Cia Rinne: Two New Recordings, 2019

We recently congratulated Finnish sound poet Cia Rinne for winning the the 2019 Prix Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou from Fondazione Bonotto for "non-book literature." Today, we're back with a pair of recent recordings from the poet, which you'll find on her PennSound author page.

First, we have a brief recording from April 2019 of Rinne reading a new poem by Vagn Steen (which you can see here). That's joined by video footage and audio of Rinne and  Tomomi Adachi reading texts based on the work of Ruth Wolf Rehfeldt at the Haus für Poesie in Berlin on February 2nd of this year.

These new recordings join a fine survey of Rinne's work available on  her PennSound author page, starting with a 2014 Close Listening program hosted by PennSound co-director Charles Bernstein in which she reads recent work and discusses her creative processes. From the same year, we have Rinne's participation in the Convergence on Poetics panel "INTERVAL: LANGUAGE + PRESENCE" alongside Aeron Bergman, Alejandra Salinas, and Lisa Radon. We have a trio of reading videos from 2013: two collective performances with Berlin Sound Poets Quoi Tête in Ausland and Altes Finanzamt, and a Berlin reading as part of "a night of text / sound / video" #3. Next there's 2012's Nonstop Action Poetry at Kiasma Theatre, Helsinki, Finland (with Leevi Lehto and Tomomi Adachi) and "notes for soloists" for the Quiet Cue Intermedia and Cooperation in Berlin as well as a performance of "sounds for soloists" with sound design by Sebastian Eskildsen from the same year. To round things out, we have another performance of the same piece (also with sound design by Eskildsen) from 2011 and a reading with Charles Bernstein and Caroline Bergvall at Gyldendal, Copenhagen from the same year. You can listen to all of these recordings by clicking here.

PoemTalk #141: on Rosmarie Waldrop's "Memory Tree"

Today, we release episode #141 in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, recorded on a very special ModPo visit to the  Providence, RI home of Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop. There, host Al Filreis gathered a panel that included (shown from left to right) Laynie Browne, Mónica de la Torre, and Kate Colby (with a cameo by Lee Ann Brown) to discuss Rosmarie Waldrop's prose poem "Memory Tree," which comes from the book Split Infinitives (Singing Horse Press, 1998).

Filreis' PoemTalk blog post on this episode offers this brief summation of the poem: "'Memory Tree' bears a major linguistic disruption: it integrates and mashes up folkloric messaging and makes phrasal and homonymic fragments of fragmented memories. The prose poem offers itself as an alternative representation of the disaster. It is a post-traumatic portrait of the artist as a young girl. Its first six stanzas or paragraphs are written out of the moment in September 1941 when, at a time of absolute control of every aspect of German society by the Nazi regime, a girl goes to school for the first time — enters, that is to say, the vortex of totalitarian socialization." You can read more about the program, find the complete text of Waldrop's poem, see many more wonderful photos, and listen to or watch this special video episode by clicking here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.

Announcing the 2020 Kelly Writers House Fellows

Yesterday, Al Filreis announced the 2020 Kelly Writers House Fellows, which, as usual, is a diverse and exciting group of authors from across multiple genres.

They include historian, memoirist, and 2019 MacArthur Fellow Saidiya Hartman; renowned Canadian poet and translator Erín Moure; and journalists, cultural critics, and co-hosts of the acclaimed New York Times podcast Still Processing, Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris. 

Funded by a grant from Paul Kelly, the Kelly Writers House Fellows program enables us to realize two unusual goals. We want to make it possible for the youngest writers and writer-critics to have sustained contact with authors of great accomplishment in an informal atmosphere. We also want to resist the time-honored distinction — more honored in practice than in theory — between working with eminent writers on the one hand and studying literature on the other.

You can read more about the program and browse through past Fellows going back to the program's start in 1999 by clicking here.

Guillaume Apollinaire on PennSound

We're very fond of touting our recordings by Guillaume Apollinaire, which are the earliest artifacts in our archives. Ironically, it's been more than a decade since we've highlighted these recordings on PennSound Daily, so it seemed like a great time to do so.

