Remembering Siah Armajani, Who Wed Ashbery and Architecture

We're grateful to Andrew Epstein (author of the indispensable blog Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets) for pointing out the recent death of Siah Armajani. This "long underrecognized" Iranian-American artist, "whose work across media bridged architecture, democracy, mathematics, and the commons" (per his Artforum obit), is perhaps best known to PennSound listeners as the architect behind Minneapolis' Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge, for which he commissioned his friend John Ashbery to compose a poem.

When Ashbery passed away in 2017 the Walker Art Center (where Armajani's pedestrian bridge is located) remembered the poet's collaboration with the architect, which started with the idea of borrowing just a few lines from Ashbery's work. As Armajani explained "Poetry makes things less didactic and makes it less dogmatic. There's a generosity in poetry that you can contradict yourself on. And also it's an open-ended proposition, so there's a way out." In time the concept evolved to a new poem, commissioned for the occasion, which Ashbery read on site on September 11, 1990. You can listen to a recording of Ashbery reading at the bridge, read the untitled poem in its entirety, and see images of the work on the Walker website. That same recording is also available on PennSound's Ashbery author page, along with a veritable avalanche of recordings from the beloved poet, spanning nearly seventy years.

Congratulations to Tracie Morris for a Historic First

We send our heartiest congratulations to Tracie Morris, who made history this week at the Iowa Writers Workshop. As a press release from the university notes:

Dr. Morris joined the Workshop this fall as a full professor with tenure and will teach Graduate Poetry Workshop courses and Form of Poetry seminars to students enrolled in the graduate creative writing program. She was the inaugural Distinguished Visiting Professor of Poetry at the Workshop for several semesters before joining the permanent faculty, and she is the first tenured African American full professor of Poetry in the history of the Workshop.

Morris joins Jamel Brinkley, Margot Livesey, Charles D’Ambrosio, Ethan Canin, James Galvin, Mark Levine, Elizabeth Willis, and Lan Samantha Chang as permanent faculty members. Chang, the workshop's director, welcomed Morris and praised her, noting "Her expertise and brilliance of innovation as a poet and performer is revolutionary. She is also an exceptional and inspiring teacher."

We're proud to have counted Morris as a friend of PennSound for a long time, as evidenced by the contents of her PennSound author page, which starts with a 2005 Close Listening reading and interview hosted by Charles Bernstein and her contributions to a half-dozen episodes in the PoemTalk podcast series, including its landmark 100th program. You'll find many more local recordings there, whether at our own Kelly Writers House, the ICA, or the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a diverse collection of readings, talks, and more spanning twenty years. Click here to start exploring.

PoemTalk #151: Two by Eileen Myles

Today we released the latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series — program #151 in total — which focuses on two poems from Eileen Myles' 2001 collection, Skies: "Writing" and "Mount St. Helens. For this show, host Al Filreis convened a panel that included Jess Shollenberger, June Thomas, and Stephen Metcalf (shown left to right).

Filreis' PoemTalk blog post on this new show makes a point of offering introductions to each of the panelists: "Jess Shollenberger is writing about the convergence of queer studies and everyday life studies. Steve Metcalf hosts Slate's Culture Gabfest, has written a book about the 1980s, and is fascinated by poems about poems. June Thomas is well known for her creation of — and support as producer of — a series of innovative LGBTQ podcasts through Slate and, aligned with this work, for her innovative approach to television criticism." As he notes, "The three together, we think, combine spontaneously to form a memorable discussion of everyday self-image in 'Writing' and writing-as-elegy in 'Mount St. Helens.'" He also offers this explanation of an oversight by the group: "We acknowledge a significant flaw after the spontaneous conversation was completed: we hadn't conferred prior to beginning the recording about Eileen Myles's then somewhat recent preference in favor of they/them pronouns, and several of us at times use 'she' and 'her' in error, for which we hope listeners will forgive us." Finally, his note closes with this eerie bit of context as a postscript: "We recorded this prior to the closure of the Kelly Writers House space. Listeners waiting for references to the tribulations of the pandemic hear none because, happily then, it hadn't happened yet."

You can read more about this latest show and find the complete text of both poems here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.

Two New Belladonna* Readings, 2020

We've just added videos of two recent readings from the venerable Belladonna* Readings Series to our site.

First up, we have a July 7th reading held as part of the Belladonna* In-Flux series. James Loop, Alma Valdez-García, Poupeh Missaghi, and Zoe Tuck provided introductions for this event, which the readers were Oki Sogumi, Kanika Agrawal, and María José Giménez. Like most cultural events nowadays, this reading was conducted via Zoom.

