PoemTalk #159: Two by bpNichol

Last week we released episode #159 in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which addresses two poems by the legendary bpNichol: "Dada Lama" and "A Small Song That Is His." For this program, host Al Filreis assembled a virtual panel that included "Tracie Morris, Douglas Kearney, and Derek Beaulieu, from Brooklyn, Minneapolis, and Banff, respectively."

Filreis starts off his PoemTalk blog post announcing the new episode by establishing the complex provenance of both poems and recordings under discussion: 

The two pieces we discuss are “Dada Lama” of 1966 (recorded in 1969) and “A Small Song That Is His” of 1974. “Dada Lama” was published by Cavan McCarthy in an edition of three hundred copies and is available from bpNichol.ca as a PDF. A recording was included in Journeying and the Returns (Coach House Press, 1967). “A Small Song That Is His” has long been part of PennSound’s extensive bpNichol page. It has been segmented from a rare sixty-minute cassette published in 1971 by High Barnet Company in Toronto. “A Small Song” is performed on that tape along with “Love Poem for Gertrude Stein,” “Beast (for Hugo Ball),” and other bpNichol favorites. The text of “A Small Song” later appeared in Love: A Book of Remembances, published by Talonbooks in 1974.

From there, the discussion begins with Beaulieu providing some context for this work: "Derek notes of 'Dada Lama” that it's an early piece in which bpNichol's clearly working through his influences. At that point the sound poem was 'really new to the Canadian conversation.' It echoes Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara. By the time you get to 'A Small Song' there's more confidence in bpNichol’s grasp of the sound poem, such that he can begin to 'come up with a poetics of the letter.'" He continues, "'And poems are not made of feelings,' Derek reminds us. 'Poems are made of letters.'"

You can learn more about this latest program, read both poems, and listen to the podcast here. PoemTalk is a joint production of PennSound and the Poetry Foundation, aided by the generous support of Nathan and Elizabeth Leight. You can browse the full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, by clicking here.

Join KWH Fellow Gabrielle Hamilton Tonight and Tomorrow

Here's a reminder that our final Kelly Writers House Fellow of 2021 — chef, memoirist, and food writer Gabrielle Hamilton — will be joining us for two events starting this evening. On April 26th at 6:30PM EDT there will be a discussion of her life and writing, with readings from her work. Then on April 27th at 11:00AM EDT, Hamilton will return for a conversation and Q&A session 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.

Hamilton is the chef and owner of the acclaimed Prune restaurant in New York City’s East Village, and the author of Prune, the cookbook. Hamilton has won four James Beard awards over her career, perhaps most notably for her New York Times bestselling memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef (Random House, 2011). Her other James Beard awards were for Best Chef in New York City in 2011, an award for journalism in 2015 for her essay “Into the Vines” for Afar magazine, and Outstanding Chef in 2018.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Bon Appetit, Saveur, and Food & Wine. She is an Eat columnist in The New York Times Magazine contributing regularly, and most recently wrote the widely praised essay "My Restaurant Was My Life For 20 Years. Does The World Need It Anymore?" for the April 26, 2020 issue, just a month or so into the 2020 Coronavirus epidemic, about closing her restaurant and the state of the industry generally. Her writing has also been collected several times in the annually published Best Food Writing, and was a featured subject of season 4 of the PBS docuseries Mind of a Chef in 2015. Hamilton received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan and a BA from Hampshire College. She lives in New York City.

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.

In Memoriam: Al Young (1939–2021)

We start this week off with sad news: Al Young — beloved author and editor with more than twenty books to his name (including poetry collections, novels, and musical memoirs) and a former Poet Laureate of California — has passed away at the age of 81 from complications of a stroke suffered in 2019. Writing on her Stanford University blog, The Book Haven, Cynthia Haven offers this summary of Young's impressive life and career:

Young has received the American Book Award twice, for Bodies and Soul: Musical Memoirs (1982) and The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990-2000 (2002). He was also awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Whittier College in 2009. He is a recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Wallace Stegner fellowships, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN-Library of Congress Award for Short Fiction, the PEN-USA Award for Non-Fiction, the Pushcart Prize, and two New York Times Notable Book of the year citations.

