Adonis on PennSound

This week closes with us shining a spotlight on our author page for Syrian poet, essayist and translator Adonis, for which we owe our gratitude to Pierre Joris (shown at left with the poet), who provided the recording to us back in 2013. 

This Poets House-sponsored reading took place on March 7, 2013 as part of that year's AWP conference in Boston. For this event, Adonis was joined by Khaled Mattawa, whose Adonis: Selected Poems was shortlisted for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize, and after the reading, the two engaged in a lively discussion about poetry and contemporary issues.

Unfortunately, in the intervening years, we have not had the opportunity to add more recordings to our Adonis author page, but this modest gem is still well worth sharing with our listeners. 

Hilda Morley on PennSound

Our author page for Black Mountain-associated poet Hilda Morley (1916–1998) is admittedly a scant archive, containing just one three minute recording — the poem "Provence" from a March 15, 1992 reading at New York's Alice Tully Hall — but as PennSound co-director Charles Bernstein notes, "it is the only recording of Morley now available."

In her New York Times obituary, Wolfgang Saxon observed that "Ms. Morley published five books of poetry in which she articulated emotions and feelings in free verse, but a type of verse as measured as dance or music. She was a 'master of that ability,' Robert Creeley, a fellow poet, said." He continues: "She wrote that her poetry was shaped by the visions of Abstract Expressionism, which can create metamorphoses. Artists like Klee and Picasso, she said, gave her the means to create word canvases depicting the world around her."

We're grateful to be able to share this document of Morley's life, no matter how brief, and thank Patrick Beurard-Valdoye and Austin Clarkson for their assistance in making this recording available.

Robert Ashley: Music with Roots in the Aether (1974)

We start this new week off by taking a look at one of the most remarkable series housed on our PennSound Cinema page: Robert Ashley's seven-part "opera for television," Music with Roots in the Aether. We've hosted a copy of this series for many years, and replaced our original lo-fi copies with new remasters in January 2011. Here's how Ashley describes his ambitious project, first released in 1974:

Music with Roots in the Aether is a music-theater piece in color video. It is the final version of an idea that I had thought about and worked on for a few years: to make a very large collaborative piece with other composers whose music I like. The collaborative aspect of Music with Roots in the Aether is in the theater of the interviews, at least primarily, and I am indebted to all of the composers involved for their generosity in allowing me to portray them in this manner.

The piece turns out to be, in addition, a large-scale documentation of an important stylistic that came into American concert music in about 1960. These composers of the "post-serial" / "post-Cage" movement have all made international reputations for the originality of their work and for their contributions to this area of musical compositions.

The style of the video presentation comes from the need I felt to find a new way to show music being performed. The idea of the visual style of Music with Roots in the Aether is plain: to watch as closely as possible the action of the performers and to not "cut" the seen material in any way — that is, to not editorialize on the time domain of the music through arbitrary space-time substitutions.

The visual style for showing the music being made became the "theater" (the stage) for the interviews, and the portraits of the composers were designed to happen in that style.

The seven installments focus on the work of (in order) David Behrman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and Ashley himself — representing the vanguard of contemporary composers — and include both lengthy interviews as well as performances. We've also included a link to a 2004 essay in The Brooklyn Rail by Kenneth Goldsmith: in it, Goldsmith appraises Music with Roots in the Aether as "a great snapshot of the period," and observes that "we're lucky that someone went through all this trouble to preserve a very valuable piece of musical history."

PoemTalk #171: Two Poems by Eugene Ostashevsky

Today we launched episode #171 in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which takes as its subject a pair of poems by Eugene Ostashevsky from his 2000 collection, The Unraveller Seasons: "Language" and "The Anatomy of Monotony." For this program, host Al Filreis was joined by a panel that included Matvei Yankelevich, Ahmad Almallah, and Kevin Platt.

"Our discussion takes us to the great Ostashevskyan topics" writes Filreis in his Jacket2 blog post announcing the new episode: "knowledge otherwise somehow alienated; language that embodies or transliterates a kind of violence; the (sound) differences between knowing and saying no (and similarities); his sincere (and doubtless Russian Absurdist-influenced) plea to 'teach us love / teach us love / teach us love / teach us love' even though 'We are wholly unfamiliar with it."" Filreis also offers this contextualization for the recording date of this new episode: "Because the episode was recorded before the February 24, 2022, Russian military invasion into Ukraine, listeners will have to reckon for themselves the many places in our conversation when we would no doubt have commented on the war (continuing at the time of the podcast's release) and on the role of the avant-garde Russian American poet in relation to Russian cultures historical and contemporary."

