Charles Bernstein on Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner's Poetic Double-Talk

Today brought the news that iconic American comedian Carl Reiner had passed away at the grand old age of ninety-eight, bringing tributes from every corner for this "gifted comic actor, [who] spent most of his career slightly out of the spotlight — writing, directing and letting others get the laughs" (in the New York Times' estimation). 

One aspect of Reiner's genius left out of most of these homages, however, is his innovative relationship to language — something that was evident even from the beginning of his career. Our own Charles Bernstein shared his recent essay, "Doubletalking the Homophonic Sublime: Comedy, Appropriation, and the Sounds of One Hand Clapping," the opening essay in Vincent Broqua and Dirk Weissmann's open-source anthology, Sound /Writing : traduire-écrire entre le son et le sens, published in late 2019, which addresses the poetic practice of homophonic translation, here also called "traducson" and "Oberflächenübersetzung." Here, Bernstein challenges the set notion that homophonic translation emerges exclusively from "the context of radical poetic innovation," making a case for more populist roots, including Sid Caesar's pioneering television comedy on Your Show of Shows. "Doubletalk, as Caesar uses the term, is homophonic translation of a foreign-language

movie, opera scenario, or everyday speech into an improvised performance that mimics the sound of the source language with made-up, zaum-like invented vocabulary." To Bernstein, "The best example of Caesar’s 'double-talk' is a concert in which he moves through four languages, starting with French and moving to German and Italian, ending with Japanese (replete with recognizable anchor words, such as Mitsubishi, Datsun and shushi). Taken as a whole, this five-minute performance is macaronic—a burlesque jumble or comic hodgepodge of different languages," which you can see here. 

While the recurring bit was buoyed by Caesar's own considerable skill, his earlier years as a jazz saxophonist, and his bilingual upbringing (with the amorphous nature of Yiddish being a key factor), Bernstein points out that "[Carl] Reiner takes the credit for suggesting the foreign film parodies, noting that he could also do 'double talk' and sold the idea to Caesar by laying it on him" and as the essay unfolds he further explains Reiner's great influence upon its development. It's a fascinating piece that manages to effortlessly bring figures as diverse as Louis Zukofsky, Charlie Chaplin, and YouTube sensation Benny Lava into the discussion, while also situating both Jewishness and the immigrant experience as being central facets of this remarkable poetic practice. You can click here for Bernstein's Jacket2 commentary post announcing the anthology — which also includes contributions from Lee Ann Brown, Cole Swensen, Abigail Lang, and Yoko Tawada, among many others — as well as a special link to some of the texts under discussion in Bernstein's essay.

Hanif Abdurraqib Reads "USAvCuba," 2019

Here's another old favorite from the PennSound Singles database to bring the week to a close —  Hanif Abdurraqib reading "USAvCuba" from his debut collection The Crown Ain't Worth Much (Button Poetry, 2016).

Columbus-born Abdurraqib is a formidable poet and critic perhaps best known for the follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), which was hailed as one of the year's best books by as diverse an array of tastemakers as The Chicago Tribune, Esquire, NPR, the CBC, Buzzfeed, Paste, Pitchfork, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Go Ahead in the Rain, his biography of hip-hop legends A Tribe Called Quest, was released to wide acclaim in February 2019.

An homage to Frank O'Hara's infectious style, "USAvCuba" makes clever use of the late poet's time-stamp aesthetics ("It is 3:15 on a Saturday & I am in a car on I-95 on the way to the soccer game") and the deft wordplay seen in poems like "Poem [Lana Turner Has Collapsed]" ("Nate is riding shotgun which is also the name for when you plunge something sharp into a can of beer & split open its aluminum shell before swallowing its urgent sacrifice"), all the while updating his voice for the 21st century and avoiding the pitfalls and cliches of so many bad O'Hara imitations. That said, not even O'Hara could come up with a line as breathtaking as "David Ruffin is singing I wish it would rain & his voice is unfolding long & slow in the backseat like an eager lover & there is a whole history of men demanding the sky to shake at their command & I’m not saying out loud whether or not I believe in god & I’m not saying out loud what I know the rain means I’m only saying that I need this dry summer to stay dry I’m only saying that the tickets to this soccer game cost as much as my best suit & kickoff is at 3:30."