We recently highlighted Young's reading at our own Kelly Writers House on November 15, 2018 here on PennSound Daily. That event starts off with a warm welcome from Al Filreis and a longer introduction by William J. Harris, who details his personal history with Young more than fifty years ago as a grad student, and observes that "like Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka, Al is a blues jazz poet." Later, he tells us that "like a blues in the heart, there's much pain and joy in the poems of Al Young," before enumerating his many publications and achievements of this "man of great craft and soul." After a long and charming salvo of opening comments, that moves from Ben Franklin to Bahrain and back again, Young delivers a fantastic reading for the appreciative audience.

You can find audio and video of this event on PennSound's Al Young author page, which is also home to a 2006 reading in San Francisco and a 1990 set at Printer's Ink in Palo Alto, CA. To listen to any of these recordings, click here. We send our deepest sympathies to all those who's lives were touched by Young's friendship and his writing.

Don't Miss KWH Fellow Gabrielle Hamilton on April 26–27

Here's a reminder that our final Kelly Writers House Fellow of 2021 — chef, memoirist, and food writer Gabrielle Hamilton — will be joining us one week from Monday. On April 26th at 6:30PM EDT there will be a discussion of her life and writing, with readings from her work. Then on April 27th at 11:00AM EDT, Hamilton will return for a conversation and Q&A session 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.

Hamilton is the chef and owner of the acclaimed Prune restaurant in New York City’s East Village, and the author of Prune, the cookbook. Hamilton has won four James Beard awards over her career, perhaps most notably for her New York Times bestselling memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef (Random House, 2011). Her other James Beard awards were for Best Chef in New York City in 2011, an award for journalism in 2015 for her essay “Into the Vines” for Afar magazine, and Outstanding Chef in 2018.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Bon Appetit, Saveur, and Food & Wine. She is an Eat columnist in The New York Times Magazine contributing regularly, and most recently wrote the widely praised essay "My Restaurant Was My Life For 20 Years. Does The World Need It Anymore?" for the April 26, 2020 issue, just a month or so into the 2020 Coronavirus epidemic, about closing her restaurant and the state of the industry generally. Her writing has also been collected several times in the annually published Best Food Writing, and was a featured subject of season 4 of the PBS docuseries Mind of a Chef in 2015. Hamilton received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan and a BA from Hampshire College. She lives in New York City.

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.

In Memoriam: Bernard Noël (1930–2021)

This week brought the sad news that French poet and author Bernard Noël had died at the age of 90. His long and fruitful career, which often saw him engage with political issues, started with the 1955 publication of Les Yeux Chimeres and would eventually see him garner high cultural honors, including le Grand Prix national de la poésie in 1992 and le Prix Robert Ganzo in 2010. He passed away this past Tuesday, April 13th.

Our PennSound author page for Noël is home to two readings spanning two decades. From November 1996, we have Noël's contribution to SUNY-Buffalo's Third Annual French Poetry Festival, where he read alongside Josée Lapeyrère and was introduced by Charles Bernstein. Then, from 2010, we have Noël's reading with Elena Rivera as part of Paris' venerable Double Change Poetry Series.

You can listen to both of the aforementioned readings by clicking here. We send our condolences to Noël's family, friends, and fans worldwide.

Newly Segmented: Maggie O'Sullivan at KWH, 2013

Thanks to the good graces of PennSound staffer Wes Matthews we start this week off with segmented audio from Maggie O'Sullivan's memorable 2013 visit to our own Kelly Writers House. Recorded on April 1st of that year, as part of the Writers Without Borders series, O'Sullivan's set included fourteen poems in total, in addition to introductory comments and an eighteen-minute Q&A session to wrap things up.

