James Schuyler "on the Day Before March First"

"It's February 28, and that means it's a good day to read and think about one of my favorite James Schuyler poems, 'February,' which takes place 'on the day before March first.'" Thus begins a 2018 blog post by Andrew Epstein on his indispensable blog, "Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets." What follows is an excerpt from Epstein's book, Attention Equals Life, which is concerned with the poem's origins and its place within Schuyler's ouvre. 

As Epstein notes, "'February' seems to have been a breakthrough for Schuyler, ushering in his mature style and set of concerns;  years later, he decided to give it pride of place as the second poem in Freely Espousing, his debut full-length collection, published in 1969." He continues, telling us that it "was also one of only four poems by Schuyler included in The New American Poetry, the epochal 1960 anthology edited by Donald Allen, which ensured that it would become an early 'greatest hit' for the poet." He then moves on to discuss Schuyler's writing process:

"February" is one of the first of Schuyler's many "window" poems; it sets out to recount exactly what could be seen from his apartment window in New York during a wintry sunset, at precisely 5 P.M. "on the day before March first." Fortunately for us, Schuyler discussed the composition of this poem in a letter he wrote (and apparently never mailed) to a woman ("Miss Batie") who had written a fan letter to him about his poems.  In the letter, he explains that

the day on which I wrote the poem I had been trying to write a poem in a regular form about (I think) Palermo, the Palazzo Abatelli, which has splendid carved stone ropes around its doors and windows, and the chapels decorated by Serpotta, with clouds of plaster cherubs; the poem turned out laborious and flat, and looking out the window I saw that something marvelous was happening to the light, transforming everything.  It then occurred to me that this happened more often than not (a beautiful sunset I mean) and that it was 'a day like any other,' which I put down as a title.  The rest of poem popped out of its own accord.  Or so it seems now.

By deciding to abandon the other, unwritten hymn to Palermo and Serpotta's baroque cherubs, and by choosing to write "February" instead, Schuyler seems to have stumbled upon a recognition about subject matter, about attentiveness to daily life, and about form.

You can read more of Epstein's observations, along with the poem in its entirety here.  You can listen to Schuyler read the poem as part of a reading at New York's Dia Art Foundation on November 15, 1988 — where he was introduced by close friend and collaborator John Ashbery — on PennSound's James Schuyler author page.

Harryette Mullen on PennSound

Today we revisit one of our most exciting recent additions to our author roster, someone that the entire PennSound team had been eager to have as part of our site since its inception: Harryette Mullen. 

Our Harryette Mullen author page archives more than thirty years of recordings, starting with a 1991 Segue Series reading at the Ear Inn, one of five total Segue Series events in the collection. There are also readings, panel discussions, and talks from 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. All of Mullen's foundational books are well represented here, with copious readings from Sleeping With the Dictionary, as well as the three influential early books collected in one volume in Recylopedia — Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse and Drudge — though sadly material from her last full-length collection, the tanka diary Urban Tumbleweed, is not present. We've also compiled a small appendix of recordings related to Mullen from within the PennSound archives, including events at which she was present and short sessions of other poets teaching her work. Our most recent addition is PoemTalk #172, "Trance of Language," in which Al Filreis leads a discussion of Mullen's "Sleeping with the Dictionary" and "Dim Lady" with Julia Bloch, Maxe Crandall and Larissa Lai.

To start browsing the aforementioned recordings, click here.

PoemTalk #181: on Hoa Nguyen's "Long Light"

Today we released the latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, its 181st in total, which is focused on Hoa Nguyen's poem "Long Light." For this program, host Al Filreis was joined by panelists Bethany Swann, Jonathan Dick, and Kate Colby.

Filreis begins his Jacket2 blog post announcing the new episode with the provenance of both the poem (collected in Red Juice: Poems, 1998–20008) and the recording under discussion (a March 22, 2016 event for the St. Bonaveture Visiting Poets Series). You'll also recall that this show was recorded before a live audience in the Arts Café of the Kelly Writers House in a special session last fall.

You can listen to this latest program, read the full text of Nguyen's poem, 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.

Joan Retallack Returns This Morning at 10AM

This year's Kelly Writers House Fellows program kicked off in grand fashion with last night's reading by poet, teacher, critic, editor-interviewer, and poethicist Joan Retallack. If you missed that event you can watch it here.

