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.

Abigail Child: Selected Films 1986–2006

Today we're highlighting a series of short films by poet and filmmaker Abigail Child. Our new page for Child's Selected Films 1986-2006 — edited by PennSound Contributing Editor, Danny Snelson — showcases four short films from throughout her past two decades of work.

The most recent film present here is 2006's Mirror World, a collaboration with Gary Sullivan, which reworks material from Mehboob Khan's Bollywood film, AAN into a fascinating twelve-minute short that layers soundtrack, dialogue and subtitles, manipulates framing and fractures narrative to critique both gender and social roles within Indian cinema while simultaneously celebrating its bright spectacle.

Next, we have three selections from Child's ongoing series, Is This What You Were Born For?: Perils (1986), Mayhem (1987) and Mercy (1989). Each organized around a central abstract notion, and embracing a jarring montage aesthetic (that's wonderfully complemented by scores featuring Christian Marclay, Charles Noyes and Zeena Parkins, among others), these films navigate a broad array of source materials to create mesmerizing meditations on our relationship to film and the ways in which the everyday and the extraordinary are reflected through the medium.

In addition to these videos, you'll want to check out the extensive archive of recordings on Child's main PennSound author page. A perennial favorite of the Segue Series, you'll find no less than six readings taking place between 1985 and 2008, split equally between the Ear Inn and the Bowery Poetry Club. There's also a 2000 appearance on PhillyTalks (which includes four poems) and a wonderful Close Listening reading and conversation with Charles Bernstein in 2007 (the former show, featuring writing from Solids, A Motive for Mayhem and Post Industrials, among others, is also segmented into six individual files). An audio-visual introduction to Child's work is only a click away.

John Richetti Reads Clement Clarke Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas"

We close out this week with one more beloved December tradition: our good friend John Richetti performing Clement Clarke Moore's 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 #191: on Two by Kenward Elmslie

Yesterday, we released the latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which focuses on two pieces — one poem ("Core Bonus") and one song ("One Night Stand") — by the multifariously talented Kenward Elmslie. A panel that included (from left to right) Henry Steinberg, Simone White, and Wayne Koestenbaum joined host Al Filreis for this program.

Filreis starts off his write-up of this new episode on Jacket2, with some fascinating backround information on the titles being discussed as well as the recordings: "As of the recording we had not located published/in-print version of 'Core Bonus' but Elsmlie's PennSound page includes a record of it. 'One Night Stand' was included in Routine Disruptions: Selected Poems and Lyrics (Coffee House Press, 1998)." He continues,"'Core Bonus' was performed during a Segue Series reading at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York on April 7, 2007. 'One Night Stand' was sung by Elmslie at the Kelly Writers House on November 12, 2003, for an event titled 'Snippets: A Gathering of Songs, Visual Collaborations, and Poems.'"

You can listen to this latest program and learn 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.

Spending Midwinter Day with Bernadette Mayer

At 10:27PM EST this evening we will officially make the transition from autumn into winter, already five hours into the longest night of the year. For many of us, this day inevitably brings bittersweet remembrances of the late Bernadette Mayer, whose beloved Midwinter Day celebrates its forty-fifth 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. 

Presenting an Updated PennSound Daily Archive

Isn't it amazing how time flies? Certainly, in the midst of this holiday season, most of us are feeling that swift passage of time for many different reasons, both happy and doleful. Today, in particular, we're thinking about PennSound Daily, which has come a long way since the first brief note posted on October 17, 2007. We estimate that there have been well over 2,000 entries in that time, but until now its archives been a little difficult to access, due largely to the technical issues that led to its hiatus over a span of months in 2017–2018.

That changes today with the introduction of a revamped PennSound Daily archive that assimilates our earlier month-by-month pages within the site for 2007 through 2017 entries with brand new links to monthly archives from 2018 forward hosted through Blogger, which is how we've generated new posts over the last five years. These newer pages also allow readers access to a brief but helpful set of tags (including PoemTalk, In Memoriam, and PennSound Cinema). 

