PoemTalk #154: on Elizabeth Willis' "The Similitude of This Great Flower"

Today we release the newest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, its 154th program in total, which focus on "The Similitude of This Great Flower" by Elizabeth Willis. For this show, host Al Filreis brought together a panel consisting of (from left to right) Kate Colby, Simone White, and Angela Carr over Zoom to discuss Willis' poem.

Filreis starts his PoemTalk blog post announcing the new episode in an evocative fashion: "'You promised to go on' indicates mere survival in the end." He continues, "The compressed and converged idioms of the previous sentences — there's a fly on the wall looking through a keyhole 'trying to read the wall'! — have a comic, almost punny multivalent quality, but whatever that indicative writing on the wall is, at least 'It says we haven't died.' We’re alive indeed and that’s grimly good — and, the group agrees, such witness to survival is owing to the writing as writing. We 'go on' through the resistant act of writing, yes, but also in the writing, in the materiality of those words. The poem is a small machine for going on."

You can read more about this latest show, read Willis' poem, and listen to the podcast here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.

PennSound Presents Poems of Thanks and Thanksgiving

With the US celebrating Thanksgiving this week, it's time to revisit a perennial PennSound Daily tradition that started way back in 2010: a mini-mix of poems of thanks and thanksgiving — some old, some new — taken from the PennSound archives.

In a classic recording of "Thanksgiving" [MP3] from the St. Mark's Poetry Project, Joe Brainard wonders "what, if anything Thanksgiving Day really means to me." Emptying his mind of thoughts, he comes up with these free associations: "first is turkey, second is cranberry sauce and third is pilgrims."

"I want to give my thanks to everyone for everything," the late John Giorno tells us in "Thanx 4 Nothing" [MP3], "and as a token of my appreciation, / I want to offer back to you all my good and bad habits / as magnificent priceless jewels, / wish-fulfilling gems satisfying everything you need and want, / thank you, thank you, thank you, / thanks." The rolicking poem that ensues offers both genuine sensory delights ("may all the chocolate I've ever eaten / come back rushing through your bloodstream / and make you feel happy.") and sarcastic praise ("America, thanks for the neglect, / I did it without you, / let us celebrate poetic justice, / you and I never were, / never tried to do anything, / and never succeeded").

"Can beauty save us?" wonders Maggie Nelson in "Thanksgiving" [MP3], a standout poem from her marvelous collection, Something Bright, Then Holes, which revels in the holiday's darker edges and simplest truths: "After dinner / I sit the cutest little boy on my knee / and read him a book about the history of cod // absentmindedly explaining overfishing, / the slave trade. People for rum? he asks, / incredulously. Yes, I nod. People for rum."

Yusef Komunyakaa gratefully recounts a number of near-misses in Vietnam — "the tree / between me & a sniper's bullet [...] the dud / hand grenade tossed at my feet / outside Chu Lai" — in "Thanks" [MP3], from a 1998 reading at the Kelly Writers House.

Finally, we turn our attention to the suite of poems that concludes Mark Van Doren's Folkways album, Collected and New Poems — "When The World Ends" / "Epitaph" / "Farewell and Thanksgiving" [MP3] — the last of which offers gratitude to the muse for her constant indulgence.

To keep you in the Thanksgiving spirit, don't forget this 2009 PennSound Podcast (assembled by Al Filreis and Jenny Lesser) which offers "marvelous expressions of gratitude, due honor, personal appreciation [and] friendship" from the likes of Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Jerome Rothenberg, Louis Zukofsky and William Carlos Williams.

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

Here's a fascinating document from our archives that certainly merits your attention. On December 12–13, 1979, Kathy Acker was a guest of Robert Creeley's at SUNY-Buffalo. Over those two days she read from her own work, delivered a talk on French novelists, and was interviewed by Creeley. Both events have been segmented, and are available on our Kathy Acker author page.

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

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

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

Congratulations to National Book Award Winner Don Mee Choi

We have been very excitedly following news of this year's National Book Award nominations — particularly PennSound poets Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Don Mee Choi as they made it from the longlist to the group of five finalists. In ceremonies held earlier this evening it was announced that Choi's DMZ Colony had been selected by judges Layli Long Soldier, Rigoberto González, John Hennessy, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Elizabeth Willis as this year's winner.

In their citation, the judges hailed DMZ Colony as an "urgent" text that "captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization." "Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly," they continue, "but 'during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.'" They conclude: "Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all 'victims of History,' so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist."

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 congratulate Choi and Wave Books for this well-deserved honor.

In Memoriam: Lewis Warsh (1944–2020)

We start this new week off with sad news to report that broke overnight: poet and publisher Lewis Warsh, a much-beloved member of the New York School's second generation has passed away just a few days after his 76th birthday.

