Melvin B. Tolson on PennSound

Today we're taking a look at the recordings you can find on PennSound's Melvin B. Tolson author page.

The heart of this collection is a two-part career-spanning reading at Washington, D.C.'s Coolidge Auditorium, on October 18, 1965 — an event held in coordination with the Library of Congress — which serves as a fitting tribute to the influential poet, politician, and pedagogue, who'd pass away less than one year later. After a lavish introduction, Tolson starts with his debut collection, Rendezvous with America and hits many of the high points of his prestigious career, including his magnum opus, Dark Symphony, and Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, written during his time as that nation's poet laureate. Running just short of eighty minutes, Tolson's reading includes the poems "Sometimes," "The Gallows," "If You Should Lie to Me," "The Primer for Today," "The Dictionary of the Wolf," "Harlem Gallery," "The Birth of John Henry," "Ballad on Old Satchmo," and "The Sea Turtle and the Shark," among others, with commentary provided along the way.

This retrospective performance is nicely complemented by a second recording of excerpts from Dark Symphony, for which, unfortunately, we have no information regarding its recording date and location. Nevertheless we're grateful to be Tolson's estate and the Library of Congress for the opportunity to present these materials to our listeners. Click here to visit PennSound's Melvin B. Tolson author page.

PoemTalk #175: on Joan Retallack's 'The Poethical Wager'

Last Friday saw the launch of a milestone episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, its 175th program in total since its launch in 2007. As befits a special occasion, this PoemTalk has a unique set-up, with host Al Filreis and panelists erica kaufman and Laynie Browne being joined by Joan Retallack, whose The Poethical Wager is the text up for discussion. Or, as Filreis put it in his Jacket2 blog post announcing the new episode, "PoemTalk went on the road, along with PoemTalk's editor Zach Carduner and our tech guru pal Chris Martin (Zach on video, Chris on audio), and wandered up some PA/NJ/NY highways into the mid-Hudson Valley, landing at Annandale-on-Hudson, the home of Bard College, where we decamped with all our gear." Filreis also provides quite specific details regarding the exact excerpts being discussed:

The group gathered at Bard to talk about two passages from the opening pages of Joan Retallack's essay "The Poethical Wager" in the collection of thirteen essays that comprise the 279-page book The Poethical Wager, published by the University of California Press in 2003. Al proposed to discuss passages from the beginning of the title essay – to be specific, its opening pages (pages 21-25), part of a conversation the author conducts with a version of herself, a "slef"-interview conducted by one Quinta Slef; and second, a few paragraphs on pages 57 and 58 about Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others.

He also offers readers a succinct summary of their conversation: "The unplanned conversation, not surprisingly, turned out to be about the unplanned, unknown things we compose by writing, thinking, and living." Filreis continues, "Engaging in such an 'unofficial' improvisitory mode is 'daunting,' as Joan notes, 'if your primary concern is control.' Please listen as the PoemTalkers join her in robustly calling for 'a robustly nuanced reasonableness' that does not derive from a notion of progress pushing inexorably toward the known." 

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. Browse the full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, by clicking here.

Happy Birthday, Guillaume Apollinaire

We close this week out by marking the birthday of poet Guillaume Apollinaire, born 142 years ago on this day. Our Apollinaire author page is a point of pride for us, since it contains the earliest artifacts in our archives, documented on lacquer discs some fifteen years before the advent of magnetic tape.

Recorded on December 24, 1913 at the laboratory of Abbé M. Rousselot, these three brief recordings offer a rare opportunity to experience the work of germinal Surrealist author Guillaume Apollinaire through his own voice. "Le Pont Mirabeau," "Marie" and "Le Voyageur," all taken from his first significant volume of poetry, 1913's Alcools, reveal both a strengthened sense of rhythm and a lyrical, elegiac tone, when presented in the original French. 

You can listen to all three poems and read the full text of "Le Pont Mirabeau by clicking here. "Le Pont Mirabeau" has also been included in several PennSound Featured Resources playlists, including Charles Bernstein's Down to Write You This Poem Sat and Marcella Durand's 2011 list of recordings.