This is but a stopgap measure, yet one that we wanted to make sure our listeners knew about. Stay tuned for a more thorough integration of both sets of archives and more tools to facilitate exploration in 2024 and beyond. If you told me in 2007 that I was going to write more than 2,000 of these things, I'd have probably stepped in front of the 42 bus, but on the other side of that process, it's quite lovely to look back at that body of work, which is still one of our primary ways of connecting with our listenership. Take a stroll through our newly revamped PennSound Daily archive today, and witness the site's evolution in a microcosm.

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.

Jena Osman: 'A Very Large Array' Book Launch, 2023

We close out this week by highlighting a recent addition to Jena Osman's PennSound author page: the October 21, 2023 launch event for her career-spanning collection, A Very Large Array (DABA, 2023), which was held at the Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore. Osman read from the book and joined in conversation with Adam Pendleton, artist and founder of the up-and-coming DABA Press.

Here's how DABA describes the new collection:

A Very Large Array is an extensive collection of poet Jena Osman's acclaimed work. Spanning more than thirty years, it gathers poems from her published books, as well as from journals and chapbooks long out of print. Osman's writing is relentlessly inventive, devising countless new formats that combine elements of the poem and the experimental essay. From her deep excavations of documentary materials, including maps from nineteenth-century New York and psy-ops leaflets dropped on Afghanistan after 9/11, her poems trace overlooked visual and linguistic incidents across centuries of American history. For Osman, vision and language are closely linked: both are anatomical, cognitive, and cultural processes — processes that are enlisted, as she repeatedly demonstrates, to exploit and entrench power. When she feeds streams of "official" language — from Supreme Court opinions to the procedural chatter of Predator drone pilots — through the filter of her poetic investigations, the verbal churn that issues forth is as chilling as it is comic.

One might consider our Osman author page as an aural accompaniment to A Very Large Array, with an encyclopedic assortment of readings, panel discussions, interviews, podcasts, talks, and more from 1990 to the present with over 100 individual files. Click here to start browsing.

Boise State University: 4 Fall 2023 Readings

Today we've got a new batch of recordings from the Boise State University MFA Reading Series from the fall semester that's just wrapped up. Recorded in September and October, these events all took place at the university's Hemingway Center.

First up, from September 22nd, we have an forty-four minute solo set by poet, editor, essayist, and teacher Peter Gizzi. Less than a week later on September 29th, Dan Beachy-Quick and Srikanth Reddy visited the campus for an event, each presenting half hour sets. Finally, the season closed out in grand fashion on October 27th with an hour-long set by Alice Notley.

Click here to visit PennSound's Boise State University MFA Reading Series homepage, where you can listen to all of the aforementioned readings. While you're there, check out our repository of recordings made between 2010–2013 under the curation of Martin Corless-Smith, including sets from Alan Halsey, Susan M. Schultz, Ben and Sandra Doller, Forrest Gander, Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, Jennifer Moxley, Bhanu Kapil, Myung Mi Kim, Renée Gladman, Tom Raworth, Lisa Robertson, Alice Notley, and Maggie Nelson. We thank current coordinator Sara Nicholson and grad student Adam Ray Wagner for their help in reviving the series page with recordings from Clyde Moneyhun, Gothataone Moeng, Alli Warren, and Brandon Brown last spring.

Happy Birthday Jerry Rothenberg

In our last post, we shared birthday greetings for a legendary poet, Emily Dickinson. Today, we'll do one better and salute a living legend: the one and only Jerry Rothenberg, who turns 92 on December 11th.

Our PennSound author page for Rothenberg, collecting recordings from 1969 to the present, is a wonderful way to interact with the Rothenberg's considerable legacy. There's a comprehensive survey of his own diverse poetic modes, spread across numerous recordings, from album releases via S Press and Optic Nerve's Rockdrill series to myriad readings and even some of his musical collaborations. There are a number of recordings related to his editorial and translation projects, including launch readings celebrating several different volumes in the Poems for the Millennium series and milestone events for Technicians of the Sacred (both its 40th and 50th anniversaries). There are lectures, class recordings, and interviews with Rothenberg, as well as commentaries on his own work, including several PoemTalk episodes. With nearly 300 MP3s alone — counting individual tracks and complete recordings — not to mention videos, it's a fittingly encyclopedic tribute to Rothenberg's influence, as well as a useful resource for all sorts of classroom settings. Listeners will also enjoy Rothenberg's ongoing Jacket2 commentary series, "Poems and Poetics," which we've been honored to host for the past eight years.

