Halloween Poems: A Brief Playlist

With Halloween coming up this weekend we've put together this brief list of poems celebrating the spookier side of life. With a mix of poets both old and new you're bound to find something to set your nerves on edge.

Lewis Warsh, "Halloween" MP3

Kimberly Lyons, "Halloween Parade" MP3

Aaron Kramer, "Halloween" MP3

Robert Grenier, "Measure's Halloween" MP3

Cecilia Corrigan, "Christmas Halloween is in a body bag..." MP3

Elizabeth Willis, "The Witch" MP3

John Giorno, "The Wisdom of Witches" MP3

Lee Ann Brown, "Witch Alphabet, Mistranslation of Mayakovsky, Pledge & Love" MP3

Robert Duncan, "Witch's Song" MP3

Edgar Allan Poe (read by John Richetti), "Annabel Lee" MP3

Edgar Allan Poe (read by Jerome McGann), "The Raven" MP3

Yuri Andrukhovych, "Werewolf Sutra" MP3

Matthew Rohrer, "Werewolves" MP3

Adrienne Rich, "What Ghosts Can Say" MP3

Michael McClure, "Ghost Tantra #49" MP3

Bernadette Mayer, "Spooky Action from a Distance" MP3

Bob Kaufman (read by Chuck Perrin), "All Hallows, Jack O'Lantern Weather, North of Time" MP3

Robert Duncan Reads "Passages" at the Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965

Today we're highlighting a newly-added recording of Robert Duncan reading at the historic Berkeley Poetry Conference. Recorded on July 16, 1965, this is ostensibly Duncan's reading from that day, introduced by Thomas Parkinson, and the one hour and forty minute set includes sections 1–25 of "Passages," Duncan's series that stretched across Bending the Bow (1968) Ground Work (1984), and Ground Work II (1987).

This new addition complements another recording of Duncan at the Berkeley Poetry Conference, presumable from during his seminar held July 12–16, which includes the titles"Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow," "Structure of Rime" numbers 9–11, "Apprehensions," "Osiris and Set (from Roots and Branches)," "A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar," "The Continent," and "The Multiversity." Taken together they present a fuller portrait of Duncan's influential presence at this landmark conference, though sadly we still do not have a recording of his July 13th lecture "Psyche-Myth and the Moment of Truth." Listen to both Berkeley recordings by clicking here

On PennSound's Robert Duncan author page you'll find a wide array of readings, talks, films, and more from 1951–1986, along with a 1990 memorial reading. Click here to start browsing.

Bern Porter on PennSound

Today we're highlighting our holdings from the influential author, artist, and publisher Bern Porter, perhaps best known for his pioneering work in the field of Found Poetry.

Our earliest recording is parts one and two of "For Our Friends in Germany," recorded by Mark Melnicove in 1979 at the Eternal Poetry Festival in South Harpswell, Maine. Then there's "Aspects of Modern Poetry," a 1982 WBAI program with Bob Holman that was broadcast live. It's presented in two parts that are roughly a half-hour each.

Next, we have the New Wilderness Audiographics cassette release, Found Sounds, whose two sides consist of two separate sessions, the first made on December 2, 1978 with Dick Higgins and Charlie Morrow; the second from May 9, 1981 and featuring Patricia Burgess (tenor saxophone), Glen Velez (bodhrán, cymbal, tambourine), and Morrow (brass, ocarina, and voice). 

Jumping forward to December 1989, we have a recording from "Williamson Street Night" at the Avant Garde, Museum of Temporary Art in Madison, Wisconsin with contributions by Malok, Elizabeth Was & mIEKAL aND, and our final recording is an interview with Higgins and aND from Woodland Pattern Book Center on March 16, 1990. You can browse all of the aforementioned recordings by visiting our Bern Porter author page.

Remembering Kerouac on the 52nd Anniversary of His Death

This October 21st marks 52 years since the passing of legendary Beat Generation author 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, while 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 FilreisAl 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.

Ted Enslin: Newly Segmented 1992 Reading

Our latest addition to the site is a set of segmented MP3 files for Ted Enslin's March 16, 1992 reading at Wendell's in New York City. We have PennSound staffer Wes Matthews to thank for processing this thirty-five minute recording, which consists of nine poems and an introduction. Some of the poems Enslin read at this event include "The Weather Within," "Sweet Berry," "In Triples," "Word Lovers," "The Belongings," "The New Dress," and "The Understanding."

On PennSound's Ted Enslin author page you'll find a total of ten readings from the late poet, starting with a 1985 reading at the legendary Woodland Pattern bookstore and ending with a 2009 set as part of Jonathan Skinner's Steel Bar series at Bates College. In-between there are sets from the University of Maine, Granary Books, Bowling Green State University, a radio appearance from WMCS Malchias and more. Click here to start browsing.

PoemTalk #165: Stephen Collis Wants to Punch Fascists

Today we release episode #165 in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which focuses on Stephen Collis' poem “Yes I Do Want to Punch” from A History of the Theories of Rain (Talonbooks 2021), though as host Al Filreis points out, "perhaps [it] should be called “Yes I Do Want to Punch / fascists in the face,” proceeding to its key first line." Joining Filreis for this show are panelists Pattie McCarthy, Kate Colby, and Lily Applebaum.

