series page, and finally, don't forget to check out our Close Listening home page for dozens of programs from the past five years.

Today, we're closing out an exciting week with new recordings by two of our favorite local-grown poets — the always-dynamic duo of CAConrad and Frank Sherlock — taken from the archives of A Voice Box. Recorded September 11, 2009 at Small Press Traffic, the two poets were invited to discuss "Class/Warfare," which each approaches through a combination of poetry and conversation in lengthy individual sets.

Conrad's set starts with a discussion of Philadelphia locales and his plans for performance art involving the Liberty Bell and dark chocolate before moving on to his poetry — first, a number of poems from (Soma)tic Midge (including, in honor of the day, "from the womb not the anus WHITE asbestos snowfall on 911"), followed by two newer "(Soma)tic Poetry Exercises," along with the poems composed by these methods. Next comes a series of poems from The Book of Frank, and he concludes the set with readings from his other new book, Advanced Elvis Course.

Sherlock begins with two selections from his latest collection, Over Here — "This Could Be a Day of Historical Interest" and "Spring Diet of Flowers at Night" — before moving on to his post-Katrina collaboration with Brett Evans, Ready-to-Eat Individual. Next comes "Wounds in an Imaginary Nature Show," which the poet dedicates to the Bay Area poets (in particular, David Buuck and Juliana Spahr) who came to his aid several years back when he was struck with a life-threatening case of meningitis. This leads to a discussion of torture both international and domestic, governmental and personal — "they try to spread democracy," Sherlock avers, "but all they spread's perversion" — which leads into the poem "XOXO." He continues with shorter poems from Over Here ("Ouch Ouch," "Baby Baby") and another excerpt from Ready-to-Eat Individual, before concluding with the title poem, "Over Here."

Speaking of Conrad, we recently posted another new recording from the poet: his October 2009 appearance on the Joe Milutis Poetry Show, which runs nearly two hours long. You can hear this, along with recordings from the Segue Series, and a PennSound-produced Studio 111 Session on his PennSound author page. Sherlock's Studio 111 Session, as well as readings at the Bowery Poetry Club, the Kelly Writers House and other locales, can be found on his PennSound author page, and stay tuned for The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems, a collaboration between the two poets and longtime friends, coming out this January from Factory School.

All of us at PennSound send the heartiest of congratulations to Keith Waldrop, who won the National Book Award in Poetry this week for his collection, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy.

The National Book Foundation's citation hails Waldrop, noting: "If transcendental immanence were possible, it would be because Keith Waldrop had invented it; he's the only one who could — and in Transcendental Studieshe has. These three linked series achieve a fusion arcing from the Romantic to the Postmodern that demonstrates language's capacity to go to extremes — and to haul daily lived experience right along with it: life imitates language, and when language becomes these poems, life itself gets more various, more volatile, more vital." You can read more about the award and Waldrop on The National Book Foundation's website, and if you haven't already checked out Waldrop's PennSound author page — including the new Kelly Writers House reading and Close Listening programs we mentioned earlier this week — then you'll definitely want to do so now.

Of course, Waldrop's win means that two excellent collections by writers near and dear to both PennSound and our many listeners — Rae Armantrout's Versed and Ann Lauterbach's Or to Begin Again — did not win. Nevertheless, we congratulate them on being part of a particularly exciting and broad-minded list of finalists, and reiterate our wish that all three could have won. While we're issuing fantasy proclaimations for prestigeous literary awards, could we get a Nobel Prize in Literature for John Ashbery as well?