Pick any recording at random and you'll understand instantly why Rothenberg is so universally beloved: for someone who's published output might fill several shelves, he's truly at his best in a live environment. Having worked at PennSound for so long, I've been to a lot of poetry readings and have listened to many more beyond that, and for my money, there's no one as captivating, no voice as powerful, no poet who entertains as well as he moves us and teaches us. I cherish the three times I've seen Jerry read in person — at our own Kelly Writers House in 2008, at Xavier University here in Cincinnati in 2011, and at the University of Michigan in 2013 (all of which are available on PennSound) — and as he adds another year to a long and fruitful life, let's all hope there will be many more happy and healthy birthdays to come, because I won't be satisfied until I get to see him read at least one more time.

Happy Birthday Emily Dickinson

Today would have been the 192nd 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.

George Quasha Reads 'gnostalgia for the present,' 2023

It has been a very productive year for the dynamic duo of Chris Funkhouser and George Quasha, who have already published five lengthy installments documenting the many sections of Quasha's waking from myself on Quasha's PennSound author page over the past year, part of a much longer project the friends and neighbors have carried out since at least 2017.

Today we shift gears with gnostalgia for the present, a collaboration with photographer Susan Quasha that was recently published in its entirety at Caesura. Listeners can follow along with the complete text and delight at Susah Quasha's frosty urban abstractions. Click here to listen along on PennSound.

You'll find these and many more recordings 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.

Bernstein and Yarmolinsky's 'Blind Witness: Three American Operas'

Today we're highlighting Charles Bernstein and Ben Yarmolinsky's multimedia operatic collaborations, collected in the 2008 volume Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Factory School). 

In conjunction with the publication of Blind Witness, PennSound launched a new author page for Yarmolinsky, hosting complete recordings of all three operas, as well as videos from the Blind Witness book launch at Medicine Show, in the spring of 2008.

Originally written and performed over three decades ago, this trio of vernacular operas — Blind Witness News (1990), The Subject (1991) and The Lenny Paschen Show (1992) — are perhaps even more pointed critiques of American society in the present: we still a nation obsessed with the news, violence, celebrity, and our own inner workings. However, in these works, we discover a memento of simpler times, before our slipping headlong down a postmodern precipice, and through that trace we are capable of marking tremendous differences. The nightly newscast so wonderfully parodied in Blind Witness News (with its anonymized news team of Jill Johns, Jack James, Jane Jones and John Jacks) seems quaint in comparison to myriad channels of 24-hour news, yet the same hollow tropes remain. Likewise, Jenny Midnight's psychoanalysis has a human (if sometimes sinister) touch in the age of a faceless psycho-pharmaceutical industry. And, to paraphrase Jean Baudrillard, the Morton Downey Jr-esque Lenny Paschen exists to distract us from the fact that most contemporary television is equally outrageous, equally offensive, equally artificed.

Social commentary notwithstanding, the operas also provide immeasurable pleasures, starting with the uncanny juxtaposition between Yarmolinsky's lush classical melodies and accompaniments, and Bernstein's oft-hilarious libretti. Writing about his contributions in the preface to Blind Witness, Yarmolinsky observes that "These three operas (if they are operas) from the early 1990s represent my ideas about how contemporary American English ought to be sung. There is a consistent attempt in the text-setting to follow the rhythms and cadences of our language as it is spoken." He continues, "Although I collaborated on the scenarios, suggested some verse forms, occasionally asked for slight changes to the original text, and sometimes asked for a second verse or a refrain, ultimately, the music was evoked by the words."