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.

Steve McCaffery, "Wot We Wokkers Want" b/w "One Step to the Next"

We begin this week with an interesting artifact from Steve McCaffery. "Wot We Wokkers Want" b/w "One Step to the Next" was released on LP and cassette in 1980 by the Underwhich Audio Collective, a small Canadian independent label (based in Toronto, Ontario and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) that also issued small run releases (usually about 100 copies) by the likes of Owen Sound, the Four Horsemen, Paul Dutton, Bob Cobbing, Susan Frykberg, Larry Wendt, and DUCT, among others.

Better known by its full title, The Kommunist Manifesto or Wot We Wukkerz Want Bi Charley Marx un Fred Engels, the leadoff track is McCaffery's translation of The Communist Manifesto into the dialect of West Riding of Yorkshire, or, as he puts it, "Redacted un traduced intuht’ dialect uht’ west riding er Yorkshuh bi Steve McCaffery, eh son of that shire. Transcribed in Calgary 25 November to 3 December 1977 un dedicated entirely to Messoors Robert Filliou and George Brecht uv wooz original idea this is a reullizayshun." You can read the piece in its entirety here as part of the PECP Library. Side A also includes "Mid●night Peace" ("a nostalgic translation of the Dadaphony of hell") and "A Hundred And One Zero S One Ng," which is McCaffery's translation of Brecht's translation of the closing section of Robert Filliou's 14 Chansons et Charade.

Side B starts with "One Step Next to the Next," co-created with Clive Robertson, which centers around turntable manipulations of a National Geographic flexi-disc on the Apollo space flights. The closing track, Emes¹ in which "a phrase is intercepted, reversed, synthesized, and obsessively repeated as a stolen micro-unit." As the liner notes explain, "it represents McCaffery's first theft from himself." Listen in to all of these tracks here.

Happy Birthday, Bob Kaufman!

April 18th is the birthday of Bob Kaufman, a quintessential San Francisco poet of the post-war period, who served as a vital bridge between jazz poetry's development during the Harlem Renaissance and its ongoing evolution during the Beat era on both coasts. Kaufman was an innovator in the surrealist tradition, as well as co-founder of the germinal journal Beatitude, and a vital voice that continues to inspire generations of writers. Born in 1925, Kaufman — who died in 1986 — would have turned 97 today.

PennSound's Bob Kaufman author page, curated by Raymond Foye — who co-edited 2019's Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman from City Lights with Neeli Cherkovski and Tate Swindell — is anchored by Bob Kaufman, poet: the life and times of an African-American man, a stunning 1992 audio documentary written and produced by David Henderson, which comes to us courtesy of Naropa University Audio Archive, Henderson, and Cherkovski. Extensive timetables have also been generated for both one-hour installments, providing details on the various speakers, topics discussed, etc. Individual poems read by Kaufman have also been broken out into their own MP3 files.

Additionally, we're proud to be able to share a twenty-one minute recording made by A. L. Nielsen, for which we have no details regarding date or location, and a brief recording of Kaufman reading the poem "Suicide," which comes to us courtesy of Will Combs. Combs' recording forms the basis for PoemTalk #158, in which Christopher Stackhouse, Maria Damon, and Devorah Major join host Al Filreis for a discussion of the poem. Click here to start browsing.

Congratulations to Griffin Prize Shortlist Poets Kearney and Roberson

Each year the Griffin Poetry Prize judges name a shortlist comprised of four international poets and three Canadian poets, from which the two eventual winners are chosen. This week brought news of this year's shortlist, and we were glad to see two PennSound poets among those honored: Douglas Kearney and Ed Roberson.

Kearney is honored for Sho (Wave Books), which the judges' citation summarizes as the poet's "genius, vulnerability, and virtuosity on full display." "These poems live in the rhythms of negotiation and navigation, at the root of saying. They elide, slide, exist in fitful comprehension of our world – where the public and private collide," they observe, before concluding: "Always playful, forever in dialogue, Kearney’s poems come at being from all sides. This book is the crowning achievement of Kearney’s body of work to date." On PennSound's Douglas Kearney author page you'll find a selection of readings from 2005– 2018 from Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Cambridge.