Recorded on December 24, 1913 at the laboratory of Abbé M. Rousselot, these three brief recordings offer a rare opportunity to experience the work of germinal Surrealist author Guillaume Apollinaire through his own voice. "Le Pont Mirabeau," "Marie" and "Le Voyageur," all taken from his first significant volume of poetry, 1913's Alcools, reveal both a strengthened sense of rhythm and a lyrical, elegiac tone, when presented in the original French. 

You can listen to all three poems and read the full text of "Le Pont Mirabeau by clicking here. "Le Pont Mirabeau" has also been included in several PennSound Featured Resources playlists, including Charles Bernstein's Down to Write You This Poem Sat and Marcella Durand's 2011 list of recordings.

Marking the 50th Anniversary of Jack Kerouac's Death

This October 21st is the 50th anniversary of the death of iconic novelist and poet Jack Kerouac, who finally succumbed to the collective effects of alcoholism and disillusionment at the age of forty-seven in St. Petersburg, FL. To mark this historic milestone, we're revisiting a PennSound Daily post for Kerouac's birthday from this past March.

While we don't have permission from the Kerouac estate to share recordings of the poet's work — multiple albums, including collaborations with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, along with polymath Steve Allen, are widely available — we do have a truly astounding document of Clark Coolidge and Michael Gizzi reading Kerouac's iconic spontaneous prose piece, "Old Angel Midnight." This session took place at the studio of Steve Schwartz in West Stockbridge, MA in 1994, and served as the basis of PoemTalk #124, first released in May 2018, where Coolidge was joined by J.C. Cloutier and Michelle Taransky to discuss the piece.

Coolidge is, of course, well-known for, as Al Filreis phrases it, "his advocacy for Kerouac as properly belonging to the field of experimental poetry and poetics." Here's how he lays out his sense of what he refers to as Kerouac's "babble flow":

[S]ound is movement. It interests me that the words "momentary" and "moments" come from the same Latin: "moveo, to move. Every statement exists in time and vanishes in time, like in alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy's famous statement about music: "When you hear music, after it's over it's gone in the air, you can never capture it again." That has gradually become more of a positive value to me, because one of the great things about the moment is that if you were there in that moment, you received that moment and there's an intensity to a moment that can never be gone back to that is somehow more memorable. Like they used to say, "Was you there, Charlie?" 

Kerouac said, "Nothing is muddy that runs in time and to laws of time." And I can’t resist putting next to that my favorite statement by Maurice Blanchot: "One can only write if one arrives at the instant towards which one can only move through space opened up by the movement of writing." And that’s not a paradox.

Here's how Kerouac himself described the project (which famously appeared in the premier issue of Big Table, along with excerpts from William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch — content liberated from the suppressed Winter 1958 issue of The Chicago Review): 

"Old Angel Midnight" is only the beginning of a lifelong work in multilingual sound, representing the haddalada-babra of babbling world tongues coming in thru my window at midnight no matter where I live or what I'm doing, in Mexico, Morocco, New York, India or Pakistan, in Spanish, French, Aztec, Gaelic, Keltic, Kurd or Dravidian, the sounds of people yakking and of myself yakking among, ending finally in great intuitions of the sounds of tongues throughout the entire universe in all directions in and out forever. And it is the only book I've ever written in which I allow myself the right to say anything I want, absolutely and positively anything, since that's what you hear coming in that window... God in his Infinity wouldn't have had a world otherwise — Amen."

You can listen to Coolidge and Gizzi's rendition of this classic here.

Bern Porter on PennSound

Today we're highlighting our holdings from the influential author, artist, and publisher Bern Porter, perhaps best known for his pioneering work in the field of Found Poetry.

Our earliest recording is parts one and two of "For Our Friends in Germany," recorded by Mark Melnicove in 1979 at the Eternal Poetry Festival in South Harpswell, Maine. Then there's "Aspects of Modern Poetry," a 1982 WBAI program with Bob Holman that was broadcast live. It's presented in two parts that are roughly a half-hour each.

