Donato Mancini: Wexler Studio Session, 2018

Late this summer, Canadian poet Donato Mancini visited the Wexler Studio at our own Kelly Writers House to record a selection of recent work. This session, which was recently segmented, can now be found on his PennSound author page. Recorded on August 13th of this year, this set includes twenty-five titles, including "Buy my buy high.," "a kind in glass and a cousin," "prevent emergency tours, and," "The nervous system of a tomato plant," "bitter generic," and "january made from table salt."

Our Donato Mancini author page is home to many more recordings of the poet from over the past five years, including a separate Wexler Studio session of selections from his Griffin Poetry Prize-nominated collection, Same Diff, readings from Washington, D.C.'s venerable Bridge Street Books, Johns Hopkins University, The Kootenay School of Writing, and Vancouver, BC. You'll also find two recordings from Mancini's residency at University of Windsor, a 2016 home-recorded session of poems from his earlier collections, Buffet World (2011) and Loitersack (2014), and a 2016 appearance on the inaugural episode of Short Range Poetic Device, entitled "Poetry and Poetics Streaming Against the Totality." Click here to start exploring all of the recordings mentioned here.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis: "INTERFACES" Opening at KWH, 2017

We're starting this week off with video and audio from the opening celebration for INTERFACES: Work by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, held at the Brodsky Gallery at our own Kelly Writers House on November 15, 2017.

As the introductory note for the event observes, "Collage poems as an inter-art practice characterize recent work by Rachel Blau DuPlessis." It continues: "These collage poems, in serial groups like Churning the Ocean of Milk, Life in Handkerchiefs, and Numbers, are charged by DuPlessis's mix of aphorism, aesthetic perception, and sociopolitical comment. A bright visuality, intense poetic commentary, and a confrontative intertextuality combine in these personable and evocative works on paper, which negotiate the afterlife of debris by vibrant uses of its traces." This event features DuPlessis reading selections from her recent books Days and Works (Ahsahta, 2017) and Graphic Novella (Xeroxial Editions, 2015), along with a illustrated talk on her collage work in the exhibition.

It's appropriate that the archive you'll find on PennSound's Rachel Blau DuPlessis author page is as ambitious, complex, and rich as the poet's work. In numerous audio and video recordings going back four decades, you'll find readings from the vast majority of DuPlessis' one hundred and fourteen poems that comprise her twenty-six year magnum opus, Drafts, along with a sampling of the work that came before and after that project. There are also numerous talks, interviews, and other events. Click here to start browsing.

28th Annual Subterranean Poetry Festival

Here's an amazing event to close out your week in spectacular fashion: audio from the 28th annual Subterranean Poetry Festival, which was held in Rosendale, NY on September 8th of this year. Curator Chris Funkhouser — who also was kind enough to provide us with a recording of the event — offers up this introduction to the unique event:

Again asked to “curate” this unique annual event held in Rosendale, NY, I unintentionally brought together writers whose places of residence are equally balanced between nearby regions known as “upstate” and “city”. A moist year for the annual Festival at Widow Jane Mine! Not only did the poets dowse the space with language and song, water steadily dripped from the ceiling all afternoon as accompaniment for everyone, and one poet, Douglas Rothschild, arrived for his boombox-infused performance wearing a wetsuit after paddling an inflatable raft across the underground lake adjacent to the stage (& no one remembered to bring a lamp for the stage so it was darker than usual down there, a sign of the times perhaps). Such dramatic presentations began early on: Tony Torn opened the show by enlisting several of the other performers — Katy Bohinc, Lee Ann Brown, Bob Holman and Rothschild — “a preview of the day to come” — to help him stage a Google translation of cave scene of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. As always, beautiful to hear a range of voices in the acoustically marvelous setting. Other highlights included hearing Nancy Dunlop’s setting of Blake’s songs, as well as her a lovely duet with Brown, who also sang some of her work — as did Holman while rendering a new work titled The Cut Outs (accompanied by soundtrack; it was a much longer performance, edited for this collection at his request). Philip Good, Michael Joyce, Bohinc, Joan Retallack, Erica Kaufman all prepared stellar sets work and read with gusto reverberating throughout the Mine, as heard in these recordings.

You'll find segmented MP3 files for each of the performers mentioned above here. On the same page, we're lucky to also have audio from last year's iteration of the festival, which featured sets from Rebecca Wolff, Pierre Joris, Pamela Twining, Nicole Peyrafitte, Michael Ruby, John Cayley, David Rothenberg, Dorota Czerner, Andy Clausen, and Adeena Karasick. We're grateful, as always, to Chris Funkhouser for his generosity in sharing these and numerous other wonderful recordings with the PennSound archive.