You can listen to the poem in its entirety here and read along at Western Beefs here.

PoemTalk #149: On Kamau Brathwaite's "Negus"

Today we launched the newest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series — episode #149 in total — which is focused on Kamau Brathwaite's poem "Negus," taken from his 1969 collection, Islands. For this program, host Al Filreis was joined by a panel including Amber Rose Johnson, Jacob Edmond (the editor of PennSound's Kamau Edmond author page), and Huda Fakhreddine.

Filreis begins his PoemTalk blog post on this episode with further contextualization for the poem under discussion: "'Negus' appears as part six of a section of the book titled "Rebellion" within Islands, and Islands, in turn, is part two of The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, which includes Rights of Passage and Masks as the first and third volumes." He then goes on to discuss the provenance for our sole recording of the poem itself, taken from a May 2004 Segue Series reading at New York's Bowery Poetry Club, noting  that Brathwaite "chose to read 'Negus' as a kind of prefatory piece to the whole forty-three-minute reading. It certainly seems to introduce several of Brathwaite’s major concerns." What exactly that means is spelled out both in the remainder of Filreis' note, and in the program itself.

You can read more about this latest show, see photos of the recording session, and read Brathwaite's poem by clicking here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.

Yusef Komunyakaa on PennSound

Today we're taking a closer look at PennSound's author page for Yusef Komunyakaa, which was created not long after our official launch in 2005. While it houses a modest set of recordings, it nevertheless has many of this much-anthologized poet's most iconic work.

The heart of our Komunyakaa page is a March 1998 reading at our own Kelly Writers House. This  segmented recording consists of twenty-four in total, including favorite poems like "Facing It," "The Smokehouse," "Ode to the Maggot," "The God of Land Mines," "You and I Are Disappearing," and "Ode to a Drum," along with "Rhythm Method," "Letter to Bob Kaufman," "Camouflage in the Chimera," "We Never Know," and "Thanks," which has been a cherished part of PennSound's "Poems of Thanks and Thanksgiving" playlist for more than a decade. There's also a July 1999 appearance with Deborah Garrison on BBC Radio 3's Contemporary American Poetry Program, and the single poem "Slam, Dunk & Hook," published as part of the 2005 anthology Rattapallax.

We're grateful and proud to have Yusef Komunyakaa as part of the diverse array of voices found within PennSound's vast archives. You can listen to all of the poems mentioned above my clicking here.

Melvin B. Tolson on PennSound

We're wrapping up this week by highlighting the recordings you can find on PennSound's Melvin B. Tolson author page.

The heart of this collection is a two-part career-spanning reading at Washington, D.C.'s Coolidge Auditorium, on October 18, 1965 — an event held in coordination with the Library of Congress — which serves as a fitting tribute to the influential poet, politician, and pedagogue, who'd pass away less than one year later. After a lavish introduction, Tolson starts with his debut collection, Rendezvous with America and hits many of the high points of his prestigious career, including his magnum opus, Dark Symphony, and Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, written during his time as that nation's poet laureate. Running just short of eighty minutes, Tolson's reading includes the poems "Sometimes," "The Gallows," "If You Should Lie to Me," "The Primer for Today," "The Dictionary of the Wolf," "Harlem Gallery," "The Birth of John Henry," "Ballad on Old Satchmo," and "The Sea Turtle and the Shark," among others, with commentary provided along the way.

This retrospective performance is nicely complemented by a second recording of excerpts from Dark Symphony, for which, unfortunately, we have no information regarding its recording date and location. Nevertheless we're grateful to be Tolson's estate and the Library of Congress for the opportunity to present these materials to our listeners. Click here to visit PennSound's Melvin B. Tolson author page.

