In Memoriam: Doug Lang (1941–2022)

We wrap up our trio of memorials for recently-deceased poets by honoring Doug Lang, who passed away on November 22nd at the age of 81. Born into wartime poverty in Swansea, Wales, Lang first distinguished himself as a novelist before moving to the US for a teaching appointment in 1973. Soon thereafter he was key conspirator in Washington, DC's burgeoning poetry scene, where he coordinated a much-beloved reading series, and formed relationships that would last a lifetime.

Lang's dear friend Terence Winch posted a tribute to Lang at the Best American Poetry blog, which speaks in part to his presence in the local scene: "He was known as a catalyst on the Washington poetry scene.

An accomplished poet himself, he also ran a nationally celebrated poetry reading series in DC at Folio Books in Dupont Circle, attracting many of the leading poets of the day, who were usually paired with a local poet." Lang's dedication and kindness also extended to generations of his students:

The Corcoran [College of Art] hired him, and Doug stayed for the next 37 years, becoming the most loved and respected member of the Corcoran faculty. His colleagues and his thousands of former students felt a tremendous debt to Professor Lang for his prodigious ability as a teacher and his generosity of spirit in all his interactions. In the literary world, he was known as a poet of fierce linguistic energy and technical skill. To his friends, he is an irreplaceable man of wondrous talent.

Introducing Lang at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in 2011, Stacy Szymaszek reached for remarkably similar words to encapsulate his talents: "I’ve been thinking a lot about the poem’s ability to alter our perception of time, and one thing that impresses me is that Doug's poems don’t play with pace as much as they are delivered as pure energy." "Past present and future aren’t part of his measuring system," she observes. "The poem is the sequencer of events, and throws the intervals between them into the realm of our own bodies."

We welcome you to visit to visit our PennSound author page for Lang, which starts off with a couple of vintage recordings from his earliest years in the states: a 1978 Segue Series reading at the Ear Inn and Xa, a collaboration with Tina Darragh released in 1979 on germinal cassette poetry label Widemouth Tapes. We then jump forward to another Segue set at the Ear Inn, this time from 1989, before finishing with a sprawling multi-part interview between Lang and Winch conducted in 2014. Taken together, its eight installments run roughly six hours in length. You can listen to any and all of these recordings by clicking here.

We send our sincere condolences to Lang's close personal friend Sandra Rottmann and family members, along with the generations of students and poets that will feel his loss acutely.

In Memoriam: Michael Rothenberg (1951–2022)

Today we say goodbye to poet, editor, publisher, and environmentalist Michael Rothenberg, who passed away after a long battle with lung cancer on November 21st. Like Bernadette Mayer, Rothenberg is a poet that will be remembered as much for his service to the genre as much as his own work — a "good citizen" of the poetry world whose selfless hard work benefitted us all.

Those endeavors included the long-running press and web journal Big Bridge, Jack Magazine, the organization 100 Thousand Poets for Change, and their associated project "Read A Poem To A Child." You'l find an encyclopedic listing of links to those efforts and more on Rothenberg's homepage at the Electronic Poetry Center, which also houses a healthy sampling of his writing across genres. Our newly created PennSound author page for Rothenberg is home to a trio of recordings of the poet in performance: a 2007 reading in Tucson as part of the POG Sound series, and a pair of videos of the poet reading in Petaluma, CA in 2009.

We send our condolences to Rothenberg's family, fans, and collaborators worldwide. Click here to start browsing through the aforementioned recordings.

In Memoriam: Bernadette Mayer (1945–2022)

This week has been been devastating for the poetry community, with three beloved poets dying in short succession. We want to honor each one individually, and today we start with Bernadette Mayer, who succumbed to pancreatic cancer on November 22nd, a little over a year since her diagnosis.

There is perhaps no better indication of just how beloved Mayer was within the world of contemporary poetry, the long shadow cast by her work and her ideas, than seeing her mourned equally for her prompts and experiments as her poetry itself. Indeed, along with a deep sense of loss, I most saliently feel a sense of gratitude for her presence in my classrooms throughout my teaching career: from teaching latter-day collections like Scarlet Tanager and Poetry State Forest in Contemporary American Poetry to discussing her innovative approach to the sonnet in Forms of Poetry and the way in which my Creative Writing Pedagogy students  (many of whom have little familiarity with non-traditional poetry) are captivated and inspired (and a little freaked out) by her iconic "Experiments List." 