Rodney Koeneke: New Author Page

Our latest author page is for Portland, Oregon-based poet Rodney Koeneke. It's anchored by a brand-new recording session done at our own Wexler Studio on September 24th, which showcases poems from Koeneke's two latest books, 2014's Etruria and 2018's Body and Glass, both of which were published by Wave Books. Titles included in this twenty-six minute set include: "Larry's House of Brakes," "in the backlands of the provence," "tarnish the coppice, punk autumn," "the new sobriety," "scott walker sings," "humber, severn, mersey, thames, and ouse," "another hapless functionary," and "he continually puts autumn in his writing."

In addition to this new set, you'll also find a trio of Segue Series readings from the Zinc Bar and the Bowery Poetry Club from 2015, 2012, and 2004, along with an hour long "Poet as Radio" interview recorded in San Francisco in 2013, and video of a Counterpath reading in Denver in 2014. You can browse all of the aforementioned recordings here.

Two David Bromige Tribute Readings, 2018

We're starting this week in grand fashion with two recent events — one held in Philadelphia, the other in Vancouver, BC — honoring the late David Bromige and celebrating the recent publication of if wants to be the same as is: The Essential David Bromige.

The first of these two readings was held at our own Kelly Writers House on September 25th of this year, and featured an astounding line-up of friends, fans, and colleagues of the late poet, including Charles Bernstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Steve Dolph, Ryan Eckes, George Economou, Eli Goldblatt, Tom Mandel, Chris McCreary, Jason Mitchell, Bob Perelman, Frank Sherlock, and Orchid Tierney. That seventy-five minute event is available in both MP3 and streaming video formats.

Then, from just a few days ago on October 12th, we have video from a launch party for the new Bromige collection, which was held at the People's Co-op Bookstore in Vancouver. That event featured readings from Bob Perelman, Meredith Quartermain, George Bowering, Anakana Schojfield, Peter Quartermain, Fred Wah, Paul Debarros, Clint Burnham, Mackenzie Ground, and Chris and Joni Bromige. We've provided an embedded and segmented YouTube playlist for these recordings.

You'll find both of these events on PennSound's David Bromige author page, along with a 2009 tribute to the poet produced by Katherine Hastings of KRCB-FM in Rohnert Park, CA, and a vast array of recordings from 1998 as far back as 1964. Click here to start exploring.

PoemTalk #129: Sylvia Plath's "The Stones"

Yesterday we released the latest episode in  the PoemTalk Podcast Series (number 129 in total), where Sylvia Plath's "The Stones" — one part of a 1959 seven-poem sequence called "Poem for a Birthday" — is the poem up for discussion. For this program, host Al Filreis convened a panel of (from left to right) Susan Schultz, Sally Van Doren, Huda Fakhreddine.

In his post announcing the new episode on the PoemTalk Blog, Filreis starts by detailing the panelists' opening observations: "The group, starting with Susan, begins with Plath's constant substitution of the natural and the artficial. They then compile instances of her strategic mixing of metaphors. Sally also points out the 'shifted scenes.' Huda notes the ironic reversals of images of illness and health and the resulting confusion and means and ends. It simply cannot be discerned which person (the speaker-patient? a foetus within? another?) is being constructed by this place, nor what is the relationship between mending and newness." "Moreover," he continues, "if 'This is the city where men are mended,' where does that leave the speaker? Is the next step more hell than rehab? What exactly is this 'after-hell'? Is it associated more with birth than with death, more with beginnings (delivery) than with endings (deliverance)?" 

You'll find the full text of Plath's poem and can read more about the program here. The full archive of PoemTalk podcasts is available here for your listening pleasure.

Two New Rudy Burckhardt Films Featuring Kenneth Koch

Today we have a pair of very exciting new additions to our PennSound Cinema author (or auteur?) page for filmmaker and photographer Rudy Burckhardt, both of which feature friend and New York School mainstay Kenneth Koch.

The earlier of the two, The Apple (1967), features a lyric and spoken interlude written by Koch, which was set to music by Tony Ackerman and Brad Burg, and sung by Kim Brody. In stop-motion and live action, it traces the sprawling adventures of its titular fruit. Running just one minute and fifty-four seconds, the film is nevertheless the subject of a marvelous essay by Daniel Kane — "Whimsy, the Avant-Garde and Rudy Burckhardt's and Kenneth Koch's The Apple" — in which he praises it for "the ways in which ideas of temporality, spontaneity, childishness, and parody are expressed within this tiny little film work," thus "revealing the latent and hilarious power of the whimsical affect."