Retallack returns this morning at 10:00AM EST for a brunch interview and conversation moderated by Simone White and Al Filreis, which you can watch live via this YouTube link. These events are entirely open to the public, although seating is limited. In addition, in an undergraduate seminar, the "Kelly Writers House Fellows Seminar," twenty or so students will read the work of each Fellow and then meet privately with them during that week's three-hour class session. 

For more about Writers House Fellows, including the 22-year history of video recordings of Fellows' visits, please visit this site. If you'd like to immerse yourself in Retallack's work in advance of her visit, there's no better place than her extensive PennSound's author page, which hosts four decades of readings, interviews, talks, and more. Click here to start browsing.

Don't Miss Joan Retallack's KWH Fellows Visit, Starting Tonight

We are just hours away from our first Kelly Writers House Fellows visitor of the year, poet, teacher, critic, editor-interviewer, and poethicist Joan Retallack. 

From New York and Charleston, South Carolina, Joan Retallack is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Procedural Elegies / Western Civ Cont’d, an Artforum Best Book of 2010. Her other books include Memnoir (2004), How to Do Things With Words (1998), Afterrimages (1995), and Circumstantial Evidence (1985). Her honors are vast, including a Pushcart Prize, a Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, and grants from the Lannan Foundation for poetry and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her critical studies, including The Poethical Wager, emphasize imagination and alterity and are playfully philosophical. She was the director of Language and Thinking Program at Bard College for ten years, and then served as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities, teaching courses related to her interests in experimental traditions of the 20th and 21st centuries, poetics, and the philosophy of language.

Retallack will be joining us for two events, starting this evening at 6:30PM EST with a reading, which you can watch via the KWH YouTube page here. Tomorrow morning at 10:00AM EST she'll return for a brunch interview and conversation moderated by Simone White and Al Filreis. Watch that event live via this YouTube link. These events are entirely open to the public, although seating is limited. In addition, in an undergraduate seminar, the "Kelly Writers House Fellows Seminar," twenty or so students will read the work of each Fellow and then meet privately with them during that week's three-hour class session. To join us in person, reserve seats by writing to: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu.

For more about Writers House Fellows, including the 22-year history of video recordings of Fellows' visits, please visit this site. If you'd like to immerse yourself in Retallack's work in advance of her visit, there's no better place than her extensive PennSound's author page, which hosts four decades of readings, interviews, talks, and more. Click here to start browsing.

James Weldon Johnson on PennSound

PennSound's author page for James Weldon Johnson — a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance and former leader of the NAACP — is edited by Chris Mustazza, building upon his archival research. Here's his description of the project:

These recordings of James Weldon Johnson were made on December 24, 1935 at Columbia University and are part of a larger collection of recordings known as The Contemporary Poets Series. Johnson is the only African American poet in the series, which ran from 1931 through the 1940s. The addition of the Johnson recordings to PennSound is crucial for a number of reasons, one of them being the function of Johnson's poetry as an ethnographic preservation of culture through the transduction of the sounds of language.

The first two recordings in the collection, "The Creation" and "Go Down Death," both from Johnson's 1927 collection God's Trombones, seek to preserve the sounds of African American folk sermons of the early 20th century. Johnson's poetics in the introduction to God's Trombones speaks extensively about how these poems are a visual representation of the sounds of the preachers of the sermons, a kind of musical score and libretto. He works to represent the cadences of these dynamic sermons through punctuation and lineation, with em-dashes representing a pause longer than a comma, and line breaks an even longer pause. In this regard, Johnson's work serves as a kind of proto-Projective Verse: he scores these poems for sonic representation. As such, the addition of the recordings to PennSound allows us to hear firsthand the poems as Johnson heard them when he composed them. And, in doing so, Johnson's vision of preserving the sounds and cultural significance of these sermons for posterity is realized.

The poems from Johnson's 1917 collection of poems, Fifty Years and Other Poems, are also sonic representations and cultural preservations. For example, Johnson's use of dialect poetry in some of the poems is a representation of speech sounds. By the time of these recordings, Johnson had spent a significant amount of time thinking about the aesthetic effects of writing dialect poetry, during which time he renounced the practice, and here returns to it (perhaps after being convinced of the the value of dialect poetry by Sterling A. Browns's 1932 collection of poetry, Southern Road). Johnson deftly uses dialect to great aesthetic effect, especially in "Sence You Went Away," a poem that creates a slippage between the dialect for "since" and the sound of "sense" (i.e. which could be read as "Sense, you went away"). Here, too, Johnson's poetry and poetics prefigure aesthetic movements of the later 20th century.

