Featured resources
From "Down To Write You This Poem Sat" at the Oakville Gallery
- Charles Bernstein, "Phone Poem" (2011) (1:30): MP3
- Caroline Bergvall, "Love song: 'The Not Tale (funeral)' from Shorter Caucer Tales (2006): MP3
- Christian Bôk, excerpt from Eunoia, from Chapter "I" for Dick Higgins (2009) (1:38): MP3
- Tonya Foster, Nocturne II (0:40) (2010) MP3
- Ted Greenwald, "The Pears are the Pears" (2005) (0:29): MP3
- Susan Howe, Thorow, III (3:13) (1998): MP3
- Tan Lin, "¼ : 1 foot" (2005) (1:16): MP3
- Steve McCaffery, "Cappuccino" (1995) (2:35): MP3
- Tracie Morris, From "Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful" (2002) (3:40): MP3
- Julie Patton, "Scribbling thru the Times" (2016) (5:12): MP3
- Tom Raworth, "Errory" (c. 1975) (2:08): MP3
- Jerome Rothenberg, from "The First Horse Song of Frank Mitchell: 4-Voice Version" (c. 1975) (3:30): MP3
- Cecilia Vicuna, "When This Language Disappeared" (2009) (1:30): MP3
- Guillaume Apollinaire, "Le Pont Mirabeau" (1913) (1:14):
MP3
- Amiri Baraka, "Black Dada Nihilismus" (1964) (4:02): MP3
- Louise Bennett, "Colonization in Reverse" (1983) (1:09): MP3
- Sterling Brown, "Old Lem " (c. 1950s) (2:06): MP3
- John Clare, "Vowelless Letter" (1849) performed by Charles Bernstein (2:54): MP3
- Velimir Khlebnikov, "Incantation by Laughter" (1910), tr. and performed by Bernstein (:28) MP3
- Harry Partch, from Barstow (part 1), performed by Bernstein (1968) (1:11): MP3
- Leslie Scalapino, "Can’t’ is ‘Night’" (2007) (3:19): MP3
- Kurt Schwitters, "Ur Sonata: Largo" performed by Ernst Scwhitter (1922-1932) ( (3:12): MP3
- Gertrude Stein, If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1934-35) (3:42): MP3
- William Carlos Willliams, "The Defective Record" (1942) (0:28): MP3
- Hannah Weiner, from Clairvoyant Journal, performed by Weiner, Sharon Mattlin & Rochelle Kraut (2001) (6:12): MP3
Selected by Charles Bernstein (read more about his choices here)
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Posted 6/21/2025
Begins jokingly proclaiming, "I'll make my Ernie Gehr film," a major preoccupation of my generation in the late 70s/early 80s, & then this very raw other thing proceeds to unfold, raw because I only had enough money (a loan from Abby Child) to do 4 shoots never having done sync & using outdated film stock from Rafik & an unfamiliar, undependable camera & trying to keep everything together & everything going wrong, yet determined to make concrete the ideas I had been abstractly developing over several years with whatever I got back from the lab no matter & so abandoning all caution to open a new area, I decided who could possibly talk better than poets? Edited in Times Square. Fans of Hill's Money (1985) will recognize many familiar techniques at play here, with rapid-fire cuts creating a dense, rhythmic collage of sights and sounds punctuated by pregnant pauses, bursts of noise, and enigmatic, orphaned fragments of speech. It would be a mistake to judge it solely in its relationship to Money, however, since the two films differ radically in scope and spirit: while the latter is an expansive survey of the city and its scenes (including poets, dancers, and musicians), the feel here is much more intimate, between the smaller cast and the more limited visual vocabulary. At the same time it's fascinating to see hallmarks of Hills' style in a raw early state, particularly given the influence of the considerable technical challenges that Hills enumerates above. You can watch Plagiarism by clicking here.
Posted 6/20/2025
It all started with a well-received ad Preiss directed for the NBA starring Bill Murray. "Then the Yellow Pages — poor Yellow Pages — they were about to just die. There was no saving the Yellow Pages. Yellow Pages were on life support and they hired an agency to try to figure out a way of keeping the Yellow Pages relevant. Now in hindsight it was really just hopeless." That "absolutely terrible" idea was disposing with the beloved "let your fingers do the walking" slogan and imagery and switch their iconography to a light bulb, thus making the book "a kind of an inspirational text and a work of literature, where it gives you ideas." "A beautiful idea, but a doomed one," as Preiss recollects.
Because the Yellow Pages didn't have the money to get Bill Murray they wound up with Jon Lovitz instead, but Lovitz was reluctant because "the scripts [weren't] funny," though working together Preiss and Lovitz were able to revise them into something workable. Now they needed a literary critic to deliver a few lines, "and I had this idea to cast Charles and I figured Charles, it's so perfect for him, he'll be able to just go for it." Everyone at the agency was please with the results — "Charles is amazing ... like, it's beyond" — to the extent that they wrote and shot a second series of spots starring Bernstein exclusively.