As for what Bernstein brings to the table, we have the poet's continued fascination with "authentic" speech (as delivered through television, advertisements, etc.) and common mythologies, seen in contemporaneous collections such as 1994's Dark City. In passages such as Lenny's abrasive monologue, Jack and Jane's opening fugue of news-speak, or John Jack's rendering of abstract sports arcana, we witness Bernstein's great joy in manipulating the conventions of everyday language and, can't help but enjoy it. At the same time, amidst this savage lampooning of a candy-colored culture, we also find sympathetic and world-weary characters — particularly Jenny Midnight — and this touch of empathy makes our experience that much richer.

PennSound's Ben Yarmolinsky author page also includes the composer's 1995 appearance on LINEbreak, where he discusses his opera Anita, inspired by the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Hearings. Click here for a truly unique listening experience.

Paul Dutton: 'Oralizations' (2005)

Today we're highlighting a recent addition to the PennSound author page of Canadian author and sound artist Paul Dutton: Oralizations, a 2005 CD release on Montréal-based label Ambiances Magnétiques. Running nearly seventy minutes, this album presents"works spanning Dutton's more than thirty years of bursting the bonds of convention, testing the extremes of voice and verbalization, and blurring the borders between literature and music," neatly summarized as "richly textured multiphonic vocal virtuosity, laced with rasps, rumbles, honks, howls, and wheezes, featured in freely improvised and formally structured solos, with flights of verbal invention added into the mix."

Reviewing the album in Vital, Dolf Mulder emphasizes the hybrid nature of the work: "The pieces on his new CD range from english spoken poems to pieces mixed of speech and sound, to pure soundpoetry. Verbal, non-verbal or anything in between, Dutton in all pieces is interested in the sound qualities of his voice performance." He continues, "Dutton himself defines the spectrum he covers as ranging from speech to music. So in his vision the border between literature and music is a gradual one," before concluding that Oralizations is "music that has to be seen to be believed!"

PennSound's Paul Dutton author page, houses solo recordings from 1979–2001, as well as links to our Four Horsemen page and other collaborations, and a series of useful links to external resources. First created in 2005, our Dutton page was one of our earliest author pages, but its materials continue to surprise us. Click here to start exploring Oralizations.

Mad Mammoth Monster Poetry Readings: Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, Meltzer, Welch, Wieners, Whalen

Today we revisit a collection of recordings from the Mad Mammoth Monster Poetry Readings, which were convened by Auerhann Press in San Francisco on August 29, 1963. They include brief but very exciting sets by a total of seven noteworthy Bay Area poets, many of whom had been published by the press. Because we have no context clues to establish the reading order we're presenting these tracks in alphabetical order. Clicking on each poet's name will take you directly to their poem(s).

First up we have Allen Ginsberg, who read "Patna-Benares Express" and "May 22 [1962] Calcutta," followed by Philip Lamantia, who read "Rest in Peace, Al Capone" and "All Hail Pope John XXIII." Michael McClure read from Dark Brown and Ghost Tantras, while David Meltzer read several short pieces: "Baby's Hands," "Rain Poems," "Nerve Root Poem," "Two Poems to My Wife," and "Poem for Lew Welch." For his own set, Welch  read from Hermit Poems, while John Wieners read "A Poem for Cocksuckers" and "A Poem for the Old Man." Finally, we have Philip Whalen bringing our new recordings to a close with an excerpt from "The Art of Literature."

It's a fascinating snapshot of the Bay Area's poetry scene at that time as the late Beat Generation heyday slowly started to give way to the burgeoning Summer of Love ethos. To listen to any of the individual poets listed above, just click their names to be taken to their PennSound author pages.

PoemTalk #190: on Aldon Nielsen's "Tray"

We just released the latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, and it's a rare one in which the poet under discussion is part of the panel. At right, you'll see the knock-out trio of Aldon Nielen, Tyrone Williams, and William J. Harris assembled by host Al Filreis to discuss Nielsen's "Tray," from his collection of the same name. Not quit as rare for PoemTalk, but still quite special: this episode was also recorded life in front of an audience at the Kelly Writers Houses' Arts Café.