You can now download or stream to individual MP3 files for titles like "Homage to a City," "All Origins Are Lonely," "For Making Dying Illegal," "That Bread Should Be," "Jugular Parting," "Courtship of Lapwings," "Circles from Which," and "Placard of the Candle." Video footage of the complete reading is also available. 

You can start browsing the aforementioned tracks by clicking here. PennSound's Maggie O'Sullivan author page is home to a wealth of recordings — of readings, talks, interviews, albums, and more — spanning nearly thirty years.

Celebrate Baudelaire's Bicentennial with Waldrop & Bernstein's Translations

Today is the 200th birthday of beloved misanthrope Charles Baudelaire, and while there are no extant recordings of the poet that doesn't mean that we don't have some fascinating recordings for your listening pleasure.

First up, from 2006 we have Keith Waldrop reading from his translations of Paris Spleen, released that same year by Wesleyan. This session — recorded and edited by Steve Evans — consists of eleven tracks in total, including "Benediction," "The Life Before," "Don Juan in Hell" "Giantess," "Posthumous Remorse," "Invitation to the Voyage," "Spleen," and "Danse Macabre." Writing in The New York Times, Joshua Clover observed that Waldrop's translation is "by no means the first prose translation, but it's the most charming: I don't recall another version, verse or prose, that slips so easily into the comradely 'we.' Or that uses the phrase 'dropsical dame.' If such choices tilt the anxious balance of the author's sensibility, this is inevitable — and the poems slink toward us from their historical distance." 

Then, we'd be remiss if we didn't include co-Founder Charles Bernstein's well-known translation of Baudelaire's "Be Drunken." This recording [MP3] was recorded at a 2009 reading for Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room, and it's one of several versions you can hear on Bernstein's Readings page. You can read the poem, taken from Recalculating, here.

Caroline Bergvall in Conversation with David Wallace and Orchid Tierney, 2014

Today we're looking back at Caroline Bergvall's 2014 conversation with David Wallace and Orchid Tierney at our own Kelly Writers House. Recorded on November 14th of that year, this hour-long conversation has been segmented into thirteen discrete files by topic, including "Connecting the contemporary and the medieval," "Transformations in the English language," "Gender and desingularizing voices," "Fascination with the letter H and phonetics," "Anonymity and voicing," and "Apocalyptic nature of medieval times," along with the all-important "On the artistic next steps." At the time, Bergvall had just release Drift, the second of three books in a planned trilogy of works influenced by medieval sources that also includes Meddle English and Alisoun Sings. It's especially fitting to hear Bergvall and Wallace talk about the former's work since this trilogy has deep roots in her "Shorter Chaucer Tales," which was initially written at the invitation of Wallace and Charles Bernstein and first presented at the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the New Chaucer Society in New York in 2006.

You can hear much more from Bergvall's trilogy, along with earlier work like Fig and Goan Atom on her PennSound author page. Click here to start exploring.

Al Young at the Kelly Writers House, 2018

We're revisiting this wonderful reading by Al Young, recorded at our own Kelly Writers House on November 15, 2018, to start off the week. If you're not familiar with Young, he's a prolific author and editor with more than twenty books to his name (including poetry collections, novels, and musical memoirs), and a former Poet Laureate of California, hailed by no less than Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as "an educator and a man with a passion for the Arts. His remarkable talent and sense of mission to bring poetry into the lives of Californians is an inspiration." 

This seventy-minute reading starts with a welcome from Al Filreis and a longer introduction by William J. Harris, who details his personal history with Young more than fifty years ago as a grad student, and observes that "like Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka, Al is a blues jazz poet." Later, he tells us that "like a blues in the heart, there's much pain and joy in the poems of Al Young," before enumerating his many publications and achievements of this "man of great craft and soul." After a long and charming salvo of opening comments, that moves from Ben Franklin to Bahrain and back again, Young delivers a fantastic reading for the appreciative audience.

