On Bill Berkson's 80th

Today would have been the eightieth birthday of the one and only Bill Berkson, a legendary poet, editor, critic, curator, and teacher, who passed away three years ago. While we're lucky to have had more time with Berkson than we might have initially expected — he lived for roughly a decade after a risky and rare double lung transplant in the mid-oughts, producing some of his very best work during that period — that doesn't mean that his loss is not still dearly felt in the poetry community.

Our Bill Berkson author page is an impressive tribute to both the longevity of his creative life and his diverse talents. Our holdings there start in 1969 with a joint reading in New York City with Kenward Elmslie and continues with dozens of readings and talks — at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, San Francisco's Intersection for the Arts, the Grand Piano, 90 Langton Street, Bolinas, The Kootenay School of Writing, the Bowery Poetry Club, Paris' Double Change Reading Series, our own Kelly Writers House, the CUE Art Foundation, Berkeley's Moe's Books, Slaughterhousespace, Maison de la Poésie in Paris, and Dia Art Foundation — along with a handful of wonderful radio appearances. There's also a 2015 Close Listening program with Charles Bernstein, and two marvelous recent films: Mitch Temple's The Air You Breathe from 2017 (on Berkson's collaborations with his painter friends) and Citizen Film's Bill Berkson, School of Poets from 2016. You can explore the numerous wonderful recordings mentioned above, and many more, by clicking here.

Kathy Acker: SUNY-Buffalo Talk and Creeley Interview, 1979

Here's a terrific recording from our archives that is well worth another listen. On December 12–13, 1979, Kathy Acker was a guest of Robert Creeley's at SUNY-Buffalo. Over those two days she read from her own work, delivered a talk on French novelists, and was interviewed by Creeley. These events have been segmented, and are available on our Kathy Acker author page.

After introductory comments by Creeley, Acker begins with "Tangier," a long chapter (the recording is forty-six minutes long) from Blood and Guts in High School about meeting Jean Genet in Tangiers. She and Creeley then talk briefly about Erica Jong before the first day's event ends. 

The second day begins with Acker offering introductory comments on the pair of French novelists "whose work I'm absolutely fascinated with" that she'll be discussing in this session: Pierre Guyotat and Laure (the pen name of Colette Peignot). "You can't get these books in this country. Don't even try," Acker warns, however she explains that "I wanted to present what I'm doing with their work to you" — even though her translations are rough first drafts and "my French is very bad," ("I knew it enough to know I didn't know it," she later tells the audience) — because of how captivated she became with these authors on a recent trip to France. Specifically, this interest ties into language: both her experience of their language and mediation inherent to encountering a foreign language of which one only has a basic knowledge, but also concerns that have followed her for much longer: "It seemed to me that more and more — I've lived in New York for the last seven years — [that] language is almost impossible now. It's as if ... to have a language, to be able to really speak to someone, seems to be almost like total freedom, in my mind."

She then reads brief translations from each author's work: an excerpt from Guyotat's novel, Eden, Eden, Eden, followed by a piece by Laure about her childhood.  A half-hour lecture on the two authors comes next, with a discussion session of about the same length wrapping up the event. That conversation has been segmented into five thematic parts: "on self-expression," "on self-reflection," "on subjectivity and perception," "on the writer's perspective," and "on the divided self." You can listen in by clicking here. 

PoemTalk #139: Worker's Tanka

Today, we released the 139th episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, a very special program that addresses six tankas by Christine Yvette Lewis, Lorraine Garnett, and Davidson Garrett of the Worker Writers School. For this show, host Al Filreis gathered a panel that included Mark Nowak (who co-curated this episode), Husnaa Hashim, and Meg Pendoley.