They then took all of this back to the Yellow Pages, and that's where things start to break down. Listen in to hear the company's reaction, Preiss discussing his long friendship with Bernstein facilitated through filmmaker Henry Hills, and more. We're very proud to be able to host the full set of radio and TV ads Preiss made, along with outtakes, which are well worth checking out whether you already know and love them or if you're just seeing them for the first time. We're also grateful to Davide Balula, who made the recording and serves as interlocutor throughout, for sharing this with us. Click here to start listening.
Posted 6/18/2025
Today we survey the recordings you'll find on our author page for legendary poet Ted Joans.
First, thanks to the S Press Collection, we have Joans' Jazz Poems, tape #72 in the series, which was recorded in Germany in November 1979 and released the following year. Running nearly seventy minutes, this album sees Joans run through fourteen poems in total — "The Truth," "Jazz Is My Religion," "Bed," "Ouagadougou Ouagadougou," "I Am The Lover," "Nine Month Blues," "Africa," and "Long Gone Lover Blues" among them — with laid-back accompaniment from a combo that included Uli Espenlaub on keys, Andreas Leep on bass, Dietrich Rauschtenberger behind the drums, and Ralf Falk on guitar. Jazz Poems is a substantial addition to our collection of Joans recordings, and a welcome one given his influence upon multiple generations of poets.
For those interested in learning more about Joans, there's no better place to start than Wow! Ted Joans Lives!, the 2010 documentary by Kurt Hemmer and Tom Knoff that we've been proud to share with our listeners for the past five years. Envisoned as "a visual and aural collage," the film "examin[es] the life and works of the legendary, tri-continental poet Ted Joans, who was born in Cairo, Illinois on 4 July 1928 and went on to become one of the significant poets of his generation performing his work in the United States, Europe, and Africa." Hemmer and Knoff continue, "The film has the sound of jazz and the flavor of surrealism. As Ted Joans declared, 'Jazz is my religion and Surrealism is my point of view.'" You'll find the complete award-winning documentary here, along with a short clip of Joans reading in Amsterdam in 1964 — taken from Louis van Gasteren's film, Jazz & Poetry — and the aforementioned S Press cassette.
Posted 6/16/2025
Today we consider our recording of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) reading an extended series of excerpts from Helen in Egypt. Altogether, there are a total of forty-six tracks, which include ten selections from the book's "Palinode" section, eleven from "Leuké," and eleven from "Eidolon," along with fourteen tracks of commentary by the poet scattered throughout the set.
As Aliki Caloyeras observes in her notes that accompany these recordings, "H.D. made these recordings of Helen in Egypt in Zurich in 1955. In a letter dated February 3, 1955, to her friend and literary executer, Norman Holmes Pearson, H.D. describes the recordings: 'I am so happy about the disk-work [sic], went in yesterday by car and E[rich Heydt] came along and helped me. I did just 21 minutes this time, some of the first section with captions. It came up quite well — the first set, of Jan. 26, sent surface, is really the second disk, in time. The first one I did is more lyrical and has sections from Eidolon; this one of Feb. 2 has Egypt and Some Leuke; one side of disk is Achilles, the other, Paris. . .'" She continues, "Since these recordings were made before Helen in Egypt was completed and published, the ordering of the sections read does not exactly coincide with the subsequent published text version. The prose sections were not yet written (as H.D. came up with the idea of adding the prose sections while making the recordings). So, in the recordings, the lyrics are interspersed with H.D.'s preliminary commentary, which she later reworks into the published prose sections." Thanks to Caloyeras, we're also able to provide page numbers for each excerpt in New Directions' edition of Helen in Egypt.
You can read more about the recordings and listen in by clicking here. Selections from Helen in Egypt from this session were the subject of PoemTalk # 84, which you can listen to here.
Posted 6/14/2025

Not long after the debut of our sister site Jacket2, its Reissues section announced the launch of an archive of Alcheringa, the groundbreaking ethnopoetics journal that was edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock and ran from 1970–1980. This massive undertaking was commissioned by Tedlock and Jon Cotner with site design and information architecture by PennSound senior editor and Jacket2 Reissues editor Danny Snelson. In conjunction with that project, we unveiled a new Alcheringa page on PennSound edited by Snelson. It's home to the flexidisc inserts that accompanied nine of the journal's issues from 1971 to 1978. These "audio inserts" include work from a number of PennSound poets including Rothenberg, Jackson Mac Low, Armand Schwerner and Anne Waldman (whose 1975 reading of "Fast Speaking Woman" at New Wilderness Event #20 at New York City's Washington Square Church is shown above), along with myriad other recordings, from the Reverend W.T. Goodwin's "Easter Sunrise Sermon" and bluesman Son House's "Conversion Experience Narrative" to Somali folktales, "Songs of Ritual License from Midwestern Nigeria" and Jaime de Angulo's "The Story of the Gilak Monster and his Sister the Ceremonial Drum."