In his write-up of this new episode on Jacket2, Filreis explains the overall structure of the poem as well as the specific sections covered in this show: "There are 29 sections in the poem; the group discussed the first 6. In the book titled Tray, published by Make Now Press in 2017, the title poem takes up the first 37 pages; the sections we discussed run to page 14." He also notes that, "Usually, of course, we play an audio recording of the poem from we're about to discuss as archived in PennSound, but on this day, because we had the honor of Aldon's presence we asked him to perform those sections."

You can listen to this latest program and learn 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 William Blake

Today would have been the 256th birthday of visionary British poet William Blake, whose work continues to captivate audiences almost two centuries after his death. While recording technology did not exist during Blake's lifetime, PennSound is proud to be home to a recently-revamped William Blake author page, that collects a wide array of performances of the poet's work from throughout the archives.

The centerpiece of our Blake page is Allen  Ginsberg's groundbreaking 1970 album, Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake, tuned by Allen Ginsberg, which features an all-star roster of jazz sessionmen (including Don Cherry, Elvin Jones and Bob Dorough) providing an engaging and wide-ranging musical accompaniment for Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky's vocals. The album's twenty-one tracks consist of more or less equal samplings from both volumes, and we've provided links to images of each page of text from Blake's illuminated manuscripts, as archived on the William Blake Archive. An assortment of recordings of Ginsberg performing Blake poems at readings from the 70s through to the 90s complements this classic LP.

Ginsberg's performance of "The Garden of Love" (from Songs of Experience) was the subject of PoemTalk Podcast #4 — featuring a panel of Al Filreis, Charles Bernstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Jessica Lowenthal — and Ginsberg's great friend and Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics co-founder, Anne Waldman, performed her own version of this setting on her 2002 album By the Side of the Road. Bernstein too has a pair of recordings here: The Grey Monk" (originally recorded for the Romantic Circles website) and "The Sick Rose" (edited from his montaged set from the Kelly Writers House event celebrating the release of Poets for the Millennium, Vol. 3). From that same event, we also have Jerry Rothenberg reading excerpts from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Another formidable set of Blake recordings comes from UPenn professor emeritus John Richetti, who recorded a set of 15 tracks for the site in 2014, including "The Lamb," The Chimney Sweeper," "Holy Thursday," "The Sick Rose," "The Tyger," and "The Poison Tree." You'll also find a pair of recordings from Aaron Kramer reading from and discussing Blake's poetry, along with 

Lee Ann Brown's spirited rendition of "Ah! Sunflower," and the late, great Naomi Replansky reading a trio of poems — "London," "The Question Answered," and "The Sick Rose" — in 2015.

To listen to any and all of these recordings, click here to visit our William Blake author page.

Dawn Lundy Martin on PennSound

We wrap up this week by 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.

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.

Susan Howe and David Grubbs: "Frolic Architecture," 2011

Over the years, we've been able to bring you a wide variety of audio and video from the fruitful and long-running collaboration of poet Susan Howe and musician/composer David Grubbs (Squirrel Bait, Bastro, Gastr del Sol) and today we're happy to present footage of a recent performance of their piece, Frolic Architecture, recorded at Harvard University on November 1, 2011.

The stunning center section of Howe's 2010 book, That This (New Directions), Frolic Architecture was "inspired by Susan Howe's experience of viewing various manuscripts, sermon notebooks, books, and pamphlets of the eighteenth century American Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards in the vast collection of Edwards family papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven, Connecticut. Especially by the folder in Box 24 titled 'Wetmore, Hannah Edwards, 1713–1773, Diary, 1736–39, copy in the hand of Lucy Wetmore Whittelsey, with commentary/n.d.'" The texts were composed "using multi-purpose copy paper, scissors, 'invisible' scotch tape, and a Canon copier PC170 [to] collage fragments of this 'private writing' with a mix of sources from other conductors and revealers in the thick of things — before." Howe and Grubbs released a studio version of Frolic Architecture on Drag City subsidiary Blue Chopsticks (home to their previous albums, 2008's Souls of the Labadie Tract and 2005's Theifth) in 2011, which further develops the collaborative nature of the piece — aside from Howe's appropriation of Hannah Edwards Wetmore's diary, Frolic Architecture was originally published as a limited-edition artist's book by Grenfell Press, featuring ten photograms by James Welling (also reproduced in That This).

