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 1/27/2023

January 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the day Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz seventy-eight years ago. In acknowledgment of the day and the six million European Jews who perished senselessly, we revisit one of the more remarkable and harrowing recordings in our archives: In late 2009, we were fortunate enough to be contacted by filmmaker Abraham Ravett, who offered us a treasure trove of rare recordings he'd made of poet Charles Reznikoff reading from his final collection, Holocaust, along with a number of photographs. Recorded December 21, 1975, these eighteen tracks — which include a number of retakes and an audio check — were originally recorded for inclusion in the soundtrack to the recently-graduated director's debut film, Thirty Years Later, which he describes as an autobiographical document of "the emotional and psychological impact of the Holocaust on two survivors and the influence this experience has had on their relationship with the filmmaker — their only surviving child."
In addition to the recordings themselves, Ravett graciously shared his recollections of that day — noting, "Mr. Reznikoff's West End apartment was located within a high-rise apartment complex reminiscent of where I grew up during my teens in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, N.Y. He was very kind and gracious to a rather nervous young filmmaker fumbling with his Nagra tape recorder and Sennheiser microphone who hoped that everything would work as planned" — along with a series of eight photographs of the poet, including the stunning image at right.
While Holocaust, as a text alone, serves as a viscerally pointed indictment of Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, not to mention a marvelous example of documentary poetics, in these selections, the auratic resonance of these appropriated testimonies are amplified dramatically, particularly when framed by the frail yet determined voice of the seventy-nine year old poet — who would pass away a month and a day from the date of this recording session — lending the work a gravid anger, a grand sense of monumental enormity.
Posted 1/25/2023
There was one name that we missed in the midst of memorializing so many writers that died at the start of this month, and so we're amending the error today with a new author page for poet and novelist Russell Banks, who succumbed to cancer at the age of 82 on January 8th.
Remembering the author in The New York Times, Rebecca Chace observes, "In much of Mr. Banks's writing, his concerns about race, class and power repeatedly surfaced, with particular attention given to the powerless and the overlooked, especially his outwardly unremarkable blue-collar characters." "There's an important tradition in American writing, going back to Mark Twain and forward to Raymond Carver and Grace Paley, whose work is generated by love of people who are scorned and derided,” Banks observed, speaking with The Guardian in 2000. "I have an almost simple-minded affection for them. My readers are not the same as my characters, as I’m very aware. So I'm glad when they feel that affection too."
Banks was a guest of Leonard Schwartz on his KAOS-FM radio program Cross Cultural Poetics a total of five times during the show's run, and these appearances constitute his new PennSound author page. First up, on Episode #33, "Addressing These Wars," Banks read his essay "Letter to My Granddaughter On The Eve Of Another War" and discussed the embedded writers of Operation Homecoming. Banks returned later that year for Episode #58, "History/Language/Silence," where he read from his Liberia-based novel The Darling and talked about Liberia's history as, effectively, an American colony. Jumping forward seven years, in Episode #231, "Abolitionist," Banks read from and discussed his critically-acclaimed novel Cloudsplitter, based on the life of John Brown. Three years later, in 2014, he'd make his final two appearances in two subsequent programs — Episode #291, "A Permanent Member of the Family," and Episode #292, "Lost Memory of Skin." In the former, Banks read from and chatted with Schwartz about his short story collection of the same name, while the latter focused on his latest novel, also of the same name.
We're grateful to Schwartz as always for his excellent and much-missed program, especially when it allows us to honor the memory of a novelist beloved by many poets, myself included. You can listen to the programs listed above by clicking here.
Posted 1/23/2023
Today we're proud to announce the latest batch of recordings from PennSound Contributing Editor Chris Funkhouser's long-running project to document the poetry of friend and neighbor George Quasha. Our last salvo — Quasha's September 2022 set from Rhinebeck, New York's 'T' Space, where he was receiving the tenth annual 'T' Space Poetry Award — was a break from the norm of home recording sessions, but we're back to the usual mode with two new sets of material. The first of these was recorded at the poet's home in Barrytown, NY on November 20, 2022 and features the shadowing ideas in the rearview mirror section of Not Even Rabbits Go Down This Hole, which brings that book to a close. Funkhouser and Quasha next reconvened on December 29 for one last session before the year drew to a close. This time around, they recorded the tuning by fire section of Waking from Myself. Each of these sessions runs just shy of 90 minutes.
You'll find these recordings on PennSound's George Quasha author page, along with lengthy selections from many of his books including Not Even Rabbits Go Down This Hole, Dowsing Axis, Hearing Other, The Ghost In Between, Verbal Paradise, Glossodelia Attract: Preverbs, The Daimon of Moment: Preverbs, Scorned Beauty Comes Up Behind: Preverbs, Things Done for Themselves: Preverbs, and Polypoikilos: Matrix in Variance: Preverbs, among others. Click here to start listening.
Want to read more? Visit the PennSound Daily archive.
