Joris, Bernstein Join in Worldwide Day of Reading Rushdie

We wrap up this week with new recordings by Pierre Joris and Charles Bernstein made in conjunction with a coordinated worldwide effort to read the works of Salman Rushdie on September 29, 2022. This project is led by the Berlin Literary Festival, who issue this call to action "intended to send a signal for the freedom of literature and public speech as well as the solidarity with the author, who was the victim of a horrific assassination attempt." They continue:

Even if the concrete background of the assassination attempt and the motive of the perpetrator have not yet been clarified, it appears to be evident who is responsible: It goes back to the fatwa that the Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued against Rushdie in 1989. It called for the killing of the Indian-born, British writer because he had supposedly insulted the Islam, the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad with The Satanic Verses. To this day, the Iranian regime has not withdrawn the call to kill the author, just as it has not withdrawn the bounty it placed on his head at the time. The important media in Iran are currently applauding the attacker. 

For years, Salman Rushdie therefore had to live under intensive police protection. For more than 20 years, it was assumed that there was no longer any danger to his life. But this assumption has been shockingly proven wrong by the bloody attack in New York. It proves that the threat to elementary human rights and freedoms remains constant. Moreover, the attack on Rushdie comes at a time when the democratic world is being forced into the defensive by increasingly aggressive authoritarian powers of various kinds, if not – as in Ukraine – it is overrun with death and destruction through open war and an incredible range of violence.

It is therefore absolutely urgent to stand up firmly and defend law and human dignity. By reading Salman Rushdie’s novels and essays, freedom-loving people all over the world can send a signal that they will not be intimidated by threats of violence and will not bow to any attempt to suppress or annihilate thoughts expressed in speech, writing and images.

Readings can take place anywhere, even privately in a small circle, in a school, in a cultural institution or on the radio.

We are very proud to be able to share Joris' and Bernstein's contributions to this worthy endeavor. Bernstein starts by introducing Joris, who reads his essay "For Salman Rushdie & The Satanic Verses," published in The Brooklyn Rail this month. Both authors then read excerpts from The Satanic Verses. There's a video of the complete reading and we've also broken out MP3 recordings of Joris and Bernstein reading Rushdie. Click here to watch or listen to all of the aforementioned recordings.

PoemTalk #176: on John Ashbery's "Some Trees"

Today we launched episode #176 in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which focuses on John Ashbery's significant early poem, "Some Trees." For this program, host Al Filreis was joined by a panel that included Abdulhamit Arvas, Dagmawi Woubshet, and Carlos Decena.

As Filreis explains in his Jacket2 blog post announcing the new episode, "Some Trees," written when the poet was only 21 years old on November 16, 1948, is "preceded only by 'The Painter' among verse written when Ashbery was an undergraduate at Harvard that the poet chose to keep and publish later." He also notes an interesting train of thought that comes up "halfway through the conversation" when

Dag begins to describe the speaker's foray among or into the protective natural space of the trees as an act of cruising. This, Carlos and Hamit readily agreed, helps explain the hierarchy of activity: first touch, then love, then later explain. This is not a poem in which even the people explain things. The trees are expressive models of unlanguaged amazing embodiment, putting on the 'still performance' that strikes the exciting balance between the intentional and chanced-upon relationship.

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.

Meet the 2023 Kelly Writers House Fellows

This week got off to an auspicious start with word of who will be joining us this spring semester for the annual Kelly Writers House Fellows program. While there's much more info to follow in the coming weeks and months, we wanted to share the good news as soon as possible.

This year, Al Filreis will be joined by Simone White to co-lead the seminars, in which twenty or so students will read the work of each Fellow and then meet privately with them during that week's three-hour class session. Current UPenn undergrads interested in joining the class should contact Filreis at afilreis@writing.upenn.edu. In conjunction with this, the public will be able to take part in (either in person or from afar) the traditional Monday evening reading and Tuesday morning interview/conversation with each guest. Limited in-person seating for each event can be reserved by writing to whfellow@writing.upenn.edu.

