Don't Miss Hilton Als' KWH Fellows Events Tonight and Tomorrow

Here's one final invitation to join us tonight and tomorrow for Hilton Als' events as part of this year's Kelly Writers House Fellows program. Tonight, Monday March 29 at 6:30 PM EDT, we will host Hilton for a reading of his work followed by a brief Q&A session. Tomorrow, Tuesday, March 30 at 11:00 AM EDT, Hilton will return for an interview and conversation moderated by Al Filreis. Both events will stream live over the KWH YouTube channel and the Q&A will be archived for later viewing afterwards. RSVPs are not required, but we look forward to you joining us.

Als began contributing to The New Yorker in 1989, writing pieces for "The Talk of the Town," and later became a staff writer in 1994, theatre critic in 2002, and lead theater critic in 2012. His reviews are not simply reviews; they are provocative contributions to the discourse on theatre, race, class, sexuality, and identity in America. He is currently working on a new book titled I Don’t Remember (Penguin, early 2021), a book length essay on his experiences in AIDS era New York. Before coming to The New Yorker, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. Als edited the catalogue for the 1994-95 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art." His first book, The Women, was published in 1996. His book, White Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014 and winner of the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Non-fiction, discusses various narratives of race and gender. He wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Early Stories of Truman Capote, and was guest editor for the 2018 Best American Essays. He wrote Andy Warhol: The Series, a book containing two previously unpublished television scripts for a series on the life of Andy Warhol. His in-progress debut play, Lives of the Performers, has been performed at Carolina Performing Arts and LAXART in Los Angeles.

In 1997, the New York Association of Black Journalists awarded Als first prize in both Magazine Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment. He was awarded a Guggenheim for creative writing in 2000 and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2002–03. In 2016, he received the Lambda Literary’s Trustee Award for Excellence in Literature, as well as the Windham Campbell Prize for Nonfiction. In 2017 Als won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and in 2018 the Langston Hughes Medal. In 2016, his debut art show "One Man Show: Holly, Candy, Bobbie and the Rest" opened at the Artist’s Institute. He has curated "Alice Neel, Uptown" and "God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin" at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York City. He is also curating three successive solo exhibitions at the Yale Centre for British Art, the first exhibit in 2018 featured Celia Paul, the second, in 2019, features Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, the third will feature Paul Doig. In 2019 Als partnered with WNYC's Greene Space on a limited podcast series titled The Way We Live Now: Hilton Als and America’s Poets. He recently contributed an essay to Moonlight, a limited edition book about the film of the same name. Als is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan, and Smith College. He lives in New York City.

New at the EPC: Peter Seaton

The latest addition the our sister site, the Electronic Poetry Center, is a brand new author page for poet Peter Seaton. Our own Charles Bernstein recently announced the new page and shared these observations on the occasion of its launch:

Peter Seaton (1944–2010) was a gloriously radical poet, one of the stellar writers working in New York in the 1970s and 1980s. Featured in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, ROOF, Tuumba, ++. For some years, Steve McLaughlin has been working on a collection of his "complete" work — everything Seaton published, with reproductions from his  magazine and anthology appearances, plus a substantial file of holographs. While his papers went to UCSD's Archive for New Poetry, and his three books are available at Eclipse (and linked here), this EPC page gives you access to a trove of significant works not included in his books or otherwise available, plus biographical information, a bibliography, and a few things written about or for Seaton. I am very grateful to Steve for this great job he has done on this digital edition. As always at EPC: free and without advertising.

We couldn't agree more with Charles' assessment: this is both a labor of love and an astounding resource for well-established fans of Seaton's work along with those encountering him for the first time. If you'd like to hear some of these poems in performance, PennSound's Peter Seaton author page is home to a half-dozen vintage recordings from Segue Series events at the Ear Inn, taking place in December 1978, April and September 1971, July 1982, December 1984 and February 1987 — the first and last of which have been segmented into individual tracks. There's also a 1980 home recording of The Son Master and a pair of recordings from 1985: a reading at the Segue Foundation offices and an interview with filmmaker and friend Henry Hills. Click here to start listening, and here to browse Seaton's work at the EPC.