Dawn Lundy Martin on PennSound

Today we're showcasing the recordings available on our Dawn Lundy Martin author page, which offers listeners the opportunity to check out readings and talks from 2006 to 2016.

The earliest pair of recordings come from an April 2006 visit to New York City, which yielded sets for both Belladonna* and the Segue Series; Martin would return for another Segue reading at the Bowery Poetry Club in December 2008. Our first recording from A. L. Nielsen's Heatstrings Theory archives is an October 2009 reading at Penn State University, and Nielsen was also kind enough to share a March 2016 appearance by the poet as part of a reading celebrating What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, held in Brooklyn for that year's National Black Writers Conference at AWP. Then, from Andrew Kenower's A Voice Box archives, we have a pair of Bay Area readings: a 2010 reading at David Buuck's house and a 2013 reading at Tender Oracle held as part of the East Bay Poetry Summit. Finally, we have "On Discomfort and Creativity," the 2016 Leslie Scalapino Lecture in Innovative Poetics, held at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Video of that event is available, along with a link to the text in Something on Paper.

Four of the earlier readings mentioned above have been segmented into individual MP3s, providing listeners the unique opportunity to listen to multiple iterations of the same poems — including "The Undress," "The Morning Hour," "Bearer of Arms 1775-1783," and "The Symbolic Nature of Chaos" — read at separate events. Taken together, they also provide an interesting document of Martin's evolving style from her first publications up to just before her most recent collection, Good Stock, Strange Blood (Coffee House Press, 2017), which earned Martin the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2019 for "creating 'fascinating, mysterious, formidable, and sublime' explorations of the meaning of identity, the body, and the burdens of history along with one’s own private traumas." You can experience Dawn Lundy Martin's formidable voice by clicking here.

Lorenzo Thomas, "Ego Trip," 1976

We're starting off the new week by highlighting an old favorite track from Lorenzo Thomas that A.L. Nielsen was kind enough to share with us back in 2016. "Ego Trip" features Thomas performing with the Texas State University Jazz Ensemble and was originally released on the album 3rd Ward Vibration Society (shown at right) on the SUM Concerts label in 1976. Lanny Steele is the composer for the track, which rubs shoulders with a cover of Carole King's "Jazzman" and the amazingly-titled suite, "Registration '74. The Worst I've Ever Endured / The Girl on the Steps / Drop and Add."

Internet commenter John Atlas provides a little context for the recording: "The TSU Jazz Ensemble was directed by Lanny Steele, who also founded and directed a nonprofit called Sum Arts. During the 70's and 80's, Sum Arts produced shows by, among others, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, The World Saxophone Quartet, Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, The Leroy Jenkins Octet, Old and New Dreams, and a host of notable poets. In the process he exhausted an inheritance from his parents, and more."

Thomas' solo voice starts us off riffing on "Stormy Monday"'s litany of days — "Every dog has his day. / Monday is my day / even if it is blue. / Come trifling Tuesday / that's my day too ..." — and is soon joined by congas and funky wah-wah guitars, then a defiant bassline, Rhodes piano, and a fuzzed out lead, before the full ensemble kicks in as Thomas' final syllable echoes out ("I ... I ... I ... I ..."). After a series of solos and some stop-start time changes Thomas returns over the band — "Let me testify! / Every day his his dog, / but I'm tired! / I want the sun shine just over me. / I want the wind blow just over me. / I want your policemen to be just to me." — which leads into the track's closing section.

You can listen to this smoldering track on PennSound's Lorenzo Thomas author page along with a slew of readings and talks from 1978 up until just a few years before his death in 2005.

