Dawn Lundy Martin on PennSound

In our last PennSound Daily entry of 2022, we're taking a look at the recordings available on our Dawn Lundy Martin author page, which offers listeners the opportunity to check out readings and talks from 2006 to 2016.

The earliest pair of recordings come from an April 2006 visit to New York City, which yielded sets for both Belladonna* and the Segue Series; Martin would return for another Segue reading at the Bowery Poetry Club in December 2008. Our first recording from A. L. Nielsen's Heatstrings Theory archives is an October 2009 reading at Penn State University, and Nielsen was also kind enough to share a March 2016 appearance by the poet as part of a reading celebrating What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, held in Brooklyn for that year's National Black Writers Conference at AWP. Then, from Andrew Kenower's A Voice Box archives, we have a pair of Bay Area readings: a 2010 reading at David Buuck's house and a 2013 reading at Tender Oracle held as part of the East Bay Poetry Summit. Finally, we have "On Discomfort and Creativity," the 2016 Leslie Scalapino Lecture in Innovative Poetics, held at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Video of that event is available, along with a link to the text in Something on Paper.

Four of the earlier readings mentioned above have been segmented into individual MP3s, providing listeners the unique opportunity to listen to multiple iterations of the same poems — including "The Undress," "The Morning Hour," "Bearer of Arms 1775-1783," and "The Symbolic Nature of Chaos" — read at separate events. Taken together, they also provide an interesting document of Martin's evolving style from her first publications up to just before her most recent collection, Good Stock, Strange Blood (Coffee House Press, 2017), which earned Martin the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2019 for "creating 'fascinating, mysterious, formidable, and sublime' explorations of the meaning of identity, the body, and the burdens of history along with one’s own private traumas." You can experience Dawn Lundy Martin's formidable voice by clicking here.

Purkinge, "Lollapalooza Soundtrack" (1994)

While Chris Funkhouser has been sending us tapes from his incredible archives from over a decade, they are more often than not recordings of other folks and not his own poetics and musical projects. Today we're taking a look at one such rare recording — a 1994 performance from the Lollapalooza festival's stop in Saratoga Springs, NY by Purkinge, a supergroup of sorts in which Funkhouser had taken part. Here's his description of the group's evolution and their triumphant appearance on the sidestage of the eclectic summer festival:

In 1992 made the unlikely move from Santa Cruz to Albany to pursue a Ph.D., partially because Katie Yates told me about a fascinating collaborative writing initiative Don Byrd spearheaded there. Too much technical & social back story to tell, but a performance group consisting of Sandy Baldwin, Belle Gironda, Eric Douglas, & I emerged named Purkinge (after brain fibers that conduct an electrical stimulus enabling the heart to contract in a coordinated fashion). Networked writing conducted across a series of computer terminals, sound, & stage were emphasized. We made hundreds of pages of poems, hours of multi-track recordings, played arts venues & theory conferences. Intent on re-defining expressive conventions, we weren't together to be popular or make money; we liked each other & did whatever we wanted given what we had ("being only possible because of gravity"). I was the only musician in the group, but our shows always featured soundtracks with everyone's input. 

We peaked in so many ways at the Saratoga Raceway stop of the 1994 Lollapalooza festival. People I knew were running a side stage, & various friends traveled show-to-show. I was invited to join & round up local talent. Purkinge worked on a set for a few weeks, mixing a 23 minute soundtrack combining ambient recordings, percussive segments, & language. We made several hundred 10 inch segments of dowels for the crowd. Voices on tape freed us from being bound to microphones, so we moved around a lot. We planned an interactive experience with the audience, & an almost unbelievable thing happened. Gorgeous afternoon: main-stage sets by the Breeders & Boredoms transpired under sunny skies. I wore a skirt, & a random party girl said, "I'm glad you're man enough to wear that." Shortly before Purkinge's show beneath a mini-circus tent on the infield, black clouds roll in & — simultaneous to thunder playing on our soundtrack — an intense thunderstorm hits. Suddenly five- or six-hundred people were in the tent, many of them hopped up, drumsticks in hand, performing. Boisterous & strident, beautiful within the larger event, we lashed folding metal chairs to ourselves, played & crashed into each other, setting a certain tone. As we finished, the rain stopped, then we danced with everyone else to George Clinton (P-Funk All Stars) & Beastie Boys in the mud.

Chris has done a wonderful production job here, creating a spacious mix that benefits those listening on headphones in particular, and leaving plenty of room for conversant dynamics to develop between noise, music and the sparring voices. You can hear this track, along with a wide array of readings, performances, interviews and lectures on PennSound's Chris Funkhouser author page.