Congratulations to PEN Career Achievement Award Winner Pierre Joris

Yesterday, PEN America announced its 2021 career achievement award winners, including the PEN/Manheim Award for Translation, which went to Pierre Joris.

The judges' citation begins by noting Joris' unique position within the field: "In a landscape of literary translation that is still beholden to linguistic and national silos, Pierre Joris's work has long been and remains essential in mapping currents and countercurrents of global modernity. As literary translation struggles to confront imperial histories of violence and erasure, and to engage with and encourage voices of cultural and linguistic differences, Joris has blazed a path for generations of emerging translators to follow." They continue: 

Having spent over half a century moving between Europe, the U.S., and North Africa, and working across multiple languages, Joris has built a stunning and unparalleled career as a translator, poet, essayist, editor, critic, performer, and academic. Indeed, Joris's personal trajectory has fueled his articulation of a "nomad poetics" that cannot be contained by national or linguistic boundaries, one in which Anglo-European perspectives are enriched and complicated by those of the Global South, and where translation models the potentialities and necessary complexities of cross-cultural contact.

They conclude by singling out Joris' work on Paul Celan and listing some of the iconic authors he's translated into English (Adonis, Jean-Pierre Duprey, Safaa Fathy, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Pablo Picasso, Rainer Maria Rilke, Kurt Schwitters, Habib Tengour, and Tristan Tzara) and French (Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Sam Shepard, and Pete Townshend). You can read more here. 

If you'd like to engage with some of Joris' award-winning work, we gladly point you in the direction of his PennSound author page, which is home to dozens of recordings spanning the past twenty-five years, including readings, talks, interviews, and podcast appearances. We send our heartiest congratulations to Joris for this great honor.

In Memoriam: Robert Hershon (1936–2021)

We start this week off with sad news: Robert Hershon, poet and co-founder of Hanging Loose Press and Hanging Loose, has died at the age of 84. 

Hanging Loose is rightly celebrated for its longevity, having published a whopping 111 issues since its launch 55 years ago, as well as its dedication to publishing emerging writers, including high school students. The press is likewise beloved for its prescience in recognizing voices that would go on to greatly shape the field of contemporary poetry. As they note on their website:

The editors are proud of having published many first books, including the first full collections by Sherman Alexie, Kimiko Hahn, D. Nurkse, Jack Agüeros, Cathy Park Hong, Eula Biss, Joanna Fuhrman, Hayan Charara, Maggie Nelson, Indran Amirthanayagam, R. Zamora Linmark, and Beth Bosworth, among others. Some of the other writers published by HL are Harvey Shapiro, Elizabeth Swados, Joan Larkin, Gary Lenhart, Jack Anderson, Maureen Owen, Donna Brook, Ha Jin, Charles North, Paul Violi, Tony Towle, William Corbett, Ed Friedman, and Jayne Cortez.

Over the years, the journal and press would receive a number of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Poetry Fund. Among more than 200 books published by the press, you'll find recipients of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Prize, The Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize, along with other notable accolades.

Of course, it would be a mistake to overlook Herson's own creative output, as John Yau recognizes with the title of a recent tribute in Hyperallergic: "Did You Know That Robert Hershon Is a Major Poet?" Therein, Yau praises Hershon for his plainspoken tone and subtle experimentalism, along with his candor, observing, "I cannot think of another contemporary poet who is willing to expose his vulnerability, worry, and pettiness through the lens of humor."

Hershon was a guest of the Kelly Writers House on October 11, 2006, where he read alongside poet Donna Brook. His half-hour set from that evening consisted of eleven poems in total, including "Big Blue Chair," "Calls from the Outside World," "Mysteries of Marriage," "International Incidents," and "Three Photographs Taken Around the House at the Request of Anselm Berrigan and Tom Devaney for a Mysterious Future Project." You can listen to that reading here. We send our deepest sympathies to Hershon's family, friends, and fans, as well as the great many readers whose lives have been touched by the work of Hanging Loose and its press.

