PennSound Daily

The Rothenberg family broke the news on Sunday night with the following note:

After a lifetime spent passionately discovering new poetic possibilities, Jerry passed away on April 21, 2024, at the home he shared with Diane Rothenberg, his wife and collaborator of 71 years. 

Until the end of his life, he remained actively engaged as a poet, anthologist and performer — and as a devoted friend to his global community. 

His final projects will come out in 2024, including a massive "omnipoetics" anthology of the Americas co-authored with Javier Taboada; a new studio project with bassist Mark Dresser; and the first performance of "Abraham Abulafia visits the Pope: A fragment of a Steinian opera," conceived and planned with composer Charlie Morrow. 

Our own Al Filreis offered this remembrance on behalf of the UPenn community: "Here at the Writers House our hearts go out to Diane and Matthew and all of Jerry's many, many friends. Jerry and Diane visited KWH a number of times over the years. We were blessed by his poetry and his overall poeticness." He concluded, "[Rothenberg] always felt — and said — the poetry should be learned 'where poetry actually happens.' And he of course made it happen in whatever space he joined." Charles Bernstein offered a more succinct tribute: "Infinite sadness to get this news, infinite happiness for Jerry’s life, work, lifelong friendship."

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

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

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

And by this I mean not his pantheon or his peers, but generations of younger poets, whom he read with a discerning eye. Perpetually curious and voracious as a reader, he kept up with new poets to his dying day. There are poets who want to lord what they have over you and poets who want to share what they have with everyone they esteem, and Neeli was firmly in the latter camp. I don’t know how he kept up with so many poets, and I’m almost 30 years younger. It takes a generosity and largeness of spirit few possess and poets like Neeli are valuable for the continuity they impart to the vast and everchanging ocean that is poetry.

On PennSound's Neeli Cherkovski author page, you'll find a couple of vintage recordings from the poet — including a 1969 reading with Charles Bukowski and a 1980 set from San Francisco's Caffe Malvina — along with a number of videos from the last 15 years or so. These include readings, talks, conversations, and interviews and provide a wonderful sense of Cherkovski's diverse talents. We send our condolences to the poet's friends and fans worldwide.

Today we celebrate endlessly influential author and artist Joe Brainard, born on this day in 1942. Our Joe Brainard author page is anchored by four readings from the St. Mark's Poetry Project recorded between 1971 and 1981. They include copious excerpts from his magnum opus, I Remember, along with selections from his journals and numerous other pieces such as "Thanksgiving," "Insomnia," "Worry Wart," "The Zucchini Problem," "Today (Monday, February 23rd, 1981)," and "Sick Art." Additionally, you'll find excerpts from Train Ride read at SFSU in the mid-1970s and a stellar reading with Bill Berkson at Intersection for the Arts in 1971, plus more I Remember selections taken from a 1974 Giorno Poetry Systems session and a recording session at home in Calais, VT in 1970. 

Filmmaker Matt Wolf (who directed the much-lauded Wild Combination, a documentary on the life of avant-pop cellist Arthur Russell) is back with an exciting new project — I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard — a haunting and gorgeous meditation that deftly intertwines both imagery and audio to create a compelling tribute to the artist and author. We're very glad to see Brainard commemorated in such grand fashion, and happier still that Wolf was was kind enough to share an exclusive clip with PennSound. In it, longtime friend, collaborator and confidante Ron Padgett discusses Brainard's early development as a visual artist and his ability to work confidently in a wide variety of media and forms, never becoming complacent in one style.

Today, in honor of International Women's Day, we're taking a look at the long-running and highly influential Belladonna* Readings Series, and the Belladonna* Collective, which will turn 24 in 2024. Here's how they define their mission:

Belladonna* Collaborative promotes the work of women and feminist writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, impossible to define, unpredictable, and dangerous with language. Belladonna* is committed to publishing and building literary community among women and LGBTQIA+ authors who write off-center, producing work that is political and critical; situational rather than plot-driven; inter-subjective, performative, or witnessing rather than personally revelatory; work that reaches across the boundaries and binaries of literary genre and artistic fields, and that questions the gender binary.

Produced by Hal Willner (William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lou Reed), the album features musical accompaniment by feminist punk band Tribe 8, as well as David Cunningham (keyboards), Ralph Carney (reeds), Joe Gore (guitar), Steve Bernstein (trumpet) and Kenny Wollesen (drums), who slip effortlessly between time signatures and genres, providing a roiling bed of sound which perfectly complements Acker's seething delivery. Willner originally recorded Acker's contribution in 1993 — a time in which the recurring references to President Bush were a not-yet-faded memory of a graceless political era — and though she worried about the timeliness of such allusions during the general political torpor of the Clinton era, they're eerily fitting now, a decade after her death.

Each take was done virtually nonstop, and Ralph Carney recalls Acker jumping up and down in the booth while Tribe 8 played. When it was finally released two years after her death, Redoing Childhood revealed a new dimension to Acker's work. "Her voice in general, there was something so lush and luscious and embracing and sexy," Ira Silverberg told the Seattle Weekly. "Kathy had rock star energy about her. [Her performance] had less to do with the punctuation of the actual sentences than with her almost reinterpreting her own work in a lyrical way … Kathy just got it."

Lyn Hejinian, American poet and essayist, died on Saturday, February 24. Born Carolyn Frances Hall on May 17, 1941, and raised in Berkeley and later Cambridge, Massachusetts, she graduated from Harvard University in 1963. Her children, Paull and Anna, were born while she was married to the physician John Hejinian. After her divorce, Hejinian eventually partnered up with the jazz saxophonist Larry Ochs, living from 1972 to 1977 nine miles north of Willits, California, on eighty acres of rural property that she referred to as "the land." There in 1976 she acquired a Vandercook letterpress, taught herself typesetting, and began editing Tuumba Press, which, especially after her return to Berkeley in 1977, put her in touch with her peers in the poetry world. The Tuumba series included books by poets that, like Hejinian herself, would come to be associated with Language writing, including Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten. Hejinian's own poetry also began to appear at this time: A Thought is the Bride of What Thinking (Tuumba, 1976), A Mask of Motion (Burning Deck, 1977), Gesualdo (Tuumba, 1978), and Writing is an Aid to Memory (The Figures, 1978). But her work gained attention in particular with the two editions of My Life (Burning Deck, 1980, and Sun and Moon, 1987), a book that at once exploded many of the conventions of the genre of autobiography and developed an innovative poetics of everyday life. The 1980 version of My Life, written when Hejinian was thirty-seven years old, included thirty-seven sections, each comprised of thirty-seven sentences; the 1987 version added eight sections and also eight sentences to each of the previous sections. 

You can read Shaw's complete obituary here. Visit Monday's PennSound Daily remembrance for a statement from our own Al Filreis and a guide to Hejinian resources at both PennSound and Jacket2.