Working in a similar mode to their earlier collaborations, Grubbs creates an airy and haunting bed of sound, consisting of laptop manipulations of Howe's pre-recorded voice — rhythmic and chaotically scattered phonemes that mimic the poem's collaged scraps and flutter around the poet's live performance — wed to modulated Hammond organ drones. Much like Souls of the Labadie Tract, the two artists' interaction on Frolic Architecture began at a very early and unpublished stage in the text's development, and as Howe acknowledges in the Q&A session that follows the performance, her association with Grubbs has shaped her approach to writing and language in general. While, at first, she deemed Frolic Arcitecture to be an "unperformable poem," Grubbs' efforts to "match [his] fragmentation to [her] fragmentation" yield fantastic results once again.

Congratulations to National Book Award Winner Craig Santos Perez

We send our heartiest congratulations to indigenous Chamoru poet Craig Santos Perez (shown at right with jury chair Heid E. Erdrich) who won this year's National Book Award for from unincorporated territory [åmot] earlier this week.

The fifth book in the from unincorporated territory series devoted to Perez's native Guam, [åmot] was hailed in the judges citation for "observ[ing] and assert[ing] storytelling as an act of resistance — a written form of 'åmot,' the Chamoru word for 'medicine.'" Accepting the award, Perez told the audience that "When I started writing, my mission was to inspire the next generation of Pacific Islanders." Without a doubt, he's already accomplished that, and this win will allow his work to reach even wider audiences.

On Perez's PennSound author page you can listen to readings from earlier installments in the from unincorporated territory series, in readings from Oakland and our own Kelly Writers House, along with a 2009 appearance on Cross Cultural Poetics, hosted by Leonard Schwartz. Listeners may also be interested in "Last Commentator in Paradise," Perez's series of commentary posts on Jacket2, where he explored "issues of representation, displacement, witness, and resistance." Again, we congratulate Perez for this monumental honor.

James Schuyler at Dia Art Foundation, 1988

Today we are remembering a historic reading took place exactly 35 years ago today: James Schuyler's November 15, 1988 reading at the Dia Art Foundation, which is available as both video and segmented audio on Schuyler's PennSound author page.

Schuyler materials are very hard to come by, largely due to the the ways in which his mental illness hindered his considerable talents. One oft-cited example: his first major collection of poetry, Freely Espousing, wasn't published until 1969 — long into the careers of his core New York School comrades John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O'Hara, and closer to when second-generation poets like Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman released their first books. Likewise, this reading, which took place not long after Schuyler turned 65, was his first ever; he'd die less than two-and-a-half years later.

When we first launched the video in 2015, it elicited many excited responses among fans and scholars. One particularly useful commentary came from New York School specialist Andrew Epstein, who offered some very useful contexts for the reading on his blog, Locus Solus: "Reclusive, plagued by intermittent bouts of severe mental illness, painfully shy, Schuyler had never before read his work in public, even though he'd been publishing since the 1950s. That evening, Schuyler's close friend John Ashbery gave a wonderful and incisive introduction (which can also be found in Ashbery's Selected Prose), and throngs of Schuyler's admirers from the literary and art world flocked to the Dia Center on Mercer Street." He continues, quoting David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde — "For many in the audience it felt like a historic occasion. The line of people waiting to get in, many poets, writers, and artists among them, snaked around the corner" — and offering up Charles North's assessment: "The Dia reading was the most thrilling I think I've ever been to, the loudest applause I've ever heard — thunderous."

His authoritative report continues, observing that "the reading was a very big deal for Schuyler himself and his letters and diaries record the anxious build-up and the exhilarated aftermath of his debut performance," before offering up copious excerpts from those documents, concluding with Schuyler's estimation that "I was a fucking sensation." Epstein can't help but agree, and neither will you once you get a chance to see the venerable poet reading "February," "Empathy and New Year," "December," "Unlike Joubert," or other favorites.

We'd like to thank Schuyler's literary executor Raymond Foye and the Dia Art Foundation for allowing us to share this remarkable document with our listeners.