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New at PennSound
- Russell Banks: New Author Page
- Peter Glassgold reading Boethius poems 1 & 2
- Leslie Scalapino and Mark Rudman seminar for
Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice 1997–1998 Readings and Talks Series,
Georgetown, October 16, 1997
- George Quasha reading tuning by fire, Barrytown, NY, December 29, 2022
- Kass Fleisher: New Author Page
- Charles Borkhuis and Basil King reading for virtual LCP Salon, November 13, 2022
- Simone White lecture "I Am Not Wallace Stevens" at Hartford Public Library, CT, November 5, 2022
- Steve Benson reading at Rhizome, Washington DC, October 12, 2022
- 2022 Boise State University readings: Aditi Machado and Cody-Rose Clevidence
- Michael Rothenberg: New Author Page
- Brian Ang and Caleb Beckwith reading at Woolsey Heights, Berkeley, September 24, 2022
- Vincent Katz reading at Blacksmith House, Cambridge, MA, April 11, 2022
- Kimberly Lyons, Maureen Owen, and Barbara Owen reading at Unnameable Books, Brooklyn, October 26, 2022
- Alan Halsey: New Author Page
- John Keene: New Author Page
- Jerome Rothenberg reading at Kelly Writers House, September 29, 2022
- Worldwide reading in support of Salman Rushdie with Pierre Joris, September 28, 2022
- Barbara Henning reading for Climate Week at Battery Park, NYC, September 24, 2022
- George Quasha reading at 'T' Space, Rhinebeck, NY, September 3, 2022
- Kit Robinson, Neeli Cherkovski, and Alan Bernheimer reading at Bird & Beckett Books, San Francisco, August 4, 2022
- The Totality Cantos: Brian Ang and Alex Abalos on the Avant-Garde, Eastwind Books, Berkeley, August 20, 2022
- Barbara Henning reading for Everybody Press, Leroy's Place, Brooklyn, August 13, 2022
- Getting It Together: A Film on Larry Eigner, directed by Leonard Henny, 1973
- Julie Patton and Nicole Peyrafitte reading at Zoom event curated by Kimberly Lyons, June 26, 2022
- New Collection: Paul Buck's Pressed Curtains Tape Project
- Barbara Henning reading from Ferne, a Detroit Story, Pages Bookshop, Detroit, MI, June 14,2022
- Erica Hunt and Marty Ehrlich reading in Brooklyn, June 16, 2022
- I See Words: The Life and Work of Hannah Weiner, Artists Space, New York, June 18, 2022
- New author page for Harryette Mullen
- New author page for Lila Zemborain
- Divya Victor's Home Recordings, March 9, 2022
- Performed Poetics: celebration of Jerome Rothenberg's 90th birthday & the works of Eric Mottram, King's College London, March 12-13, 2022
- George Quasha reading sound talk from Not Even Rabbits Go Down This Hole, Barrytown, NY, May 21, 2022
- Tyrone Williams reading at Stephen Henderson Award Ceremony, May 27th, 2022
- Adam Fieled reading from Something Solid, Harmonville, Plymouth Meeting, PA, 2022
- Three Peter Lamborn Wilson recordings by Chris Funkhouser: Olana
State Historic Site, February 7, 2015; Woodstock Public
Library, July 11, 2015; and Hudson Opera House with
Charles Stein, April 3, 2016
- Radical Poetry Reading #82 / New Social Environment #562 ft.
Barbara Henning, Brooklyn Rail, May 18, 2022
- John Richetti reads selected poems of T. S. Eliot
- Anne-Marie Albiach, from Mezza Voce 1992
- Eric Mottram reading at Sub-Voicive, The Archers Bricklane, London, 1992
- Matvei Yankelevich reading and discussing Dead Winter with Al Filreis, Kevin Platt, and Ahmad Almallah, Kelly
Writers House, February 17, 2022
- Three new reading events from Belladonna* featuring Erica Hunt, Laura Henriksen, Gabrielle Civil, 최 Lindsay, Anna Moschovakis, and more
- Mei-mei Berssenbrugge conversation and reading with Runa Bandyopadhyay, February 13, 2022
- Sophia Naz reading in the Wexler Studio at Kelly Writers House, September 8, 2021
- Clark Coolidge reading at SPD Open House, April 5, 2009
- A collection of videos by Ted Roeder, ft. Larry Fagin, Tonya
Foster, John Godfrey, Julie Patton, Stacy Syzmaszek, and Anne Waldman, c. 2013
- Amiri Baraka performing with Steve McHall and Fred Houn in 1984
- Mark Van Doren: Portrait of a Poet, film by Adam Van Doren, 1994
- Peter Gizzi reading with interview and introduction by Ocean Vuong, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, November 18, 2021
- Jerome Rothenberg reading for his 90th birthday celebration, NYC, December 12, 2021
- John Richetti reads a selection of love poetry, 2021
- John Ashbery and Peter Ackroyd in conversation, September 23, 1986
- Robert Duncan reading at the Berkeley Poetry Conference, July 16, 1965
- Jackson Mac Low recording from the Naropa Institute Archives, August 1975
- Clark Coolidge and Gryphon Rue in conversation, Montez Press Radio, September 22, 2021
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