Adonis on PennSound

This week begins with the spotlight on our author page for Syrian poet, essayist and translator Adonis, for which we owe our gratitude to Pierre Joris (shown at left with the poet), who provided the recording to us back in 2013. 

This Poets House-sponsored reading took place on March 7, 2013 as part of that year's AWP conference in Boston. For this event, Adonis was joined by Khaled Mattawa, whose Adonis: Selected Poems was shortlisted for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize, and after the reading, the two engaged in a lively discussion about poetry and contemporary issues.

Unfortunately, in the intervening years, we have not had the opportunity to add more recordings to our Adonis author page, but this modest gem is still well worth sharing with our listeners. 

Trish Salah on PennSound

Today we're wrapping up the week by highlighting our author page for Canadian poet and critic Trish Salah, which we first launched a little over two years ago.

At that time, our holdings included the poet's appearance at the 2009 ADFEMPO (Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism) conference, organized by Belladonna*, which took place on September 24th and 25th of that year. Salah appeared as part of a panel on "Body as Discourse" chaired by Kate Eichhorn that included Joan Retallack, Laura Smith, Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël), and Ronaldo V. Wilson in addition to Salah, which explored "questions of the body, referentiality, remapping bodies and borders, intertextuality, narrativity, aesthetics, and the challenges of de-essentialization as we scrutinize 'female,' 'queer,' 'raced' and 'othered' bodies."

Beyond that panel, we had a brief set as part of a Belladonna* Reading Series event on Transfeminism and Literature from 2012, and Salah's Segue Series reading at the Zinc Bar in March 2013. Since then, we've added several more recordings, including "Nevada: A Reading and Panel" that also included Imogen Binnie, from the Young Centre for Performing Arts in 2013; 2014's Wanting in Arabic: A Conversation with Poet Trish Salah," recorded as part of the Asia Pacific Forum for NYC's WBAI-FM; and a 2014 reading at the East Bay Poetry Summit, hosted by the Manifest Reading and Workshop Series. There's also a very exciting PennSound Podcast episode (#57) in which Christy Davids interviews Salah and Salah reads her poetry, including "Two Self Portraits," "Interlude for the Voice," "Future Foundered," and "Gossels in Fugue."

You can listen to any and all of the recordings mentioned above by clicking here.

Edwin Torres and Will Alexander at KWH, 2016

PennSound co-director Al Filreis recently posted a Jacket2 commentary entry highlighting a recent addition to our site: "On October 25, 2016, Edwin Torres and Will Alexander gave a double reading at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia, and then joined together in conversation. The program, organized by Edwin Torres in collaboration with the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, was titled 'Paradigm Shifting.'" 

As the description for that event notes, Alexander and Torres are "both practitioners in the fields of poetry, art, and commitment to making the creative process visible, [who] will read from their works and then engage in an open discussion of process, genesis, the way language evolves from within a poem, and how we allow ourselves to travel within a universe of our own making in parallel to humanity's continuous shift."

We're now able to share segmented audio of both poets' sets, thanks to the hard work of PennSound staffer Luisa Healey. The event moves through six phases altogether, with each poet offering a brief selection of poems, followed by a segment of conversation, then repeating this pattern a second time. Alexander reads "The Blood Penguin," "The Ghost Survivor," "The Deluge in Formation," and "The Bedouin Ark," among other titles, while Torres' set includes "Oblique Offering," "Slipped Curve," "The Happy Skeptic," and "To The Rendered Excision." You can listen to this complete event by clicking here.

In Memoriam: George Economou (1934–2019)

Today we're mourning the loss of poet and translator George Economou, who passed away late last week at the age of eighty-four. 

Jerry Rothenberg, an old and dear friend of Economou, posted a brief tribute to his work, hailing him as a "master translator and poet" and "a major influence on my own life and times as a poet and assembler." Elsewhere, he offered a more substantial statement:

The death of George Economou brings with it a rush of memories & warm good feelings that sometimes seem overwhelming. His poetry & presence were crucial to what we were attempting early on, & in particular his prowess & devotion to the ancient art of translation & the years he spent in translating & transcreating the work of the fabled Greek modernist C.P. Cavafy. My awareness of George & his work goes back to distant deep-image days, when he was the co-editor with Robert Kelly of Trobar, a magazine the name of which was itself a kind of translative act that brought ancient Provençal troubadours into the orbit of experimental modernism (or 'post'modernism as it came to be called later). His masterwork Ananios of Kleitor [...] remains one of the great transcreative works of my time & generation."

We were lucky to count both Economou and his wife, poet and playwright Rochelle Owens, as part of the Kelly Writers House community, and therefore it comes as no surprise that our George Economou author page is full of wonderful recordings made in-house, from a 2002 reading with Owens to last fall's David Bromige memorial reading. You can browse those resources by clicking here. We send our condolences to Owens, and to Economou's friends and colleagues, for their loss.

Three New Belladonna* Readings, 2019

Here are the three latest additions to our Belladonna* Reading Series homepage, representing programming that took place during the spring of 2019.

The earliest of these readings, which took place on March 4, 2019 at Performance Space New York, has the amazing title of "Lesbian All-Stars." This event featured introductory comments by Rachel Levitsky before sets by Raquel Gutiérrez and Ru (Nina) Puro, Gail Scott and Pamela Sneed, and finally, Camille Roy, who was recorded in absentia.

The next event, from March 9, 2019, was "Epic Voices: Bernadette Mayer and Stacy Szymaszek," held at Poets House. Introduced by Rachael Wilson, this symposium focused "on the long poem and daily writing."

Finally, dating from April 8, 2019, we have Sahar Muradi and Diana Khoi Nguyen reading at Queens College. James Loop and Amanda Long provided introductions for this evening, while the Q&A session was facilitated by Amanda Long and Zachary Zeringue.

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.