Trish Salah on PennSound

Today we mark International Transgender Day of Visibility by visiting our author page for noted Canadian poet and critic Trish Salah.

Our holdings included the poet's appearance at the 2009 ADFEMPO (Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism) conference, organized by Belladonna*, which took place on September 24th and 25th of that year. Salah appeared as part of a panel on "Body as Discourse" chaired by Kate Eichhorn that included Joan Retallack, Laura Smith, Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël), and Ronaldo V. Wilson in addition to Salah, which explored "questions of the body, referentiality, remapping bodies and borders, intertextuality, narrativity, aesthetics, and the challenges of de-essentialization as we scrutinize 'female,' 'queer,' 'raced' and 'othered' bodies."

In addition to that panel, we have a brief set as part of a Belladonna* Reading Series event on Transfeminism and Literature from 2012, and Salah's Segue Series reading at the Zinc Bar in March 2013. More recent recordings, include "Nevada: A Reading and Panel" that also included Imogen Binnie, from the Young Centre for Performing Arts in 2013; 2014's Wanting in Arabic: A Conversation with Poet Trish Salah," recorded as part of the Asia Pacific Forum for NYC's WBAI-FM; and a 2014 reading at the East Bay Poetry Summit, hosted by the Manifest Reading and Workshop Series. There's also a very exciting PennSound Podcast episode (#57) in which Christy Davids interviews Salah and Salah reads her poetry, including "Two Self Portraits," "Interlude for the Voice," "Future Foundered," and "Ghazals in Fugue."

You can listen to any and all of the recordings mentioned above by clicking here.

Philly Small Presses Dinner Panel, 1999

Here is a true slice of vintage Kelly Writers House programming, dating all the way back to March 26, 1999. If you were around then, you could've enjoyed a full day of wonderful programming billed as "A Celebration of Philadelphia Writers," which was sponsored by the Humanities Forum.

The day started early with breakfast at the White Dog Cafe and a talk entitled, "So, You Want to Get Published?" That was followed by "Communities and Writers," a lunchtime event on "Writing in Philly," "Philadelphia in Film," and an exhibition opening and book signing that went straight on through to 5:30. For evening plans, you had your choice of The Chosen at the Arden Theatre or a busy night at the Clef Club that started with a talk on "Interplay of Philadelphia Jazz and Poetry," followed by an open-mic poetry jam hosted by KWH.

The keystone event of the day, however — and the one that we're highlighting — is the Philadelphia Small Presses Dinner, held at the Writers House. As the program blurb announces, "Philadelphia is experiencing a literary renaissance, thanks to the many dedicated poets and writers who run reading series, publish literary journals, and run small presses here in Philadelphia. Join some of Philadelphia's literary innovators at the Kelly Writers House for a roundtable conversation about Philadelphia's lively publishing scene." The line-up for the event is quite formidable, including Chris and Jenn McCreary (of Ixnay Press), Dave Deifer (of Xconnect), Michael Magee (of Combo), Heather Thomas and Alicia Askenase (representing 6ix), Gil Ott (of the Philadelphia Publishing Project and Singing Horse Press), Louis Cabri (of PhillyTalks), Kristen Gallagher (of Handwritten Press), and Jena Osman (of Chain). You can listen to this historic discussion here.

Happy Birthday to Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Today we celebrate the long and fruitful life of poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was born 104 years ago today in Bronxville, NY. We first launched PennSound's Lawrence Ferlinghetti author page in March 2018 on the poet's 99th birthday and mourned his passing just shy of two years later by highlighting recordings from that collection.

The most recent recording you'll find there is an hour-long set from 1994 at Page Hall in Albany, which comes to us via Chris Funkhouser. Next we have a pair of recordings from the archives of George Drury and Lois Baum, including an appearance on the program Word of Mouth and a forty-minute reading of selected poems at the Art Institute of Chicago. Then there's Ferlinghetti's Watershed Tapes release Into the Deeper Pools, recorded in two sessions in Bethesda and Baltimore, Maryland in 1984 and 1983, respectively, and his 1981 S-Press cassette release, No Escape Except Peace. Jumping back a few decades, there's a set of poems recorded in 1969, including "Assassination Raga" and "Tyrannus Nix," which were digitized by Joel Kuszai for The Factory School, and the Ferlinghetti/Ginsberg episode of Richard O. Moore's Poetry USA series from 1966. Finally, along with a short recording from the Berkeley Poetry Conference and a few assorted recordings without dates. You can listen to any of the aforementioned recordings by clicking here.