New at J2: 'Poetry at the Rail Park' Podcast by Laynie Browne

In addition to our many ongoing podcasts, Jacket2 is always keeping an eye out for worthwhile limited series that we can share through the journal, which is why we were ecstatic when Laynie Browne came to us with the idea for Poetry at the Rail Park, a new six-part podcast "exploring poetry in public space, celebrating literary arts in multiple languages, and in the ongoing conversations which make art sustainable and available to all." 

The series is produced in conjunction with Dawn Chorus, an installation by Browne and Brent Wahl commissioned specifically for the Rail Park at Callow Hill by the City of Philadelphia's Percent for Art Program of the Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, which consists of "a sculpture made of a repurposed utility pole and cast aluminum birds" (shown at right) and "poetry excerpts in thirteen languages engraved in paver stones, carefully selected to celebrate communication, rail lines, and the city as a meeting place." "Altogether," the curators explain, "Dawn Chorus is designed to spark conversation and connect the ground with the sky, using imagery of birds, threads, and transmission."

Five of Poetry at the Rail Park's six episodes focus on poets whose work is part of the installation — Caroline Bergvall, Sawako Nakayasu, Erín Moure, Sarah Riggs, and Bernadette Mayer — with a sixth program featuring Wahl. You can listen by clicking the linked names above, or click here for the series' main homepage.

Peter Gizzi Reads from 'Sky Burial,' 2020

We're back with a newly-added reading from Peter Gizzi, recently featured on PennSound Daily for his January 2020 session produced by Charles Bernstein, which presented poems from his forthcoming collection, Now It's Dark, along with 2011's Threshold Songs. Hosted by Colin Herd, this reading took place over Zoom on May 11th, and serves to celebrate Gizzi's recent  collection from Carcanet Press, Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems. Alan Baker of Litter Magazine praised Sky Burial as "'an outstanding piece of work," where "there's a sense in which it encapsulates Gizzi's achievement as a lyric poet, as the strategies and concerns found in it can be traced throughout his career."

Gizzi begins his set with "Speech Acts For a Dying World," followed by "Nonotuck Avenue," "Beginning with a Phrase from Simone Weil," "When Orbital Proximity Feels Creepy,"  and then three pieces from the series, "Field Recordings": "Languour," "Wrapper Frag," and "Strangeness Becomes You." He continues with "Now It's Dark," "The Present Is Constant Elegy," and ends with "The Growing Edge," before granting his appreciative audience an encore with "Every Day I Want to Fly My Kite." The second half of the recording features Gizzi and Herd in conversation, along with questions from the crowd, before Gizzi shares one last poem, "Release the Darkness to New Lichen."

You can listen to all of the aforementioned readings on Gizzi's PennSound author page, which is home to more than twenty recordings spaning nearly three decades.

PoemTalk #148: on Erica Hunt's "Should You Find Me"

We recently posted the latest episode of the PoemTalk Podcast — program #148 in the series — which addresses Erica Hunt's poem "Should You Find Me," the coda of her 2006 Belladonna* collection, Time Slips Right Before Your Eyes.  For this show, which was recorded live at the Kelly Writers House in November 2019, host Al Filreis was joined by a panel that included (from left to right) Tyrone Williams, William J. Harris, Aldon Nielsen, and Hunt herself.

"Who is the you in the title and the refrain?," Filreis asks in his PoemTalk blog post on this episode. "It might be us, those who witness the speaker's efforts to look at herself in family photographs that pre-date her. You could also be herself. That would be a developed, succeeding you, the self presenting herself in the present of the poem — an identity formed by the family and by the family's stories as they are re-told through archived images." He continues, "As we begin to locate the speaker in the meta-photographic poem, we discern her in the process of finding herself. After working through this complex second-person address, the group contemplates the power of this special kind of finding as it increases through the course of the poem."  Summarizing the panelists' perspectives, he observes, "We note that insofar as such power is gained, the speaker can turn to ask herself: Where do you belong, if at all, in the socio-economic, post-design world of both 'residential grids' and 'tear-downs'? How might the speaker-who-relearns-her-own-name cancel the threatened 'cancellations of futurity'? By posing this question, the very supposition 'Should You Find Me' radicalizes self-renaming."

