Poetry Is for Breathing, 2019

Organized by Orchid Tierney,  "Poetry Is for Breathing: A Reading Against Islamophobia" took place at our own Kelly Writers House on April 17th of this year, with sets by Aditya Bahl (poet, translator, and a current Johns Hopkins Ph.D. candidate), Husnaa Hashim (2017-2018 Youth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia), and Fatemeh Shams (shown at right, a poet and UPenn professor of Persian literature). 

The announcement for this event situates it as a direct response to both recent tragedy and and long-simmering prejudices: "On March 15, 2019, a white supremacist murdered fifty people at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, Aotearoa-New Zealand. Please join us for a special lunchtime poetry reading in support of the survivors and victims of this terrorist attack. Invited poets will read their works, and we encourage the audience to share their thoughts as we collectively examine the intersections of white supremacy in Christchurch and Philadelphia. "

You can experience this very special reading via streaming video or MP3 format by clicking here. More recordings by both Tierney and Shams are available on their respective PennSound author pages.

Dubravka Djurić on Close Listening

Today Charles Bernstein posted the latest episode in the long-running Close Listening series: a conversation with Dubravka Djurić recorded in Belgrade on July 26, 2019. Interestingly enough, while most Close Listening shows come in two parts — a reading segment followed by a separate discussion — which are recorded concurrently, this program's two parts were recorded a dozen years apart, with the first session taking place in New York City on April 29, 2007.

Here's how Bernstein introduces the program: "Dubravka Djurić is the most significant and innovative Serbian poet, translator, editor, and advocate of her generation. She is the coeditor, with Biljana Obradović, of the crucial 2016 anthology of contemporary Serbian poetry, Cat Painters from Diálogos / Lavender Ink. She is also the coeditor, with Miško Šuvaković, of Impossible Histories: Historic Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991 from MIT Press (2006). Djurić was a Poetics Program Fellow in Buffalo in the spring of 1994. James Sherry and I visited her in Beograd in the spring of 1991."

On PennSound's Dubravka Djurić author page, you'll find this earlier session, which consists of a dozen poems, including "REMEĆENJE," "Naše ideologije," "Umetnost, telo, tehnologija," "Maria Grazia želi da sedne za Rilkeov sto/stol," and "Bavim se sobom." There's also a short clip from Bernstein's series of video portraits, and a twenty-four minute reading of Priroda Meseca that's undated. You can listen in by clicking here.

Belladonna* Lesbian All-Stars Reading, 2019

If you missed this exciting Belladonna* event in New York City a few weeks ago, then you're in luck, because an audio recording if now available on our Belladonna* Reading Series homepage. Recorded on July 12th at Bureau of General Services – Queer Division, this appropriately-named event featured sets by Ariel Goldberg, Andriniki Mattis, Natalie Peart, LJ Roberts, Jeanne Thornton, and Jeanne Vaccaro.

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.

Congratulations to Neustadt Nominees Hoa Nguyen and Jorie Graham

Monday brought exciting news from World Literature Today that poets Hoa Nguyen and Jorie Graham were among the nominees for the 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. The Neustadt Prize is "the first international literary award of this scope to originate in the United States and is one of the very few international prizes for which poets, novelists, screenwriters and playwrights are equally eligible." Hailed as the "American Nobel," the award "recognizes significant contributions to world literature and has a history as a lead-up to the Nobel Prize in Literature."

Nguyen is recognized for her 2014 collection, Red Juice: Poems, 1998-2008, while Graham's nomination is for 2017's collection, Fast. They are joined by fellow nominees Emmanuel Carrère,  Jessica Hagedorn, Eduardo Halfón, Ismail Kadare, Sahar Khalifeh, Abdellatif Laâbi, and Lee Maracle. Previous winners of the biannual Neustadt Prize include Elizabeth Bishop, Francis Ponge, Gabriel García Márquez, Czesław Miłosz, Octavio Paz, Tomas Tranströmer, Kamau Brathwaite, Nuruddin Farah, Dubravka Ugrešić, and Edwidge Danticat.

We congratulate Nguyen and Graham, along with all of the other very deserving nominees. The winner will be announced on October 16th.

PoemTalk #138: on Maggie Nelson's 'Bluets'

This weekend we released the latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series — number 138 in total — which is concerned with Maggie Nelson's first magnum opus, Bluets, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2019. For this show, host Al Filreis was joined by a panel that included (as seen from left to right) Jennifer Firestone, Adrienne Raphel, and Julia Bloch.