The latter film, On Aesthetics (1999) has a sense of finality about it, coming during Burckhardt's last year and not long before Koch developed leukemia that would ultimately take his life in 2002. Running nine minutes and taking its name from the last poem in Koch's 1994 collection One Train, On Aesthetics — charmingly presented by "KoBu Productions" — features the poet's voice-over reciting the various micropoems contained under that title, from "Aesthetics of the Man in the Moon" and "Aesthetics of Creating Light" to "Aesthetics of Being with Child" and "Aesthetics of Echo," while Burckhardt's camera eye finds appropriate accompanying images, whether literary or abstract.

We're grateful to be able to share this work with our listeners, along with two other Burckhardt films: — The Automotive Story (1954) and Central Park in the Dark (1985) — which you can find here. Our Kenneth Koch author page also houses these films, along with a 1998 reading at our own Kelly Writers House and a few brief recordings from the St. Mark's Poetry Project.

Five New Belladonna* Readings, 2018

We're starting this week off with five new additions to our homepage for the Belladonna* Reading Series, all taken from this year. 

First, from March 1st, we have a Belladonna* intern and staff reading at Out-of-Office at the Brooklyn Art Library. That event featured brief sets from Lindsey Hoover, Christine Ramkarran, Rupert McCranor, Fatima Lundy, Christina Barriero, Kayla Park, Rachel Wilson, Emily Skillings, and Asiya Wadud. We also have audio from a March 19th staff reading at Queens College, with sets by Javier Zamora and Aracelis Girmay.

From April 10th, we have an event organized in conjunction with the Asian American Writers' Workshop and held at the Brooklyn Public Library, in which Abdellah Taïa reads from his Belladonna* chaplet and then talks with Meena Alexander. Jumping ahead to May 14th, we have a reading from New York's Institute of Arabic and Islamic Art, at which Aditi Machado and Iman Mersal read from their Belladonna* chaplets and then take part in a conversation moderated by Omar Berrada.

Finally, from August 16th, we have at event at the Matthew Gallery held in collaboration with Montez Press Radio, at which Pamela Snead read from her book, Sweet Dreams.

Now approaching its twentieth year, Belladonna* continues to be as vital a force as ever in our contemporary poetry scene. On our Belladonna* reading series homepage, you'll find an astounding array of audio and video documentation of the organization's ambitious work promoting "the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, and dangerous with language," going back to its very origins. Click here to start browsing, or click any of the individual dates above to visit that specific reading.

Two New Richard Foreman Recordings

We bring this week to a close by highlighting a pair of new recordings of Richard Foreman, noted avant-garde playwright and founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.

First, we have an excerpt from Foreman's 2013 film, Once Every Day, which is accompanied by a link to rent the complete film from Vimeo on Demand. Observing that "the goal, for Foreman, is not to induce pleasure, but rather to demand acute — even obsessive — attention in his viewers," Film Comment's Emma Meyers notes, "the film is most striking for the emptiness of its signs. A woman's feet, clad in high heels and bound together with rope, or the stern face of an old man, do not necessarily signify anything outside of themselves." She concludes, "the effect falls anywhere between refreshingly liberating, mildly amusing, and stalwartly infuriating."

Second, we have candid video and audio footage of Foreman discussing the pioneering queer filmmaker Jack Smith, recorded at New York City's Metrograph on September 10th of this year. You'll find both of these artifacts on PennSound's Richard Foreman author page, amidst a remarkable treasure trove of work from the 1970s up to the present. Click here to start browsing.

PoemTalk #128: Sueyeun Juliette Lee's "Perfect Villagers"

Finally, here's the most recent episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, which was released just a few weeks back on September 19th. For this program, host Al Filreis and a panel of (from left to right) Sawako Nakayasu, Donato Mancini, and Gabriel Ojeda-Sague discuss a pair of poems — "Dear Margaret Cho" and "Daniel Dae Kim" — from Sueyeun Juliette Lee's sequence "Perfect Villagers," which first appeared in a 2006 chapbook of the same name, and later was republished in 2008's That Gorgeous Feeling.

Here's Filreis's brief description of the commentary on the latter of the two poems, taken from his write-up on the PoemTalk blog: "The four PoemTalkers attempt to assess the effects on Lee's powerful lyric about Daniel Dae Kim enabled by his fame as 'the sexiest man alive' in 2005, per People magazine. The poem, seemingly a verse portrait, begins with 'a perfect symmetry' — he is after all, in the public eye, the truly 'perfect villager' — and concludes with a Korean American body as it is constructed of 'beautiful tangents.'"