As Filreis explains at the start of his PoemTalk blog post on the episode, Nowak "is one of the few contemporary artists who has organiziationally sought a way to recontextualize working-class consciousness and activism within the American labor movement into the poetics and media art of the twenty-first century." He continues, "Mark's new labor poetics has led him to found Worker Writers, an institute that organizes and facilitates poetry workshops with global trade unions, workers' centers, and other progressive labor organizations," and three members of this worthy project — Christine Yvette Lewis, Lorraine Garnett, and Davidson Garrett — are the authors of the half-dozen tankas under discussion here.

You can find more here, including the full texts of all six poems, more info on Worker Writers, and video footage of the poets reading their work filmed by Zardon Richardson at the group's February meeting. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.

City Planning Poetics #7: Carceral Justice

Organized and hosted by Davy Knittle, "City Planning Poetics" holds events once a semester at Kelly Writers House "that invite one or more poets and one or more planners, designers, planning historians or others working in the field of city planning to discuss a particular topic central to their work, to ask each other questions, and to read from their current projects."

On March 21st of this year, Knittle convened the seventh event in the series, "Carceral Justice," with guests Emily Abendroth and Nina Johnson. Abendroth is a poet, teacher, and anti-prison activist, whose "creative work investigates state regimes of surveillance, force, and power, as well as individual and collective resistance strategies." Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Coordinator of the Program in Black Studies at Swarthmore College. Her scholarly work addresses "the areas of inequality, politics, race, space, class, culture, stratification and mobility." 

You can stream video and download audio of their discussion here here. Previous events in the series, which started in the winter of 2016, include "What Is a Map? What Does a Map Do?" (with Jena Osman and Amy Hillier), "What Are the Tools That Shape the Built Environment? Where Did They Come From? How Have They Been Used?" (with Francesca Ammon and Jason Mitchell), "Queer Placemaking" (with Max J. Andruck and Rachel Levitsky), "Urban Memory" (with Simone White and Randall Mason), "Queer City" (with Jen Jack Gieseking and Erica Kaufman), and "Urban Revitalization" (with Brian Goldstein and Douglas Kearney). You can watch or listen to those events here.

In Memoriam: Steve Katz (1935–2019)

We are sad to share the recently-discovered news that multi-genre author Steve Katz passed away after a long battle with pancreatic cancer on August 4th. Best known for his fiction — his 1970 short story collection Creamy and Delicious was hailed by Larry McMurtry as one of the hundred greatest books of the twentieth century — Katz's work was championed by iconic small presses including Fiction Collective/FC2, Sun & Moon/Green Integer, Ithaca House, and Starcherone Books, as well as major publishing houses like Grove Press; Holt, Rinehart and Winston; and Random House.

A longtime fixture at the University of Colorado Boulder (where he taught for a quarter century), Katz was remembered by that city's Daily Camera as a man who "lived a life of words." Their tribute quotes colleague Peter Michaelson who remembered Katz as an "incredibly creative and inventive" author, with a "great sense of humor." "He was fun to be around, a lively mind," he continued, "I'm going to miss him, I already miss him and the literary scene will miss him. But there's still his work … there's plenty around for people to read and they should."

PennSound doesn't have much in the way of recordings of Katz, but we're glad for what we do have. There's an hour-long reading [MP3] from January 25, 1979 from New York's Droll/Kolbert Gallery Series, which was curated by Ted Greenwald. Additionally, from the archives of Bill Berkson, we have a brief, undated recording of Katz reading "William Reichert" at the St. Mark's Poetry Project [MP3], which is likely — like many of the short, single-title recordings on that page — an unused track recorded for the album, The World Record: Readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project 1969–1980, which Berkson co-edited with Bob Rosenthal. You can stream the aforementioned tracks instantly by clicking on the MP3 links.

Will Alexander Reads at Hauser and Wirth Gallery, 2019

Here's a brief video of Will Alexander reading his work at New York City's Hauser and Wirth Gallery on February 12th of this year.