After specifying the sections of the book under discussion here — "those numbered 222 through 232; these appear on pages 89 to 93 in the Wave edition" — Filreis PoemTalk blog post on the episode offers a general survey of the of the associative paths that the panelists took: "Not surprisingly the discussion of this work causes us to riff on the many senses of blue that engaged Nelson as she wrote one mostly non-sequitur poetic proposition after another. Sky, flower, pigment, celestiality, impression(ism), heartedness, atmospherics, sexuality, and (of course) depression."

You can read more here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.

Lyn Hejinian reads from 'The Book of a Thousand Eyes,' 2011

"Nothing can quite prepare readers for The Book of a Thousand Eyes," Charles Bernstein offers, at the start of a 2012 Jacket2 commentary post on Lyn Hejinian's then-latest book. "This is Hejinian's largest scale book — yet it reflects the kind of intimacy — and affective and affecting charm – I associate with all her work," he continues. "One key frame of the book is dreams — and there are many poems that have the quality of dreams — whether made-up or created in sleep — who's to say the difference? — Hejinian seems to say over and again."

Today we're highlighting a recently-added recording of Hejinian reading from The Book of a Thousand Eyes in January 2011. At the start of this sixteen-minute reading, she echoes Bernstein's estimation of the book's scale, noting that it's "an ongoing project — been going on forever, and will continue to do so." Some small evidence of this is offered by the fact that this new recording is one of five on our Hejinian PennSound author page that samples from the book, going as far back as a 2005 reading at our own Kelly Writers House.

In a 2014 essay for Poetry, Siobhan Phillips considers "the politics of sleep" as an act of resistance, juxtaposing Hejinian's book with Whitman. "Sleep is strange —'[s]tranger than habit and than obsession,' Lyn Hejinian writes [...] She could be talking about poetry. It's an old connection, of course, older than the Romantics — who seem prescient, in the light of contemporary science, when they propose the jump-cuts of dreaming as a model not just for poetry but also for knowing, full stop." In Phillips' mind, "Hejinian reconsiders": "She wants to figure out what sleep can do for the chance of cognition. She also wants to test what sleep means for the promise of politics."

If these observations have gotten you primed and ready to tackle this uncompromising book, then click here without delay to start listening.

Bill Berkson reads from 'Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently,' 2011

Here's a treat that we recently added to the site: the late, great Bill Berkson reading from the second half of his 2007 Owl Press collection, Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently at an unknown location in January 2011.

The titles read in this twelve-minute set include "Tiffany Song," "Salad Spinner," "For Theremin," "I Thought They Were Beautiful, but They Were Really Glamorous," "Glass Hoist," "But Then (to Anselm Hollo)," "Art Diary" (for David Meltzer), "Compass Points," "Without Penalty," "Goods and Services," "A Recording Device," "Tango," and the book's coda, "The Way We Live Now." 

Of course, Berkson also reads the title poem, which begins with the memorable observation, "You hope the earth is equitable, because why else are you here?" It's fitting that this strong late offering's title has taken on an elegiac air in light of Berkson's death three years ago, with it framing several tributes to the poet, including Anne Waldman's Brooklyn Rail memorial, though she's quick to correct him: "Love this title of yours, Bill. But never silently, as the subtext is a great adhesive roar to what counts, what sounds, what listens, what lights up the cortex in relation to Bill Berkson."

You'll find this new recording and numerous other readings on our Bill Berkson author page.

PennSound Podcast #64: Corbett and Knittle on Schuyler

Bill Corbett, Davy Knittle, and Stan Mir at KWH in 2017 

Today saw the release of the 46th episode in the PennSound Podcast series, which was produced by our own Davy Knittle. Here's Knittle's brief introductory note for the program:

William Corbett visited the Kelly Writers House in October 2017 for a retrospective reading and conversation with Stan Mir in honor of the poet Michael Gizzi. During his visit, Corbett and I had a conversation in the Wexler Studio about the work of New York School poet James Schuyler, whose Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler Corbett edited (Turtle Point Press, 2009). In our conversation, we discussed Schuyler's early poems, his methods of perception, his fondness for children, his attention to New York and its qualities of light from his apartment window, and Corbett's long career of teaching Schuyler's poetry to undergraduate students.