St. Mark's Talks (1984-1986), Curated by Charles Bernstein

Today we revisit a fantastic highlight from the PennSound archives originally added to the site 10 years ago this month: the the St. Mark's Talks series, which was organized by Charles Bernstein at the Poetry Project from the fall of 1984 to the spring of 1986. The St. Mark's Talks series was an extension of the New York Talks series Bernstein curated and moderated during the first half of 1984. 

In a Jacket2 commentary post announcing the new additions in 2012, Bernstein explains the origins of the series: "In 1985, Eileen Myles was the new director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York. [They] asked me to curate a lecture series, the first such program at the church. I modeled the series at the Poetry Project on my earlier series New York Talk, giving it the amusing title, given the sometimes seeming resistance to poetics at the St. Mark's at the time, St. Mark's Talks. And talk it did." "I made these recordings myself," he continues, "and we are missing some of the talks, and in some case parts of the talk ... Here is what we got."

Altogether, PennSound has preserved all or part of fifteen events in the series, which follow the same general pattern of talk followed by discussion established during New York Talks. The series began with "Politics and Language," featuring Bruce Boone, P. Inman, Erica Hunt, and Jackson Mac Low, and continued with events including David Antin's "line music counterpoint disjunction and the measure of mind," Nathaniel Mackey's "Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol," "The Tradition of Marginality," featuring Kathleen Fraser and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Barbara Guest's "Mysteriously Speaking of the Mysterious Byzantine Proposals of the Poem," and Ron Silliman's "Postmodernism: Sign for a Struggle, the Struggle for the Sign." Other participants included Steve McCaffery, Lyn Hejinian, Anne Waldman, David Bromige, Nick Piombino, Lorenzo Thomas, and Bob Perelman, among others.

John Richetti reads "A Visit from St. Nicholas"

As we close out the year, we have one more gift to pass along to our listeners from our friend John Richetti: a recording of Clement Clarke Moore's beloved Christmas poem, "A Visit from St. Nicholas," from his ever-growing anthology, "125 Favorite Poems, Good for Memorizing."

More frequently known by its opening phrase, "'Twas the night before Christmas ...," "A Visit from St. Nicholas" was first published in Troy, New York's Sentinel on this day in 1823 with no attribution. It became wildly popular, reprinted far and wide, and its author — a professor of literature and divinity at New York City's General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, who initially sought to downplay his connection to the poem — would finally be credited in 1837, with Moore including it in a collection of his verse in 1844.

Click here to listen to Richetti's performance of the poem. You can read along on the Poetry Foundation's copy of the poem here. Many more recordings made by Richetti form the backbone of our PennSound Classics page, which is organized by author name. To start browsing, click here.

PoemTalk #179: Two by Armand Schwerner

Today we release the last new episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series for 2022. Program #179, "Untranslatable" focuses on two poems by Armand Schwerner: "Tablet XXV," an entry in his signature project, The Tablets, written near the end of his life, and "'daddy, can you staple these two stars together to make an airplane?,'" an earlier poem published in the collection Seaweed. For this episode, host Al Filreis is joined by a formidable panel that included (from left to right) Jerry Rothenberg, Pierre Joris, and Charles Bernstein.

Filreis' Jacket2 blog post announcing the new episode offers the provenance for each of the recordings discussed in the program: "'Tablet XXV' was recorded by the National Poetry Foundation in the mid-1990s," while "'"daddy, can you staple …"' was made by Paul Blackburn during Schwerner's public reading at the Poetry Project, at St. Mark’s Church, in New York, on January 18, 1967, and is made available through the remarkable Blackburn collection housed at the University of California at San Diego." There, you'll also find links to the complete text of each poem discussed and links to other recordings made during Jerry and Diane Rothenberg's visit to the Kelly Writers House last September

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.

Our First Midwinter Day Without Bernadette Mayer

At 4:47PM EST this afternoon we will officially make the transition from autumn into winter, and 32 minute later the sun will set, ushering in the longest night of the year. For many of us, the last month has felt especially dark due to the passing of Bernadette Mayer, whose beloved Midwinter Day celebrates its forty-fourth birthday this year. While not published until 1982, Mayer famously wrote the book — hailed by Alice Notley as "an epic poem about a daily routine ... sedate, mundane, yet marvelous" — in its entirety while marking the the winter solstice at 100 Main Street in Lennox, Massachusetts on December 22, 1978. 