Then, from August 18th, we have a launch event celebrating the third issue of Matters of Feminist Practice, which was also held virtually via Zoom. Poupeh Missaghi (co-editor of the journal, along with Karla Kelsey) and Megan Madden provided introductions for the reading, which featured sets from Yanara Friedland, Frances Richard, Adrienne Perry, Rachel Levitsky, and Serena Chopra.

Now in its twenty-first year, Belladonna* is "a reading series and independent press that promotes 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." You can watch these latest additions by clicking here, and there are countless amazing recordings spanning the series' complete history waiting for you to discover on PennSound's Belladonna* series page.

A New S Press Addition: Ernst Jandl, 'Aus der Fremde' (1980)

We've been ecstatic to see such positive responses to our recent announcement of PennSound's S Press Collection page and we intend to periodically dip back into the archive to highlight certain recordings of note. Today, however, we're happy to announce a new addition to that page from Austrian author, translator, sound poet, and concrete poet Ernst Jandl.

Originally released in 1980 as #52 in the series, Jandl's Aus der Fremde ("From Abroad," sometimes translated as "From Foreign Lands") was reissued as S Press tape #86. Subtitled "A spoken opera in 7 scenes," Aus der Fremde was later staged with three actors' voices as a radio play by Westdeutscher Rundfunk / Hessischer Rundfunk (also later released on CD by Gertraud Scholz Verlag). This S Press version appears to be an artist's study of sorts for that later production, recorded during the latter half of 1978 as Jandl worked through the material, and therefore there are variations in the text from the final version and the fidelity is not studio quality. The piece is divided into two parts, seemingly determined by the technical limitations of the medium: the first side runs for 59 minutes while the second is just shy of 43. Click here to listen.

Jandl's 13 Radiophone Texts, recorded at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1966, was released in 1977 as S Press tape #50. While we currently do not have permission to present that recording, we have provided a link to UbuWeb where the curious can listen in. Click here to start browsing our S Press Collection page from the top.

Adrienne Rich: Three New Recordings

We recently added a trio of new recordings to PennSound's Adrienne Rich author page that come from various points through her writing life. Particularly with the new academic year starting, this is a great time for readers and teachers alike to check out the formidable collection of recordings we have to share from one of the most iconic poets of our time.

First, we have Rich's April 30, 1972 appearance on New York's WBAI-FM. Interestingly, given that this reading takes between two of her best-known collections — 1971's The Will to Change and 1973's National Book Award-winning Diving Into the Wreck — Rich has chosen to read from two earlier collections: Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law (1963) and Necessities of Life (1966). Given Rich's radicalization and embrace of her queer identity as the 60s progressed, these earlier poems, written between 1954 and 1965, are dramatically different in both form and content than the work Rich was presently engaged in.

Jumping forward to 1977, we have Rich's contributions to A Sign / I Was Not Alone, an LP released by Out & Out Books that also featured readings by Honor Moore, Audre Lorde, and Joan Larkin. Rich's nine-minute set closes out the album's B-side and features three poems: "The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen As One," "Power," and "Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev." We've also provided a link to Queer Music Heritage where you can read the album's liner notes and listen to the other poets who took part as well. 

Finally, from November 30, 1993, we have "An Evening with Adrienne Rich: City Arts and Lectures," an event that took place in San Francisco. Here, Rich reads work that would later be published in What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. The recording starts in the middle of "How Does a Poet Put Bread on the Table?" and continues with an excerpt from "The Muralist," then "A Leak In History" and "Tourism and Promised Lands," before concluding with that book's final section, "What If?"

You can click on the links above to be taken to each recording, or click here to start browsing PennSound's Adrienne Rich author page from the top.

City Planning Poetics 8: Urban Ruins, with Stonecipher and Biddle, 2019

One of the most exciting ongoing series taking place at our Kelly Writers House is "City Planning Poetics," which has been organized and hosted by Davy Knittle since 2016. Twice a year, Knittle holds events "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." The latest installation in the series, focusing on "Urban Ruins," took place on October 7th of last year, with panelists Donna Stonecipher and Daniel R. Biddle.

Stonecipher is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Transaction Histories (2018), which was cited by The New York Times as one of the 10 best poetry books of 2018. She has published one book of criticism, Prose Poetry and the City (2018). Her poems have been published in many journals, including The Paris Review, and have been translated into eight languages. She lives in Berlin. Biddle, a former politics editor for The Philadelphia Inquirer, has worked as a journalist for four decades. His Inquirer stories on the courts won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. As an editor he helped direct Inquirer investigative projects, regional news coverage, and reporting on elections. 

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), "Urban Revitalization" (with Brian Goldstein and Douglas Kearney), and "Carceral Justice" (with Emily Abendroth and Nina Johnson). You can watch or listen to those events here.