You can read more about this program, watch the raw video feed or listen to the MP3 mixdown, and read the poem under discussion by clicking here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.

A Message from Al Filreis and Jessica Lowenthal of KWH

To the beloved Writers House community: 

We unequivocally support justice for those murdered and brutalized by police: Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade, and countless others. We unequivocally support justice for those lynched by civilians: Ahmaud Arbery, Nina Pop, and countless others. 

Anything we might say in this time of rage, despair, and mourning would be inadequate and incommensurate as a response to these deaths, especially because so many members of our community are in pain and there is so much work to do. But we do want to state a few things simply and plainly:

We firmly now and always stand against racial injustice, inequality, and police brutality. 

We resolutely affirm that Black lives matter. 

And we are committed as always to amplifying the ideas and voices of our community, many of whom are engaged daily in the necessary work of change. That is what the Writers House was founded to do nearly 25 years ago and now more than ever we consciously intend to honor that mission.

We’re putting together a livestream event on Monday, June 15 at 6:00 PM that will feature some of our community members sharing thoughts, writing, and reflection. We’ll send more info soon. Meantime, please put that date and time in your calendar and we hope you’ll plan to participate.

And in the coming days, weeks, and months we plan to use outreach methods the Kelly Writers House has created and extended over the years — connecting a strong network of artists, writers, teachers, students, citizens — to share readings, writings, ideas, resources, and projects that provide urgently needed information, challenge racist assumptions and structures, might bring comfort, and are otherwise relevant to this extraordinarily difficult time. Here, for now, we share a few links below, as recommended by some of our community members. 

We hope you will join us in this effort by sending us links to and information about some of the projects, readings, ventures, stories, and work that you find important and relevant right now. We will share what we can with our networks via email and social media. Send your notes and suggestions to whresources@writing.upenn.edu . 

—Al and Jessica

Al Filreis, Faculty Director, Kelly Writers House

Jessica Lowenthal, Director, Kelly Writers House

*

IMPORTANT LINKS:

Arts and writing organizations:

• • Virtual programming from the Free Library of Philadelphia while branches remain closed due to COVID-19: https://libwww.freelibrary.org/calendar/virtual-programs/ , use this link specifically for programs with the tag African American: https://libwww.freelibrary.org/calendar/tag/african-american
• • Safe Kids Stories which promises to see safety, peace, and non-violence with the clarity and imagination with which we now see danger
• • Mighty Writers, a Philadelphia organization that teaches kids to write and has expanded to launch an urgently needed food distribution program
• • Art for Philadelphia, a collaborative project by Philadelphia-based artists in support of the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund
• • Printers for #BlackLivesMatter, list of print studios offering free services for anti-racist protest use: bit.ly/printersforBLM

Support Black-owned bookstores in Philadelphia:

• • Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee and Books https://www.unclebobbies.com/
• • Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse https://amalgamphilly.com/
• • Harriett’s Bookshop https://www.harriettsbookshop.com
• • Hakim’s Bookstore http://www.hakimsbookstore.com /

Resources for speaking to children about racial injustice, policing, and protest:

• • Educators Responding to Nationwide Uprisings Resource Guide a fantastic series of conversation prompts, articles and other resources for children and teens, compiled by the Racial Justice Organizing Committee of the Caucus of Working Educators of Philadelphia
• • Early childhood educator Akiea Gross shares read-alouds and other kindergarten-appropriate content affirming Black lives matter, follow their YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZJqFGssFb-O9mOuF6nKJNQ/videos or on Instagram @wokekindergarten

Food distribution or donation:

• • Philabundance, a Philadelphia organization seeking to end hunger and food insecurity. To find food distribution, click here: https://www.philabundance.org/find-food/
• • Follow @bunnyhopphl on Instagram for information on how to pick up free food, or donate food and other goods you have to spare in Philadelphia
• • City of Philadelphia food distribution sites for K-12 students and their families, seniors, or ANY Philadelphian. View the map with pick up sites, dates and more information here: https://www.phila.gov/food/#/

Happy Birthday to Allen Ginsberg!