This very important collection is publicly available here in PennSound for the first time ever. For this, we thank Jill Rosenberg Jones and the James Weldon Johnson estate for their permission to distribute the recordings, as well as the staff at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library for their assistance in digitizing these materials. Thanks, too, to the Penn Digital Humanities Forum for supporting a project that made these digitizations possible. I hope you will enjoy listening to these recordings.

New at the EPC: 'Witz' (1992–1999) ed. Christopher Reiner

Today we're proud to announce a new addition to our sister site, the Electronic Poetry Center: a complete digital archive of the journal Witz, which was edited by Christopher Reiner and published a total of twenty issues in seven volumes between 1992 and 1999.

The first piece to appear in the very first issue, "What's Witz," starts with a long quotation from Steve McCaffery's North of Intention:

Witz, as we receive it from German Romanticism, is a profoundly social and revolutionary faculty. Friedrich Schlegel describes it as "absolute social feeling, or fragmentary genius," as an "explosion of confined spirit" and likens it to "someone who is supposed to behave in a manner representative of his station, but instead simply does something." Novalis designated it as "a principle of affinities" that is simultaneously "the menstruum universale." In old and middle-high German the term "witz" describes an intellectual faculty based on ingenuity, mental acuity and (in contrast to mathemata) the ability to grasp truth unprovably, non-scientifically and at a single glance.

Reiner adds one more layer to this multifarious definition, "Witz, in this case, is a magazine of critical writing, published three times a year." He continues: "We're hoping for a variety of criticism on a wide range of subjects and ideas, though our primary focus will be on readings and reviews of recently published small press books. Most of these books are ignored by mainstream publications, and we're hoping that Witz will be a resource for interested readers — particularly students — who might otherwise overlook this work."

Reviews were certainly a major component of each issue of Witz, with the books covered offering a fascinating snapshot of contemporary small press poetics during the 90s and yielding some very interesting combinations: Trimmings by Harryette Mullen, reviewed by Alan Davies; Strong Place by Tim Dlugos, reviewed by Kevin Killian; Song of the Andoumboulou by Nathaniel Mackey, reviewed by Christopher Funkhouser; The Marginalization of Poetry by Bob Perelman, reviewed by Susan M. Schultz. That said, each offer also offered up a handful of incisive articles on poetics, with the last two issues dedicated solely to essays. You can start exploring this treasure trove by clicking here.

One Week Till Joan Retallack's KWH Fellows Visit

We're starting to get excited because we're just one week away from our first Kelly Writers House Fellows visitor of the year, Joan Retallack. 

From New York and Charleston, South Carolina, Joan Retallack is a celebrated poet, teacher, critic, editor-interviewer, and poethicist. She is the author of 8 books of poetry, most recently Procedural Elegies / Western Civ Cont’d, an Artforum Best Book of 2010. Her other books include Memnoir (2004), How to Do Things With Words (1998), Afterrimages (1995), and Circumstantial Evidence (1985). Her honors are vast, including a Pushcart Prize, a Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, and grants from the Lannan Foundation for poetry and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her critical studies, including The Poethical Wager, emphasize imagination and alterity and are playfully philosophical. She was the director of Language and Thinking Program at Bard College for ten years, and then served as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities, teaching courses related to her interests in experimental traditions of the 20th and 21st centuries, poetics, and the philosophy of language.

Retallack will be joining us for two events, starting with a reading at 6:30PM EST on Monday, February 20th, which you can watch via the KWH YouTube page here. Then, at 10:00AM EST on Tuesday the 21st, Retallack will return for a brunch interview and conversation moderated by Simone White and Al Filreis. Watch that event live via this YouTube link. These events are entirely open to the public, although seating is limited. In addition, in an undergraduate seminar, the "Kelly Writers House Fellows Seminar," twenty or so students will read the work of each Fellow and then meet privately with them during that week's three-hour class session. To join us in person, reserve seats by writing to: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu.

For more about Writers House Fellows, including the 22-year history of video recordings of Fellows' visits, please visit this site. If you'd like to immerse yourself in Retallack's work in advance of her visit, there's no better place than her extensive PennSound's author page, which hosts four decades of readings, interviews, talks, and more. Click here to start browsing.