It's hard to underestimate the impact that Warsh has had upon the field of contemporary poetry through the work of his two presses: Angel Hair (co-founded with Anne Waldman) and United Artists (co-founded with Bernadette Mayer), which continues to release books to this day. Both projects served as essential extensions of the thriving socio-poetic scene, centered around the St. Mark's Poetry Project, that just as easily could have found its nexus in Waldman and Warsh's Lower East Side apartment, as evidenced by the latter's well-known "New York Diary 1967." United Artists in particular shows us the evolution of that scene beyond its vibrant first flourish, as marked by a series of departures — the death of Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan's departure to Iowa and Chicago, and Warsh and Mayer's move to Western Massachusetts, chief among them.

Of course, it would be a mistake to overlook Warsh's prolific output as both poet and novelist as well, and that's where humbly direct our listeners towards our Lewis Warsh author page, where you'll find a variety of recordings spanning six decades, starting with "Halloween" (an excerpt from "New York Diary 1967") from Tape Poems (edited by Eduardo Costa and John Perreault) and a 1972 reading in Oakland. Other interesting selections include Warsh's contribution to a 2006 Barbara Guest Day Tribute, a two-disc album of Warsh's long-poem The Origin of the World released by Deerhead Records and Ugly Duckling Presse in 2006, and Warsh and Mayer's appearance on Public Access Poetry in 1978. Click here to start browsing. Those eager to learn more about Angel Hair and its history will want to start with the retrospective feature on the press published in Jacket #16 in 2002, and Laura Sims' 2016 Jacket2 commentary series "Reports from the Archives" also showcases a number of publications from the press.

We send our deepest sympathies to Warsh's family, his friends, and his many fans in the poetry world as they come to terms with his death.

Julie Patton: Two Short Films by Ted Roeder c. 2013

Here's a wonderful pair of videos of Julie Patton performing her poetry, which were made by Ted Roeder circa 2013. They've been on our site for a little while now, and we wanted to make sure that they got the attention they certainly deserve.

Filmed in an intimate domestic setting, traffic noises and birdsong drifting through open windows, Patton sits comfortably in a chair before the camera, reading from typescript pages, a pen poised in one hand. She performs in a fluid sprechtstimme, easing in and out of accents and personas, casually adding various musical accompaniments from time to time: she forces the knob on a toddler's toy music box, galloping through the lullabye at a hectic gait, then backs off, plinking it forward in little tonal constellations; she reaches down, offscreen, to plunk a guitar note or stroke the strings behind the nut, producing glassy little accents; her foot settles into a restless and insistent rhythm that resonates through the room. Papers flutter as pages turn, her hands trace and stretch notes through the air. She stares you down, then returns to the poem.

These remarkable clips demand and reward your attention, whether you're watching or simply listening in, the various sonic elements creating one sort of experience with their visual counterparts and a different one without. You'll find these two films here on PennSound's Julie Patton author page, which is also home to a wide variety of audio and video recordings of readings, performances, panel discussions, interviews, and more, from 1997 to the present.

Ted Greenwald, "Voice Truck" (1972)

Here's a fascinating recording from the late Ted Greenwald that we added to the site in January 2015. "Voice Truck" was assembled as part of Gordon Matta-Clark's installation Open Space (a similar contemporary work is shown at right). Our own Charles Bernstein announced the new addition in a Jacket2 commentary post, which includes this description of the recordings:

In May 1972, the artist Gordon Matta-Clark installed a dumpster in front of 98 Greene Street in Soho (Manhattan). The work was called both Open Space and Dumpster. The Dumpster was filled with construction debris and other material, formed into three corridors. For Ted Greenwald's contribution to the installation, he created a special audio work. Greenwald installed a tape recorder on the delivery truck for the Village Voice, his long-time day job. Six reels were recorded. One of the tapes, featuring the most dramatic action of the day, was stolen from the cab of the truck: in the middle of Times Square, mounted police galloped up to a subway entrance, tied their horses to the entrance, and ran down into the subway. The other five reels survived and are being made available by PennSound for the first time (one of those cassettes is listed below in two parts)."

You can listen, read more about the work, and find a link for further discussion of Open Space as well as a short video on Matta-Clark on Bernstein's J2 commentary. The recordings are also linked on our Ted Greenwald author page, where, among many other recordings, you can also listen to a March 1971 reading by Greenwald with Matta-Clark. Click here to start listening.

Lee Harwood on PennSound

We're starting off this new week by revisiting our PennSound author page for British poet and translator Lee Harwood, whose work crossed the Atlantic to find affinities with the poets of the New York School.