Fred Wah: "Standing in the Doorway - the Hyphen in Chinese-Canadian Poetry"

Here's a wonderful new addition from Fred Wah to wrap up our week. "Standing in the Doorway - the Hyphen in Chinese-Canadian Poetry" is a lecture delivered by Wah at the Richmond Public Library in British Columbia, on March 25, 2013. We're able to present both audio and video (via YouTube) of this talk, along with a written summary prepared by Husnaa Hashim.

Wah begins by discussing his own ethnic identity and his grandfather's emigration from China to Canada followed by "the cultural inability to write about race in the late 1950s–early 1960s after he (himself) arrived at the University of British Columbia." From there he addresses "the introduction of bilingualism and biculturalism in Canada in the 1970s," via Joy Kogawa's novel Obasan (set in Japanese-Canadian internment camps), which "allowed for conversations about race to begin in English departments in Canada," as well as "the chronology of national racial conversations and redress (for internment)." Wah shares that he was pleasantly surprised "about race suddenly becoming discussable in English literary spaces in comparison to the conversations he had been having with white colleagues (mostly on class)," then goes on discuss several highlights in that growing discourse from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, including the work of the Vancouver-based Chinese-Canadian Writers Workshop (later the Asian-Canadian Writers Workshop), Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe, Jim Wong-Chu and Bennett Lee's anthology Many-Mouthed Birds: Contemporary Writing by Chinese Canadians, and Rita Wong's Monkey Puzzle, along with contemporaneous cultural developments.

As he nears the end of his talk, Wah explains its metaphoric title through a poem from his Diamond Grill reflecting upon the importance of hybridity to his poetics: "If I stand in the doorway and don’t go through, I can see both rooms.” Thus the hyphen, representative of his hybrid identity, serves a similar purpose, allowing multiple perspectives. He shares more of his poetry and answers questions about his writing process along with culture and memories. You can listen (or watch) this fascinating talk by clicking here.

Join us for Kelly Writers House Fellow Hilton Als, March 29–30

The 22nd annual Kelly Writers House Fellows program continues this month with a two-day visit from Hilton Als on March 29th and 30th. 

Als began contributing to The New Yorker in 1989, writing pieces for "The Talk of the Town," and later became a staff writer in 1994, theatre critic in 2002, and lead theater critic in 2012. His reviews are not simply reviews; they are provocative contributions to the discourse on theatre, race, class, sexuality, and identity in America. He is currently working on a new book titled I Don’t Remember (Penguin, early 2021), a book length essay on his experiences in AIDS era New York. Before coming to The New Yorker, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. Als edited the catalogue for the 1994-95 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art." His first book, The Women, was published in 1996. His book, White Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014 and winner of the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Non-fiction, discusses various narratives of race and gender. He wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Early Stories of Truman Capote, and was guest editor for the 2018 Best American Essays. He wrote Andy Warhol: The Series, a book containing two previously unpublished television scripts for a series on the life of Andy Warhol. His in-progress debut play, Lives of the Performers, has been performed at Carolina Performing Arts and LAXART in Los Angeles.

In 1997, the New York Association of Black Journalists awarded Als first prize in both Magazine Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment. He was awarded a Guggenheim for creative writing in 2000 and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2002–03. In 2016, he received the Lambda Literary’s Trustee Award for Excellence in Literature, as well as the Windham Campbell Prize for Nonfiction. In 2017 Als won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and in 2018 the Langston Hughes Medal. In 2016, his debut art show "One Man Show: Holly, Candy, Bobbie and the Rest" opened at the Artist’s Institute. He has curated "Alice Neel, Uptown" and "God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin" at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York City. He is also curating three successive solo exhibitions at the Yale Centre for British Art, the first exhibit in 2018 featured Celia Paul, the second, in 2019, features Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, the third will feature Paul Doig. In 2019 Als partnered with WNYC's Greene Space on a limited podcast series titled The Way We Live Now: Hilton Als and America’s Poets. He recently contributed an essay to Moonlight, a limited edition book about the film of the same name. Als is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan, and Smith College. He lives in New York City.