Our full slate of 2023 Kelly Writers House Fellows will include:

— poet and theorist of ethics Joan Retallack: February 20–21
— cultural critic and essayist Wayne Koestenbaum: March 27–28
— bestselling YA novelist Jason Reynolds: April 24–25

Of course, we'll keep our readers posted with more info as it becomes available. In the meantime, if you'd like to spend a little time some of the wonderful visitors we've had over the past 23 years, you can do so here.

'Alcheringa' Audio Inserts: 1971–1978

Not long after the debut of our sister site Jacket2, its Reissues section announced the launch of an archive of Alcheringa, the groundbreaking ethnopoetics journal that was edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock and ran from 1970–1980. This massive undertaking was commissioned by Tedlock and Jon Cotner with site design and information architecture by PennSound senior editor and Jacket2 Reissues editor Danny Snelson.

In conjunction with that project, we unveiled a new Alcheringa page on PennSound edited by Snelson. It's home to the flexidisc inserts that accompanied nine of the journal's issues from 1971 to 1978. These "audio inserts" include work from a number of PennSound poets including Rothenberg, Jackson Mac Low, Armand Schwerner and Anne Waldman (whose 1975 reading of "Fast Speaking Woman" at New Wilderness Event #20 at New York City's Washington Square Church is shown above), along with myriad other recordings, from the Reverend W.T. Goodwin's "Easter Sunrise Sermon" and bluesman Son House's "Conversion Experience Narrative" to Somali folktales, "Songs of Ritual License from Midwestern Nigeria" and Jaime de Angulo's "The Story of the Gilak Monster and his Sister the Ceremonial Drum."

You can read more about the Alcheringa discs on Jacket2, and explore the journal's archives here. To listen to the audio inserts, click here to visit PennSound's Alcheringa audio page.

Sophia Naz on PennSound

We close out this week by taking a look at our holdings from bilingual poet, essayist, author, editor and translator Sophia Naz. Naz has published four poetry collections in total — Peripheries (Cyberhex 2015), Pointillism (Copper Coin 2017), Date Palms (City Press 2017), and Open Zero (Yoda Press 2021) — as well as a biography of her mother, titled Shehnaz; A Tragic True Tale of Royalty, Glamour and Heartbreak  (Penguin Random House 2019). On her PennSound author page you'll find a pair of sessions recorded at the Kelly Writers House's Wexler Studios in 2019 and 2021.

Naz's April 3, 2019 session consists of sixteen titles in total, including "Black Butterflies," "Eye of the Labyrinth," "The Heart of the Matter," "Habeas Corpus," "If You Spoke, Firefly," "Odysseys of an Onion Moon," "Chappan Churi," "Ode to a Scar," "In the Margins," "Atomic Nocta," and "The Department of Wronged Rights." Jumping forward to September 8, 2021, Naz's second session for PennSound included five short poems: "The Lesson," "Thumbnail," "Split Ends," "Nakhuda," and "The Dance." 

You can listen in to both sets of recordings on PennSound's Sophia Naz author page.

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

Here's a wonderful recording from our archives that takes listeners from the Middle Ages all the way up today: 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 broken up 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 her latest, 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.

H.D. Reads from 'Helen in Egypt,' 1955

Here's a deep cut from the archives to start the right off in grand fashion: H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) reading an extended series of excerpts from Helen in Egypt. Altogether, there are a total of forty-six tracks, which include ten selections from the book's "Palinode" section, eleven from "Leuké," and eleven from "Eidolon," along with fourteen tracks of commentary by the poet scattered throughout the set.

