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Featured resources

From "Down To Write You This Poem Sat" at the Oakville Gallery

Contemporary
  1. Charles Bernstein, "Phone Poem" (2011) (1:30): MP3
  2. Caroline Bergvall, "Love song: 'The Not Tale (funeral)' from Shorter Caucer Tales (2006): MP3
  3. Christian Bôk, excerpt from Eunoia, from Chapter "I" for Dick Higgins (2009) (1:38):  MP3
  4. Tonya Foster, Nocturne II (0:40) (2010) MP3
  5. Ted Greenwald, "The Pears are the Pears" (2005) (0:29): MP3
  6. Susan Howe, Thorow, III (3:13) (1998):  MP3
  7. Tan Lin, "¼ : 1 foot" (2005) (1:16): MP3
  8. Steve McCaffery, "Cappuccino" (1995) (2:35): MP3
  9. Tracie Morris, From "Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful" (2002) (3:40): MP3
  10. Julie Patton, "Scribbling thru the Times" (2016) (5:12): MP3
  11. Tom Raworth, "Errory" (c. 1975) (2:08): MP3
  12. Jerome Rothenberg, from "The First Horse Song of Frank Mitchell: 4-Voice Version" (c. 1975) (3:30): MP3
  13. Cecilia Vicuna, "When This Language Disappeared" (2009) (1:30): MP3
Historical
  1. Guillaume Apollinaire, "Le Pont Mirabeau" (1913) (1:14): MP3
  2. Amiri Baraka, "Black Dada Nihilismus" (1964) (4:02):  MP3
  3. Louise Bennett, "Colonization in Reverse" (1983) (1:09): MP3
  4. Sterling Brown, "Old Lem " (c. 1950s) (2:06):  MP3
  5. John Clare, "Vowelless Letter" (1849) performed by Charles Bernstein (2:54): MP3
  6. Velimir Khlebnikov, "Incantation by Laughter" (1910), tr. and performed by Bernstein (:28)  MP3
  7. Harry Partch, from Barstow (part 1), performed by Bernstein (1968) (1:11): MP3
  8. Leslie Scalapino, "Can’t’ is ‘Night’" (2007) (3:19): MP3
  9. Kurt Schwitters, "Ur Sonata: Largo" performed by Ernst Scwhitter (1922-1932) ( (3:12): MP3
  10. Gertrude Stein, If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1934-35) (3:42): MP3
  11. William Carlos Willliams, "The Defective Record" (1942) (0:28): MP3
  12. 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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A Tribute to Paul Dutton (2014)

Posted 10/5/2022

Today we're highlighting a 2014 tribute event to author Paul Dutton, which brings together numerous friends, collaborators, and fans to honor the venerable Canadian poet.

Recorded on March 4, 2014 at The Supermarket in Toronto, Ontario, this two-hour event was hosted by Gary Barwin, Jenny Sampirisi, and Stuart Ross, and features an impressive all-star roster of Dutton's friends, fans, and collaborators, including Phil Minton; Eric Schmaltz; Jay Millar; Mari-Lou Rowley; Steve Venright; Christian Bök; W. Mark Sutherland and Nobuo Kubota; Donkey Lopez (Ray Dillard, Stuart Ross, and Steven Lederman); a.rawlings; John Kamevaar; Karl Jirgens; Margaret Christakos; Chris Tonelli; Jenny Sampirisi and John Kameel Farah; Dan Waber, Gary Barwin, Gregory Betts, and David Lee; and Shannon McGuire, before concluding with a set from CCMC (Dutton, Kamevaar, John Oswald, and Michael Snow).

Barwin opens the show by highlighting the many hats Dutton has worn — "poet, novelist, musician, improviser, essayist, mentor, collaborator, soundsinger, critic, friend." "Over the past forty years," he continues, "Paul has created an impressive body of great work: sound poems, visual poems, collections of poetry, short fiction, a novel, CDs, countless performances (both as a solo artist and as a part of groups such as the Four Horsemen and CCMC). He has been a significant part of major works by R. Murray Schafer and has performed and collaborated with a wide array of other artists. Paul is a sensitive, exacting, witty, and inventive performer and explorer of language out of the human. As a writer, he has plumbed the musicality of the paragraph, the sentence, and the word. As an oral sound artist, Paul has helped redefined the musical potential of human utterance." You can listen to the rest of his introduction, and view all of these marvelous performances here. We'd also like to thank Laurie Kwasnik and ChromaSonic Pictures for making this footage available to us.