Congratulations to Shelley Memorial Award Winner Evie Shockley

Today we send our heartiest congratulations to Evie Shockley, recently named the 2023 winner of the Shelley Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America, as chosen by judges Mary Jo Bang and Monica Youn. Created at the behest of Mary P. Sears in 1930, the Shelley Award "recognizes poetic genius and is bestowed upon one distinguished American poet each year."

The Poetry Society of America's announcement begins by acknowledging that Shockley "thinks, creates, and writes with her eye on a Black feminist horizon." The Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University, Shockley "has twice garnered the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, has been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and has appeared internationally." It continues, listing honors including the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and the Stephen Henderson Award, along with "her joys [which] include participating in poetry communities such as Cave Canem and collaborating with like-minded artists across media."

The judges' citation is unstinting in its praise:

Evie Shockley’s work is imbued with a particular kind of tenderness, for the world and for the self in the world. It’s a savvy tenderness wedded to a type of vigilance that continually tracks the lines of the political and the personal, documenting where they meet and where they later separate again. There is, as well, a keen recognition of how prosody can heighten the reader’s awareness of the fact that what is in front of them on the page has been curated so that the complexity of the presentation will echo the complexity of the human actions that make up the moral universe of the poem.

Each of Shockley’s poems is a document that says: I was here, and you were here, and together, we comprise an entity that occupied this moment. In that togetherness, there is hope, although hope forever tempered by the awareness that change is slow and sometimes illusive.

You can explore more than a decade's worth of recordings on PennSound's Evie Shockley author page, starting from a 2005 appearance on the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics (her first of two), and including readings for the Segue Series, Belladonna,* and Penn State University, plus several conference panels, and a pair of MLA Offsite readings. Click here to start listening.

Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant Garde, 1910-1917

Today we're remembering "Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant Garde, 1910-1917," a groundbreaking exhibition that ran through the spring of 2009 at Los Angeles' Getty Center.

PennSound Senior Editor Danny Snelson was responsible for seeing this remarkable multimedia resource through to fruition, and so we thought it fitting to have him provide our listeners with an introduction. Here's what he had to say:

PennSound has been working in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute to present this remarkable collection of historical and contemporary transrational poetry, centered on an exhibition of Russian Futurist book art held at the Getty earlier this year. The exhibition's title — "Tango with Cows" — taken from a poem by Vasily Kamensky, points to the sense of hilarity and irreverence you'll hear in these startlingly original 'beyonsense' poems. Our page of recordings compliments the extensive media collected online at the Getty's website. There, you can find programs, essays, video footage, full scans of the Futurist books, and even a fully interactive slideshow of key books from the exhibition! 

Our archive of sound recordings comes in two parts: first, Tango with Cows features Oleg Minin's bilingual readings of essential poems found in book art projects from poets such as Alexei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Pavel Filonov. By reading from the Russian before the accompanying English translation, Minin offers listeners the pleasure of sound before recognition — an ideal situation for the revolutionary poetics on display here.

However, the real highlight of this great resource sounds from the second half: we're pleased to present high quality recordings of Explodity: An Evening of Transrational Sound Poetry held on February 4th, 2009. This blockbuster reading casts the zaum' poetries of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh in the parallel light of historic and contemporary sound poetry, as presented by Christian Bok and Steve McCaffery. After virtuoso performances of English translations of historical Russian poems, Bok and McCaffery present personal selections from the history of sound poetry alongside their own original compositions. On the short list are works by Aristophanes, Raoul Hausmann, F.T. Marinetti, Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, and R. Murray Schafer, just to mention a few.

You can hear more work in this vein on PennSound pages for Christian Bok, Steve McCaffery, Jaap Blonk, Tomomi Adachi, and The Four Horsemen. Additionally, we'd like to suggest our historic pages for F.T. Marinetti and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Our partner UbuWeb offers a huge index of this exciting brach of poetry; we suggest in particular that you visit a companion set of Russian Futurist recordings from the GLM Collection.

Special thanks to Nancy Perloff and everyone at the Getty Research Institute for making this resource possible. We hope these recordings lend the same vision of language that mystified Benedikt Livshits in 1911 (from Nancy Perloff, Curator's Essay): "I saw language come alive with my very own eyes. The breath of the primordial word wafted into my face."

You can start browsing our PennSound page for this event by clicking here.