As Aliki Caloyeras observes in her notes that accompany these recordings, "H.D. made these recordings of Helen in Egypt in Zurich in 1955. In a letter dated February 3, 1955, to her friend and literary executer, Norman Holmes Pearson, H.D. describes the recordings: 'I am so happy about the disk-work [sic], went in yesterday by car and E[rich Heydt] came along and helped me.  I did just 21 minutes this time, some of the first section with captions.  It came up quite well — the first set, of Jan. 26, sent surface, is really the second disk, in time.  The first one I did is more lyrical and has sections from Eidolon; this one of Feb. 2 has Egypt and Some Leuke; one side of disk is Achilles, the other, Paris. . .'" She continues, "Since these recordings were made before Helen in Egypt was completed and published, the ordering of the sections read does not exactly coincide with the subsequent published text version.  The prose sections were not yet written (as H.D. came up with the idea of adding the prose sections while making the recordings).  So, in the recordings, the lyrics are interspersed with H.D.'s preliminary commentary, which she later reworks into the published prose sections." Thanks to Caloyeras, we're also able to provide page numbers for each excerpt in New Directions' edition of Helen in Egypt.

You can read more about the recordings and listen in by clicking here. Selections from Helen in Egypt from this session were the subject of PoemTalk # 84, which you can listen to here. 

John Ashbery: Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1989-1990

We bring this week to a close by revisiting one of many highlights on our John Ashbery author page: a set of six recordings documenting the poet's complete series of Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1989 and 1990.

Later revised and published under the title Other Traditions, Ashbery's six lectures explore the work of relatively-unknown poets who, for him, are more than mere inspirations, but rather serve as "a poetic jump-start for times when the batteries have run down." You'll find all six talks — "John Clare: 'Grey Openings Where the Light Looks Through,'" "Olives and Anchovies: The Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes," "'The Unthronged Oracle:' Laura Riding," "The Bachelor Machines of Raymond Roussel," "David Schubert: 'This Is the Book That No One Knows,'" and "'Why Must You Know:' The Poetry of John Wheelwright" — on our Ashbery author page, along with an amazing wealth of readings, lectures, interviews and radio programs spanning more than sixty years.

As always, we extend our gratitude to David Kermani and the Ashbery estate, along with Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room (specifically Christina Davis), for their help in making these marvelous recordings available. Click on here to start listening.

George Quasha at 'T' Space, 2022

Over the past five years PennSound Contributing Editor Chris Funkhouser has been engaged in an extensive project to document the poetry of George Quasha. Sometimes that means we get lengthy sessions of dozens of poems and sometimes we get more modest ones. Chris recently sent along one of the latter, a twenty-six minute recording of Quasha reading at Rhinebeck, New York's 'T' Space on September 8th of this year. Quasha was there to receive the tenth annual 'T' Space Poetry Award, joining the likes of Cathy Park Hong, Ann Lauterbach, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Arthur Sze. While the recording took place in a bucolic outdoor setting, complete with the persistent thrum of crickets, our Managing Editor Zach Carduner has also taken the liberty of creating a cricket-free mix for our listeners.

You'll find that recording on PennSound's George Quasha author page, along with lengthy selections from many of his books including Not Even Rabbits Go Down This Hole, Dowsing Axis, Hearing Other, The Ghost In Between, Verbal Paradise, Glossodelia Attract: Preverbs, The Daimon of Moment: Preverbs, Scorned Beauty Comes Up Behind: Preverbs, Things Done for Themselves: Preverbs, and Polypoikilos: Matrix in Variance: Preverbs, among others. Click here to start listening.

PennSound Celebrates Jackson Mac Low's Centennial

Today we celebrate the 100th birthday of polymath poet Jackson Mac Low, born on September 12, 1922. That certainly seems like a worthwhile reason to revisit some of the many recordings housed on his PennSound author page.