In Memoriam: Hugh Seidman (1940–2023)

We start this week off with sad news via Michael Heller that poet Hugh Seidman passed away last week at the age of 83. To honor the late poet, we've assembled a PennSound author page for Seidman from various recordings scattered throughout the site.

The earliest of these is a half-hour Segue reading at the series' first home, the Ear Inn, alongside James Sherry on November 16, 1991. Next up, we have a trio of recordings of Seidman and poets Lawrence Joseph and D. Nurkse made for the WBAI-FM radio program Cat Radio Cafe on December 4, 2005, including an hour-long reading, a forty-five minute discussion segment, and a brief concluding track with author bios. Finally, from the Poets House-organized George Oppen Centennial Symposium at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center in April 2008, we have a brief set by Seidman reading five sections from Oppen's "Route."

We send our sincere condolences to Seidman's friends, family, and colleagues. Click here to start exploring his work.

Richard Foreman: 'Astronome: A Night at the Opera,' 2010

In celebration of the 70th birthday of composer John Zorn, we are proud to announce the addition of Richard Foreman's presentation of Zorn's opera,  Astronome: A Night at the Opera to the PennSound archives.

Astronome: A Night at the Opera was originally released on DVD by the iconic label Tzadik in July 2010 (you can still purchase a copy here) and we're grateful to their permission (and Zorn's) to share this recording through our site. As the liner notes comment: "Foreman's dynamic staging of John Zorn's opera Astronome premiered in February of 2009 at his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre in New York. For this video, ten performances were captured on film from hundreds of angles and edited by filmmaker Henry Hills.

Our Richard Foreman author page is home to a comprehensive survey of his work spanning five decades.  Edited by Jay Sanders, the collection begins with excerpts from early works — Rhoda in Potatoland (1975), Livre des Splendeurs (1976, Paris), Blvd. de Paris: I've Got the Shakes (1977), Threepenny Opera (1976), Book of Splendors; Part II (Book of Leaves) Action at a Distance (1977), Sophia = (Wisdom): Part 3: The Cliffs (1972) — before moving on to films and complete plays. They include Luogo and Barsaglio (Place and Target) (1980), La Robe de Chambre de Georges Bataille (1983), Cure (1986), Symphony of Rats (1988), Lava (1989), Eddie Goes to Poetry City Parts 1 and 2 (1990-1991), The Mind King (1992), Samuel's Major Problems (1993), My Head Was a Sledgehammer (1994), I've Got the Shakes (1995), The Universe (1996), Permanent Brain Damage (1996), Benita Canova (1997), The Missing Jewels of Benita Canova (1997; Elka Krajewska's behind-the-scene documentary [with interviews] of Benita Canova), Pearls for Pigs (1997), Paradise Hotel (1998), Bad Boy Nietzsche! (2000), Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty! (2001), Maria del Bosco (2002), Panic! (How to be Happy! (2003), King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe (2004), The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (aka Lumberjack Messiah) (2005), What to Wear (2006), and  Zomboid (2006). Next up there's Foreman's 2006 appearance on Close Listening, a pair of Segue Series readings, a 2006 appearance at the Penn Humanities Forum, a half-dozen appearances on Cross-Cultural Poetics, and Foreman's 2017 film, Now You See It Now You Don't. 

To start browsing through all of these amazing documents, click here to visit PennSound's Richard Foreman author page.

Harryette Mullen on 'The Poetry Show,' 1987

We've got an exciting recent addition to our Harryette Mullen author page to kick off this new week: a March 18, 1987 appearance on Morton Marcus' long-running The Poetry Show on Santa Cruz, CA's KUSP-FM. Running just shy of an hour, this program features Mullen reading selections from and discussing her 1991 Tender Buttons collection, Trimmings.

Writing in Boston Review about Recyclopedia — the 2006 Graywolf Press reissue of Trimmings and two other related early books, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge — Joyelle McSweeney cites Trimmings as the collection that "broke with both the form and content of [Mullen's] earlier lyrics, which largely concerned memory and family narratives." Inspired by and speaking to the “Objects” section of Stein’s Tender Buttons, these poems "investigate the dual trappings in which women go out to meet the world: their clothing and their bodies. Flinty shards of language line up in herky-jerk sentences to act out different parts of speech."