Mayer was truly the patron saint of the empty page, whose poems not just delighted her fans, but — through their meta-poetic bent, their evident conceptual or ludic processes — challenged them to pick up a pen and try their hand at writing. "Experimental" is a word we throw around easily, and often to describe authors that settled into an established style decades ago, but Mayer truly never stopped blazing new trails, finding new forms, and empowering passive readers to think of themselves actively as poets. I've always drawn inspiration from her line "Let's get on with our non-paying work as always" (from "Sonnet Welcome"), for the way in which it demystifies the writing life: if you're waiting around for a visit from the muse you're not going to write many poems. There's serious work to be done; roll up your sleeves, start a new journal, let's go!

Bernadette was also a beloved member of the Kelly Writers House family, starting with a day-long celebration of her and her work in 1998, with subsequent visits in 2007, 2014, 2018 (as a Kelly Writers House Fellow), and 2019. Her early support for PennSound is reflected by the more than 200 individual files you'll find on her encyclopedic author page, which starts with "Complete Music of Webern, A Movie" from Eduardo Costa and John Perreault's groundbreaking 1969 album Tape Poems, and continues through at least three dozen individual events up to a February 2021 Zoom reading for the University of Glasgow. Particularly for a true poet's poet like Mayer, there is no better way to honor her legacy by connecting with her work, whether on the page or in your headphones. We send our condolences to Philip Good and Mayer's children, her friends, and generations of fans throughout the world.

PennSound Presents Poems of Thanks and Thanksgiving

With the US celebrating Thanksgiving this week, it's time to revisit a perennial PennSound Daily tradition that started way back in 2010: a mini-mix of poems of thanks and thanksgiving — some old, some new — taken from the PennSound archives.

In a classic recording of "Thanksgiving" [MP3] from the St. Mark's Poetry Project, Joe Brainard wonders "what, if anything Thanksgiving Day really means to me." Emptying his mind of thoughts, he comes up with these free associations: "first is turkey, second is cranberry sauce and third is pilgrims."

"I want to give my thanks to everyone for everything," the late John Giorno tells us in "Thanx 4 Nothing" [MP3], "and as a token of my appreciation, / I want to offer back to you all my good and bad habits / as magnificent priceless jewels, / wish-fulfilling gems satisfying everything you need and want, / thank you, thank you, thank you, / thanks." The rolicking poem that ensues offers both genuine sensory delights ("may all the chocolate I've ever eaten / come back rushing through your bloodstream / and make you feel happy.") and sarcastic praise ("America, thanks for the neglect, / I did it without you, / let us celebrate poetic justice, / you and I never were, / never tried to do anything, / and never succeeded").

"Can beauty save us?" wonders Maggie Nelson in "Thanksgiving" [MP3], a standout poem from her marvelous collection, Something Bright, Then Holes, which revels in the holiday's darker edges and simplest truths: "After dinner / I sit the cutest little boy on my knee / and read him a book about the history of cod // absentmindedly explaining overfishing, / the slave trade. People for rum? he asks, / incredulously. Yes, I nod. People for rum."

Yusef Komunyakaa gratefully recounts a number of near-misses in Vietnam — "the tree / between me & a sniper's bullet [...] the dud / hand grenade tossed at my feet / outside Chu Lai" — in "Thanks" [MP3], from a 1998 reading at the Kelly Writers House.

"I miss everything / all the time, even / what's in front of me," Kate Colby reflects in "Home to Thanksgiving (1867)" [MP3], ably mimicking the sense of loss that simultaneously haunts and heightens the holiday season for many of us.

Kenneth Irby begins his 1968 poem, "Thanksgiving Day and Lowell's Birthday" [MP3] with a succinct synopsis of the holiday's meaning: "This is / the day set aside / for public harvest's / gratitude, / giving back of all the energies of devotion /for an instant equal / to the energies gathered / of earth's sustenance given / or what was attended / watching the slow shift of season / knowledge thankful for to have gathered /before the shift — not so slow and more like a / sudden awareness come on too late — / before cold winter." You can read along with Irby at Jacket2, where the poem was published as part of the career-spanning 2014 feature, "On Kenneth Irby."