There you'll find a wide array of audio and video spanning four decades, from the 1970s up till just a few months before his death in December 2004. In addition to numerous readings — including seven Segue Series sets, recordings from the St. Mark's Poetry Project, the Living Theater, the Line Reading Series, PhillyTalks, the Radio Reading Project, the Orono 40s conference, the Sound & Syntax International Festival of Sound Poetry, and more — along with talks from the St. Mark's Talks series, SUNY-Buffalo, the New Langton Arts Center, and LINEbreak, videos from Public Access Poetry and Mac Low's 75th birthday festschrift, and numerous complete album releases (often with Anne Tardos). A few more recent additions include his 1975 reading at Naropa University and  a 1978 video of Jackson Mac Low and Tom Leonard reading at the Sound and Syntax International Festival of Sound Poetry.

If this embarrassment of riches seems a little overwhelming, or if you're new to Mac Low's prodigious career, it might be helpful to start with the 2008 book launch event for Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, which features Tardos, Charles Bernstein, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Drew Gardner, Joan Retallack, Chris Mason, or PoemTalk #46 on Mac Low's "Words nd Ends from Ez."

Al Young at the Kelly Writers House, 2018

It's been a year and a half since we lost poet Al Young, and he is still sorely missed. We start this week off by highlighting his November 15, 2018 reading at our own Kelly Writers House.

Young was 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.

Congratulations to Ruth Lilly Prize winner CAConrad

We close this week out with exciting news from our friends at the Poetry Foundation who recently announced the winners of this year's Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. "One of the most prestigious awards given to American poets," the $100,000 Lilly Prize "honors a living US poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition," however "in recognition of Poetry magazine’s 110th anniversary, the Poetry Foundation has decided to award 10 additional Ruth Lilly Poetry Prizes this year ... the greatest prize amount that the Foundation has ever awarded to a cohort of living poets at one time."

That cohort is indeed formidable, including Sandra Cisneros, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Juan Felipe Herrera, Angela Jackson, Haki Madhubuti, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, Patti Smith, and Arthur Sze, however the winner we're most excited about is Philadelphia's own CAConrad. The jury's complete citation reads as follows:

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975; their honors include a Lambda Literary Award. As a young poet, they lived in Philadelphia, where they lost many loved ones during the early years of the AIDS crisis, as documented in the essay “SIN BUG: AIDS, Poetry, and Queer Resilience in Philadelphia.” Conrad is the author of many books of poetry, including AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration and While Standing in Line for Death.

Conrad was an enthusiastic member of the Kelly Writers House community from close to its founding, as evidenced by their PennSound author page, where the earliest recording you'll find is a 2001 appearance on Live at the Writers House reading from Advanced Elvis Course. Given their long involvement with KWH and PennSound — resulting in a healthy collection of readings, talks, interviews, performances, and more — it's no stretch to suggest that you can see a career worthy of lifetime recognition take shape just by browsing the locations and dates of the three dozen events between 2001 and 2019 archived there. Among those many recordings, my personal favorite (for obvious reasons) is the 2007 Studio 111 Session that I engineered, which highlights poems from The Book of Frank and Deviant Propulsion as well as the complete chapbook (Soma)tic Midge. In effect it was my first introduction to their poetry — Charles Bernstein had introduced me to both Conrad and Frank Sherlock at a reading the week before and encouraged me to set up sessions with the two close friends and collaborators — but by the end of that evening I was a lifelong fan.

We at PennSound send our congratulations to Conrad and the rest of the formidable class of 2022 Lilly Prize winners. You can browse PennSound's CAConrad author page by clicking here.

In Memoriam: Peter Straub (1943–2022)

Yesterday news broke that author Peter Straub had passed away at the age of seventy-nine. While an author of "literary novels of terror, mystery and the supernatural" doesn't seem like a likely candidate to be mourned at PennSound, Straub had an author page since close to our site's launch. Charles Bernstein marked his friend's passing, noting "'"The world is half-night,' Peter Straub once wrote, but it seems all night now. ... The world I've known is less. His work lives on, but it's not enough and still more than enough."