Listen in to this program and many more recordings spanning more than thirty years on PennSound's Harryette Mullen author page, including numerous readings from the Segue Series, the St. Mark's Poetry Project, Cornell University, Woodland Pattern Book Center, SUNY-Buffalo, UT Austin, Poets House NYC, the Belladonna* Reading Series, and our own Kelly Writers House, as well as the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics. Also, don't forget that Mullen will be joining us in April as one of the 2024 Kelly Writers House Fellows.

Remembering Carl Rakosi on his 120th Birthday

This November 6th would have been the 120th birthday of Objectivist poet Carl Rakosi, who passed away at the venerable age of 100 in the summer of 2004. To celebrate this milestone, today we survey the recordings of Rakosi available on his PennSound author page.

Much like his friend George Oppen, Rakosi took a quarter-century break from poetry from the early 40s until the release of Amulet in 1967, so all of our holdings come from that second act. Our earliest recording you'll find there is a May 13, 1971 appearance on Charles Armakanian's KPFA program Ode to Gravity, in which Rakosi reads and discusses a dozen or so poems. That's followed by two half-hour films that capture the "Objectivists and After" panel at the National Poetry Festival, in June 1973. Next up are two readings at the Library of Congress that took place twenty years apart: the first at the LOC Recording Laboratory on May 4, 1976 (where, per the catalogue listing, "Mr. Rakosi reads four poems from his collection entitled Amulet; seven from Ere-voice; and nine from Ex-cranium, night."), while the latter, introduced by Robert Hass, took place in the Mumford Room on April 11, 1996. 

Jumping forward two years, we have a three-hour panel discussion on the Objectivists from Naropa University's Summer Writing Program also featuring  Michael Heller, Jenny Penberthy, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis recorded on June 17, 1998. Then, from our own Kelly Writers House, we have a 99th birthday celebration that took place on October 30, 2022. Our final recording of Rakosi is a silent five minute clip from filmmaker Nathaniel Dworsky filmed during the last year of the poet's life at the Arboretum of Golden Gate Park, which shows Rakosi strolling with his companion, Marilyn Kane, talking and writing.

You can listen to all of the aforementioned recordings — plus a single track from The World Record: Readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, 1969-1980 and PoemTalk #83, which focuses on "In What Sense I Am I" from the 99th birthday celebration — on PennSound's Carl Rakosi author page. Click here to start browsing.

Haroldo de Campos at PennSound

We'll bring this week to a close by highlighting our author page for poesia concreta pioneer, Haroldo de Campos, which is anchored by a 2002 video from the Guggenheim Museum celebrating his life and work. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Brazil: Body and Soul, this January 12, 2002 event featured both performances and discussion of de Campos' work by a wide variety of poets, translators and critics.

The video begins with introductory comments by Pablo Helguera and organizer Sergio Bessa, who are followed by a staging of de Campos' 1950 poem/play "Auto do Possesso (Act of the Possessed)," translated by Odile Cisneros and directed by Cynthia Croot. Craig Dworkin is next, reading his translation of "Signantia quasi coelum / signância quase céu," follwed by a brief set by Cisneros, who reads her translations. The performances conclude with Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein reading Bessa's translation of "Finismundo," after which Perloff and Bernstein take part in a panel discussion moderated by Bessa.

Next, from 2005's Rattapallax we have a single track, "Calcas Cor de Abobora." Finally, we have a 2017 video of our own Charles Bernstein performing at New York's Hauser and Wirth Gallery with Sergio Bessa on September 28, 2017. This event, co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America and held in conjunction with an exhibit by Mira Schendel at the gallery, included Bessa speaking about de Campos and Bernstein reading his translations of Drummond, Cabral, Cruz e Sousa, Leminksi, and Bonvicino.

On our Haroldo de Campos author page, you'll also find a link to Bernstein's 2003 essay "De Campos Thou Art Translated (Knot)", first published in the Poetry Society of America's Crosscurrents.

Joseph Ceravolo on PennSound

Today we're highlighting 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.