You can RSVP for one or all of this year's events by dropping us a line at whfellow@writing.upenn.edu.

Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant Garde, 1910-1917

Here's a deep-cut from the PennSound archives to start out the week in grand fashion: "Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant Garde, 1910-1917," a groundbreaking exhibition that ran through the spring of 2009 at Los Angeles' Getty Center.

PennSound Senior Editor Danny Snelson, who organized this multimedia resource, provides an introduction for our listeners:

PennSound has been working in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute to present this remarkable collection of historical and contemporary transrational poetry, centered on an exhibition of Russian Futurist book art held at the Getty earlier this year. The exhibition's title — "Tango with Cows" — taken from a poem by Vasily Kamensky, points to the sense of hilarity and irreverence you'll hear in these startlingly original 'beyonsense' poems. Our page of recordings compliments the extensive media collected online at the Getty's website. There, you can find programs, essays, video footage, full scans of the Futurist books, and even a fully interactive slideshow of key books from the exhibition! 

Our archive of sound recordings comes in two parts: first, Tango with Cows features Oleg Minin's bilingual readings of essential poems found in book art projects from poets such as Alexei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Pavel Filonov. By reading from the Russian before the accompanying English translation, Minin offers listeners the pleasure of sound before recognition — an ideal situation for the revolutionary poetics on display here.

However, the real highlight of this great resource sounds from the second half: we're pleased to present high quality recordings of Explodity: An Evening of Transrational Sound Poetry held on February 4th, 2009. This blockbuster reading casts the zaum' poetries of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh in the parallel light of historic and contemporary sound poetry, as presented by Christian Bök and Steve McCaffery. After virtuoso performances of English translations of historical Russian poems, Bok and McCaffery present personal selections from the history of sound poetry alongside their own original compositions. On the short list are works by Aristophanes, Raoul Hausmann, F.T. Marinetti, Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, and R. Murray Schafer, just to mention a few.

You can hear more work in this vein on PennSound pages for Christian Bök, Steve McCaffery, Jaap Blonk, Tomomi Adachi, and The Four Horsemen. Additionally, we'd like to suggest our historic pages for F.T. Marinetti and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Our partner UbuWeb offers a huge index of this exciting brach of poetry; we suggest in particular that you visit a companion set of Russian Futurist recordings from the GLM Collection.

Special thanks to Nancy Perloff and everyone at the Getty Research Institute for making this resource possible. We hope these recordings lend the same vision of language that mystified Benedikt Livshits in 1911 (from Nancy Perloff, Curator's Essay): "I saw language come alive with my very own eyes. The breath of the primordial word wafted into my face."

You can start browsing our PennSound page for this event by clicking here.

Happy 99th Birthday, Jack Kerouac!

We'll close this week out by marking what would have been the 99th birthday of Beat Generation icon Jack Kerouac (1922–1969). 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 few noteworthy recordings of others reading him within our archives.

Of course, you'll recall that we only recently announced Vivien Bittencourt and Vincent Katz's short film documenting a 1988 tribute reading of Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, which took place at the Knitting Factory. This stunning half-hour video includes live performances by Barbara Barg, Charles Bernstein, Lee Ann Brown, Maggie Dubris, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Hell, Bob Holman, Lita Hornick, Vicki Hudspith, Vincent Katz, Rochelle Kraut, Gerard Malanga, Judith Malina, Eileen Myles, Simon Pettet, Hanon Reznikov, Bob Rosenthal, Jerome Rothenberg, Tom Savage, Elio Schneeman, Michael Scholnick, Carl Solomon, Steven Taylor, David Trinidad, Lewis Warsh, Hal Willner, and Nina Zivancevic, with Mark Ettinger, Dennis Mitcheltree, Charlie Morrow, and Samir Safwat, among others, providing live, improvised accompaniment. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure also appear in brief interview segments. You can watch here.

