In Memoriam: Emmanuel Hocquard (1940–2019)

More sad news to report in the poetry world today: this weekend, news broke that French poet and translator Emmanuel Hocquard passed away at the age of 78. Perhaps best known to for the two anthologies he edited with Claude Royet-Journoud — 21+1: poètes américains ďaujourďhui and its successor, 49+1: nouveaux poètes américains — Hocquard was also a well-respected poet and translator (of Charles Reznikoff, Michael Palmer, Paul Auster, and Benjamin Hollander, among others).

While our Emmanuel Hocquard author page is modest, containing only two recordings, it's still a wonderful way to connect with the poet and his work. The earlier of our two offerings comes from the First Poetics Program French Poetry Festival, recorded on October 18, 1995. Unfortunately the recording starts in medias res, but it's nevertheless a fine sampling from Palmer's translation of Theory of Tables, with Charles Bernstein reading the English versions. Then we have an April 13, 2000 reading at UCSC that starts with introductory comments by Peter Gizzi, who then reads the afterword to Theory of Tables, setting up a bilingual reading with Hocquard and Gizzi alternating French and English versions of the poems. You can listen to both of these recordings by clicking here.

In Memoriam: Jonas Mekas (1922–2019)

We are very sad to share the news that legendary filmmaker and poet Jonas Mekas has passed away at the age of 96. The New York Times' obituary offered up a succinct summary of Mekas as "part intellectual, part enthusiast, part provocateur," and observed that "It is rare to have consensus on the pre-eminence of any person in the arts. But few would argue that Mr. Mekas, who was often called the godfather or the guru of the New American Cinema — his name for the underground film movement of the 1950s and '60s — was the leading champion of the kind of film that doesn't show at the multiplex."

To honor this peerless artist, we've created a new author page to gather recordings of Mekas from throughout the PennSound archive. It contains two Segue Series readings — one at the Bowery Poetry Club, the other at Zinc Bar — from 2006 and 2015, respectively, along with a brief recording of Allen Ginsberg reading his classic "Sunflower Sutra" from one of his films. While Mekas was far better known as a filmmaker than a poet, it's important to remember that he had a long history as writer and editor, and therefore it's possible that these selections from his literary expression might offer a new angle of appreciating his prodigious talents.

Anselm Hollo: New EPC Author Page

Today we're highlighting a new addition to our sister site, the Electronic Poetry Center, who yesterday announced "perhaps the most extensive page we've ever launched, a long overdue tribute to the late Anselm Hollo." There, you'll find twenty-two poems (selected by Anselm Berrigan, who was named in Hollo's honor), taken from throughout Hollo's prodigious career, from 1970's Maya up to two poems written in 2000, an excerpt from "rue Wilson Monday," and "West Is Left on the Map." 

In addition to these examples of Hollo's own work and a variety of resources drawn from across the web, Jack Krick has also gathered an impressive sampler of his work as a well-respected translator, with poems originally written in Russian, German, Swedish, and Finnish, including several complete books. These texts are wonderful complement to our own PennSound author page for Hollo, which houses eight complete readings by the poet from 1978 until several months before his death in 2013. Whether you're an old fan of Hollo's immense talents or this is your first time hearing of him, it's a wonderful time to connect with his work. 

Charles Bernstein Wins Bollingen Prize in American Poetry

We are incredibly proud to share the news, announced today, that our friend, colleague, and PennSound co-founder Charles Bernstein has been awarded the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, which is awarded biennially by the Yale University Library through the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

In their citation, the judges — Ange Mlinko, Claudia Rankine, and Evie Shockley — attest that, "Throughout his career Bernstein has facilitated a vibrant dialogue between lyric and anti-lyric tendencies in the poetic traditions we have inherited; in so doing, he has shaped and questioned, defined and dismantled ideas and assumptions in order to reveal poetry's widest and most profound capabilities." Bollingen Prize Director Nancy Kuhl offered this praise: "We are thrilled that the 2019 Bollingen Prize Judges have honored Charles Bernstein, a poet whose creative and critical work has for decades enlivened American poetry and poetics. The poems in his latest book, Near/Miss, explore the very nature of poetry."

The fifty-first poet to be granted this honor, Bernstein joins august company including Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Adrienne Rich, Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. You can read the complete Beinecke press release here; other press coverage includes pieces in The New York Times and Penn Today. You can start exploring our extensive archive of recordings on our Charles Bernstein author page.

Anne-Marie Albiach: 1978 Radio Interview for France Culture

This week starts off with a new addition to our author page for Anne-Marie Albiach: a France Culture radio interview with Jean Daive recorded in 1978. For French-speaking fans of the late poet (who died in November 2012), this is sure to be an illuminating listen, and it's one of many great recordings you'll find on our site, including two later France Culture broadcasts — from the program "Poésie sur parole" — recorded in 2003 and 2004.