After a few minutes of introductory comments linking slavery and oppression with futuristic and retroactive technologies, Alexander reads "In the Ghostly Eclipse Zones" from his 1998 Pavement Saw Press collection Above the Human Nerve Domain, which ties to these foundational ideas. After that poem, he tells the audience, "These, for me, are spells. Poems for me are spells. It's this magic instance and a wave of energy energy. [...] To me life is a wave of poetry. At certain points things pop up. They pop up at interesting moments. In fact it's so spontaneous that something could come to me now as I'm standing here and I'd have to scribble something." His second and final selection, which goes unnamed, is inspired by César Vallejo and starts with an epigraph by the poet, "Brooding on life. Brooding slowly on the strength of the torrent," and continues these themes. 

In March of this year, we highlighted Aural Monsoon's album Live in the Haight — the jazz duo features Alexander on piano and Mark Pino on drums — which is another manifestation of the spontaneous poetic energy Alexander describes above. You'll find that and many more wonderful examples of his work on his PennSound author page, which is home to a variety of talks, readings, and interviews spanning the past twenty-five years. 

Aaron Kramer on PennSound

Way back in April 2010, we created an extensive author page for left-wing poet, Aaron Kramer. This project was initiated by PennSound co-director, Al Filreis, who provided some useful historical contexts for Kramer and his work in a blog post accompanying the new materials.

Kramer was (for a time, and perhaps for a long time) a member of the Communist Party of the U.S. He was involved in just about every radical issue, cultural and straight-out political, of this time: the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Perhaps his first big break as a poet was his inclusion in the anthology, Six Poets in Search of An Answer (1944), which at a (brief) hopeful moment in the liberal-left alliance brought Aaron in with Max Bodenheim, Joy Davidman, Langston Hughes, Alfred Kreymborg (by then a vintage modernist who'd joined the radical left), Martha Millet, and Norman Rosten. His "Garcia Lorca" memorialized that poet murdered by Spanish fascists. "Berlin Air Raid" begins: "For ten years they were listening to different / sounds." "Natchez" is about southern racist violence, a place where "a hundred tabloid writers ran to the flame." I have been in touch with Aaron's daughter Laura for years. Recently she went through the attic and gathered together three shoeboxes of cassettes and VHS tapes and delivered them to us at PennSound. We are slowly going through them, digitizing them, and make them available — as always — for free download through our archive. 

In total, there are fifty-two discrete recordings made between the mid-50s and the mid-90s, including one complete Smithsonian Folkways album (1959's Serenade: Poets of New York) and numerous programs made for public radio for series including "University of the Air" and "Poets of the Sweatshops," along with individual tributes to many poets. Aside from offering a broad selection of Kramer's own work,  he also reads from and provides commentary on a stunning array of poets, including Walt Whitman (he reads the first thirty-two sections of "Song of Myself," talks about "Drum Taps," and gives a talk at the poet's birthplace), William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Herman Melville, Langston Hughes, John Greenleaf Whittier, Charles Lamb, Walter Savage Landor, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost, among others. 

In a time when we need poetry to do vital work for justice and equality, it's never a bad idea to remember those who helped fight the good fight in previous generations. If you're not already aware of Aaron Kramer and his work, there's sure to be something to hold your interest on his PennSound author page.

"The New Colossus" in the News

Certainly, no one woke up today imagining the day would be filled with chatter about Emma Lazarus, but that's exactly what's happened. You might very reasonably wonder why. 

While announcing a new and predictably cruel policy change targeting legal immigrants who make use of public assistance on NPR's Morning Edition today, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli revised the most beloved lines of Lazarus' "The New Colossus," which famously adorns the base of the Statue of Liberty. In place of "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," he offered "Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge," and in the process earned the memorable Jezebel headline, "Terrible Asshole Would Like to Update 'The New Colossus,'"  along with a lot of well-deserved scorn.

It also served as a worthwhile reminder of the symbolic power of Lazarus' sonnet. This isn't the first time we've written about "The New Colossus" on PennSound Daily — in late January 2017, as we first started to see how rabidly anti-immigration this administration's policies would be, we humbly offered up the poem "as a reminder of the high-minded ideals of acceptance that we, as a nation of immigrants, should hold ourselves to."