Then we have another old favorite from the archives: Clark Coolidge and Michael Gizzi reading Kerouac's iconic spontaneous prose piece, "Old Angel Midnight," taken from a 1994 recording session at the West Stockbridge, MA home studio of Steve Schwartz. 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, and might also want to check out PoemTalk #124, wherein Coolidge and Filreis, along with J.C. Cloutier and Michelle Taransky, discuss their recording of the poem.

PoemTalk #158: on Bob Kaufman's "Suicide"

Today we released the latest episode (#158) in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which is focused on Bob Kaufman's poem "Suicide," as taken from Billy Woodberry’s docu-film on Kaufman, And When I Die I Won’t Stay Dead. For this program, host Al Filreis assembled an exciting panel via Zoom that included (from left to right) Maria Damon, Christopher Stackhouse, and Devorah Major.

"'Suicide' is just three short stanzas, but our group found a great deal to discuss — about the lines and phrases of this complex expression of survival, and about the many ways this poem teaches us about Bob Kaufman's modes of art and life overall," Filreis notes early on in his PoemTalk blog post announcing the new episode. "Two dealers open the scene, named obliquely yet there’s no doubt about them. They are what’s extant after the big botch of the US, which can only be what Kaufman means by 'the largest colony / of the new world,'" he continues, before asking, "Who could have predicted that it would all come down to this — to these dealers, but also to the particular way Vinne gets around and moves around?"

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

In Memoriam: Paul Kelly

Dear friends:

It's with deep sorrow that I share the terribly sad news that Paul Kelly has passed away. For those of us in the Kelly Writers House community especially, it is nearly inconceivable that a person of such vitality, such dynamic intellectual energy and enthusiasm — whose many (and more or less constant) venturesome ideas sought to make the Writers House better and more responsive as a space and an organization — could possibly now be still. The cause of death was COVID-19.

Paul didn't quite invent the Writers House. When he first saw it, its community was already, in a nascent way, in action. In 1996 he was working with Penn administrators and fund-raisers to find a new university project getting started in an interesting space. He wanted to get behind something that might potentially have a positive effect on people across campus, that might bring together undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, staff, alumni, and those from the various schools and degree programs. He walked into the unrenovated 1851 house, heard the sounds of a free jazz group playing in the Arts Cafe, saw people talking about poetry on the old green couch in the living room, smelled the smells of cookies baking in the kitchen, observed that the place needed some serious fixing up, and within an hour had pledged to make a gift that would transform the house. Enabled by Paul's instinct and generosity, major reconstruction of the Tudor-style cottage took place in 1997, maintaining its original Samuel Sloan design and idea but updating everything. The renovation set aside space for students to do their creative work, and made way for the networked wiring that would soon make the Writers House one of the first spaces on campus that would make its events available online.

When the house grandly re-opened in December 1997, with an official relaunch celebration attended by Paul, his wife Nancy, and his family, and by Writers House-affiliated students, community writers, faculty, staff — including deans and president and provost — it was declared, to huge applause and cheers, that the project would henceforth be called the Kelly Writers House (in honor of Paul's parents, Thomas and Rita). From that day forward, Paul's generosity to Penn, which has included many other areas of support as well — undergraduate financial aid, athletics, the School of Arts & Sciences, the Fine Arts program in the School of Design — would be known and acknowledged by every one of the thousands of people who walked into the house at 3805 Locust, joined its events, drank its coffee, read books on its inviting couches, or met a writer they admired.

Paul never stopped working with the people of the Writers House to come up with new ideas, ways of broadening the reach of its programs, establishing partnerships that would bring in more exciting writers and artists. He especially supported the development of webcasts, the archive of recordings of seminars and workshops made available online, the studio space for even more digital production, and eventually regular livestreaming. The plaque honoring his original gift quotes Emily Dickinson, her idea that has become anthemic at the house, the gist of which is this: to dwell in the house of possibility depends on occupying oneself with "this," with whatever you are doing in this space now.