Hanif Abdurraqib on PennSound

We wrap up this week by taking a look at our author page for poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib.

This modest collection of recordings begins with his virtual reading at our own Kelly Writers House on April 19, 2021. Video footage from that event is available, along with segmented MP3 audio that you can stream or download. In the first half, Abdurraqib reads the ten-part poem "All the TV Shows Are About Cops," which is split into individual tracks. The Q&A session that followed has also been split into thematic segments, such as "on the writing process," "on making an office space," "tips for aspiring cultural critics," "on being influenced by his favorite books," and "on sneakers."

These new tracks join an old favorite, a January 2019 reading of "USAvsCuba," taken from his debut collection The Crown Ain't Worth Much (Button Poetry, 2016). Listeners can read along with that poem in Western Beefs here. To listen to all of the aforementioned recordings, click here.

Peter Glassgold Reads from 'Boethius: The Poems from "On the Consolation of Philosophy"'

We recently made a new addition to our singles database — where you can find recordings from poets for whom we don't have enough files to construct an individual author page — that documents an audacious experiment in translation: Peter Glassgold's Boethius: The Poems from "On the Consolation of Philosophy." Specifically, we have an recording made on July 13, 1990 of the poet reading the first two poems from that collection, which, as its subtitle suggests, were "translated out of the original Latin into diverse historical Englishings." 

Boethius was eventually published in 2000 by Sun & Moon. On Green Integer's page for the now out-of-print collection, the author shares his perspectives on the work: "Glassgold says he thinks of these translations as Benjaminic (as in the Walter Benjamin essay "The Task of the Translator") insofar as Benjamin evokes a pure text, or a pure language that exists somewhere in between the original and its translations. His kabbalistic/Neoplatonist ideal of language as such finds distant philosophical echoes in Boethius, the last of the classic Neoplatonists, while the notion of pure language being found in intertextual space finds a kind of graphic expression in Glassgold's historical linguistic collaging." The blurb continues, "The translator likes to think of his translations 'as if the Latin words were viewed through a deep pool, and down at the bottom, distorted by layers of verbal currents and aural foreshortenings, lies the Latin," before concluding, "What Zukovsky strives for in his sound-translations of Catullus, so Glassgold in his way does for Boethius: restoring poetry to its densely layered meanings."

You can listen to a sampling of this pioneering polyglot poetry by clicking here.

"E" no. 3 (2020), featuring McCaffery, Mac Low, Weiner, et al.

E was a magazine of experimental and performance writing with a particular interest in visual, concrete, and sound poetry, edited by poet/performer Marshall Reese and composer Eugene Carl. Like many upstart journals, it got off to an enthusiastic start with two issues published in 1976, with a note on the back cover of the second issue promising "next issue will be cassette or lp." Well, the editors have proven true to their word, though it took a little longer than expected, with the material initially gathered for E's third issue finally being released on red vinyl by the esteemed label Slowscan in 2020 in a limited edition of 250 copies (available via Granary Books). Reese was kind enough to contact PennSound about hosting a free digital copy of the issue and we were grateful for the opportunity, especially given how well this exciting compilation sits alongside similar works within our archives.

In his liner notes, Reese discusses the influences shaping the direction E would take, most notably his experience of the Toronto Sound Poetry Festival of 1978. He writes, "this record documents those forces and influences affecting me in the 70's, early 80's. My generation was the the forefront of an expansion of literacy combining indigenous poetries, graphics, still and moving images, recorded words, music and sound, an oral/aural culture experiencing poetry and music as synesthesia."

E no. 3 features nine tracks in total from eight artists, starting with Steve McCaffery's "Cappuccino: A Suffix Story for Henri Poincaré." Next up is CoAccident (a Baltimore-based "sound poetry music performance group" featuring Kirby Malone, Chris Mason, Ellen Carter, Alec Bernstein, Mitch Pressman, and Reese) with "When What Whole Wheat Means Meant That" and Greta Monach with two excerpts from Fonergon, before Jackson Mac Low closes out side A with "The First Sharon Belle Matla Vocabulary Gatha." Side B starts with two untitled pieces by Vladan Radovanovic, followed by Irrepressible Bastards (a.k.a. cris cheek and Lawrence Upton), followed by an excerpt from Hannah Weiner's Clairvoyant Journal (taken from her 1978 New Wilderness Audiographics cassette release), with Gene Carl wrapping up the record with "Words and Music by Gene Carl." Click here to start exploring.