Next, we have the New Wilderness Audiographics cassette release, Found Sounds, whose two sides consist of two separate sessions, the first made on December 2, 1978 with Dick Higgins and Charlie Morrow; the second from May 9, 1981 and featuring Patricia Burgess (tenor saxophone), Glen Velez (bodhrán, cymbal, tambourine), and Morrow (brass, ocarina, and voice). 

Jumping forward to December 1989, we have a recording from "Williamson Street Night" at the Avant Garde, Museum of Temporary Art in Madison, Wisconsin with contributions by Malok, Elizabeth Was & mIEKAL aND, and our final recording is an interview with Higgins and aND from Woodland Pattern Book Center on March 16, 1990. You can browse all of the aforementioned recordings by visiting our Bern Porter author page.

Congratulations to 2019 Prix Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou Winner Cia Rinne

We send our heartiest congratulations to Finnish sound poet Cia Rinne, who was awarded the 2019 Prix Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou by Fondazione Bonotto last month. The prize, for "non-book literature," was previously won by Caroline Bergvall and Fia Backström.

Writing up the accompanying festival, Extra! for the Best American Poetry blog, Tracy Danison observes that "Rinne has linguistic feet in Sweden, Finland and Germany, as well as in her translingual poetry, which, she told me, was suggested by ordinary conversation in the multilingual household where she grew up. Just as Nina Santes' work reverberates with energies inherited from happenings, Rinne's work winds around and binds together concepts exemplified by sound-tech poet pioneers such as Laurie Anderson and traditional, page-visual-Ogden-Nash-book-of -practical-cats-style poetry formats."

Our Cia Rinne author page is anchored by a 2014 Close Listening program hosted by PennSound co-director Charles Bernstein in which she reads recent work and discusses her creative processes. From the same year, we have Rinne's participation in the Convergence on Poetics panel "INTERVAL: LANGUAGE + PRESENCE" alongside Aeron Bergman, Alejandra Salinas, and Lisa Radon. We have a trio of reading videos from 2013: two collective performances with Berlin Sound Poets Quoi Tête in Ausland and Altes Finanzamt, and a Berlin reading as part of "a night of text / sound / video" #3. Next there's 2012's Nonstop Action Poetry at Kiasma Theatre, Helsinki, Finland (with Leevi Lehto and Tomomi Adachi) and "notes for soloists" for the Quiet Cue Intermedia and Cooperation in Berlin as well as a performance of "sounds for soloists" with sound design by Sebastian Eskildsen from the same year. To round things out, we have another performance of the same piece (also with sound design by Eskildsen) from 2011 and a reading with Charles Bernstein and Caroline Bergvall at Gyldendal, Copenhagen from the same year. You can listen to all of these recordings by clicking here.

New at the PEPC Library: Poets on Stage: The Some Symposium on Poetry Readings

This week saw an exciting new addition to our PEPC Library, Poets on Stage: The Some Symposium on Poetry Readings, edited by Alan Ziegler and originally co-issued by the journal Some (as its ninth issue) and and its book publishing arm Release Press in 1978. The volume's origins are explained in an introductory note by Ziegler:

One night the three editors of Some were discussing possibilities for forthcoming issues. One of the editors didn't have his mind in the sessions; he was thinking about a poetry reading he was to give the next day. He had given readings before but hadn't thought much about them. But now, as he drifted away from the work at hand, he thought about the fact that the next afternoon he would be reading his poems to an audience. Some of his poems would reveal to strangers and friends alike things he had not told anyone. (Of course, these secrets would be presented on a "wall of literature," and he could remain behind that wall). There was also material that was mostly incarnated from the imagination — images that had emerged excitedly yet silently onto the page. How comfortable would they be wearing sound? 

These musings interested him, and since the major criterion for Some is interesting material (and he was feeling guilty about not contributing to the meeting), he suggested: why not an issue of Some devoted to poetry readings? The meeting was transformed into a tentative discussion of the new project.