June 3rd is the birthday of Beat Generation legend Allen Ginsberg, who would have turned 94 today. For many generations, Ginsberg has served as an important gateway to poetry — I've written and spoken about my own teenage experience discovering his work and its life-changing effects — and in these turbulent times it's well worth remembering that for Allen poetry and politics were inextricably linked, from his earliest scribbles through to his deathbed writings. 

From the civil rights movement to queer liberation, nuclear disarmament to environmentalism, censorship to anti-imperialism, Ginsberg (who originally aspired to being a labor lawyer) tirelessly fought the good fight on behalf of the oppressed and challenged those in power to do better. We see it in his dream cabinet in "Death to Van Gogh's Ear," his demands for the Clinton presidency in "New Democracy Wish List," and hundreds more poems  written over his fifty-year career. Moreover, a spirit of radical empathy guided both his work and his worldview: "I'm with you in Rockland," he pledges to Carl Solomon in the footnote to "Howl," his most iconic poem, and undoubtedly he would be with us in Minneapolis, in Ferguson, in Baltimore, in Cleveland, in Sanford, and every other battleground in our long and ongoing struggle for justice.

We are honored to be able to share a startling array of recordings — readings, songs, interviews, talks, and more —  on PennSound's Allen Ginsberg author page, which spans more or less the entirety of his writing career, from a few 1956 sessions all the way up to his legendary residency at the Knitting Factory in 1995, during which he gave authoritative readings of his three finest long-form pieces: "Howl," "Kaddish," and "Wichita Vortex Sutra." You'll find the majority of Ginsberg's most iconic poems — aside from the aforementioned titles, "A Supermarket in California," "America," "Sunflower Sutra," "The Lion for Real," "Don't Grow Old," "Plutonian Ode," "Gospel Noble Truths," "Do the Meditation Rock," "Hum Bom," and "After Lalon" are all there — but the real treat for diehard fans are the more obscure titles, the telling asides between poems, and the pieces shared with audiences in their earliest drafts. To hear Ginsberg read "Autumn Leaves" or "Manhattan Mayday Midnight" or "Tears" or "To Aunt Rose" or "Transcription of Organ Music" or "After the Big Parade" is as much a delight as encountering them for the very first time. You can start exploring by clicking here.

'Jacket2' Bids Farewell to Editor Divya Victor

It is hard to express how much Divya Victor has enriched and expanded Jacket2 since we first welcomed her as a (then-guest) editor in 2017. From the two commentary series she’s contributed, to the thoughtful and wide-reaching features she’s curated, not to mention the tireless work she’s done behind the scenes to make Jacket2’s editorial process more equitable, affirming, and innovative, Divya’s presence as a member of the J2 team will be sorely missed. It is with sadness — but excitement for Divya as a thinker and writer — that we say goodbye to Divya as a J2 editor. From our wonderful friend and colleague’s departure note:

[W]e work, every day, to support those who hyphenate between these roles as poet-critics, especially the ones who work (in Stephen Collis’s words) as “anarcho-scholars,” and who write to unsettle their roles as artists, academics, scholars, critics, graduate students, or editors in order to perform new modes of disruptive engagement with contemporary poetry.  

Working with this team has been one of the least complicated joys of my professional life. I will miss our spirited conversations and our careful negotiations. I will continue to read Jacket2 for this team’s earnest labor (along with the labor of countless interns, students, and editors at large) which has shaped a field in which our international audiences can witness the changing horizon of poetry’s critical and chimeral role in contemporary letters. 

Read Divya’s full departure note here. We’ll miss you, Divya!