Quoting a 2004 Library of Congress exhibit on America's "century of immigration" we noted that "Lazarus, who had worked with East European immigrants through her association with the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, composed 'The New Colossus' in 1883 as part of a fundraising campaign for erecting the Statue of Liberty." However, it wasn't until thirty years later, in 1903, that "a tablet with her words — 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free' — was affixed to the statue's base." They conclude by observing that "These words remain the quintessential expression of America's vision of itself as a haven for those denied freedom and opportunity in their native lands." Once again, we proudly present Lazarus' words here: 

The New Colossus 

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

We're also happy to point our listeners in the direction of PoemTalk #58 on Bernadette Mayer's poem, "The Tragic Condition of the Statue of Liberty," which begins by quoting Lazarus' final, and most iconic, lines. As for director Cuccinelli, we gently implore him to leave poetry to the poets.

Raul Zurita: New Author Page

Last week kicked off with a recently-added recording of Raul Zúrita reading from Song For His Disappeared Love at the Rotterdam Poetry Festival. This week, we begin with news of a newly-created PennSound author page for Zúrita, where you can browse a variety of recordings made over the last decade.

Central to this archive are a half-dozen episodes of Leonard Schwartz's indispensable radio show, Cross Cultural Poetics. Four programs feature Zúrita reading his own work: in episode #219 he reads from Purgatory and Anteparadise (both translated by Anna Deeny and published by University of California Press), in episode #234 he reads from Inre (Marick Press), in episode #245 he reads from Song For His Disappeared Love (translated Daniel Borzutsky and published by Action Books), and finally in episode #271, he reads from Dreams for Kurosawa (also translated by Deeny and published by Arrow as Aarow).  The remaining two episodes feature other poets discussing Zúrita and his work — Isabel Cadenas Canon discusses translating his work into Basque in program #273, while episode #287 is wholly dedicated to Zúrita and features appraisals by poet and translator Forrest Gander and journalist Magdelena Edwards.

Next, we have a quartet of VideoPoesia films made by Ernesto Livon Grosman as part of his 2009 "Sur & North" series: "Canto," "Desierto de Atacama," "Pastoral de Chile," and "Me Llamo ... Raquel." Finally, "Inscripcion 15," recorded in 2002 and presented as part of Rattapallax, rounds out the collection. Taken together, these recordings represent a generous introduction to the work of an important and uncompromising poet. Click here to start exploring.

Kenward Elmslie: Many New Recordings 1974–1989

Thanks to the good graces of Ron Padgett, we recently posted a total of eleven recordings from New York School legend Kenward Elmslie. While some of these readings are missing information in regards to their date and/or location, those we can identify date from between 1974 and 1989.

There are a total of three readings with Kenneth Deifik — one at a 1980 St. Mark's Poetry Project Town Hall, one at Books and Company that same year, and an undated recording from Philadelphia — along with Poetry Project readings with Steven Taylor and Tony Greco (in 1984 and 1974, respectively) and an undated reading with Lee Crabtree. The remainder are solo readings in Burlington, VT (1989); Venice, CA's beloved Beyond Baroque bookstore (1982); and undated readings at the Poetry Room and St. Mark's, along with an hour-long undated recording of Rare Meat: A Cabaret Review. 

These new additions join several other recordings on our Kenward Elmslie author page, including a 2000 reading as part of The Line Reading Series, "Snippets: A Gathering of Songs, Visual Collaborations, and Poems," hosted at our own Kelly Writers House in 2003, a 2007 Segue Series Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, and a 2009 appearance in issue #3 of the journal textsound. You can browse our complete Elmslie archive by clicking here.

'Dome Poem NC,' a Film by Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn, 2011

Here's an old favorite from the marvelous Lee Ann Brown, which takes us back to 2011. 

