Remembering Michael Gizzi, Ten Years Later

Today is the tenth anniversary of the passing of Michael Gizzi. When we originally broke the news on PennSound Daily, we acknowledged that Gizzi's work was widely praised by some of the most respected names in the world of contemporary poetics, including John Ashbery, who hailed his poetry as "[r]azor sharp but also rich and generously compelling . . . [it] lambastes as it celebrates, bringing us finally to a place of poignant irresolution." Similarly, reviewing his final collection New Depths of Deadpan for the Brooklyn Rail, John Yau praised Gizzi's ear for "American vernacular," insisting that readers interested in knowing "how weird, interesting, scary, and odd America is" acquaint themselves with Gizzi's poetry, while Ron Silliman cited Gizzi's "genius" as "not just the degree to which [he] can make great complexity appear breath-takingly simple, but rather the great sense of humanity in whose service he does this."

In 2010, we already had a compelling collection of recordings available on our Michael Gizzi author page, including a pair of Segue Series readings (a 1999 set at the Ear Inn and a 2004 recording from the Bowery Poetry Club) and a pair of recordings made by Steve Evans in Providence in 1997 (reading No Both and "We See" in their entirety), plus four tracks made in collaboration with pianist Dave McKenna in 2004 and the full-length album Cured in the Going Bebop from 2000. We also had the beloved 1994 recording of Gizzi and Clark Coolidge reading Jack Kerouac's Old Angel Midnight, which was the subject of PoemTalk #124 in 2018. Since then, we've added two new recordings of Gizzi — a 2001 Wednesdays @ 4-Plus reading at SUNY-Buffalo and a 2009 Chapter & Verse Series reading in Philadelphia. 

In our original tribute post, we also pointed listeners towards "another marvelous and revealing resource": Stan Mir's lengthy 2006 interview with Gizzi and Craig Watson, which had recently been published in the final issue of Jacket Magazine. While that's still a wonderful document, we are happy to also add a 2017 retrospective honoring Gizzi at our own Kelly Writers House, hosted by Davy Knittle and featuring Mir and William Corbett, which is given prominence of place at the head of our Michael Gizzi author page. Click here to reconnect with these marvelous poems and Gizzi's memorable voice, which are every bit as potent a decade later.

PoemTalk #152: on Wallace Stevens' "The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain"

Today we release the newest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, its 152nd program in total, which addresses Wallace Stevens' "The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain." This show is doubly special in that a) it's the second PoemTalk episode dedicated to "this gnarly poem" (as host Al Filreis describes it) and b) it was recorded in conjunction with a panel at last year's MLA conference on contemporary poetic responses to Stevens' work, with the same formidable panel — Kate Colby, Tyrone Wiilliams, Mónica de la Torre, and Aldon Nielsen — participating in both conversations.

Filreis' PoemTalk blog post on this new program starts with a summation of what's at stake in Stevens' poem and how the panelists approach it: "The group collaborates on an enumeration of possibilities for understanding the poet's current ruminative state as a retrospective view of his previous poems and old ideas about poetry. Past perfect and conditional language — had needed, would be right, would discover, could lie — make us doubt that there is or ever was such a thing as a 'there' in 'There it was.' There what was? The words? The new words of this poem? The old words on previous poems about the uphill climb of poetic career? The new poem about such old poems re-presents the word-for-word mountain and never really means, it seems, to stand in for the thing itself." "This isn't mere exhaustion," he concludes, "It's a final development of theory."

You can read more about this latest show, read Stevens poem, and choose between unedited video footage of the conversation or the polished podcast version here. Filreis has also made arrangements with the MLA to present video of the aforementioned conference panel available on our site. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.

Kevin Killian: Four Newly Segmented Readings

It's been more than a year since the death of poet Kevin Killian and his absence is still acutely felt within the poetry community. In the aftermath of his passing we were grateful to Andrew Kenower of A Voice Box who very generously shared a half-dozen recordings of Killian made in the Bay Area between 2009 and 2013. Today, we're happy to announce that we've segmented three of these readings, as well as a favorite NYC reading from our archives.

The most recent of these readings is Killian's June 2011 set as part of the Condensary Series at Oakland's The Speakeasy. Following short introductory comments, Killian reads a total of sixteen poems, including "Better Than Today," "Overcoming Shame," "Anagrams," "Wuthering Heights," "Violets in the Snow," and "Nude Valentine." Next, from the New Reading Series at Oakland's 21 Grand we have a forty-three minute set that includes nine poems in total, among them "Hey Day," "I Lost Me to Meth," "Skull With Jewels on It," "Cannot Exist," and "American Idol." Also from 2009, we have Killian's undated recording from San Francisco's Canessa Park, however this set consists of just one piece, "Hot Lights," with brief opening comments. Finally, Killian's contribution to the 2007 launch event for EOAGH Issue 3: Queering Language from the Bowery Poetry Club, which includes "Norwegian Wood" and "Is It All Over My Face?"