Mina Loy: 1965 Interview Now Segmented

Today we're revisiting an important recording from the PennSound archives that was recently segmented. In 1965, towards the end of her life, modernist icon Mina Loy sat down with another iconic poet, Paul Blackburn, for a sprawling ninety-minute conversation that covered various topics across the span of her life and also featured Loy reading extensively from her poetry. While Blackburn is the primary interlocutor, Joan Blackburn informed us that poet and publisher Robert Vas Dias was also present and took part.

The complete recording has been broken down into forty-three discrete MP3 files, isolating threads of their conversation and showcasing the individual poems read. Topics discussed include Loy's "life in England and her husband Arthur Cravan," Robert Creeley, James Joyce, "giving up poetry," "exhibiting paintings in Paris," "how she began writing," "'strange experiences,'" republishing her work, and more. Individual poems read include "Love Songs" (split into separate files for each of its thirteen parts), "Parturition," "Three Italian Pictures," "On the Costa San Giorgio," and more. Listen in by clicking here.

We're grateful to Joan Blackburn and Roger Conover (Loy's editor and literary executor) for their permission to present this historic recording, as well as to Douglas Storm who provided us with a copy. While this is the sole recording present on PennSound's Mina Loy author page, don't forget about Loy's homepage at the Electronic Poetry Center, which we launched in 2020. Sandra Simonds served as coordinator for the page, selecting the poems and other writings presented there and wrote notes on many of her choices. Jack Krick handled the coding and site design, while Karla Kelsey and Ariel Resnikoff also had some input into the page.

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

We start this week off on our PennSound Classics page, taking a look at "Burd Ellen," an eighteenth century Scottish ballad by Anna Gordon Brown and transcribed by her nephew, Robert Scott. Our recording was made by Ruth Perry, an MIT professor and scholar of Gordon Brown, in conjunction with an ambitious book series on the cultural contributions of women throughout history.  

Al Filreis tells the complete tale of how the recording came to PennSound in a 2011 Jacket2 commentary post announcing its addition to the archive:

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

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

Etheridge Knight Reads 'Prison Poems,' c. 1968

We bring this week to a close by highlighting a fascinating recording of Etheridge Knight reading from Prison Poems at the Indiana State Prison. While we don't have precise info regarding the date of this event we believe that it took place towards the end of his incarceration, which ended in 1968. Of the eight years Knight served for armed robbery, he has said, "I died in 1960 from a prison sentence, and poetry brought me back to life."

When these segmented tracks were first introduced, our own Al Filreis commented that the "recording is marred by — or indeed perhaps enhanced and positively complicated by — the loud music playing in the background." You can judge for yourself. 

Altogether, there are twenty-eight tracks, including an introduction and the following titles among many others: "Cell Song," "Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane," "To the Man Who Sidled Up to Me and Asked: How Long You In Fer, Buddy?," "Poems for Black Relocation Centers," "For Malcolm, A Year After," and "Apology for Apostasy." You'll find these tracks, along with Watershed Tapes' album, So My Soul Can Sing and video footage of a 1980 reading for the Friends of the Scranton Public Library Poetry Series on our Etheridge Knight author page.

Happy Birthday to Lew Welch

This August 16 would have been the 96th birthday of San Francisco Beat pioneer Lew Welch, who sadly disappeared into the California wilderness in 1971, never to be found. We first launched our Welch author page in the spring of 2009, with two key recordings representing some of the most notable work of his tragically brief career.

The centerpiece of our Lew Welch page is an April 1967 reading at Santa Barbara's Magic Lantern — a luxuriously long performance in which the poet reads practically all of his major works (save, perhaps, his "Taxi Suite"), including "Chicago Poem," "A Round of English," "Winter," "Graffiti," and "Maitreya Poem," as well as the entire sequence of Hermit Poems and most of its complementary volume The Way Back. Many of the poems are preceded by lengthy introductions (often longer than the poems themselves) in which Welch gives background information on his works and discusses topics as varied as politics, linguistics and popular music (some listeners might be familiar with Welch's stepson Hugh Cregg, whose stage name, "Huey Lewis," honors the father figure who took him to his first rock concerts).