Michael Ruby Reads from Three Books, 2019–2020

A lot of poets have day jobs — it's the nature of the field — but Michael Ruby's is particularly interesting: serving as an editor at The Wall Street Journal covering US news and politics. Williams famously opined that "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there," and in Ruby's adventurous poetry we find a voice seeking to reconcile art and current events. Today we're proud to unveil extensive recordings of Ruby reading from three recent books, which were made over the last two years.

We begin with Ruby's most recent book, The Star-Spangled Banner, to be released next month from Barrytown/Station Hill Press, which "spans the 15-year arc from 9/11 to 11/9." The project started after the September 11th attacks, when Ruby "saw people freely using U.S. national symbols for their own political purposes. He decided to do the same thing for poetic purposes." Each poem in the book, which is dedicated to Jasper Johns and Jimi Hendrix, starts with the 81 words of our national anthem, making insertions from various lexicons in the gaps between words and phrases. A short excerpt from the book was initially published as a Dusie Kollektiv in 2010.

Next there's Ruby's 2019 BlazeVOX volume, The Mouth of the Bay, written in response to the forbidding landscape of Maine's Frenchman Bay, which served as both sonic and visual inspiration for the poet. Some poems here were generated by reciting maxims by the likes of Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Empedocles within the environment, while the "Elements" series addresses the setting with a stanza for each of six classical components (rocks, water, islands, mountain, sky, sun) within each of the poems.

Finally we jump back to 2010 for another BlazeVOX collection, The Edge of the Underworld, which takes its inspiration from diverse sources: "After studying Louis Zukofsky's Rudens in graduate school, I always wanted to write a homophonic translation," Ruby writes. "A decade later, I settled on the long opening of Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid, the famous Underworld book, and wrote 'Sic Fatur Lacrimans.' Soon afterward, sensing the translation itself needed translation, I decided to derive other poems from the words and phrases of 'Sic Fatur Lacrimans' — poems that would be connected to the long poem and to each other, in a sort of literary Rayonism." He concludes, "I saw the book as the verbal equivalent of St. Sebastian pierced by arrows, with 'Sic Fatur Lacrimans' as St. Sebastian and the shorter poems as the arrows, crisscrossing each other."

You can listen to Ruby reading extensive selections from each of the books mentioned above by clicking on each title. On PennSound's Michael Ruby author page, you'll find similar sessions covering his books American Songbook, Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep, and Compulsive Words, along with a handful of readings from 2004 to the present.

Ted Joans on PennSound

While there are innumerable exciting recordings in the S Press Collection, we wanted to take time to highlight one that PennSound's own editorial staff was very happy to see added to our archive. Ted Joans' Jazz Poems, tape #72 in the series, was recorded in Germany in November 1979 and released the following year. Running nearly seventy minutes, this album sees Joans run through fourteen poems in total — "The Truth," "Jazz Is My Religion," "Bed," "Ouagadougou Ouagadougou," "I Am The Lover," "Nine Month Blues," "Africa," and "Long Gone Lover Blues" among them — with laid-back accompaniment from a combo that included Uli Espenlaub on keys, Andreas Leep on bass, Dietrich Rauschtenberger behind the drums, and Ralf Falk guitar. Jazz Poems is a substantial addition to our collection of Joans recordings, and a welcome one given his influence upon multiple generations of poets.

For those interested in learning more about Joans, there's no better place to start than Wow! Ted Joans Lives!, the 2010 documentary by Kurt Hemmer and Tom Knoff that we've been proud to share with our listeners for the past five years. Envisoned as "a visual and aural collage," the film "examin[es] the life and works of the legendary, tri-continental poet Ted Joans, who was born in Cairo, Illinois on 4 July 1928 and went on to become one of the significant poets of his generation performing his work in the United States, Europe, and Africa." Hemmer and Knoff continue, "The film has the sound of jazz and the flavor of surrealism. As Ted Joans declared, 'Jazz is my religion and Surrealism is my point of view.'" You'll find the complete award-winning documentary here, along with a short clip of Joans reading in Amsterdam in 1964 — taken from Louis van Gasteren's film, Jazz & Poetry — and the aforementioned S Press cassette.

Introducing the S Press Collection

This is a very exciting day for PennSound as we get to unveil a project that's been in the works for a long time: our new S Press Collection page. 