These newly-segmented readings are only part of what you'll find on our Kevin Killian author page, including a 1997 Kelly Writers House event with Killian and his wife Dodie Bellamy in conversation, a 1991 talk on Spicer at the Kootenay School of Writing, a 2009 reading at Oakland's Studio One, a 2015 reading from the Frank O'Hara's Last Lover series with CAConrad and Jennifer Moxley, and two 2013 events from Berkeley's Woolsey Heights: a reading from November of that year, and Killian's talk "Activism, Gay Poetry, AIDS in the 1980s," originally delivered at the National Poetry Foundation's "Poetry of the Eighties" conference at the University of Maine at Orono in 2012, which was recorded in February. Click here to start browsing.

Bob Perelman Reads Live, Sept. 23rd at 6PM

We couldn't be more happy to welcome UPenn emeritus professor Bob Perelman back to the Kelly Writers House for a virtual reading this Wednesday, September 23rd at 6:00PM EDT. Perelman will be reading from his latest collection, Jack and Jill in Troy (Roof Books, 2019), which "makes use of the rapid clarity of Homer and the elemental incantations of nursery talk to create a compelling array of poems that speak to our present moment with tragic humor and urgent, skeptical directness." "A rather R-rated version of Jack and Jill appear in some poems," the back cover blurb continues, "as if a worldly-wise Mother Goose is addressing young and old in the same breath. In other poems the world of the Iliad appears — permanent war economy, never-finished gender negotiations, continual power disputes, absolute hierarchies arbitrarily enforced — but both these nursery matters and the ancient epic trappings are brought forward to provide a wide-angle frame onto our own situation."

KWH faculty director and PennSound co-director Al Filreis will moderate a Q&A with the audience after Perelman reads. This event will stream live over the KWH YouTube channel, and will eventually be archived on Perelman's PennSound author page, where you'll find a wide selection of recordings from the late 1970s to the present. You can learn more about this event here.

Congratulations to National Book Award Nominees Berssenbrugge, Choi

The New Yorker has been announcing the longlists for this year's National Book Awards this week, with the ten books under consideration for the poetry category released yesterday. Their short article starts by highlighting Honorée Fanonne Jeffers' The Age of Phillis, inspired by pioneering Black poet Phillis Wheatley who died free but lived most of her short life as a slave. As the author notes, Jeffers' book is just one of many among this year's longlist that "observes the violence of empire and excavates histories that have been forgotten or erased," including Anthony Cody's Borderland Apocrypha, Natalie Diaz's Postcolonial Love Poem, and Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony.

We were very excited to see Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, among the nominees for her most recent collection A Treatise on Stars, which the panelists hailed as "a lyrical work that reveals constellations of our connectedness to fuel introspection" and "implores that we connect with the larger natural and cosmic world." You'll recall that Berssenbrugge was one of our Kelly Writers House Fellows in 2019, and during her visit she read a number of poems from A Treatise on Stars, including "Star Beings," "Lux," and "Chaco and Olivia." You'll find audio and video from that visit here. Our PennSound author page for Berssenbrugge houses more than two dozen individual recordings going back as far as 1986, including interviews, radio programs, and many, many readings. 

While we don't have a PennSound author page for Don Mee Choi, you can also hear her reading her work as part of Poetry Politic and as part of the 2012 MLA Offsite Reading. 

We offer our congratulations to Berssenbrugge, Choi, and all of this year's worthy nominees. This year's panel, which will announce its final decision on November 18th, is chaired by Layli Long Soldier, and also includes Rigoberto González, John Hennessy, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Elizabeth Willis.

Announcing the 2021 Kelly Writers House Fellows

While we were only recently discussing Erín Moure's Kelly Writers House Fellows visit from this past spring, we've already got news concerning next year's group of fellows. Today Al Filreis announced the trio that will be joining us during winter/spring 2021, and as always they are an eclectic and exciting as a group. They include (from left to right) author and critic Hilton Als, chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton, and poet Erica Hunt. Details on their individual programs will follow in the near future, but we couldn't wait to spread the word.

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.

Clark Coolidge reads 'Polaroid,' 1976

We're starting off this new week by taking a dip back into the S Press Collection, highlighting a recording that was part of the PennSound archives since close to the site's inception. 

We first added Clark Coolidge's Polaroid to the site in December 2005, but it's only recently that listeners have been able to see it in its proper context within the full S Press catalogue, as well as read the liner notes. Released in 1979 as S Press Tonbandverlag #57, the cassette contains Polaroid (Adventures in Poetry / Big Sky, 1975) read in its entirety, as recorded by S Press head Michael Köhler on September 24th 1976 at University of Connecticut at Storrs. Excerpts from Polaroid are available on Coolidge's EPC page, while the entire book can be read or downloaded in PDF format from Eclipse.

Interestingly, given both Coolidge's own musical history as drummer for Tina and David Meltzer's San Francisco-based psych-folk band The Serpent Power and the liner notes' acknowledgment that "In addition to his books [Coolidge] has composed a number of word tapes, which have remained unpublished so far," this is Coolidge's first solo album. It would take another thirty-four years to see the release of Comes Through in the Call Hold, the first of two albums Coolidge recorded with Anne Waldman and Thurston Moore; Coolidge and Moore's Among The Poetry Stricken was released earlier this year. 