What emerged from that suggestion is a trailblazing document in the field of poetry in performance that draws its responses from fascinating cross-section of the contemporary poetry world, with contributions from (in order of appearance) Alan Dugan,  Jack Anderson, Colette Inez, John Love, Stephen Stepanchev, Marge Piercy, David lgnatow, Janet Sternburg, June Fortess, Mark Weiss, Phillip Lopate, Joe Brainard, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Haseloff, John Wieners, Gerard Malanga, Audre Lorde, Virginia R. Terris, Hugh Seidman, Paul Hannigan, Terry Stokes, Armand Schwerner, Rochelle Ratner, Denise Levertov, David Meltzer, Margaret Atwood, Dick Gallup, Anne Waldman, and James Dickey.

The responses, as you might imagine, are as diverse as the authors interviewed. Dugan offers this practical advice: "The first time I recited, at a college, I had forgotten how over-heated academic interiors can be and sweated because I was wearing a jacket and was too nervous to take it off, and therefore performed badly. The students and teachers were good to me, saying, roughly, 'Well, it's over, it's your first time, you'll do better next time,' which I did." Brainard's handwritten response, "On Reading," starts by observing "Both my aim and my desire is to please." Malanga shares that "I know I've made people feel I'm having just as good a time reading as they are listening, because of the response I've received at the end of the reading. I include the audience in what I'm feeling in every instant in my poems when I read aloud. I've attended readings by many poets who literally drove their work into the ground and knew it, too, although they probably didn't mean to. The worst feeling in the world is when you and your audience both know you're bad. When an audience loves you, there is no greater exhilaration." Finally, Audre Lorde confesses that "I find [readings] both leech-like & rewarding, alternately and together, so approach them always with great excitement & terror." 

You can read and/or download Poets on Stage: The Some Symposium on Poetry Readings in PDF format by clicking here.

Happy 85th Birthday to Amiri Baraka

Today would have been the eighty-fifth birthday of legendary poet and provocateur Amiri Baraka, born LeRoi Jones in Newark, NJ in 1934. That means that it's a great time to revisit the recordings housed on our Amiri Baraka author page.

The earliest two recordings found there — the first from the Asilomar Negro Writers Conference in Pacific Grove, CA, which took place in early August 1964; the second from March 1965 at San Francisco State University — are particularly interesting because they show the author in flux, still LeRoi Jones but quickly being pushed by current events (most notably the assassination of Malcolm X in early 1965) towards his rebirth in Harlem. These sets include a number of notable poems, including "A Poem for Speculative Hipsters," "Short Speech to My Friends," "Black Dada Nihilismus," "A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand," "Kenyatta Listening to Mozart," and "Black Bourgeoisie."

We take a massive leap forward to a pair of Buffalo recordings from the archives of Robert Creeley: a short set from 1978 accompanying a much larger reading by Ed Dorn at the Just Buffalo Literary Center, and a two-part performance from 1985 at the Allentown Community Center. We owe Chris Funkhouser a debt of gratitude for several full-length recordings — from the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2000, a home recording for Kenning in 2001, the Newark Public Library in 2002, and the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival, also in 2002 — along with many miscellaneous recordings presented without date or location information. Our final major recording is a 2007 appearance on Leonard Schwartz's Cross Cultural Poetics program, where he read his work and discussed a number of topics including the recent controversy over "Somebody Blew Up America." There are also, as mentioned before, a healthy collection of miscellaneous audio recordings, joined by a fine selection of video clips made by Optic Nerve. Finally, Baraka's work has served as the subject for not one, but two episodes in the PoemTalk Podcast Series: episode #20 on "Kenyatta Listening to Mozart" and episode #126 on "Something in the Way of Things (In Town)." Click here to access all of the aforementioned recordings and more.

Eva Macali on PennSound Italiana

We're closing this week out with a series of new audio visual recordings by Eva Macali, which were recently added to our PennSound Italiana page (lovingly edited by Jennifer Scappettone).

The first of these is GAR, "a project about the Proto-Indo-European languages theory (PIE) inspired by the semiology research of Zoltán Ludwig Kruse," which states that "the majority of languages spoken today have a common ancestor language [whose] seed-words can be found in today's spoken languages with similar meanings." Here, Macali explores one of these seed words, "gar," which means "circle," in two pieces, "Gar," (recorded at Tapetenwerk, Leipzig, Germany with sound design Benjamin Leal) and "Har" (recorded at Campus Allegro, Jakobstad Pietarsaari, Finland with sound design by Matteo Polato).