In 1999 Paul proposed the creation of an annual series of three major programs, connected to an undergraduate course to be held inside the Writers House, that would feature extended visits by eminent writers. This became the Kelly Writers House Fellows program, which Paul and Nancy have funded with a generous grant each year for twenty-two years. The "Fellows" program has enabled students to learn directly from — and to spend hours of informal time with — writers such as Susan Sontag, Grace Paley, June Jordan, Robert Creeley, Tony Kushner, John Edgar Wideman, John Barth, Joyce Carol Oates, Jamaica Kincaid, Joan Didion, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Rosanne Cash, and others. The Fellows program is about creating surprising intellectual intimacy, a sense of connectedness aligned with the feel of the old house itself, between students and writers so famous that the students could not have imagined the freedom to ask them difficult questions and receive thoughtful, honest answers. Kelly Writers House Fellows has been an experiment in creating a learning community that starts with the student and extends to an eminence, rather than the other way around. This idea is vintage Paul Kelly.

Paul loved the idea that students associated with the Writers House kept coming up with new ideas for magazines, writing projects, marathon readings, names of writers and artists they wanted to invite, letterpress and other artisanal projects, plans for combining travel and writing and research. So he charged me as Faculty Director with providing grants to support such ingenuity and creativity, and he made donations to establish the Faculty Director's Discretionary Fund.

When asked to help the Writers House expanded physically, with a two-story addition to be built on the east side of the back of the house, Paul and Nancy Kelly hesitated not even for a moment. They supported this project and it is named for their children and many grandchildren, "the Kelly Family Annex."

Paul, who graduated from Penn in 1962, loved the university. He served on its Board of Trustees for many years, and was for some years a member of the School of Arts & Sciences Board of Overseers. He was active with the Athletics Department and the Huntsman Program.

His creative ideas about how to secure matching funds in support of undergraduate financial aid are credited with helping to cause a huge resurgence of funds aiding students whose families could not otherwise afford tuition.

Paul was my friend. We talked several times each month for nearly all of the twenty-five years the Writers House has existed. He visited the Writers House often and we met up in New York. The conversations always flowed with his ideas — some of them quite way out, true thought bubbles — and he always listened hard to those ideas which I conveyed from students and staff colleagues back home at his beloved 3805 Locust. His support was incessant. It was never habitual, but always hopeful and faithful. I knew he utterly believed in what we were doing, especially in reaching students whose learning styles did not flourish through the conventional curriculum. He once called the Writers House "the ultimate home for the extra-curriculum." He established an endowed fund to support a chaired professorship for a faculty member whose work is devoted to the idea of such creative learning. With a great sense of honor, and deep gratitude, I have held the Kelly Family Professorship since its inception.

On behalf of the members of the Kelly Writers House Advisory Board (of which Paul was its Chairperson), the many members of the Writers House "hub" or Planning Committee, the staff of the Writers House and of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, the many writers and artists who have benefited from Paul's support, and the thousands of admirers of writers and of the writing life who have joined us for gatherings inside the cozy confines of 3805 Locust Walk — I offer heartfelt condolences to Nancy and all the Kelly family, and extend the warmest invitation to come back before too long to hang out with us in the sweetly capacious House that Paul Built.

With sadness,

Al Filreis

Keep Up With PoemTalk, No Matter How You Stream

After 14 years and 157 episodes, you're probably already well-acquainted with the PoemTalk podcast series, but were you aware of all the different ways you can access it and find out about the latest episodes? Of course, you can always find PoemTalk through Jacket2 and on The Poetry Foundation's website, but you can also subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Simplecast. Regardless of how you follow the series, we hope you'll find that it's a wonderful way to fit a little poetry into your life during your commute, your workout, or while you're doing the dishes.

Don't forget that PoemTalk is just one of the podcasts produced by our affiliated entities here at UPenn's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. There's also the PennSound Podcast series and the more sporadic Kelly Writers House podcast, as well as Steve McLaughlin's Into the Field series (which ran from 2011–2016) and  Laynie Browne's limited series, Poetry at the Rail Park (published last June). You can keep up with the latest episodes from each on Jacket2's Podcast landing page.