For those not familiar with the label, Edition S Press, was a privately funded small-press venture connected to a non-profit gallery, which was established in 1969 by Angela Koehler, Nikolaus Einhorn and Axel Knipschild in Hattingen near Bochum in what was then West Germany. Koehler's brother Michael joined the label in 1972 and took over operations in 1980, keeping the label going until his death in 2005. While rooted in Europe's poésie sonore movement, S Press took inspiration from projects like John Giorno's Dial-A-Poem and Giorno Poetry Systems and sought to diversify their roster with titans of the postwar American poetry (Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Jerry Rothenberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ted Joans, and Ed Dorn) and the generation of poets that followed in their footsteps (Giorno, Anne Waldman, Jackson Mac Low, Clark Coolidge, Patti Smith) along with figures who straddled the worlds of contemporary music and literature (John Cage, Henri Chopin, Ernst Jandl, Charles Amirkhanian), and a fascinating group of European (mostly German) poets to boot. The label took great pride in working closely with its artists and presenting work in the poets' own voices (with a few exceptions) in relatively small editions — as Marc Matter notes in his introduction to the collection, even "stars" and "classics" only merited runs of approximately 300 cassettes, with many of the titles also being released in reel-to-reel format.

While we've been lucky enough to have select recordings from the label in our archives since practically the beginning of the site, this new page is our best effort at presenting as complete a document of the S Press discography as is presently possible — taking into account irregularities in the catalogue, such as duplicate issues and records that were announced but never produced, along with a few tapes for which we were not able to secure copies. Scans of the covers and liner notes are presented for each release, along with track listings and credits, even for recordings that are not available, and a good number of the recordings have been segmented into individual MP3 files. Marc Matter, who headed up this project in conjunction with Charles Bernstein, has provided both a brief introduction on the page itself, as well as a longer essay that delves deeper into the label's history. We're grateful for his tireless work on this endeavor, and also to J. Nick Seymour, who processed all of the materials on our end, and Zach Carduner, who oversaw the project. You can start browsing through the S Press Collection by clicking here.

New at PennSound: Breaking Through

Here's a promising new series to bring your week to a wonderful close. Curated by Simone White, the Breaking Through series at our own Kelly Writers House features poets on the verge of publishing their first books for conversations about poetics, influence, and the future of poetry.

Our just-launched page for the series is home to the four events that have been held so far, starting with a November 28, 2018 reading by Laura Henriksen and Benjamin Krusling. That's followed by an April 9, 2019 featuring A. H. Jerriod Avant and Adjua Greaves, and sets by Shiv Kotecha and Bianca Rae Messinger recorded on November 20, 2019. Our final event, from January 29th of this year, showcased the poetry of Peter BD and Rachel James. Video and audio are available for the majority of these readings, with just audio from the latest. You can click on the date in each entry's header to view the Kelly Writers House calendar listing for each event, which includes bios for the readers and info on where you can find more of their writing. 

With a diverse array of exciting writers, each linked by being on the verge of publication, Breaking Through is well worth keeping your eyes on. You can listen to the readings listed above by clicking here.

Remembering Tim Dlugos on His 70th Birthday

Today would have been the seventieth birthday of groundbreaking poet Tim Dlugos, who passed away from AIDS-related complications in December 1990. Though his life was cut tragically short by the disease he bravely documented in his late poems, Dlugos nevertheless produced an impressive body of work that continues to inspire readers decades after

While we don't have a whole lot of Dlugos in the PennSound archives, we're justifiably proud to be able to share the recordings we have. They include a 1977 appearance on Public Access Poetry (in an episode shared with Brad Gooch) and a 1978 Segue Series reading at the Ear Inn that begins with his "Sonnet for Eileen Myles," and also includes the poems "Je Suis Ein Americano," "Poppers," "A Day for Don and Vladimir," "Some," "American Baseball," "Great Books of the 1950s" and "Gilligan's Island." These poems remind us not only of the poet's wicked sense of humor, but also his prodigious talent for celebrating the kitsch glories and televised tragedies which shaped mid-century American life. You can listen to the aforementioned recordings by clicking here.

Trevor Joyce Reads in Los Angeles, 2020

Here's a new addition to the PennSound Singles database from Irish poet Trevor Joyce, reading as part of the Effie Street Series in Los Angeles. Recorded on February 24th of this year, Joyce performed two brief sets, alternating with his fellow reader. 

Having previously read for the series from his 2017 Miami University Press collection, Fastness: A Translation from the English of Edmund Spenser, Joyce choose to read "lots of small things," noting that "the general thematics [of his selections] are related to the thematics of Fastness. I'm trying to use to some extent, to draw on historical texts that are connected with the development of modern empirical science, a great deal of which was done in relation to the British colonization of Ireland. And then also there's the reaction to that in the 17th and 18th centuries by agricultural insurgents within the country."

If this taste of Joyce's poetry whets your appetite then may we kindly point you towards "Trevor Joyce: Reading in Ireland," a fantastic 2014 Jacket2 feature edited by Niamh O’Mahony, which includes a brief essay on Joyce's poetics, an interview with the author, a bibliography of his publications, two recovered poems, and a short piece by Joyce himself in which he describes the compositional process behind his long-form poem Trem Neul.  Click here to start reading; Joyce's LA reading can be found here in the PennSound Singles database.