PoemTalk #182: on Two Poems by Douglas Kearney

Today we released the latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series — number 182 if you're counting — which focuses on a pair of poems from Douglas Kearney's Sho, winner of the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize. The panel joining host Al Filreis to discuss "Welter" & "Static" are (left to right) co-curator Divya Victor and panelists Whitney Trettien and Dagmawi Woubshet.

As Filreis notes in his Jacket2 blog post announcing the new episode, this session coincided with several other events during a visit by Victor to the Writers House, "including a marvelous reading from her new work and discussion with Julia Bloch." Filreis also includes links to multiple takes of each of the two poems, which were recorded specially for this episode by Kearney.

Listen to this latest program, find links to the text of each 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.

Jeffrey Robinson: "Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth 1825–1833: Fibres of These Thoughts"

Today we revisit an engaging short lecture by Jeffrey Robinson — perhaps best known as co-editor, with Jerry Rothenberg, of Poems for the Millennium Volume Three: The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry — who retired as Professor of Romantic Poetry at the University of Glasgow, Scotland in 2019. He delivered this talk, "Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth 1825–1833: Fibres of These Thoughts," at his home institution in 2018.

This nearly forty minute video presentation, essentially a distillation of Robinson's Anthem Press book of the same name, begins with this foundation: 

Scholars of the working manuscripts of poets often assume that drafts exist primarily to highlight the pathway to a poem's final and eventually-published version. Interest in them, in other words, is an instrumental one. In my book ... I enact a contrasting possibility: that a manuscript, no matter where it stands on that pathway, may be taken seriously in its appearances as a poetic event in itself. The French call such a manuscript an avant texte. In the present case an unusually complex and intensely-worked manuscript of Wordsworth might in itself indicate a moment of dedicated poetic exploration relevant not only to the material on the page, but to other poems written at roughly the same time.

Robinson then launches into the specific manuscript under discussion — "Dove Cottage Manuscript #89," which contains a half dozen whole or drafts or partial drafts of "The Unremitting Voice of Nighly Streams," along with pieces of three other late poems, "On the Power of Sound," "The Triad," and "The Sonambulists" — where, he attests,"we can observe poetry thinking." This marvelous video is intensely visual and also includes performances from Andrea Brady, Judith Goldman, and Peter Manson. It's a very welcome addition to our PennSound Classics collection, and you can watch it here.

'Mark Van Doren: Portrait of a Poet' (1994)

We start this new week by revisiting Mark Van Doren: Portrait of a Poet, a remarkable 1994 short film produced by Adam Van Doren, the poet's grandson. Running just over a half hour, the documentary offers up marvelous photo and video footage of Van Doren in conversation and reading his work, along with interviews with friends and contemporaries including Robert Giroux, Allen Ginsberg, Alfred Kazin, John Hollander, Louis Simpson, Daniel Hoffman, Richard Howard, and more.

You can watch this documentary on PennSound's Mark Van Doren author page, alongside recordings from several sources, including a 1935 set of three poems for Columbia University's Speech Lab, a 1960 set of four titles for the Spoken Arts Treasury and the 1967 Smithsonian Folkways album, Mark Van Doren Reads from His Collected and New Poems, whose twelve tracks encompass thirty-two poems in total. Listen in to any and all of these recordings by clicking here.

Happy Birthday, Joe Brainard!

Today we celebrate endlessly influential author and artist Joe Brainard, born on this day in 1942. Our Joe Brainard author page is anchored by four readings from the St. Mark's Poetry Project recorded between 1971 and 1981. They include copious excerpts from his magnum opus, I Remember, along with selections from his journals and numerous other pieces such as "Thanksgiving," "Insomnia," "Worry Wart," "The Zucchini Problem," "Today (Monday, February 23rd, 1981)," and "Sick Art." Additionally, you'll find excerpts from Train Ride read at SFSU in the mid-1970s and a stellar reading with Bill Berkson at Intersection for the Arts in 1971, plus more I Remember selections taken from a 1974 Giorno Poetry Systems session and a recording session at home in Calais, VT in 1970. 

We're also very proud to be able to present an exclusive excerpt from Matt Wolf's 2012 documentary short, I Remember: a Film About Joe Brainard. Here's how we announced the film's addition to our archives in August of that year:

Filmmaker Matt Wolf (who directed the much-lauded Wild Combination, a documentary on the life of avant-pop cellist Arthur Russell) is back with an exciting new project — I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard — a haunting and gorgeous meditation that deftly intertwines both imagery and audio to create a compelling tribute to the artist and author. We're very glad to see Brainard commemorated in such grand fashion, and happier still that Wolf was was kind enough to share an exclusive clip with PennSound. In it, longtime friend, collaborator and confidante Ron Padgett discusses Brainard's early development as a visual artist and his ability to work confidently in a wide variety of media and forms, never becoming complacent in one style.