Roberson is nominated for Asked What Has Changed (Wesleyan University Press). The judges' citation notes in part that "Poised between the vertical forces of social inequality and racial injustice, the horizontal sprawl of ghettoized urban growth and environmental degradation, and the temporal trajectories of a glacial past and a climate-changed future, these poems position a poetic eye attuned not only to seeing, 'but with understanding sight.'" They continue, "Through inventive language that moves with the sonic beauty and unpredictability of lake breakers, or wheeling swallows, [this book] is a challenging and urgent interrogation of and reckoning with the history, violence, and revelatory inevitability of interconnectedness between humans and nonhumans." In conclusion, they hail the collection as "a crucial contribution to pressing political, artistic, and environmental questions." On PennSound's Ed Roberson author page, you'll find a treasure trove of readings, performances, interviews, panel discussions and more from the beloved poet, starting in 1993 and going all the way up to 2018.

We send our congratulations to Kearney, Roberson, and the rest of the very deserving finalists, and will look forward to hearing who eventually takes the prize.

"Chanson Tzara" with Lee Harwood by Alexander Baker, 2012

In the early 60's the late poet Lee Harwood heard for the first time, in a London cafe, a poem by Tristan Tzara. An "immediate convert" to Dada, Harwood tracked down a few of Tzara's then difficult to find poems and translated them; he eventually also tracked down Tzara himself and met him in Paris. "Chanson Tzara" — with text, translation, and narration by Harwood, and sound and realization by Alexander Baker — is a sound work created around that encounter.

This twenty-seven minute audio composition is 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.

You can listen to this recording on PennSound's Lee Harwood author page, which is also home to his contribution to the Rockdrill series, The Chart Table, Lee Harwood: Poems 1965–2002, and a 2008 reading as part of the Shearsman Reading Series at Swedenborg Hall in London.

Cid Corman Recordings by John Levy, 1974

We're starting this new week off by showcasing a remarkable treasure trove of recordings of Cid Corman — approximately eighteen hours in total — made by John Levy in 1974. They come to us courtesy of  Steel Wagstaff, who originally digitized and posted these recordings and was kind enough to share them with us, so that they might coexist alongside the wonderful bevy of materials — both Corman reading his own work and critical commentary by others — available on his PennSound author page. Wagstaff provides this context for the recordings:

In 1973, Cid Corman and his wife Shizumi Konishi Corman opened CC's, a coffeeshop in Kyoto, Japan. The second floor was a tatami space with a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf and a space where Cid hosted readings and talks. Soon after opening the shop Cid invited one of his many correspondents, an American named John Levy, to work at the shop for room and board. In 1974 and 1975 John taped some of the readings and talks on poetry Cid gave. During these gatherings of Cid's friends and customers (often other American & British writers), the group would sit, often in a circle, on the tatami mats.

Poets discussed in these sessions include Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore. Others have colorful names like "In Good Time & Words for Each Other," "0:1 & Little Books," or "Plight | & [infinity]." Again we are grateful to both Steel Wagstaff and John Levy, along with Bob Arnold (Corman's literary executor) for the opportunity to make these unique documents with our listeners.

James Weldon Johnson on PennSound

PennSound's author page for James Weldon Johnson — a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance and former leader of the NAACP — is edited by Chris Mustazza, building upon his archival research. Here's his description of the project:

These recordings of James Weldon Johnson were made on December 24, 1935 at Columbia University and are part of a larger collection of recordings known as The Contemporary Poets Series. Johnson is the only African American poet in the series, which ran from 1931 through the 1940s. The addition of the Johnson recordings to PennSound is crucial for a number of reasons, one of them being the function of Johnson's poetry as an ethnographic preservation of culture through the transduction of the sounds of language.