You can find audio and video of this event on PennSound's Al Young author page, which is also home to a 2006 reading in San Francisco and a 1990 set at Printer's Ink in Palo Alto, CA. To listen to any of these recordings, click here.

Happy Birthday, Anne Waldman

PennSound sends birthday greetings to the one and only Anne Waldman, who turns seventy-six today. Where does one start to appreciate the indelible influence Waldman has had upon our aesthetic community? Her prolific poetic output over the last half-century, which, while always evolving, still feels immediately and unmistakably recognizable? Her tireless work as an editor for Angel Hair and United Artists up to her present guidance of Fast Speaking Music? Her fostering presence as an early Artistic Director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project and her co-founding of Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics?

PennSound's Anne Waldman author page provides a thorough survey of the poet's long and fruitful career, provides a thorough survey, with recordings from 1969 ("Three Minutes of My Life" from the LP anthology Tape Poems) all the way up to a 2017 reading at the Dia Art Foundation. There are numerous full readings for Belladonna*, the Bowery Poetry Club, the Naropa Institute, the Sue Scott Gallery, the CUNY Graduate Center, Zinc Bar, the St. Mark's Poetry Project, and our own Kelly Writers House, along with a number of complete album releases and myriad individual tracks, talks, radio interviews, films, and more. There's no better way to celebrate this legendary poet on her birthday than to share some of her work. Click here to start browsing and listening!

PigeonSound Turns 12!

This April Fool's Day marks twelve years since our PennSound Daily announcement of our PigeonSound ™ service, which sadly never got off the ground given — among other things — the widespread rejection of pigeon post in the United States. Turntables still continue to sell healthily, flip phones are coming back, and every hipster has a vintage typewriter they paid too much money for, but the same enthusiasm could not be rekindled for avian poetry delivery, and so our fleet coos in waiting for more genteel and discerning times.

Here's our original announcement, which, in true April Fool's Day fashion, came a month early, alongside the unveiling of our Twitter account:

It's been less than 24 hours since we launched our PennSound Twitter page, and already we have 50 followers. Sign up to follow our feed to get micro-updates — from co-directors Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein, and managing editor Michael S. Hennessey — highlighting changes to the site, new additions and favorite recordings from our archives. Recent tweets have featured Bernadette Mayer & Lee Ann Brown, Tracie Morris, the PennSound Podcast series and our video page. 

Are you getting the most out of your PennSound experience? Aside from Twitter, don't forget all of the other ways in which you can keep up to date with the site through the web or your cell phone: first, there's the PennSound Daily newsfeed, which automatically delivers entries like this one to your iGoogle page, Google Reader, or favorite feed reader.PennSound is also on FaceBook, along with pages for our sister sites, including the Kelly Writers House and the Electronic Poetry Center. One additional option is the Kelly Writers House's Dial-a-Poem service: just dial 215-746-POEM (7636), and aside from news on upcoming KWH events, you can also hear a recording from a past reading, courtesy of the PennSound archives.

Finally, for those of you who feel overwhelmed by all this new technology, and liked the world a lot more before it Twittered, Tumblred and Bloggered, we're currently beta-testing yet another, more traditional means of transmission. Utilizing homing pigeons equipped with state-of-the-art (well, state-of-the-art circa WWI) wire recording technology, PigeonSound ™ (see prototype at right) will be able to deliver three minutes of telephone-quality audio up to several hundred miles from our home base at UPenn's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (our apologies to the rest of the world). Though there have been numerous unfortunate setbacks to date, we hope to have the program up and running by the first of next month with our inaugural offering: The Selected Poems of Ern Malley (read by the author himself). From sites that tweet to birds that tweet, we have all of your poetry options covered at PennSound.

For what it's worth, I still think it's funnier than Voltswagen.