After sorting out details of provenance, Filreis' Jacket2 blog post announcing the new episode turns to the poem itself: "The ecopoetic turn — an urgent one, although it can also be read as casual, even patient — from the power of a counter-violent radical reaction to a sweet comic catalogue of warblers occurs right at the beginning of the poem. One has no time to get one’s readerly bearings." "Typically," he continues, "we have time to ask, What kind of poem is this? What is its tone? What is the subject matter? 'But first' signals a rapid, mind-clearing, nearly immediate volta."

You can listen to this latest program and read more about the show 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.

Henry Hills, 'Plagiarism' (1981)

Today we're revisiting a remastered film from Henry Hills that was uploaded to the archive about a year ago. Filmed in 1981, Plagiarism features Hannah Weiner, Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, and James Sherry reading from Weiner's notebooks that would eventually be published as Little Books/Indians (Roof Books, 1980). Hills offers these notes on the film:

Begins jokingly proclaiming, "I'll make my Ernie Gehr film," a major preoccupation of my generation in the late 70s/early 80s, & then this very raw other thing proceeds to unfold, raw because I only had enough money (a loan from Abby Child) to do 4 shoots never having done sync & using outdated film stock from Rafik & an unfamiliar, undependable camera & trying to keep everything together & everything going wrong, yet determined to make concrete the ideas I had been abstractly developing over several years with whatever I got back from the lab no matter & so abandoning all caution to open a new area, I decided who could possibly talk better than poets? Edited in Times Square.

Fans of Hill's Money (1985) will recognize many familiar techniques at play here, with rapid-fire cuts creating a dense, rhythmic collage of sights and sounds punctuated by pregnant pauses, bursts of noise, and enigmatic, orphaned fragments of speech. It would be a mistake to judge it solely in its relationship to Money, however, since the two films differ radically in scope and spirit: while the latter is an expansive survey of the city and its scenes (including poets, dancers, and musicians), the feel here is much more intimate, between the smaller cast and the more limited visual vocabulary. At the same time it's fascinating to see hallmarks of Hills' style in a raw early state, particularly given the influence of the considerable technical challenges that Hills enumerates above. You can watch Plagiarism by clicking here.

Happy Birthday, Amiri Baraka

Today would have been the eighty-seventh birthday of legendary poet and provocateur Amiri Baraka, born LeRoi Jones in Newark, NJ in 1934. That means that it's a great time to revisit the recordings housed on our Amiri Baraka author page, starting with the most recent addition, a 1978 reading with Diane Di Prima at the Naropa Institute.

The earliest two recordings found there — the first from the Asilomar Negro Writers Conference in Pacific Grove, CA, which took place in early August 1964; the second from March 1965 at San Francisco State University — are particularly interesting because they show the author in flux, still LeRoi Jones but quickly being pushed by current events (most notably the assassination of Malcolm X in early 1965) towards his rebirth in Harlem. These sets include a number of notable poems, including "A Poem for Speculative Hipsters," "Short Speech to My Friends," "Black Dada Nihilismus," "A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand," "Kenyatta Listening to Mozart," and "Black Bourgeoisie."

We take a massive leap forward to a pair of Buffalo recordings from the archives of Robert Creeley: a short set from 1978 accompanying a much larger reading by Ed Dorn at the Just Buffalo Literary Center, and a two-part performance from 1985 at the Allentown Community Center. We owe Chris Funkhouser a debt of gratitude for several full-length recordings — from the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2000, a home recording for Kenning in 2001, the Newark Public Library in 2002, and the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival, also in 2002 — along with many miscellaneous recordings presented without date or location information. Our final major recording is a 2007 appearance on Leonard Schwartz's Cross Cultural Poetics program, where he read his work and discussed a number of topics including the recent controversy over "Somebody Blew Up America." There are also, as mentioned before, a healthy collection of miscellaneous audio recordings, joined by a fine selection of video clips made by Optic Nerve. Finally, Baraka's work has served as the subject for not one, but two episodes in the PoemTalk Podcast Series: episode #20 on "Kenyatta Listening to Mozart" and episode #126 on "Something in the Way of Things (In Town)." Click here to access all of the aforementioned recordings and more.

Davy Knittle: New Author Page

Our latest PennSound author page is for Davy Knittle, a recent UPenn Ph.D. graduate and an integral part of the Kelly Writers House community. 

That centrality is evident from the second you look over the listings on his page, which begins with four episodes of PoemTalk plus a PennSound Podcast interview with Rachel Levitsky and continues with the groundbreaking City Planning Poetics reading series that Knittle curated at KWH from 2016–2019. Other KWH-centric events include "A New Disability Poetics Symposium" from 2018 and the 2017 retrospective on poet Michael Gizzi.

Other recordings include a 2018 Segue Series reading at Zinc Bar, the MLA Offsite Reading from 2017, and a 2016 appearance as part of Housework at Chapterhouse. Finally, there's a 2020 reading and group discussion of Jerome Rothenberg's poem "A poem of fears, in seven installments, for David Antin" that was recorded at KWH for ModPo.

Click here to start listening to all of the aforementioned tracks on PennSound's new Davy Knittle author page.