Welch's musical interests — he was a former music major, and loved everything from Charlie Parker to James Brown to the Quicksilver Messenger Service with equal fervor — are on full display here, in pieces performed a cappella like "Graffiti" and "Supermarket Song," as well as sung portions of poems such as "A Round of English," which are marked off by musical notes (♪) in the printed texts. In one section of that poem, a somewhat unremarkable passage:

♪

Shakespeare Milton

Shakespeare Milton

Shelley as well

Shelley as well

Sarah something Teasdale

Sarah something Teasdale

Edith M. Bell

Edith M. Bell

♪

yields a breathtaking performance when Welch sings it to the tune of "Frère Jacques," going so far as to emulate the effect of multiple voices singing the lines in a round: "Shakespeare Milton / Shakespeare Milton / Shelley as Milton / Shelley as Milton / Shelley as Well / Sarah something Shelley as / Sarah something Shelley as / Sarah something Teasdale / Sarah something Teasdale / Edith M. Bell / Edith M. Bell." For Welch, poetic language was purely a spoken vernacular full of idiosyncratic American rhythms and melodies. He tells us: "A poet has his material absolutely free. It's coming out of the mouth of every American in the world. All he has to do is clean his ear out, listen to it, and put down what he has on his mind out of that material, because there is no other material."

Also included in the Magic Lantern set is Welch's epic "Din Poem," an ambitious pastiche of poetry, prose and song which most completely achieves his poetic goals, ventriloquizing numerous parallel discourses — the language of business and patriotism, of faith and lust, of marriages in disrepair and psychological breakdowns, along with virulent hate-speech — which are eventually woven together into a thunderous wave of American noise, against which he sets a parable of hope and escape. In this raw and uncompromising masterpiece, we see a complex portrait of America at numerous societal crossroads, as well as the personal hells Welch eventually sought to escape.

Our other recording at launch was made at San Francisco's Renaissance Corner in the spring of 1969. In that set in which Welch reads his collection, Courses, in its entirety. This suite of micro-poems, each named after a different academic subject, showcases both the poet's wit as well as his propensity for potent and memorable phrasing, honed during his years working in the advertising industry. Both of these recordings came to us through the reel-to-reel collection of Robert Creeley. We also recently added a third recording of Welch, which comes from the Mad Mammoth Monster Poetry Reading organized by Auerhahn Press that took place on August 29, 1963. At this event Welch also read excerpts from his Hermit Poems series.

Inspired by the optimism of poet Tom Mandel, I'd like to think that Welch is still out there in the wilderness, living on locusts and wild honey and "wear[ing his] hair / as long as [he] can / as long as [he] can." As a New American Poet that embodied the spirit of San Francisco poetics, had one foot in the Beat era and the other squarely set in the Summer of Love, and looked forward to the advances of Language poetry, Welch is endlessly fascinating. Click here to start listening to his work.

Hennessey Celebrates 15 Years at PennSound

Fifteen years ago today I stepped into the Kelly Writers House for my first day as the new managing editor at PennSound. My first post-MFA summer was terrifying and I imagined I'd return home to Philly and temp for a year but in short order I'd lined up two exciting jobs: an adjunct position at my alma mater, St. Joe's (a very strange experience to be on the other side of classrooms I still remembered well) and the job at PennSound, which I'd been a huge fan of since its public launch a few years earlier.

 

I'm so proud of the work that I've done alongside Charles Bernstein and Al Filreis and the rest of our wonderful crew, and am grateful that even after all these years the work is still fascinating and challenging. I've learned so much and look forward to all of the discoveries still to come.

 

In honor of the day I figured I'd repost this PennSound podcast Al and I did about five years back, where I was presented with the daunting challenge of choosing five recordings from the breadth of the PennSound archive. The story those selections tell is not just about my growth as a poet and archivist, but also sheds a lot of light on (to borrow a title from Donald Barthelme) "our work and why we do it." It's one of the many readings, talks, and experiments you'll find on my own PennSound author page.

'Hanuman Presents!' dir. Vivien Bittencourt and Vincent Katz

We wrap up this week by taking a look back at Hanuman Presents!, a filmic tribute to Raymond Foye and Francesco Clemente's influential press of the same name, directed and produced by Vivien Bittencourt and Vincent Katz. The performances that form the heart of this film took place at the St. Mark's Poetry Project that took place on May 18, 1989. 

Introduced by Foye, the film was edited by by David Dawkins and Henry Hills, and features an impressive line-up of poets spanning two generations — Gregory Corso, Elaine Equi, Bob Flanagan, Amy Gerstler, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Hell, Herbert Huncke, Katz, Taylor Mead, Cookie Mueller, Eileen Myles, Rene Ricard, David Trinidad, John Wieners — reading from their work. As Foye notes in his opening comments, all of Hanuman's living authors are included in the event. While the poets and the poems are wonderful enough on their own, the performances are cleverly accompanied by abstract images from the films of Rudy Burckhardt. 