Celebrating Mayer and Midwinter Day on this day is an annual PennSound tradition, dating back to 2014. As Megan Burns notes in her Jacket Magazine essay on the book: "A long held tradition on Midwinter's Day was to let the hearth fire burn all night, literally keeping a light alive through the longest night of winter as a source of both heat and a symbol of inspiration to come out the other side of the long night closer to spring and rebirth. It is fitting that a poem about surviving death and the intimacy of the family would be centered around this particular day that traditionally has focused on both. The hearth is the center of the home where the family gathers, where the food is cooked and where warmth is provided. Metaphorically, the poem Midwinter Day stands in for the hearth gathering the family into its folds, detailing the preparation of food and sleep and taking care of the family's memories and dreams."

Mayer read a lengthy excerpt from the book at a Segue Series reading at the Ear Inn on May 26th of the following year, which you can listen to on her PennSound author page along with a wide array of audio and video recordings from the late 1960s to the present. 

Ted Enslin on PennSound

Today we're surveying our collection of recordings from Ted Enslin (1925–2011), the avant-garde poet long associated with Maine's wilderness. 

Our collection starts well into his writing life, with a February 1985 reading at the legendary Woodland Pattern Book Center, followed by a January 1986 interview and reading on WMCS-AM and a reading of the single poem "Antiphony" at Bowling Green State University's Kobacker Hall in April 1989. We have another Woodland Pattern reading from February 1990, a March 1992 reading at Granary Books and another set from the same month at Wendell's, both in New York City. Then there are readings in Las Cruces in February 1997, the University of Maine in February 2000, and a recording of Enslin and Ben Friedlander reading at an unknown location in April 2000. Finally, from Jonathan Skinner's Steel Bar Reading Series, we have Enslin's last reading, close to home at Bates College in November 2009.

You can browse the aforementioned readings by clicking here.

Lytle Shaw: "Olson's Archives: Fieldwork in New American Poetry"

Today we dip into our archives to revisit Lytle Shaw's 2008 lecture, "Olson's Archives: Fieldwork in New American Poetry," delivered at the Kelly Writers House as part of the Theorizing series. 

Delivered on October 22nd of that year, "Olson's Archives" would eventually appear as a chapter in Shaw's 2013 book, Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics (here referenced under its working title, Field Authorities). In the essay Shaw examines "site-specific poetry and art as forms of experimental historiography and ethnography," tracing the shift from "a future-oriented poetics of place" (as seen in Williams and Olson) to a contemporaneously lived aesthetic (he cites Creeley, Baraka and Snyder as examples). In particular, Shaw is "interested in the way that poets who wanted to account for actual empirical places found themselves having to trespass beyond poetry proper to poach some of their authority from other disciplinary fields."

You'll find Shaw's lecture on his PennSound author page, alongside eight other recordings, starting with a 1999 reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project. Other readings include a trio of Segue Series readings — two from the Bowery Poetry Club (in 2004 and 2009) and a 2014 set at Zinc Bar — plus a 2002 reading at The Kootenay School of Writing, a 2006 appearance on Cross-Cultural Poetics, and his contributions to a "Barbara Guest Praise Day" at the BPC during the same year. In addition, you'll want to be sure to check out the Line Reading Series, which Shaw curated at the Drawing Center in New York from 2000-2006.

Paul Buck's Pressed Curtains Tape Project

In the 1970s, Paul Buck edited Curtains, a leading British avant-garde journal, whose amorphous identity was evidenced by its issue-by-issue name changes (Safety Curtain, Curtain-Raiser, A Range of Curtains, etc.) in the style of Tom Clark's Once and Kenward Elmslie's Z. "Curtains was not a poetry magazine either," Buck notes, "though it contained poetry and was viewed as part of the poetry world. Initially I was intent on researching an area of writing between poetry and prose, a writing that was more likely to be written by poets, though not exclusively." In time, the magazine would expand to become a multimedia endeavor:

Halfway through the 1970s, the notion of performing, whether relating to "performance art" or in terms of the oral tradition of poetry, was another factor that became part of the fabric. I was combining the two courses and exploring the oral in terms of poetry, music, art and ethnic traditions. It seemed natural to extend the boundaries of Curtains into a cassette tape series, even if no sophisticated equipment was available, either at home or nearby. 