You can read more about this podcast and listen in here. The complete archive of PennSound Podcast series can be found here.

John Richetti Reads English Renaissance Verse and Auden, 2019

Golden-throated UPenn emeritus professor John Richetti returned to the Wexler Studio at the Kelly Writers House this April two record two new sets of material spanning the breadth of his interests within the field of English literature.

First, we have a broad selection of English Renaissance Verse, including poems by Edmund Spenser (including Cantos I and II from The Faerie Queen and "Epithalamion"), Sir Philip Sidney ("Leave Me, O Love," "With How Sad Steps," "What Tongue Can Her Perfections Tell?," and "Come Sleepe, O Sleepe," among others), Sir Walter Raleigh ("The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage," "What Is Our Life," "The Lie," "Of Spenser's Faery Queen"), Sir Thomas Wyatt ("They Flee From Me," "My Lute Awake," and "Forget Not Yet," among others), Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (including "When Youth Had Led," "When Raging Love," and selections from Poems of Love and Charity), Robert Southwell ("The Burning Babe"), and Thomas Campion ("My Sweetest Lesbia," "When to Her Lute," "Though You Are Young," "When Then Is Love but Mourning," and "There Is a Garden in Her Face"), along with Fulke Greville, John Skelton, Michael Drayton, Sir Edward Dyer, and George Gascoine. In total, there are more than four dozen poems in this set, which you can listen to here.

Richetti also recorded a sprawling collection of more than three dozen poems by W.H. Auden during the same visit, including "Spain," "September 1, 1939," "Epitaph on a Tyrant," "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," "The Secret Agent," "This Lunar Beauty," "The Witnesses," "Danse Macabre," "Musée des Beaux Arts," "In Memory of Sigmund Freud," "The Fall of Rome," and "The Geography of the House." These poems can be found here.

We're grateful, as always, for John Richetti's time and dedication to the PennSound project. You can find many more recordings he's made for us over the past fourteen years on the PennSound Classics homepage.

Kevin Killian: Six New Recordings 2009–2013

Without a doubt, many in the poetry community are still reeling from the sudden and unfairly premature death of Kevin Killian. As we mentioned in our memorial note last month, we anticipated adding a number of recordings to our Kevin Killian author page courtesy of Andrew Kenower and his remarkable archive, A Voice Box. Today, we're very happy to be able to announce that they've been posted for our listeners to relish.

These six recordings were made in the Bay Area between 2009 and 2013. The first half — from San Francisco's Canessa Park, and Oakland's 21 Grand and Studio One — are readings from 2009. There are two more readings from Oakland's the Speakeasy in June 2011 and Berkeley's Woolsey Heights in November 2013. Finally, we have what's perhaps the most historically significant of these tracks: a February 2013 Woolsey Heights recording of "Activism, Gay Poetry, AIDS in the 1980s," a talk Killian originally delivered at the National Poetry Foundation's "Poetry of the Eighties" conference at the University of Maine at Orono in 2012.

These wonderful new additions join our previous Killian holdings, including a 1997 Kelly Writers House event with Killian and his wife Dodie Bellamy in conversation, a 1991 talk on Spicer at the Kootenay School of Writing, a 2007 reading of "Norwegian Wood" and "Is It All Over My Face?" at the launch party for EOAGH Issue 3: Queering Language, and a 2015 reading from the Frank O'Hara's Last Lover series with CAConrad and Jennifer Moxley.

Once again, we thank Andrew Kenower for his generosity in sharing these new recordings with us. You can browse through all of the aforementioned recordings by clicking here.

"Concordance: An Evening with Susan Howe," Harvard Divinity School, 2019

Here's a very exciting event from this spring to start your week of right: "Concordance: An Evening with Susan Howe," took place at Harvard Divinity School on April 24th. 

In their announcement of the event, Harvard offers this synopsis: "The binding together of freedom and law, spontaneity and habit, are occasions for awakening a reader to the exaltation of spirit in process. Crossing the guarded borders between image and word, individual and community, history and the present, poetry provides an opening to the transcendent order that chance makes possible." 

You'll find audio and video of Howe's forty-minute talk on our Susan Howe author page, along with a dazzling array of materials spanning five decades, from her groundbreaking radio programs for WBAI-Pacifica Radio to her stunning live collaborations with David Grubbs. Click here to start browsing.