Running just shy of forty-three minutes, Bittencourt and Katz's film is both a stunning time capsule and testimony to the power of Foye and Clemente's innovative press. You can start watching by clicking here. Be sure you don't miss Bittencourt and Katz's tribute to Jack Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, filmed at the Knitting Factory in 1988, which is also available on the same page.

Divya Victor: Home Recordings, Spring 2022

Today we're highlighting a recent addition to the author page of poet and Jacket2 guest editor emerita Divya Victor: a series of home recordings made on March 9th of this year of a number of poems from her latest book, Curb (Nightboat Books, 2021). In total there are seven tracks. The first half dozen are "Curb 3," "Curb 4," and "Curb 5," along with the notes to those respective poems, while "Frequency (Alka's Testimony)" rounds out the set. These recordings were made in coordination with PoemTalk episode #173, which is focused on these seven pieces.

On Victor's PennSound author page you'll find an archive of work spanning nine years, starting with a 2009 Emergency Series reading at our own Kelly Writers House. That's followed by a 2010 reading of Hellocast Feral Cat Attack (with participant-collaborators) for Les Figues Press, a 2012 St. Mark's Poetry Project reading with Vanessa Place, 2014 readings at Videofag and Counterpath, and "Cicadas in the Mouth," her Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics (which you can read as well as watch). Jumping forward to 2017, theres video of her reading "W is for Walt Whitman's Soul" at BookThug, and then a trio of readings from 2018: a Wexler Studio Recording Session and a Kelly Writers House conversation with Laynie Browne, both recorded on April 20th, along with a July reading with Cat Tyc for Living Poetry at the Hudson Area Library. In addition to her recent PoemTalk appearance, Victor was also the subject of episode #133, which focuses on her "W Is for Walt Whitman's Soul." Click here to start exploring this treasure trove of recordings.

New on PennSound: Lila Zemborain

Our most recently-created author page is for New York-based Argentine poet Lila Zemborain. While relatively modest in scope the collection of recordings you'll find there nevertheless spans more than twenty years and includes both readings and interviews with the poet.

Our earliest recording comes from the Monday reading series at the St. Mark's Poetry Project and features Zemborain reading with Greta Goetz on February 28, 2000. Next up there's a May 2008 reading with Leonard Schwartz as part of the Belladonna* Reading Series and Zemborain's appearance on Schwartz's radio program Cross Cultural Poetics from that same spring. Jumping forward five years we have another appearance on Cross Cultural Poetics, this time recorded live at our own Kelly Writers House on April 16, 2013. That's followed by a 2017 multi-author reading as part of the Segue Series reading at Zinc Bar and a 2018 reading at McNally Jackson Books, which was co-sponsored by The Operating System, Ugly Duckling Presse, and Belladonna*. Finally, from just short of a year ago we have video footage of Zemborain reading from "Rasgado/Torn" in New York City.

You'll find all of the aforementioned recordings on PennSound's new Lila Zemborain author page. Click here to start exploring.

Jim Dine on PennSound

You probably know Jim Dine as an important early Pop Artist whose aesthetic has since evolved to encompass other styles and modes. You could be forgiven for not knowing that Dine has also been a poet across the breadth of his prodigious career, from an early collaboration with Ron Padgett presenting Guillaume Apollinaire's The Poet Assassinated through to the 2015 publication of Poems to Work On: The Collected Poems of Jim Dine (Cuneiform). Today, we take a look at the contents of his PennSound author page.

The earliest recording you'll find there comes from Robert Creeley's 70th birthday celebration, held at SUNY-Buffalo on October 11, 1996. This all-day event concluded with an hour-long conversation between Creeley, Dine, and Charles Bernstein. Next up, we have a September 2005 Segue Series reading from the Bowery Poetry Club, containing seventeen poems in total, including "From the Diary of a Non-Deflector," "I Wish All My Flowers Were Named Jesse Horowitz," "My Nose Goes Vibrating Down the Street," "Silver Printing: The Dance of Photography," "George Bush Poem," and "When Creeley Met Pep." That's followed by a December 2013 performance of Jewish Fate with accompaniment by Marc Marder on double bass, and a February 2014 reading in Paris that features eight titles, including "I Ran Into Him," "The Downfall of Your Eyes," "Peroxide," and "The Bartok Poem," among others.