Next, there's The Fire of 'Bu, an operetta "developed with jazz singer Alice Ricciardi in 2016-2017 and performed in different locations and with different musical arrangements." There are three selections from this project — "Y'am," "Tip Tap Shoes," and "Savoy Savoy" — recorded at various locations and presented in both video and audio forms. The libretto for this project is also provided. That's followed by "Ustica ha il ritmo suo" from I Luoghi, a "live recording performed with jazz drummer Armando Sciommeri and piano player Pietro Lussu," and AL5B5RI "a poetry film produced with Joakim Finholm and installed in the exhibition AL5B5RI at Energiverket in Jakobstad Pietarsaari, Finland." Finally, we have Löyly, another short poetry film also based on Kruse's Proto-Indo-European languages theory.

You can listen to or watch all of the aforementioned recordings by clicking here and while you're there don't forget to check out the many other astounding poets housed on our PennSound Italiana homepage.

Finally, we have two more projects, each represented by one 

Jeff Preiss Discusses the Jon Lovitz / Charles Bernstein Yellow Pages Ads, 2019

Since we talked about our co-director Charles Bernstein's recent ad for PennSound, it's a great time to revisit his classic Yellow Pages ads from the late 1990s, particularly since we recently added a somewhat spontaneous recording — as evidenced by the turn signal clicks that punctuate his spiel — in which Jeff Preiss, who conceived and directed the spots, shares how they came to be.

It all started with a well-received ad Preiss directed for the NBA starring Bill Murray. "Then the Yellow Pages — poor Yellow pages — they were about to just die. There was no saving the Yellow Pages. Yellow Pages were on life support and they hired an agency to try to figure out a way of keeping the Yellow Pages relevant. Now in hindsight it was really just hopeless." That "absolutely terrible" idea was disposing with the beloved "let your fingers do the walking" slogan and imagery and switch their iconography to a light bulb, thus making the book "a kind of an inspirational text and a work of literature, where it gives you ideas." "A beautiful idea, but a doomed one," as Preiss recollects.

Because the Yellow Pages didn't have the money to get Bill Murray they wound up with Jon Lovitz instead, but Lovitz was reluctant because "the scripts [weren't] funny," though working together Preiss and Lovitz were able to revise them into something workable. Now they needed a literary critic to deliver a few lines, "and I had this idea to cast Charles and I figured Charles, it's so perfect for him, he'll be able to just go for it." Everyone at the agency was please with the results — "Charles is amazing ... like, it's beyond" — to the extent that they wrote and shot a second series of spots starring Bernstein exclusively.

They then took all of this back to the Yellow Pages, and that's where things start to break down. Listen in to hear the company's reaction, Preiss discussing his long friendship with Bernstein facilitated through filmmaker Henry Hills, and more. We're very proud to be able to host the full set of radio and TV ads Preiss made, along with outtakes, which are well worth checking out whether you already know and love them or if you're just seeing them for the first time. We're grateful to Davide Balula, who made the recording and serves as interlocutor throughout, for sharing this with us. Click here to start listening.

PennSound in 90 Seconds

PennSound co-director Charles Bernstein recently sat down with Bob Greenberg to record a few poems, and while the camera was rolling he asked Bernstein to record a short, spontaneous ad for our site (something, of course, he has a little experience with). You can watch the pitch above and here's a little of what he had to say:

PennSound is the largest archive of poets reading their work on the internet and it's a giant site — [it] goes from very early recordings such as complete Williams, Stein, Stevens to readings that are taking place just this year all around the country and internationally. The files are all completely downloadable and many of the readings are broken up into individual poems and for many of the featured poets we have enormous numbers of readings by each one. So it's ideal for a way to enter into contemporary poetry by listening rather than reading.

Don't forget that you can read more about our site — its history and methodologies, as well as the long roster of wonderful poetry fanatics who've been involved with PennSound since its inception — on our About PennSound page. You might also enjoy browsing our Praise for PennSound and PennSound in the News pages.