In time, Buck would go on to release three cassettes under the series name Pressed Curtains: readings by Eric Mottram and Ulli McCarthy (then known as Ulli Freer) made at his own home, along with a recording of himself reading his piece xxxx7. Other recordings were made for potential release, but never saw the light of day. That ended in 2015, when Test Centre and Blank Editions put out a lavish limited-edition box set including a ten cassettes in total. With that edition of fifty now sold out, Buck has generously shared the complete archives with PennSound. In addition to the three original releases, you'll find recordings by Kathy Acker, cris cheek, Allen Fisher, Bill Griffiths, Pierre Joris, Robert Kelly, and Jean-Luc Parant. Buck's illuminating liner notes are also included. Click here to start exploring this fascinating time capsule.

Ted Greenwald, "Voice Truck" (1972)

Here's a fascinating recording from the late Ted Greenwald that we added to the site in January 2015. "Voice Truck" was assembled as part of Gordon Matta-Clark's installation Open Space (a similar contemporary work is shown at right). Our own Charles Bernstein announced the new addition in a Jacket2 commentary post, which includes this description of the recordings:

In May 1972, the artist Gordon Matta-Clark installed a dumpster in front of 98 Greene Street in Soho (Manhattan). The work was called both Open Space and Dumpster. The Dumpster was filled with construction debris and other material, formed into three corridors. For Ted Greenwald's contribution to the installation, he created a special audio work. Greenwald installed a tape recorder on the delivery truck for the Village Voice, his long-time day job. Six reels were recorded. One of the tapes, featuring the most dramatic action of the day, was stolen from the cab of the truck: in the middle of Times Square, mounted police galloped up to a subway entrance, tied their horses to the entrance, and ran down into the subway. The other five reels survived and are being made available by PennSound for the first time (one of those cassettes is listed below in two parts)."

You can listen, read more about the work, and find a link for further discussion of Open Space as well as a short video on Matta-Clark on Bernstein's J2 commentary. The recordings are also linked on our Ted Greenwald author page, where, among many other recordings, you can also listen to a March 1971 reading by Greenwald with Matta-Clark. Click here to start listening.

Happy Birthday to Emily Dickinson

Today would have been the 191st birthday of Emily Dickinson. For many years, a treasure trove of Dickinson materials was scattered throughout our site, but a few years ago we pulled together a proper PennSound author page for the poet, gathering selected resources from throughout our archives.

It should come as no surprise that Susan Howe would be prominent featured, and here you'll find complete talks on the poet from 1984 (from the New York Talk series) and 1990 (from SUNY-Buffalo) in addition to several smaller excerpts from larger talks pertaining to the poet. There's also a link to PoemTalk #32, which discusses Howe's interpretation of Dickinson's "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun."

Full series of lectures on Dickinson are also available from Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley, both at the New College and dating from 1981 and 1985, respectively. Among other substantial contributions, there's also the 1979 Dickinson Birthday Celebration at the St. Mark's Poetry Project (featuring Jan Heller Levi, Charles Bernstein, Susan Leites, Charles Doria, Virginia Terrace, Barbara Guest, Madeleine Keller and Vicki Hudspith, Armand Schwerner, Karen Edwards, Jackson Mac Low, Maureen Owen, and Howe) and Rae Armantrout's 2000 presentation on Dickinson from "Nine Contemporary Poets Read Themselves Through Modernism."

You'll also find performances of individual Dickinson poems from John Richetti and Jeffery Robinson as well as brief excerpts of radio interviews — with John Ashbery, Guest, and Elizabeth Bishop — pertaining to the poet.

Our hope is that this page, which brings together disparate resources already available in our archives, will be a useful tool for teachers, students, and casual readers, as well as serious scholars. Click here to start exploring.

Happy Birthday to Eileen Myles

We send out birthday greetings to Eileen Myles, who celebrates their 72nd birthday today. There's no better way to celebrate than browsing through the selections available on PennSound's Eileen Myles author page. 

Whether you're an old fan or newly acquainted with Myles, a great place to start is their two-part 2009 Close Listening radio program with Charles Bernstein that includes readings of twenty-one poems selected from across their first three decades of published work — including The Irony of the Leash (1978), Not Me (1991), School of Fish (1997), and Sorry, Tree (2007) — and a half-hour conversation between the two. 

Our earliest recordings of Myles are three appearances on Public Access Poetry in the late 1970s. They're nicely complemented by a 1978 appearance on Susan Howe's WBAI radio program and an October 1978 Segue Series Reading at the Ear Inn — one of seven total Segue Series appearances from the 1970s to the present. That's followed by a 1981 reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, a pair of Belladonna* readings from 2003 and 2009, visits to our own Kelly Writers House in 2010 and 2016 (when they were one of that year's Kelly Writers House Fellows). Other full-length readings include sets from the Dia Art Foundation, Mills College's Contemporary Writers Series, the ICA in Philadelphia, the California College of the Arts, the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona (via POG Sound), LA Lit, the CUNY Graduate Center, Basilica Soundscape, and the Penn Book Center, and there are also numerous individual tracks scattered over the past five decades.

