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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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Steve McCaffery, "Wot We Wokkers Want" b/w "One Step to the Next"

Posted 5/1/2024

There's probably no more fitting recording for May Day in the PennSound archives than Steve McCaffery's "Wot We Wokkers Want" b/w "One Step to the Next," This album was released on LP and cassette in 1980 by the Underwhich Audio Collective, a small Canadian independent label (based in Toronto, Ontario and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) that also issued small run releases (usually about 100 copies) by the likes of Owen Sound, the Four Horsemen, Paul Dutton, Bob Cobbing, Susan Frykberg, Larry Wendt, and DUCT, among others.

Better known by its full title, The Kommunist Manifesto or Wot We Wukkerz Want Bi Charley Marx un Fred Engels, the leadoff track is McCaffery's translation of The Communist Manifesto into the dialect of West Riding of Yorkshire, or, as he puts it, "Redacted un traduced intuht’ dialect uht’ west riding er Yorkshuh bi Steve McCaffery, eh son of that shire. Transcribed in Calgary 25 November to 3 December 1977 un dedicated entirely to Messoors Robert Filliou and George Brecht uv wooz original idea this is a reullizayshun." You can read the piece in its entirety here as part of the PECP Library. Side A also includes "Mid●night Peace" ("a nostalgic translation of the Dadaphony of hell") and "A Hundred And One Zero S One Ng," which is McCaffery's translation of Brecht's translation of the closing section of Robert Filliou's 14 Chansons et Charade.

Side B starts with "One Step Next to the Next," co-created with Clive Robertson, which centers around turntable manipulations of a National Geographic flexi-disc on the Apollo space flights. The closing track, Emes1 in which "a phrase is intercepted, reversed, synthesized, and obsessively repeated as a stolen micro-unit." As the liner notes explain, "it represents McCaffery's first theft from himself." Listen in to all of these tracks here.


In Memoriam: Andy Clausen (1941–2024)

Posted 4/30/2024

We are sorry to report the death of latter-day Beat poet Andy Clausen, who passed away at the age of 83 on April 11th. Clausen came a long way from bomb-scarred Belgium to Woodstock, NY, where he was a mainstay of the poetry scene for the last quarter century. 

A tribute by Eliot Katz on the website of the National Beat Poetry Foundation provides a rollicking biography as well as a bibliography, listing his publications including "The Iron Curtain of Love, 40th Century Man, Songs of Bo Baba, Without Doubt, and Home of the Blues [and] an extraordinary memoir, Beat, about his adventures with well-known and lesser-known Beat Generation writers." Katz also frame Clausen's poetry as "extend[ing] the democratic-left and imagination-filled traditions of poets like Walt Whitman, William Blake, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, the French surrealists, and the Russian Futurists, especially Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was always one of Andy’s favorites." He also provides this fascinating description of Clausen's Pauline transformation from a Marine into a poet:
Andy was physically stronger than most poets. After graduating from high school, he became a talented Golden Gloves boxer and, for a brief time, joined the Marines, which he left in 1966 after watching Allen Ginsberg on TV read his anti-Vietnam War poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra."  The line from Allen's poem that caught Andy's attention and changed the direction of his life was the simple but poignant, humanizing question: "Has anyone looked in the eyes of the dead?"

Folks wanting a taste of Clausen's poetry should head over to our archive page for the recordings of Chris Funkhouser, where you'll find several recordings: two tracks from issue #14 of We Magazine (one a collaboration with thelemonade), a December 1991 We Press/Gargoyle Mechanique Laboratory Benefit from New York City, and Clausen's set from the 27th Annual Subterranean Poetry Festival, held in Rosendale, NY in 2017. We send our condolences to Clausen's friends and family.



Caroline Bergvall in Conversation with David Wallace and Orchid Tierney, 2014

Posted 4/27/2024

Today we're looking back at Caroline Bergvall's 2014 conversation with David Wallace and Orchid Tierney at our own Kelly Writers House. Recorded on November 14th of that year, this hour-long conversation has been segmented into thirteen discrete files by topic, including "Connecting the contemporary and the medieval," "Transformations in the English language," "Gender and desingularizing voices," "Fascination with the letter H and phonetics," "Anonymity and voicing," and "Apocalyptic nature of medieval times," along with the all-important "On the artistic next steps." At the time, Bergvall had just release Drift, the second of three books in a planned trilogy of works influenced by medieval sources that also includes Meddle English and Alisoun Sings. It's especially fitting to hear Bergvall and Wallace talk about the former's work since this trilogy has deep roots in her "Shorter Chaucer Tales," which was initially written at the invitation of Wallace and Charles Bernstein and first presented at the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the New Chaucer Society in New York in 2006.

You can hear much more from Bergvall's trilogy, along with earlier work like Fig and Goan Atom on her PennSound author page. Click here to start exploring.


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