When we first announced our Dine author page, Cuneiform publisher Kyle Schlesinger wrote a lovely note on his own relationship to Dine's work, which ends with a link back to PennSound, along with the recommendation that his readers "log out of facebook, and kick back by the stereo with a tall glass of something or other, and check out Jim's poems." If that ringing endorsement doesn't convince you then nothing will!

'Getting It Together: A Film on Larry Eigner, Poet' (1973)

Today we are very proud to highlight Leonard Henny's groundbreaking 1973 film, Getting It Together: A Film on Larry Eigner, Poet, which George Hart — co-editor with Eigner biographer Jennifer Bartlett of Momentous Inconclusions: The Life and Work of Larry Eigner — called an "astounding document of disability history." Our own Charles Bernstein shared Hart's "Context for Getting It Together: A Film on Larry Eigner, Poet" through his Jacket2 commentary series, a valuable resource for understanding the complex history surrounding the film's creation. The brief essay draws heavily upon Hart and Bartlett's research into Eigner's correspondence for their "two books, my ecocritical reading of Eigner and her bio," however as he notes, "we have only begun to understand the intersection of disability, ecology, poetics, Jewishness, place, and community contained in Eigner's life and writing."

Eigner's "active social life in Swampscott, in the 1960s and early 1970s" frequently centered upon Frank Minelli's Parnassus Bookshop in nearby Marblehead, where he gave readings and attended workshops, so it was a natural choice for Henny to film Eigner there over the course of two days on March 19-20, 1971. Hart notes that "Eigner was resistant to the idea of being featured as a poet with disabilities because he had already seen a film on the Irish writer Christy Brown (whom Eigner once exchanged letters with)," however he eventually came around:

Eigner was willing to do it, as long as he was not the "star," and as long as he could get to "as much relevance as possible." Eigner had no control over the aesthetics of the film (the time lapse flowers, musicbox, and doll indicate that); the narration includes inaccurate information (some of which was corrected by Eigner in annotations on the transcription made by Jack Foley); some of the subtitles are inaccurate or incomplete. But in the documentary sections that capture him reading, talking with his friends, sitting in his wheelchair, and so on, we can see Eigner asserting his will to make what choices he was able to. He didn't want to feature disability; he wanted to talk about ecological issues: pollution, food shortages, overconsumption, overpopulation.

Allen Ginsberg lends a hand, providing both voiceover narration and performing Eigner's work, due to the poet's challenges communicating verbally. We're presenting this rare and fascinating document in two formats: the film in its entirety, and a leaner cut that eliminates the more whimsical touches to focus solely on Eigner's poetry. Choose from either by clicking here to visit PennSound's Larry Eigner author page.

In Memoriam: James Longenbach (1959–2022)

We start this week off on a sad note as we mark the passing of poet and critic James Longenbach, who died on July 29th at the age of 62. Longenbach first came to prominence for his scholarly work, penning a number of well-received volumes on modernist poets including Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and T. S. Eliot starting in the late 1980s. A decade or so later he'd launch a career as a poet with the collection Threshold in 1998, the first of six collections he'd eventually publish, the last of which, Forever, was released in 2021.

That last book, written after Longenbach's cancer diagnosis, was hailed for "explor[ing] a life lived with the knowledge of its end" through "luminous, lyrical poems [that] pose a question: Why did this poet once live as if he would live forever? And what does it mean to know that we will not?" Langdon Hammer praised the collection for accurately capturing "the vivid dailiness of domestic life…and the specificity and poignance."

We do not have a proper PennSound author page for Longenbach, but we are proud to present two recordings of the poet that might be of interest to our listeners. First we have the poet's January 27, 1999 reading at SUNY-Buffalo as part of the "Wednesdays at 4 Plus" series, where he read alongside his wife, novelists Joanna Scott. Longenbach also served as an interlocutor for John Ashbery during the Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror Gallery Exhibition, which took place at the University of Rochester's Memorial Art Gallery on June 2, 2011. You can listen to that event on our Ashbery author page.

We send our sincere condolences to Longenbach's family and friends — particularly his wife Joanna and two children — as well as his many fans worldwide.