Certainly, the promise of the poet's early writing and the audacity of their 1992 presidential campaign have flourished fully in our new century, with Myles taking their rightful place as one of our era's most influential poets, as well as one of our community's greatest ambassadors to lay audiences. Therefore we not only celebrate them today, but wish them many happy returns!

Jeff Preiss Discusses the Jon Lovitz / Charles Bernstein Yellow Pages Ads, 2019

If, like 57.19% of the world's population, you have seen Charles Bernstein's cult-classic Yellow Pages ads from the late 1990s, you might reasonably have some questions: Did Charles hurl a bottle of improperly-chilled spring water at a hapless PA? Is Jon Lovitz really just two children in a rubber suit? What is a Yellow Pages? You'll find all the answers you need in this 2019 recording in which Jeff Preiss, who conceived and directed the spots, shares how they came to be.

It all started with a well-received ad Preiss directed for the NBA starring Bill Murray. "Then the Yellow Pages — poor Yellow Pages — they were about to just die. There was no saving the Yellow Pages. Yellow Pages were on life support and they hired an agency to try to figure out a way of keeping the Yellow Pages relevant. Now in hindsight it was really just hopeless." That "absolutely terrible" idea was disposing with the beloved "let your fingers do the walking" slogan and imagery and switch their iconography to a light bulb, thus making the book "a kind of an inspirational text and a work of literature, where it gives you ideas." "A beautiful idea, but a doomed one," as Preiss recollects.

Because the Yellow Pages didn't have the money to get Bill Murray they wound up with Jon Lovitz instead, but Lovitz was reluctant because "the scripts [weren't] funny," though working together Preiss and Lovitz were able to revise them into something workable. Now they needed a literary critic to deliver a few lines, "and I had this idea to cast Charles and I figured Charles, it's so perfect for him, he'll be able to just go for it." Everyone at the agency was please with the results — "Charles is amazing ... like, it's beyond" — to the extent that they wrote and shot a second series of spots starring Bernstein exclusively.

They then took all of this back to the Yellow Pages, and that's where things start to break down. Listen in to hear the company's reaction, Preiss discussing his long friendship with Bernstein facilitated through filmmaker Henry Hills, and more. We're very proud to be able to host the full set of radio and TV ads Preiss made, along with outtakes, which are well worth checking out whether you already know and love them or if you're just seeing them for the first time. We're also grateful to Davide Balula, who made the recording and serves as interlocutor throughout, for sharing this with us. Click here to start listening.

Douglas Kearney on PennSound

We start this week off by taking a look at our author page is for poet, performer, and librettist Douglas Kearney, whose 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize win we celebrated back in June.

The majority of the recordings you'll find there come from Kearney's fall 2018 visit to our own Kelly Writers House, which included a two-part Close Listening reading and conversation with Charles Bernstein recorded on October 22nd, along with an appearance alongside Brian Goldstein for a "City Planning Poetics" event. This sixth installment in the series, organized by Davy Knittle, was titled "Urban Revitalization" and took place the following day.

In addition to these recordings, which are available in MP3 format or streaming video, we also have video from a trio of recent readings, including a September 2017 reading at the Poetry Center at the San Francisco State University, and a pair of undated recordings from Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art and Harvard University's Vocarium Reading Series. A 2005 appearance on LA-Lit is our earliest recording, while a set of home recordings made this October for a future episode of PoemTalk rounds out the collection.

You can check out all of the aforementioned recordings on our Douglas Kearney author page. Click here to start listening.

PoemTalk #178: on Matvei Yankelevich's 'Dead Winter'

Last week we released episode #177 in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which focuses on four poems/sections from Matvei Yankelevich's book-length work Dead Winter (Fonograf, 2022): "Winter comes calling" (7), "Winter have I lost your thread?" (12), "In a disjunctive age, disconsolate, without connection" (21), and "Winter and one more mine is the other guilt" (27). For this show, host Al Filreis was joined by a panel that included (from left to right) Ahmad Almallah, Huda Fakhreddine, and Kevin Platt.

Filreis' Jacket2 blog post announcing the new episode you'll find links to the texts for all four poems as well as segmented tracks from a special session recorded just for this program. That post also includes links to a video recording of a conversation with Matvei himself about Dead Winter — joined by Kevin, Ahmad, and Al as well as a dozen or so of Ahmad's students."

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.