Happy Birthday, Gertrude Stein!

February 3rd marks the 149th anniversary of Gertrude Stein's birth, and that's a wonderful reason to reacquaint our listeners with the Stein-related resources that are available at both PennSound and Jacket2.

Our Gertrude Stein author page, edited by the late scholar Ulla Dydo, is home to all known extant recordings of the iconic author, including the contents of her 1956 Caedmon album Gertrude Stein Reads From Her Works — which were recorded during the winter of 1934–35 in New York City — and several tracks not used for the album. The other large body of material you'll find there are Stein's sessions for Columbia University's Speech Lab, uncovered by our own Chris Mustazza several years back.

We're also very proud to be able to share a 1947 recording of Virgil Thompson's opera Four Saints in Three Acts, based on Stein's work of the same name, which came to us courtesy of John Whiting. In addition to complete audio of the performance and the full text of its libretto, we've provided listeners with a link where they can see a brief clip from the production, which includes gorgeous sets by Florine Stettheimer.

Beyond that, Stein has been the subject of two PoemTalk programs: episode #10 from 2008, which addresses "Portrait of Christian Bernard," and episode #90 from 2015, which discusses "How She Bowed to Her Brother." Audio and video from the 2014 Kelly Writers House celebration "Tender Buttons at 100" rounds out our holdings, along with a link to "A Little Bit of a Tumblr," which is quite possibly the only single-serving website influenced by Stein and her work.

Over at our sister site, Jacket2, you'll want to check out Charles Bernstein's ongoing dossier, "Gertrude Stein's War Years; Setting the Record Straight," and Julia Bloch's micro-reviews feature, "Twenty-Two on Tender Buttons." Readers might also enjoy Rachel Galvin's review of Stein's Stanzas in Meditation: The Corrected Edition or Joshua Schuster's 2011 article, "The Making of Tender Buttons," and you can browse our complete archive of commentary posts tagged with Stein's name here.

Kathy Acker, 'Redoing Childhood' (1999)

Today we're taking a dip into the PennSound archives to showcase Kathy Acker's album Redoing Childhood (Kill Rock Stars, 1999), which we first added to the site in December 2007. Here's what our original PennSound Daily announcement said about the record:

Produced by Hal Willner (William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lou Reed), the album features musical accompaniment by feminist punk band Tribe 8, as well as David Cunningham (keyboards), Ralph Carney (reeds), Joe Gore (guitar), Steve Bernstein (trumpet) and Kenny Wollesen (drums), who slip effortlessly between time signatures and genres, providing a roiling bed of sound which perfectly complements Acker's seething delivery. Willner originally recorded Acker's contribution in 1993 — a time in which the recurring references to President Bush were a not-yet-faded memory of a graceless political era — and though she worried about the timeliness of such allusions during the general political torpor of the Clinton era, they're eerily fitting now, a decade after her death.

Of course, our current political climate seemed practically unimaginable way back then, and Acker's strident and uncompromising perspectives are, no doubt, even more vital then than now. Hindsight also provides us with the opportunity to share these observations on the album and its origins, via Chris Kraus' After Kathy Acker: A Biography, which explains how Acker reframed large chunks of her recent book, My Mother: Demonology as "as an avant-operatic spoken-word CD":

Each take was done virtually nonstop, and Ralph Carney recalls Acker jumping up and down in the booth while Tribe 8 played. When it was finally released two years after her death, Redoing Childhood revealed a new dimension to Acker's work. "Her voice in general, there was something so lush and luscious and embracing and sexy," Ira Silverberg told the Seattle Weekly. "Kathy had rock star energy about her. [Her performance] had less to do with the punctuation of the actual sentences than with her almost reinterpreting her own work in a lyrical way … Kathy just got it."

You can listen to the complete album, along with a 1978 Segue Series reading (with selections from Blood and Guts in High School), recordings from SUNY-Buffalo in 1979 and 1995, and several recordings surrounding Acker's late novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates, including the 1995 album of the same name she recorded with the Mekons by clicking here. As always, we're grateful to Matias Viegener and the Acker estate for their permission to share these recordings with our listeners.