While many might be familiar with Charles Bernstein's delightfully-thorny "Thank You for Saying Thank You," I'm offering up a recording of his 2015 mutation of that poem, "Thank You for Saying You're Welcome" [MP3], which inverts the sentiments of the original: "This is a totally / inaccessible poem. / Each word, / phrase & / line / has been de- / signed to puz- / zle you, its / read- / er, & to / test whether / you're intel- / lect- / ual enough — / well-read or dis- / cern- / ing e- / nough — to ful- / ly appreciate th- / is / poem."

Finally, we turn our attention to the suite of poems that concludes Mark Van Doren's Folkways album, Collected and New Poems — "When The World Ends" / "Epitaph" / "Farewell and Thanksgiving" [MP3] — the last of which offers gratitude to the muse for her constant indulgence.

To keep you in the Thanksgiving spirit, don't forget this 2009 PennSound Podcast (assembled by Al Filreis and Jenny Lesser) which offers "marvelous expressions of gratitude, due honor, personal appreciation [and] friendship" from the likes of Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Jerome Rothenberg, Louis Zukofsky and William Carlos Williams.

For the Holiday Travelers: Kenneth Goldsmith's 'Traffic' and 'The Weather'

We start off this holiday week by revisiting a Thanksgiving-themed post from the very first year of PennSound Daily. Published this week in 2008, on a day when many of our listeners in the US might have found themselves enduring some challenging conditions on the roads — whether they were traveling across state lines or merely going over the river and through the woods — we presented some unconventional but calming listening material. — MSH

On the busiest travel day of the year, when most Americans are glued to their televisions and radios for the traffic and weather report, you can remain tuned in to PennSound for Kenneth Goldsmith's Traffic (2006) and The Weather (2005).

This imposing pair of book-length poems (transcriptions of a year's worth of traffic and weather reports, respectively, from New York's 1010 WINS radio) plays tricks with listeners' perceptions and attention spans over the course of the three or four hours it takes to listen to them from beginning to end. Goldsmith's soothing tone, an amalgam of John Cage's confident narration and a well-oiled radio baritone, threatens to lull us into distraction, with only the transcribed (and deliberately pronounced) ers, ahs and ums breaking through the narcotic flow of narration — the vital, yet ubiquitous information which fills our daily lives becomes background noise, while the syntactical glitches command our attention. However, with repeated careful listening, this transmutation is reversed as the seemingly ephemeral events (Hurricane Isabel, Game 1 of the World Series, a run of bad grammar puns celebrating "Be Kind to Writers and Editors Month") begin to recur, along with the rather limited parlance of the reports themselves, giving the poems a sense of continuity, of design through iteration.

Highly conceptual? Yes, but also eminently engaging and listenable. Click on the title above to visit Goldsmith's PennSound author page, where you'll find both Traffic and The Weather, complete with links to the complete text of both books, and much, much more.

Congratulations to National Book Award Winner John Keene

The past 365 days have been quite auspicious for poet John Keene, starting with the publication of his latest, Punks: New & Selected Poems (The Song Cave), on December 1st of last year. Since then, he's won the 2022 Lammy Award in Gay Poetry from Lambda Literary and his journey from National Book award long-list to finalist came to an end last week when Punks was named this year's poetry winner. Publisher's Weekly provided this coverage of Keene's victory:

Poet Kwame Dawes, chair of the jury for poetry, announced the category winner was Punks: New & Selected Poems by John Keene (The Song Cave). Keene dedicated the award to 'all the readers out there and the ancestors on whose shoulders I stand… particularly the black, gay, queer, and trans writers, especially those we lost to HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s." He implored attendees to "support workers in the publishing industry and in every industry," and to "support writers who speak up and face political censure and oppression." Keene ended his speech by reading a few lines from “one of my favorite poets,” Robert Hayden.

Rutgers University Newark, where Keene is both Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Africana Studies department, provided this charming snapshot of an astonished poet struggling to process his feelings: "As he stood at the dais after receiving the award and searched for a sentiment to capture his feelings, Keene said, 'I'm actually crying. I'm in shock!' much to the delight of the audience." He continued, "I put together some notes because I said, in the improbable instance that I actually receive this award, all the words — I work with words, right? — would fly right out of my head.” 

You can celebrate and connect with Keene's work through his recently-created PennSound author page. The most recent recordings there come from Keene's visit as a 2019 Kelly Writers House Fellows: a reading on the evening of February 11th and his Q&A session with Al Filreis the following morning. Audio and video footage from both events is available. Beyond that, you'll also find another Philadelphia reading for the Housework at Chapterhouse series in 2011, a pair of Segue Series readings at the Bowery Poetry Club in 2009 and 2005, and a 2009 panel from the Belladonna* collective's ADFEMPO conference in which Keene took part.