Want to read more? Visit the PennSound Daily archive.
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New at PennSound
- New author page: Gilbert Adair, featuring a reading from
h c e, May 16, 2025
- Maggie Nelson reading and conversation for Kelly Writers House
Fellows Program, April 29–30, 2024
- Leland Hickman, Great Slave Lake Suite
- Ken Taylor reading in the Wexler Studio at Kelly Writers House,
March 4, 2025
- Boise State University spring 2025 readings, featuring
Xavier Cavazos, Dan Beachy-Quick, Timmy Straw, Hannah Brooks-Motl, and Matvei Yankelevich
- Harryette Mullen reading and conversation for
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program, April 1–2, 2024
- Eugene Ostashevsky reading and conversation with Kevin
M.F. Platt, Kelly Writers House, February 20, 2024
- Barbara Henning reading for Village Story Salon: MOM, Hudson Park Library, NYC, May 8, 2025
- Barbara Henning reading for the book launch of Girlfriend, Young Ethel's, Brooklyn, NY, May 4, 2025
- Julia Bloch, Laynie Browne, Elizabeth Kim, Jena Osman,
and Syd Zolf on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée,
Kelly Writers House, October 15, 2024
- Rod Smith reading for the Hidden Palace Reading Series, Baltimore, MD, January 5, 2023
- Sean Bonney and Joshua Clover reading at University of Warwick, June 11, 2015
- Bob Holman reading in the Wexler Studio at Kelly Writers House, October 9, 2024
- Sophia Naz reading in the Wexler Studio at Kelly Writers House, November 21, 2024
- George Quasha reading surface retention in the Wexler Studio at Kelly Writers House, March 26, 2025
- Living & Seeing Charles Reznikoff, Documentary, dir. Xavier Kalck,
Naomi Toth, and Fiona McMahon, 2024
- Rae Armantrout reading at Kelly Writers House, Sussman Poetry Program, November 6, 2024
- Julie Patton reading at Temple University, Philadelphia, March 20, 2025
- Three new Old Songs albums of archaic Greek performances: Corinna (2020),
Callimachus (2022), and Sappho (2024),
produced by Mark Jiclking and Chris Mason
- Ted Enslin Centenary Reading, featuring John Taggart,
Ben Friedlander, Denver Butson, John Phillips, Jonathan Skinner, Margaret Randall,
Maria Damon, Mark Nowak, and Michael Heller; Virtual Reading, March 25, 2025
- Stanley Silverman and Richard Foreman theatrical collaborations, with performances ranging from 1974 through 2018
- Dennis Barone reading the poetry of Pascal D'Angelo, home recording, January 20, 2025
- George Quasha reading syntactic sentience, Barrytown, NY, December 13, 2024
- Kate Colby reading in the Wexler Studio at Kelly Writers House, October 17, 2024
- Peter Cole, DA Powell, and Luke Roberts readings for Boise State Reading Series, Fall 2024
- Khonsay: Poem of Many Tongues, a film by Bob Holman and Steve Zeitlin, 2015
- Jerome Rothenberg memorial program, June 24, 2024
- Rachel Blau DuPlessis's complete grid of Drafts, 1988–2024
- George Quasha reading the laryngeal uterus of the word, Barrytown, NY, June 17, 2024
- Piotr Gwiazda reads from Grzegorz Wróblewski's Dear Beloved Humans, February 7, 2024
- Adam Fieled reading from Something Solid: Portal-Ways
- Leonard Schwartz with Simon Carr at Bowery Gallery, 2024
- Michael Ruby reading from Close Your Eyes, Visions, 2023
- David Shapiro reading and talk for UMass Amherst Visiting
Writers Series, Spring 2004
- Anne-Marie Albiach reading ÉTAT, Hotel de Ville, Neuilly, France, October 10, 2007
- Spring 2024 Boise State Reading Series: Christina Piña, CAConrad, Jennifer Moxley, Endi Bogue Hardigan, Rob Schlegel, and Ian Dreiblatt
- Belladonna* GIST #2 featuring Kaleem Hawa and Rachelle Rahmé, Center for Brooklyn History, March 23, 2024
- George Quasha reading strange beauty by stranger attraction, Barrytown, NY, March 18, 2024
- Richard Foreman at Segue / Artist Space, New York City, March 16, 2024
- Belladonna* GIST #1 featuring Peter Myers and Jameson Fitzpatrick, Brooklyn Central Library, February 24, 2024
- Six Poems by Giovanni Fontana
- Barbara Henning reading with Jaime Manrique, St. Mark's Poetry Project, January 27, 1993
- George Quasha reading crossroads angelics, Barrytown, NY, December 30, 2023
- Charles North reading for the William Corbett Poetry Series, MIT Virtual Event, April 21, 2022
- VOX Audio Collection, 2005–2011
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