When Harwood passed away in the summer of 2015, he was remembered by The Argus for his dedication to both poetry and politics, serving "as a union official and as a member of the Labour Party during its most radical years." John Harvey offered up a recollection of his long friendship with Harwood, including the memory of an event in the last year of the poet's life when they both read their work with jazz accompaniment, conjuring up memories of Harwood's formative experiences in New York during the 1960s. Finally, Enitharmon Press, publishers of Harwood's most recent collection, The Orchid Boat hailed him as "not only a highly gifted and skilled poet, but a man of immense kindness and thoughtfulness."

The heart of our Lee Harwood author page is his career-spanning Rockdrill  album The Chart Table: Poems 1965-2002, which showcases twenty titles from across his career, including "As Your Eyes Are Blue," "Linen," "Animal Days," "Summer Solstice," "African Violets" and "Gorgeous." Another highlight is "Chanson Tzara," a twenty-seven minute audio composition that serves as an ambitious and fully-dimensional tribute to both Tzara and the chaotic spirit of Dada made contemporary, starting with a hectic sound collage of found samples, ring modulated radio noise, music, and text-to-speech voice generation, which eventually gives way to a touching and elegiac voiceover by Harwood that weaves together memories, translations, and the young poet's conversation with Tzara. Finally, we have Harwood's half hour set from the Shearsman Reading Series at London's Swedenborg Hall in June 2008.You can listen to all of these recordings by clicking here.

New at PennSound Cinema: 'Hanuman Presents!' dir. Vivien Bittencourt and Vincent Katz

Here's a very exciting new addition to the site to bring this hectic week to a close. Directed and produced by Vivien Bittencourt and Vincent Katz, Hanuman Presents! is a filmic tribute to Raymond Foye and Francesco Clemente's influential press of the same name, centered around a reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project that took place on May 18, 1989. 

Introduced by Foye, the film was edited by by David Dawkins and Henry Hills, and features a stellar line-up of poets spanning two generations — Gregory Corso, Elaine Equi, Bob Flanagan, Amy Gerstler, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Hell, Herbert Huncke, Katz, Taylor Mead, Cookie Mueller, Eileen Myles, Rene Ricard, David Trinidad, John Wieners — reading from their work. As Foye notes in his opening comments, all of Hanuman's living authors are included in the event. While the poets and the poems are wonderful enough on their own, the performances are cleverly accompanied by abstract images from the films of Rudy Burckhardt. Running just shy of forty-three minutes, Bittencourt and Katz's film is both a stunning time capsule and testimony to the power of Foye and Clemente's innovative press. You can start watching by clicking here.

As we did four years ago, we turn to Muriel Rukeyser for guidance in the wake of a presidential election. Just like four years ago, there's a lot of uncertainty at the present moment, but a fruitful sort that merits cautious optimism.

Poem (1:45): MP3

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

The news would pour out of various devices

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

(text via the Poetry Foundation)

PennSound Classics: "Burd Ellen," Performed by Ruth Perry

We start this week off in eighteenth century Scotland with "Burd Ellen," an exemplery ballad by Anna Gordon Brown (transcribed by her nephew, Robert Scott), which you can find on our PennSound Classics page.

In a 2011 Jacket2 commentary post, Al Filreis discusses the origins of the new recording and how it came to PennSound:

Ruth Perry of MIT [shown at right] has written a chapter for a volume being edited by Ellen Pollak, A Cultural History of Women in the Age of Enlightenment, to be published by Berg/Palgrave. This work will be part of an illustrated, six-volume Cultural History of Women being assembled with a general audience in mind. Ruth Perry's topic is Anna Gordon Brown, whose repertoire of English ballads was the first to be tapped and written down by antiquarians and literary scholars in the eighteenth century, at a time when scholars feared that the oral tradition was in danger of disappearing forever. It turns out that Ruth Perry, aside from being an eminent scholar of the ballad tradition in English, is a talented ballad singer herself. As of today, PennSound has added to its "Classics" page a studio recording of Perry performing "Burd Ellen," generally deemed to be one of the most beautiful of Brown's ballads. Ruth transcribes "Burd Ellen" in her forthcoming chapter, and discusses it as well. It is the hope of Ellen Pollak that the published book will refer to the PennSound URL so that readers can have easy permanent access to the recording, without the need of a CD inserted into the book. We at PennSound are happy to help with this project and any similar endeavor.

You can read more about the history of the piece in Filreis' J2 commentary and listen to Perry's performance here. "Burd Ellen" and many more interpretations of poetry that predates recording technology — from the ancient Greeks to Walt Whitman — can be found at PennSound Classics.