You can listen to all of the aforementioned recordings by clicking here. Again, we send our heartiest congratulations to John Keene for a year full of momentous and well-deserved honors.

Vincent Katz at Blacksmith House, 2022

Our latest addition to the site is a new reading from Vincent Katz, recorded this past April 11th at Cambridge's famous Blacksmith House, which comes to us courtesy of Amy Rupert. Running just shy of half an hour, Katz's set is available as one file or segmented MP3s for each of the poems read. This set consists of twenty-two titles in total, including "Rudy's Movie," "Spring Frost," "Thought," "Broadway," "Lincoln Plaza" I-VI, "Maine Hours and Days," "Calligraphy at the Beach," "Woman in Green," and "Keys and Ripples."

You'll find this recording on PennSound's Vincent Katz author page, which is also home to a wide array of readings, talks, performances, and films that stretches back forty-four years to an appearance by the young poet on Public Access Poetry. PennSound listeners will also remember Katz's two astounding filmic collaborations with Vivien Bittencourt: Hanuman Presents! and Jack Kerouac's "Mexico City Blues," which were added to the site in 2020 and 2010 respectively. Click here to browse all of the aforementioned recordings.

Julie Patton: Two Short Films by Ted Roeder

Today we're revisiting a marvelous pair of videos of Julie Patton performing her poetry, which were made by Ted Roeder circa 2013. Filmed in an intimate domestic setting, traffic noises and birdsong drifting through open windows, Patton sits comfortably in a chair before the camera, reading from typescript pages, a pen poised in one hand. She performs in a fluid sprechtstimme, easing in and out of accents and personas, casually adding various musical accompaniments from time to time: she forces the knob on a toddler's toy music box, galloping through the lullabye at a hectic gait, then backs off, plinking it forward in little tonal constellations; she reaches down, offscreen, to plunk a guitar note or stroke the strings behind the nut, producing glassy little accents; her foot settles into a restless and insistent rhythm that resonates through the room. Papers flutter as pages turn, her hands trace and stretch notes through the air. She stares you down, then returns to the poem.

These remarkable clips demand and reward your attention, whether you're watching or simply listening in, the various sonic elements creating one sort of experience with their visual counterparts and a different one without. You'll find these two films here on PennSound's Julie Patton author page, which is also home to a wide variety of audio and video recordings of readings, performances, panel discussions, interviews, and more, from 1997 to the present.

David Antin Discusses Kathy Acker, 2002

Here's a hidden gem from our archives that deserves your attention: a half-hour video of David Antin discussing Kathy Acker — who he calls "a dazzlingly charming and funny and brilliantly powerful writer, whose work I've always felt very close to" — as part of a symposium on her work held at New York University on November 8, 2002.

"Let me point out I knew Kathy before she was the Kathy Acker you all know," Antin begins, discussing his first meeting her at UC San Diego in 1968, when she was working as a teaching assistant and associating with other "refugees from Brandeis," along with her husband Robert (nominally a student of Marcuse). He goes on to discuss "the climate in which Kathy came to be a poet" — specifically "the proclaimed sexual revolution" and "the year of the assassinations" (Antin's arrival in the city coincided with Robert Kennedy's murder and Valerie Solanas' shooting of Andy Warhol) — then recalls the guidance that he provided to young and aspiring writers like Acker, Mel Freilicher, and others from their social circle, the conceptual art projects he worked closely with (including a Fluxus retrospective), and associations with figures like his wife, Eleanor, Jerry and Diane Rothenberg, Lenny Neufeld, George Quasha, et al., all of which proved to be very influential. "She was exposed to all of these people in various ways that were useful to her," he observes. 

He goes on to talk about her compositional use of constraint ("Her engagement was with so many things but she had to restrain herself to not be all over the place all at once."), her means of getting her work out to wider audiences, and the qualities that made her a singular talent: "Kathy had both intelligence and energy, and she had desire [...] It was the intensity of her desire for life." It's a gossipy, raucous recollection that also reveals deeper truths about how Acker came into her own. You can watch it here.

A New Disability Poetics Symposium, 2018

Today we're highlighting A New Disability Poetics Symposium, which was recorded at the LGBT Center at UPenn on October 18, 2018. This ambitious, multi-part gathering was organized by Jennifer Bartlett, Ariel Resnikoff, Adam Sax, and Orchid Tierney, in collaboration with Knar Gavin, Declan Gould, Davy Knittle, and Michael Northen.