Appropriately enough, Barwin is also the editor of Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poetry of Paul Dutton, released in late 2015 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press — a collection hailed for "demonstrat[ing] Dutton's willingness to (re)invent and stretch language and to listen for new possibilities while at the same time engaging with his perennial concerns — love, sex, music, time, thought, humour, the materiality of language, and poetry itself." And, of course, don't forget PennSound's Paul Dutton author page, which houses solo recordings from 1979–2001, as well as links to our Four Horsemen page and other collaborations, and a series of useful links to external resources. First created in 2005, our Dutton page was one of our earliest author pages, but its materials continue to surprise us.


Charles Baudelaire: New Author Page

Posted 10/3/2022

We recently created a new PennSound author page for beloved proto-modernist misanthrope Charles Baudelaire, which brings together resources related to the poet that were previously scattered throughout our archives.

First up, we have Ariana Reines reading and discussing Baudelaire's "My heart laid bare" as part of a 2009 Segue Series Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club. That's followed by Keith Waldrop reading "To the Reader," "The Bad Glazier," "The Dog and the Flask," and "Invitation to the Voyage" at Harvard University in 2009 as part of a launch event for Poems for the Millenium Vol. III. Waldrop returns to read eleven of his translations in a 2006 recording session engineered by Steve Evans. 

Charles Bernstein also makes two appearances on the Baudelaire page, first presenting a bilingual reading of "Be Drunken" with Pierre Joris at the aforementioned 2009 Harvard event, and also reading "Venereal Muse," his take on "Muse Venale" at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2006. A twenty-seven minute video of Sean Bonney reading Baudelaire in English in London's Abney Park during the winter of 2008 round out our collection, though we've also included a brief bonus clip of Marjorie Perloff discussing Eliot and Baudelaire's concepts of evil, from a 2012 talk on "The Waste Land."

Click here to listen to any and all of the recordings detailed above on PennSound's Charles Baudelaire author page.

Joris, Bernstein Join in Worldwide Day of Reading Rushdie

Posted 9/29/2022

We wrap up this week with new recordings by Pierre Joris and Charles Bernstein made in conjunction with a coordinated worldwide effort to read the works of Salman Rushdie on September 29, 2022. This project is led by the Berlin Literary Festival, who issue this call to action "intended to send a signal for the freedom of literature and public speech as well as the solidarity with the author, who was the victim of a horrific assassination attempt." They continue:
Even if the concrete background of the assassination attempt and the motive of the perpetrator have not yet been clarified, it appears to be evident who is responsible: It goes back to the fatwa that the Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued against Rushdie in 1989. It called for the killing of the Indian-born, British writer because he had supposedly insulted the Islam, the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad with The Satanic Verses. To this day, the Iranian regime has not withdrawn the call to kill the author, just as it has not withdrawn the bounty it placed on his head at the time. The important media in Iran are currently applauding the attacker. 

For years, Salman Rushdie therefore had to live under intensive police protection. For more than 20 years, it was assumed that there was no longer any danger to his life. But this assumption has been shockingly proven wrong by the bloody attack in New York. It proves that the threat to elementary human rights and freedoms remains constant. Moreover, the attack on Rushdie comes at a time when the democratic world is being forced into the defensive by increasingly aggressive authoritarian powers of various kinds, if not – as in Ukraine – it is overrun with death and destruction through open war and an incredible range of violence.

It is therefore absolutely urgent to stand up firmly and defend law and human dignity. By reading Salman Rushdie’s novels and essays, freedom-loving people all over the world can send a signal that they will not be intimidated by threats of violence and will not bow to any attempt to suppress or annihilate thoughts expressed in speech, writing and images.

Readings can take place anywhere, even privately in a small circle, in a school, in a cultural institution or on the radio.

We are very proud to be able to share Joris' and Bernstein's contributions to this worthy endeavor. Bernstein starts by introducing Joris, who reads his essay "For Salman Rushdie & The Satanic Verses," published in The Brooklyn Rail this month. Both authors then read excerpts from The Satanic Verses. There's a video of the complete reading and we've also broken out MP3 recordings of Joris and Bernstein reading Rushdie. Click here to watch or listen to all of the aforementioned recordings.


Want to read more? Visit the PennSound Daily archive.