You can read both poems and learn more about this episode here. The full archive of PoemTalk episodes can be found here.

PoemTalk #127: John Ashbery's "The Short Answer"

Since we ended last week with a recent PoemTalk episode on Amiri Baraka — just in time for his birthday this weekend — it might be a good idea to catch up to the latest episode in the series. Before we get to the most-recent program, we have episode #127, on John Ashbery's "The Short Answer," which was released in August of this year. For the discussion of this Quick Question-era poem, host Al Filreis was joined by (from left to right) Susan McCabe, Marjorie Perloff, and Robert von Hallberg at Perloff's Los Angeles-area home.

As Filreis explains in his write-up on the PoemTalk blog, "There are, abounding, the usual marooned pronouns, and the typically high 'daftness quotient,'" however he notes that he and Perloff chose this poem "with the goal of exploring of what it means to read closely and talk in detail about a seemingly 'minor' poem from a 'major' poet, from a late book not especially praised — a poem that might strike readers as an effect of Ashbery's incessant and seemingly easeful poetic fermentation." He concludes, "Perhaps, too, the poem evinced a style grown old."

You can read Ashbery's poem in full, and as was the case with the previous episode, interact with both audio of the finished podcast and raw video of the recording session here. The full archive of PoemTalk episodes can be found here.

PoemTalk #126: Amiri Baraka's "Something in the Way of Things"

Last July we released the 126th episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, which addresses Amiri Baraka's poem, "Something in the Way of Things (In Town)," perhaps best-known for its appearance on The Roots' 2002 LP, Phrenology. For this discussion, host Al Filreis assembled an astounding all-star panel including (from left to right) Aldon Nielsen, Tyrone Williams, and William J. Harris. 

After getting preliminaries out of the way, Filreis' write-up on the PoemTalk blog starts by discussing the connection between Baraka and The Roots, noting, "Ahmir 'Questlove' Thompson of The Roots wrote a remembrance of Baraka after the poet's death. It was published on January 12, 2014, in The New York Times. The essay describes Baraka's influence and importance. It identifies poets who had influenced the Amiri Baraka of this particular poem (Olson and Burroughs, for instance) in such a way as to complicate (in a manner the PoemTalk panelists commend) the relationship between experimental black poetics arising out of modernism and the themes taken up by Phrenology — racial profiling, social Darwinism, and 'hip-hop itself.'" He continues, "We at PoemTalk recommend this episode for several reasons, among them this in the middle of the podcast: a fresh, detailed analysis of Baraka's critical yet ultimately unstubborn and nuanced relationship to popular black music in his later years. This leads to a discussion more generally of the special power of Baraka's later poetry." 

You can read more about this episode, read Baraka's poem in full, and explore both audio of the finished podcast and raw video of the recording session here. The full archive of PoemTalk episodes can be found here.

Bernadette Mayer: Kelly Writers House Fellows Program, 2018

This past spring we were very lucky to be joined by the one and only Bernadette Mayer (shown at right with Al Filreis), as the second of this year's three Kelly Writers House Fellows. Her visit consisted of a reading on the evening of March 26th and a brunch conversation with Filreis on the 27th. Video and audio of both sets are available on Mayer's PennSound author page, with the reading segmented into individual MP3 files as well.

Running more than an hour, that reading serves as a useful introduction to Mayer's diverse creative modes, which have sustained for more than five decades. Mayer starts with new poems, including "Myrmidon" and "Dear Sarah," before moving into requests from the audience, some very old ("Failure in Infinitives," "Eve of Easter") and some quite recent ("Chocolate Poetry Sonnet," "Summer Solstice"). To start listening, click here.

"Talking About David Antin," Artists Space, NYC

Antin's "Sky Poem," 1987

Here's a wonderful recent addition to our archives that you don't want to miss: "Talking About David Antin," with with Eleanor Antin, Charles Bernstein, Julien Bismuth, and Ellen Zweig, recorded at New York's Artists Space on March 27th of this year.

Artists Space Director Jay Sanders provided introductory comments for the two-hour event, which featured individual talks by the aforementioned friends and colleagues, followed by a half-hour collaborative Q&A session.  As the venue's blurb for the event notes, "David Antin's influential work as a poet and artist led him to develop the hybridized format of 'talk poems' in the 1970s, whereby he would compose literary texts in an improvised, conversational manner in a public setting." Those assembled offer up "performances and interventions" that pay tribute to his prodigious, "multidimensional literary and artistic output."

You can enjoy video and audio versions of this event on PennSound's David Antin author page, which is home to forty years' worth of recordings highlighting his singular talents, which are sorely missed.