The proceedings began with the panel "Larry Eigner's Disability Poetics," moderated by Charles Bernstein, with talks by George Hart, Michael Davidson, and Jennifer Bartlett. That's followed by "Disability and Performance," moderated by Declan Gould, with contributions by torin a. greathouse and Camisha Jones; and "Poetic Experiment and Disability," moderated by Orchid Tierney, with panelists Sharon Mesmer and Gaia Thomas.

These talks are complemented by a number of readings, the first taking place as part of the symposium itself, with sets by Bartlett, Jim Ferris, Ona Gritz, Anne Kaier, Dan Simpson, and Brian Teare. There's a second set recorded at our own Wexler Studios with Kaier, Simpson, Ferris, Gritz, and Michael Northen reading their work. Finally, poet Kathi Wolfe was unable to take part in the symposium, but made home recordings of the pieces she would have read at the event, which we've made available to listeners as well.

Given both the significance of Disability Studies and the growing attention it's receiving from more mainstream audiences, this is a particularly important event, and one that we are very proud to be able to share with a wider audience. To start listening, click here.

Joseph Ceravolo on PennSound

Today we're shining the spotlight on our holdings from beloved New York School poet Joseph Ceravolo (1934–1988), which we're very proud to be able to present through the generosity of his widow, Rosemarie.

Our earliest recording was made at the poet's home in the spring of 1968 and largely consists of poems from Wild Flowers Out of Gas (published the previous year) including "A Song of Autumn," "Drunken Winter," "Skies," "Happiness in the Trees," "White Fish in Reeds," and "Dangers of the Journey to the Happy Land." That's followed by "Poems and Background" from the 1969 album Tape Poems (ed. Eduardo Costa and John Perreault) and another set of home recordings from 1971. Running a little more than half an hour, this set also includes selections from Wild Flowers Out of Gas, plus "Ho Ho Ho Caribou" (here divided into its ten sections), the first three sections of "The Hellgate," and "Where Abstract Starts." 

Up next is a lengthy set of forty-nine poems recorded at the University of Chicago on May 11, 1976. Some titles included in this set: "Winds of the Comet," "Sleeping Outside My Mind," "The Spirit Mercury," "Interior of the Poem," "Kyrie Eleison," and "Good Friday." As Rosemary Ceravolo notes, there are some differences in titles between these recordings and the table of contents of 2012's Collected Poems since "Joe must have changed or added titles after he did the readings." Our last recording is Ceravolo's October 21, 1978 set at the Ear Inn that contains a number of poems-in-progress from the collection Mad Angels, often represented by a first line rather than its finished title, including "Tongues" and "Night Ride," along with a selection of early poems published in 1979's Transmigration Solo: "Sleep in Park," "Descending the Slope," "Romance of Awakening," and "Migratory Noon."

Along with these original recordings, we offer our listeners two marvelous complements. First, there's the September 2013 celebration of Ceravolo's work at the Kelly Writers House, organized by CAConrad, along with "The Lyrical Personal of Joe Ceravolo," an ambitious 2013 Jacket2 feature organized by Vincent Katz. Click here to listen to everything mentioned above.

PennSound Cinema: Ken Jacobs

We start off this week by highlighting a number of stunning short films by Ken Jacobs that we're proud to include as part of our PennSound Cinema collection. They include a half-dozen silent micro-films, each the length of a television commercial, created in 2016: Writhing Cities, Central Park, Snow in Headlights I, Window Cleaner, Dead Leaves, and Deader Leaves. These silent meditations serve as an amuse-bouche to unfamiliar viewers, introducing them to Jacob's use of the Pulfrich effect — an early film theory based on the notion that a projected image reaches each eye at a slightly different time (those interested in learning more can read a wonderfully-detailed explanation by Miriam Ruth Ross here) — built upon looped images that rapidly alternate from positive to negative. The resulting films effect a visual equivalent to the Shepard scale, seeming simultaneously static and in-motion, and creating a lush, immersive three-dimensional image.

This is probably a good point to warn readers that due to this intense flickering effect we recommend that those with epilepsy and similar conditions triggered by light avoid watching these films. They can be challenging even for those without seizure disorders: I started to get a headache after about a half hour with the films, but it was a worthwhile tradeoff for the viewing experience.