The first two recordings in the collection, "The Creation" and "Go Down Death," both from Johnson's 1927 collection God's Trombones, seek to preserve the sounds of African American folk sermons of the early 20th century. Johnson's poetics in the introduction to God's Trombones speaks extensively about how these poems are a visual representation of the sounds of the preachers of the sermons, a kind of musical score and libretto. He works to represent the cadences of these dynamic sermons through punctuation and lineation, with em-dashes representing a pause longer than a comma, and line breaks an even longer pause. In this regard, Johnson's work serves as a kind of proto-Projective Verse: he scores these poems for sonic representation. As such, the addition of the recordings to PennSound allows us to hear firsthand the poems as Johnson heard them when he composed them. And, in doing so, Johnson's vision of preserving the sounds and cultural significance of these sermons for posterity is realized.

The poems from Johnson's 1917 collection of poems, Fifty Years and Other Poems, are also sonic representations and cultural preservations. For example, Johnson's use of dialect poetry in some of the poems is a representation of speech sounds. By the time of these recordings, Johnson had spent a significant amount of time thinking about the aesthetic effects of writing dialect poetry, during which time he renounced the practice, and here returns to it (perhaps after being convinced of the the value of dialect poetry by Sterling A. Browns's 1932 collection of poetry, Southern Road). Johnson deftly uses dialect to great aesthetic effect, especially in "Sence You Went Away," a poem that creates a slippage between the dialect for "since" and the sound of "sense" (i.e. which could be read as "Sense, you went away"). Here, too, Johnson's poetry and poetics prefigure aesthetic movements of the later 20th century.

This very important collection is publicly available here in PennSound for the first time ever. For this, we thank Jill Rosenberg Jones and the James Weldon Johnson estate for their permission to distribute the recordings, as well as the staff at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library for their assistance in digitizing these materials. Thanks, too, to the Penn Digital Humanities Forum for supporting a project that made these digitizations possible. I hope you will enjoy listening to these recordings.

Charles Bernstein: 67 Video Portraits (2006–2010)

Today we're highlighting Charles Bernstein's sprawling series of video portraits of various poets, performers, artists, filmmakers, and other assorted friends and colleagues. In total, there are sixty-seven short films, created in twelve series between 2006–2010, which have been conveniently organized in a central series homepage.

Working in the opposite mode of Warhol's Screen Tests, Bernstein's super-short films (rarely exceeding a minute) get absurdly up close and personal with their subjects (complete with shaky handheld cinematography), reducing the encounter to one abstract angle: Rod Smith warns of the postal perils of fruitcakes, Hank Lazer compares poetry and shrimp, Caroline Bergvall discusses "Norwegian speakin,'" Norman Fischer tells of his past work as a baker, and John Yau articulates the difference between children and bears.

Some of the other folks included in the series are Peter Gizzi, Marjorie Perloff, David Antin, Leslie Scalapino, Mimi Gross, Ann Lauterbach, Nicole Brossard, Phong Bui, John Ashbery, Christian Bök, Susan Howe, Jerry and Diane Rothenberg, John Tranter, and Tom Haworth, among many others. To start watching, click the title above.

Series Spotlight: Jonathan Skinner's Steel Bar Reading Series

We're starting this week off with another Series Spotlight post, this time focusing on The Steel Bar Reading Series, curated by Jonathan Skinner in collaboration with his partner Isabelle Pelissier (whose sculpture studio provided the venue) during his time as a grad student at SUNY-Buffalo in the early oughts. While we've opted to catalogue the overall collection under that name, there are recordings from numerous other Buffalo venues — Rust Belt Books, the Just Buffalo Literary Center, the Albright-Knox Gallery, The Poetry Collection at UB, classes taught by Dennis Tedlock, and even the city's sidewalks — along with events held in Paris, Toronto, and New York City, recorded between 2000–2008.

Poets who participated in these readings include Alice Notley, Steve McCaffery, Brenda Coultas, Caroline Bergvall, Fiona Templeton, Julia Patton, Bruce Andrews, Paul Dutton, Christian Bök, Tom Raworth, Robert Grenier, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Bernadette Mayer, Stephen Rodefer, Cecilia Vicuña, Michael Basinski, Charles Alexander, Barbara Cole, and Peter Culley, among many others. We send our thanks to Kristen Hewitt and Katherine Zeltner for crucial help in preparing these recordings, without which this archive wouldn't exist.

To start listening, click here to visit our Steel Bar series page.

PigeonSound at 13

This April Fool's Day marks thirteen 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.