On Straub's author page, you'll find two interviews with Bernstein that took place nearly a decade apart. The earlier of the two, from Bernstein's LINEbreak radio program, was recorded in 1995. On that show, Straub discussed "horror as a literary genre and its relationship to the Vietnam War" and "his early aspirations to poetry" as well as reading from his novel Koko and excerpts from the short stories "Hunger" and "Mr. Club and Mr. Cuff." Then, in 2004, Straub was Bernstein's guest at the Kelly Writers House, with the resultant reading and conversation being broadcast as part of the Close Listening radio series. In that February 24th session, Straub read the story "Lapland or Film Noir" and excerpts from Koko, then took questions from Bernstein as well as his students. The photo above was taken during that visit.

You can listen to both of those recordings and read a Daily Pennsylvanian article on Straub's visit by clicking here.

Madeline Gins on PennSound

We start this week off by taking a closer look at PennSound's author page for multi-genre artist and author Madeline Gins, who passed away in January 2014. Taken together, the recordings found there offer a broad sense of her diverse talents.

Our earliest recording, from the archives of Robert Creeley, is a 1979 seminar with Gins and her long-term creative (and romantic) partner, Arakawa at SUNY-Buffalo. That recording is nicely complemented by the pair's two-day appearance at the school in 2000 as part of the Wednesdays at 4-Plus series, along with "Blank and Other Relatives of Indeterminacy," a lecture given in the spring of 1984 as part of the New York Talk series.

We also have a number of readings by Gins, from throughout the long history of the Segue Series, with a 1992 set at the Ear Inn (featuring excerpts from "To Not to Die" and Helen Keller or Arakawa), a 2001 set at Double Happiness (including "Poetics or Architectonics," "Electron Transport Chain One," "Spaghetti A," "Spaghetti A,'" and "Krebs Cycle"), a 2007 set at the Bowery Poetry Club (with selections from Making Dying Illegal, Architecture Against Death: Original to the 21st Century and parts one and two of "A Work of Procedural Architecture"), and finally a 2013 set at Zinc Bar (including "This Poem Precedes Its Title," "Why Don't I Have The Courage of the Wind of My Bones," "Krebs Cycle," "This Deeply Poignant Poem," "An Introduction to Elementary Biotopology," and "What The President Will Say and Do," along with excerpts from Hellen Keller or Arakawa). Finally, we have Gins' 1995 appearance on LINEbreak, where she read the "Th" section from Hellen Keller or Arakawa, and a brief track, "Reversile Destiny Decaration," recorded circa 2013 by Léopold Lambert.

You can check out all of the recordings mentioned above by clicking here.

Brian Ang and Alex Abalos: 'The Totality Cantos' in Berkeley, 2022

We close out this week with a recent livestreamed performance by Brian Ang and Alex Abalos held in celebration of Ang's latest book, The Totality Cantos (Atelos 2022), at Eastwind Books of Berkeley on August 20, 2022.

The video begins with a brief DJ set by Abalos. Cheryl Truong starts off the event with introductions, which are followed by a performance by Abalos. Next, Travis Ortiz reads a statement from his Atelos co-director and editor Lyn Hejinian on publishing The Totality Cantos. Ang takes the mic next and reads from the book for roughly twenty minutes, starting with "Totality Canto 59," before reading cantos 61-7, 39-8, 78-7, 89-8, 93-3. He concludes his set with "A Thousand Records" 96–100. 

That's followed by a lengthy discussion involving both Ang and Abalos, which touches upon topics including "choosing words and radio experience," "avant-garde music and street culture," "sampling and the avant-garde," and "the avant-garde and new weapons," in addition to a number of facets of The Totality Cantos: the origins of its title, the formal rules of the series, and its visual art, among others. Abalos closes out the set with another DJ set.

You can watch all of this unfold on PennSound's Brian Ang author page, which is also home to a 2011 session on LA's KChung Radio and an MP3 of him reading "Fenced Femivisions" at the 2011 MLA Offsite Reading at ArtShare, also in Los Angeles. There, you'll also find links to all ten entries in Ang's Jacket2 commentary series, "PennSound and Politics," which ran in the fall of 2011.