There are a number of home recording sessions, including a 1993 recording of « H II » linéaires and a 2005 recordings of ETAT and UNE GÉOMÉTRIE (triptych), along with a 2000 reading as part of the Paris-based Steel Bar reading series, and shorter recordings made for Grey Suit and Kenning. 

Charles Bernstein's 2012 Jacket2 commentary post marking the poet's passing includes this appraisal of her talents, written on the occasion of her volume, Figured Image: "Anne-Marie Albiach's words are never alone on the page, having each other for company, just as they find here ideal companionship in Keith Waldrop’s translation. In Figurations de l’Image, Albiach pursues her rigorous investigation into the possibilities of measure, the perceptible, luminescence, vulnerability, memory, contour, ardor, breath, oscillation, remonstration, trajectory, disparity, abstraction, antecedence, disparity, refraction, trace, tapestry, rehearsal, reverberation, and the irreparable. In these poems, the figures refute image as they bank, relapse, surge, palsy, recollect. Albiach scores space to twine time, abjures rhyme to make blank shimmer in the mark." You can read more of Bernstein's remembrance here, and browse our Anne-Marie Albiach author page here.

Al Young: Kelly Writers House Reading, 2018

Here's a great reading by Al Young, recorded at our own Kelly Writers House on November 15, 2018, to bring the week to a close. If you're not familiar with Young, he's a prolific author and editor with more than twenty books to his name (including poetry collections, novels, and musical memoirs), and a former Poet Laureate of California, hailed by no less than Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as "an educator and a man with a passion for the Arts. His remarkable talent and sense of mission to bring poetry into the lives of Californians is an inspiration." 

This seventy-minute reading starts with a welcome from Al Filreis and a longer introduction by William J. Harris, who details his personal history with Young more than fifty years ago as a grad student, and observes that "like Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka, Al is a blues jazz poet." Later, he tells us that "like a blues in the heart, there's much pain and joy in the poems of Al Young," before enumerating his many publications and achievements of this "man of great craft and soul." After a long and charming salvo of opening comments, that moves from Ben Franklin to Bahrain and back again, Young delivers a fantastic reading for the appreciative audience.

You can find audio and video of this event on PennSound's Al Young author page, which is also home to a 2006 reading in San Francisco and a 1990 set at Printer's Ink in Palo Alto, CA. To listen to any of these recordings, click here.

PoemTalk #132: on G. Maria Hindmarch, "Kitsilano (1963–1969)"

Today, we are proud to release episode #132 in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, a very special program that focuses on “Kitsilano (1963–1969),” an unpublished poem by G. Maria Hindmarch, who " lived and worked at the center of the emerging avant-garde and counterculture literary scene in Vancouver the early 1960s and later." Host Al Filreis has gathered an all-star panel to discuss this important, including (from left to right) Erin Mouré, along with Karis Shearer and Deanna Fong, who have been working closely with Hindmarch on the assembly of a forthcoming collected works.

Filreis' PoemTalk blog post announcing this new episode starts by further establishing Hindmarch's bona fides: "Maria attended the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, established productive connections with Black Mountain poets among many others; founded TISH magazine in 1961; published three books; published her writings in dozens upon dozens of magazines; and made audio recordings as a feminist, materialist, and literary communitarian." He also explains that "a few months prior to our gathering in Montreal, Deanna and Karis had met at length with Maria, talked about this poem (and others), and made a recording of the poet performing her poem," noting that "listeners to the PoemTalk episode will hear some discussion of several ways in which Maria improvisationally revises the poem as she reencounters it in the present — always with an eye and ear to the idea of such a communal witnessing in verse to be archivally current and responsible, and alive." You can continue reading his write-up here, including information on the PoemTalk crew's five-day visit to Montreal and the other materials they produced while there. You can also watch this episode or listen to it, depending on your preference, and of course there's a full archive of PoemTalk programs spanning more than a decade, which you can browse here.

Norbert Lange: New Close Listening Plus Other Recordings

Charles Bernstein has filed his latest episode of Close Listening, this time sitting down with German poet and translator Norbert Lange for a two-part program recorded at our own Kelly Writers House as part of the Writers Without Borders series on October 30, 2018. Bernstein recently offered this brief summation of the two shows: "Norbert and I discuss his poetry and translations (of Oppen, Rothenberg and my work) in our conversation and Norbert reads his work at Kelly Writers House, including both of us reading our collaboration 'Apoplexy/Apoplexie' from Near/Miss and a few translations by Adam Sax."