As you might know, Brown and her husband, Tony Torn, split their time between New York City and North Carolina, where they run the FBI or French Broad Institute (of Time and the River). This short film, Dome Poem NC, is a product of the pair's time down south,  and was produced coterminously with Brown's work on the book The Spirit of Black Mountain College (co-edited by Rand Brandes). Brown calls it a "lecture demo and call for work" inspired by R. Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes. Blending text, images, music and live action scenes, Dome Poem NC includes poems by Brown ("Geodesic Dome"), along with Erin O'Neal ("Ephemeralization"), Cheryl J Fish ("Pleasure Dome/Supine Dome"), Timothy Dyke ("Symmetry to Mound and Minds Are Bumps") and Leah Souffrant ("My Long Short Talk on Black Mountain Which Is Invisible") and invites viewers to consider what their own geodesic dome poems might be. 

You'll find Dome Poem NC on PennSound's Lee Ann Brown author page, which is home to a wide variety of readings, performances, talks and films from 1988 to the present. To start watching, click the title above.

Raul Zurita at the Rotterdam Poetry Festival, 2019

This new week kicks off with a brief video of Chilean poet Raúl Zurita reading at the Rotterdam Poetry Festival on June 15th of this year. In this clip, he reads excerpts from his iconic Canto a Su Amor Desaparecido (Song for His Disappeared Love) in Spanish, while translations provided by Anna Deeny Morales are projected on the screen behind him (along with the original text).

Originally published in 1985 in the midst of Pinochet's horrendous reign, Song for His Disappeared Love was published by the venerable Action Books in a 2010 bilingual edition with translation by Daniel Borzutzky. As Steven Karl notes in his review of that volume, Zurita envisioned the poem as a "[response] to the terror with a poetry that was just as powerful as the pain being delivered by the state." As an Academy of American Poets appraisal of the book acknowledges, the poet knew these atrocities all too well: "Zurita was arrested by the Chilean government and persecuted for being a possibly 'suspicious' poet, and his first volume of poems was tossed into the sea." 

Karl continues, "Throughout the poem, Zurita examines and questions the binary opposition of life and death, often conflating the two into a sense of sameness. What does it mean to 'live' when your liberty has been confiscated, when you are silenced either by fear or force? How 'alive' are the oppressed when family has been kidnapped, beaten, abused, or murdered? How does one live a 'life' when the very idea of what constitutes 'life' is defined by a political ideology opposite our own?" — questions sadly every bit as pressing now as they were decades ago. You can start listening to this powerful work by clicking here.

PennSound Podcast #65: Trevino, Bentley, and Rees

Here's a fascinating new program from the PennSound Podcast Series — its 65th episode overall — to wrap up your week. Hosts Levi Bentley and Ted Rees are joined by Wendy Trevino for this show, which is the start of a new series of discussions concerning the evolution of Housework  from a reading series to recording series. "Conversation topics included Barack Obama’s appearance in Best Experimental Writing 2016, post-arrest listmaking, 'unequal collateral,' the organizing-specific shifts of self, acknowledging messy comrade conflict, and further associations drawn from Trevino's 2018 collection Cruel Fiction."

The Housework series explains their mission thusly: "Housework is work undervalued, invisible, unpaid. It is classed, raced and gendered. It is also the work that allows life, it is 'reproductive.' It is intimate. It's necessary. It's weird. It has been precarious. This is the kind of work we want to recognize." It also serves as an extension of the earlier "Chapter and Verse" series, hosted at Chapterhouse Coffee Shop, which was founded by Ryan Eckes and Stan Mir. You can browse the collected archives of that series — which includes readings by Matvei Yankelevich, Lamont Steptoe, Gabriel Ojeda-Sague, Trish Salah, Kyle Schlesinger, Lewis Warsh, Michael Gizzi, Jenn McCreary, Tonya Foster, Kristen Gallagher, Pattie McCarthy, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Hoa Nguyen, William Corbett, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Elaine Equi, and Tyrone Williams among many others — here. More information on this episode of the PennSound Podcast, including extensive bios for the participants, can be found here.