Breaking Through: Taylor Johnson, 2020

We're wrapping this week up with the latest installment in the Breaking Through series, a relatively-new and very promising reading series at our own Kelly Writers House, curated and Simone White features poets on the verge of publishing their first books for conversations about poetics, influence, and the future of poetry.

This event, co-hosted via Zoom by White and Sofia DuRose on November 17th of last year, presents the work of Washington, DC's Taylor Johnson, and is framed in a very interesting fashion. White and DuRose, who were currently working on a review of Johnson's just-released debut, Inheritance (Alice James Books), present the evening's conversation as an extension of that collaboration.

You'll find this event on PennSound's Breaking Through series page, along with the four previous readings and discussions that have taken place: Laura Henriksen and Benjamin Krusling from November 2018, A. H. Jerriod Avant and Adjua Greaves from April 2019, Shiv Kotecha and Bianca Rae Messinger from November 2019, and Peter BD and Rachel James from January 2020. Video and audio are available for the majority of these readings. 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.

"North of Invention" at the Kelly Writers House, 2011

It's been ten years since we hosted North of Invention: A Canadian Poetry Festival, co-organized by Sarah Dowling and Charles Bernstein, at the Kelly Writers House. Extensive audio and video documentation from the multi-day event is available on PennSound's homepage for the event. Here's a description of the festival's aims, taken from its event page on the KWH website:

North of Invention presents 10 Canadian poets working at the cutting edge of contemporary poetic practice, bringing them first to the Kelly Writers House, then to Poets House in New York City for two days of readings, presentations and discussion in each location. Celebrating the breadth and complexity of poetic experimentation in Canada, North of Invention features emerging and established poets working across multiple traditions, and represents nearly fifty years of experimental writing. North of Invention aims to initiate a new dialogue in North American poetics, addressing the hotly debated areas of "innovation" and "conceptual writing," the history of sound poetry and contemporary performance, multilingualism and translation, and connections to activism.

Poets involved in the festival include Lisa Robertson, M. NourbeSe Philip, Stephen Collis, Christian Bök, Nicole Brossard, Adeena Karasick, a.rawlings, Jeff Derksen Fred Wah and Jordan Scott, and the full schedule includes both readings and presentations from all participants. You can start exploring this wonderful resource by clicking here. A companion feature of the same name, edited by Dowling, was published by Jacket2 in 2013, and is likewise well worth your time.

Remembering John Wieners

This March 1st marks nineteen years since the passing of beloved poet John Wieners, whose long writing life took him from Black Mountain to San Francisco to New York City to Buffalo, and finally to Boston, where he spent the last three decades of his life. It' alsos a great opportunity for our listeners to reacquaint themselves with the recordings available on PennSound's Wieners author page.

Our earliest recordings include a trio from 1965: Wieners' July 14th set at the Berkeley Poetry Conference, another July reading possibly in Berkeley, and a brief recording from SUNY-Buffalo that September. Next, we have a October 1966 event from the 92nd Street Y's Unterberg Poetry Center and a pair of long recordings made at SUNY-Buffalo in 1967 and at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in 1968. Following that we have a wonderful conversation with Walter Lowenfels, Lillian Lowenfels, and Alan DeLoach in March 1969 and two recordings from Boston in 1972: two days' worth of visits to Robert Creeley's ENG-1670 class at Harvard and a short appearance on WBCN-FM.

Jumping forward to the 1980s, there are two tracks from The World Record: Readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, 1969-1980 and three poems recorded at Brooklyn College in 1988. The next decade starts in grand fashion with a pair of recordings from the spring of 1990: the first in San Francisco, followed by an appearance at the St. Mark's Poetry Project. There's another Poetry Project set from the fall of 1996, and an October 1999 reading at the Guggenheim to round things out, along with the recently-added film Hanuman Presents!

I also happily recommend that interested listeners check out the Wieners component of Jim Dunn and Kevin Gallagher's ambitious Jacket2 feature, Mass: Raw Poetry from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts," which we published in December 2012, as well as Wieners' page at the Electronic Poetry Center.