In addition to this exciting new addition, we've put together a new PennSound author page for Lange, where you'll find a handful of additional recordings of Bernstein and Lange together, including sets from this past year's Berlin Poetry Festival and readings from Dresden, Essen, and Berlin recorded in 2014 and 2015. You can start browsing these materials by clicking here.

Jeffrey Robinson: Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth 1825–1833: Fibres of These Thoughts

Here's a recent addition from our friend Jeffrey Robinson — perhaps best known as co-editor, with Jerry Rothenberg, of Poems for the Millennium Volume Three: The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry — who currently serves as Professor of Romantic Poetry at the University of Glasgow, Scotland: "Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth 1825–1833: Fibres of These Thoughts," which he delivered at his home institution last year.

This nearly forty minute video presentation, essentially a distillation of Robinson's Anthem Press book of the same name, begins with this foundation: 

Scholars of the working manuscripts of poets often assume that drafts exist primarily to highlight the pathway to a poem's final and eventually-published version. Interest in them, in other words, is an instrumental one. In my book ... I enact a contrasting possibility: that a manuscript, no matter where it stands on that pathway, may be taken seriously in its appearances as a poetic event in itself. The French call such a manuscript an avant texte. In the present case an unusually complex and intensely-worked manuscript of Wordsworth might in itself indicate a moment of dedicated poetic exploration relevant not only to the material on the page, but to other poems written at roughly the same time.

Robinson then launches into the specific manuscript under discussion — "Dove Cottage Manuscript #89," which contains a half dozen whole or drafts or partial drafts of "The Unremitting Voice of Nighly Streams," along with pieces of three other late poems, "On the Power of Sound," "The Triad," and "The Sonambulists" — where, he attests,"we can observe poetry thinking." This marvelous video is intensely visual and also includes performances from Andrea Brady, Judith Goldman, and Peter Manson. It's a very welcome addition to our PennSound Classics collection, and you can watch it here.

A New Disability Poetics Symposium

Today we're highlight a tremendous new addition to the PennSound archive: A New Disability Poetics Symposium, which was recorded at the LGBT Center at UPenn on October 18, 2018. This ambitious, multi-part gathering was organized by Jennifer Bartlett, Ariel Resnikoff, Adam Sax, and Orchid Tierney, in collaboration with Knar Gavin, Declan Gould, Davy Knittle, and Michael Northen.

The proceedings began with the panel "Larry Eigner's Disability Poetics," moderated by Charles Bernstein, with talks by George Hart, Michael Davidson, and Jennifer Bartlett. That's followed by "Disability and Performance," moderated by Declan Gould, with contributions by torin a. greathouse and Camisha Jones; and "Poetic Experiment and Disability," moderated by Orchid Tierney, with panelists Sharon Mesmer and Gaia Thomas.

These talks are complemented by a number of readings, the first taking place as part of the symposium itself, with sets by Bartlett, Jim Ferris, Ona Gritz, Anne Kaier, Dan Simpson, and Brian Teare. There's a second set recorded at our own Wexler Studios with Kaier, Simpson, Ferris, Gritz, and Michael Northen reading their work. Finally, poet Kathi Wolfe was unable to take part in the symposium, but made home recordings of the pieces she would have read at the event, which we've made available to listeners as well.

Given both the significance of Disability Studies and the growing attention it's receiving from more mainstream audiences, this is a particularly important event, and one that we are very proud to be able to share with a wider audience. To start listening, click here.

PoemTalk #131: on Rachel Zolf's "Human Resources"

Just before the holiday break, we released the latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series (#131 in total), which addressed a brief passage from Rachel Zolf's 2007 book, Human Resources. Joining host Al Filreis for this program are a panel comprised of Jeff T. Johnson, Whitney Trettien, and Amy Paeth (shown left to right).

Filreis starts his post announcing the new episode on the PoemTalk Blog, by locating the selections under discussion (they fall between pages 73–79) and notes that "all but one of these sections have been performed by Zolf at various readings over the years" and can be heard on her PennSound author page, before adding that "the poet obliged us by making a new audio to aid our discussion" of that one remaining section. He continues, explaining that "the passages discussed in this episode were in part created by a Markov Chain process, a stochastic model usually entailing a sequence of events in which the probability of each depends only on the state attained in the previous. It is typically used by metereologists, ecologists, computer scientists, financial engineers, and other people who model big phenomena." "But," he concludes by asking, "what about a poet, especially a radical and radically experimental writer such as Rachel Zolf, who has always sought a poetics at work on the big phenomena of contemporary life?"

You can read more about the show and listen to the panelists' attempts to answer that question here, while the full archive of PoemTalk podcasts is available here.