After the super-brief clips, we have a trio of longer films: Capitalism: Child Labor (2006), Another Occupation (2011), and Seeking the Monkey King (2012). On the small scale, these films operate much like the aforementioned shorts in terms of their flickering using the Pulfrich effect, however the images are further embellished with color washes, inset details, and other distortions, and evolve over time rather than fixating on one image. They're also scored, with Rick Reed providing music for the first two — which showcase tremoloed drones that shift from peaceful bell-tones to harsh metallic squeals — while J.G. Thirwell's soundbed for the last blends dramatic blockbuster pomp with calmer passages. In Capitalism we meditate on a haunting Lewis Hine-like image of young textile workers, while Another Occupation recycles and degrades found footage of Bangkok, and in Seeking the Monkey King we explore dazzling jewel-like landscapes of crumpled tinfoil while pondering occasional intertitles that rail against the titular monarch.

You can view all of these films, and listen to a three-part 2009 Close Listening program with the filmmaker on our Ken Jacobs author page.

Henry Hills and Sally Silvers: 'Little Lieutenant,' 1994

PennSound has been very happy to host work by filmmaker Henry Hills since our launch. Today we're focusing on one particularly interesting work from his complete filmography: Little Lieutenant, a 1994 collaboration with choreographer and co-director Sally Silvers. 

Here is how Hills summarizes the film on his website:

Little Lieutenant is a look back at the late Weimar era with its struggles and celebrations leading up to world war, a period piece. Scored to John Zorn's arrangement of the Kurt Weill song, "Little Lieutenant of the Loving God", and drawing its imagery both from the original song and its somewhat idiosyncratic rearrangement, the film presents an internal reading of Silvers' solo scored to the same musical piece, "Along the Skid Mark of Recorded History". 

Closely following the Zorn arrangement, the film was storyboarded in 30 scenes (the arrangement changes approximately every 4 measures) and principally shot in a small studio employing rear screen projection, with foreground movement choreographed to interact with the projected imagery which reflects themes apparent in the song and its arrangement (Weimar cabaret scenes, labor footage, empty industrial landscapes, water, slides of moody photographs by James Casebere, a kinescope of Silvers' performance of the solo at the Joyce Theatre, battle newsreels, Walther Ruttmann's film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, and a restructured animation, The Youth Machine). Scenes range through a Citizen Kane-esque pan up a forboding structure, idyllic lovers in both pastoral and industrial settings, labor marches, a lonely walk down a deserted alley, a bar brawl, a Motown-ish girl group, a dream sequence, and a giddy animation, up to the terrors of war and a bittersweet conclusion: an elaborate music video.

Silvers and Cydney Wilkes portray dual aspects of the Salvation Army Lieutenant who sang the song in the Brecht/Weill play “Happy End”, with Kumiko Kimoto and Leonard Cruz as the lovers and Pilar Alamo and Toby Vann filling out the group. The film was conceived by Zorn, Silvers, and Hills, co-directed by Silvers and Hills, choreographed by Silvers, shot and edited by Hills, and funded by a grant from the NEA Dance Program, with assistance from the Segue Foundation and the loan of a rear screen by Ken Jacobs.  

On that same page you can also see Zorn's score and read "Catalysts: Little Lieutenant," a scene-by-scene explication of the film. To watch this film, and many more Hills works from throughout his career, visit PennSound's Henry Hills author page.

PoemTalk #177: Two by Maggie O'Sullivan

On Monday we launched episode #177 in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which focuses on two poems from Maggie O'Sullivan's 1993 Reality Street collection, In the House of the Shaman: "To our Own Day" (from the section "Kinship with Animals") and "Hill Figures" (from "Prisms & Hearers"). For this show, host Al Filreis was joined by a panel consisting of (from left to right) Julia Bloch, Charles Bernstein, and Eric Falci. 

"Both poems, the group concurred, create soundings — and readings, to be sure," Filreis writes in his Jacket2 blog post announcing the new episode, "but aural qualities foremost — that enact and continue O’Sullivan’s resistance to the English of the UK south." He continues: "The hill figures, if they are personages (beings on the landscape), seem in part to form up that resistance through a certain located noise: “Crow-Shade / plumb, true / hemispheres / (dwell-juggling).” What does their “rolled-a-run / lettering” stand against poetically?" "Whatever originary sound is being made, or called for," he concludes, "it is aided by instruments accompanying the human voice."

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.