Happy 98th Birthday to Jackson Mac Low!

This September 12th would have been the ninety-eighth birthday of the one and only Jackson Mac Low, and that's as good a reason as any to revisit some of the recordings housed on his PennSound author page.

There you'll find a wide array of audio and video spanning four decades, from the 1970s up till just a few months before his death in December 2004. In addition to numerous readings — including seven Segue Series sets, recordings from the St. Mark's Poetry Project, the Living Theater, the Line Reading Series, PhillyTalks, the Radio Reading Project, the Orono 40s conference, the Sound & Syntax International Festival of Sound Poetry, and more — along with talks from the St. Mark's Talks series, SUNY-Buffalo, the New Langton Arts Center, and LINEbreak, videos from Public Access Poetry and Mac Low's 75th birthday festschrift, and numerous complete album releases (often with Anne Tardos). You'll also want to check out the 2008 book launch event for Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, which features Tardos, Charles Bernstein, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Drew Gardner, Joan Retallack, Chris Mason, and others, as well as PoemTalk #46 on Mac Low's "Words nd Ends from Ez." Finally, you'll find links to Mac Low's EPC author page, which is home to numerous texts, interviews, and tributes.

John Richetti Reads Two By Whitman

We're very glad to have a new brief session from UPenn emeritus professor John Richetti to share with our listeners. Recorded just last week, we find Richetti revisiting the work of Walt Whitman, delivering compelling versions of two of the good gray poet's most beloved poems: "O Captain! My Captain!," and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." You'll find these tracks on a special page containing all of Richetti's renditions of Whitman's work, which also includes "Song of Myself" in its entirety, "I Sing the Body Electric," and "I Hear America Singing," among other titles.

We last heard from Richetti this past spring, when he delivered a set of five poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.  Numerous previous sessions with Richetti are available on PennSound Classics, spanning more than a decade. They include his prodigious "111 Favorite Poems for Memorizing," "The PennSound Anthology of Restoration & 18th-Century Poetry," and his audio anthology of English Renaissance Verse. Richetti has additionally recorded selections from Matthew Arnold, W.H. Auden, William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, John Dryden, George Herbert, Ben Jonson, John Keats, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Edgar Allan Poe, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Wordsworth, and William Butler Yeats. These lovingly-made recordings, rendered in Richetti's distinctive tenor, are a tremendous resource for the classroom or for any lover of poetry. 

With the exception of the aforementioned anthologies, PennSound Classics is divided by author, so you can see Richetti's ample contributions alongside those of many other poets and scholars. To start browsing, click here.

New at Jacket2: "This Poem Kills Facists!" — Poetry and the 2020 Election

We're really excited to share news of a new Jacket2 commentary series that launched this week, "'This Poem Kills Facists!' — Poetry and the 2020 Election," which is co-curated by Michael Ruby and Sam Truitt (who also co-edited the 2016 feature "13 Poems by Bernadette Mayer," published in coordination with Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer). In their introductory post, they set out their plans for the next two months:

Our thought was to showcase responses to this poetry-politics crisscross from Hudson Valley poets. Elections are decided by bodies of people on land with arbitrary boundaries. The Hudson Valley is as good a set as most — at once full of wild practitioners and via the Hudson River connected to New York City, with many of us circulating back and forth. That means it breathes and integrates myriad influences, interests, and ways of whipping up words, among other poetic materials.

We wanted the poets who responded to this call to be free in what they do — as immortal, uncanny, and useful as they saw fit — with the proviso that they maintain foremost in mind that they are writing as commentators on poetry in relation to the 2020 elections or vice versa.

After mentioning the "suggestions and instigations" they offered their respondents (which are appended at the end of the post) they note that "That pretty much takes us to now: this first post introducing what's to come, which we haven't yet seen from most of the other contributors. This puts us all on the same plane, analogous to where the world is, wondering what this coming vote may bring."

Ruby and Truitt then offer individual notes to inaugurate the series. In Truitt's, he ruminates on the commentary series' title — "The phrase of course derives from the Oklahoma-born poet folk-rocker Woody Guthrie (1912–1967), who in 1943, in wartime, wrote on his guitar 'THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.' He did that shortly after writing 'Talking Hitler's Head Off Blues.' — and connects the iconic folk singer to the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. via "white supremacist Fred Trump," who owned the Brooklyn apartment complex where Guthrie lived in the early 1950s. Ruby starts in " haze of fear and pessimism," about the election that leads him to revisit "some political poems that had always resonated for me, some about elections, some not," by the likes of Whitman, Williams, Lowell, Olson, Mayer, Ginsberg, and Baraka, before concluding, "I came to the possibly defeatist conclusion that American political poetry is a series of responses to defeats. That's what I'm going to write about in our next post."

While the next few months will be hectic, we're glad to have these two poets spearheading what promises to be a fascinating commentary series. Be sure to check in frequently to see when new posts have gone up.