You'll find all of the recordings mentioned above by clicking here. It's also worth checking out Andrew Epstein's 2014 Brainard birthday post on his New York School-focused blog, Locus Solus, which features excerpts from a tribute poem by James Schuyler, excerpts from I Remember "thinking about birthdays, and our frustrating efforts to understand 'time,'" and a few examples of his artwork. Brainard's birthday is also a wonderful reason to revisit the Make Your Own Brainard site, where you can make your own collages using fragments from his visual work.

T.S. Eliot Comes to PennSound

We'll waste no time in handing the mic to PennSound Director Chris Mustazza, the man behind the exciting news:

It's a huge day for PennSound! I'm thrilled to announce my edition of recordings of T.S. Eliot, available in PennSound for the first time. These are the master recordings from one of the earliest recording sessions of Eliot, made at Columbia University in the early-mid 1930s. Some of these recordings had subsequently been distributed through various releases later in the twentieth century, but this is the first time the master recordings are being made available, digitized from aluminum transcription discs.

Mustazza discusses the sessions that yielded these historic recordings in greater detail in his liner notes on PennSound's Eliot author page: "These recordings were made in 1933, 1935, and at a later, unknown date at Columbia University, recorded by Barnard professors George W. Hibbitt and W. Cabell Greet, lexicologists and scholars of American dialects." He continues, tracing the provenance of these digitizations, straight back to the source recordings in an editor's note: "The recordings here were originally made on aluminum platters. They were subsequently dubbed to reel-to-reel tapes by the Library of Congress in the 1970s. These digitizations are made from the reels, which are stored at Columbia University."

In total, these recordings offer a very substantial (if incomplete) portrait of Eliot's most iconic works, including Ash Wednesday, two separate recordings of the entirety of The Waste Land, and Four Quartets, plus "The Hollow Men," "Sweeney Among the Nightinngales" (plus discussion of the poem), and three of the six Ariel Poems: "Marina," "The Journey of the Magi," and "Triumphal March." These original recordings are beautifully complemented by John Richetti's 2022 Wexler Studios session of twenty-nine key poems for PennSound Classics (which you can listen to here).

We wish to thank, above all, the T.S. Eliot Estate for their permission to share these recordings. We also send gratitude to the staff at Columbia's Rare Book & Manuscript Library, especially Thai Jones, Jennifer Lee, Devon Maeve Nevola, Jane Siegel, and Karla Nielsen, for helping us to make these recordings available. Finally we thank Leila Pearlman for doing the audio production for this collection.

New at PennSound: 32 Ethnic Minority Poets from China

We couldn't be more excited about one of the newest additions to the site: 32 Ethnic Minority Poets from China Reading in Their Minority Mother Tongues, a documentary film curated by Ming Di, heading up a filmmaking team that also included Xi Chu, and Sun Amu on behalf of PoetryEastWest—Poetry Across the Oceans. Running just under fifty minutes, this video showcases performances by poets in honor of International Mother Language Day with the first twelve poets recorded in February 2022 and the remaining twenty last month. 

The complete roster of poets (along with their ethnicity and province of origin) includes Pan Mei (b. 1987), Buyi from Guizhou; Lan Dingguan (b. 1996), Yao from Guangxi (reading in Zhuang); Shadette Gamarie (b. 1968), Kyrgyz from Xinjiang; Pan Nianying (b. 1963), Dong (Kam) from Guizhou; Li Hui (b. 1978), Dônđäc from Shanghai; Na Sa (b. 1977), Kham Tibetan from Qinghai; Wolfman (Li Chenghan, b. 1965), Naxi from Yunnan; Jibu Riluo (b. 1994), Nuosu Yi from Sichuan; Chakdor Gyal (b. 1985), Amdo Tibetan from Qinghai; Norzin Dolma (b. 1999), Amdo Tibetan from Sichuan; Pan Liwen (b. 1975), Shui from Guizhou; He Fukai (b. 1976), Naxi from Yunnan; Solongod Todgerel (b. 1980) Mongolian from Inner Mongolia; Hazhibek Aidarhan (b. 1979) Kazakh from Xinjiang; Yi Wei (Yang Yilong, b. 1971), Bai from Yunnan; Luo Yu (b. 1983), Nasu Yi from Guizhou; Wu Tianwei (b. 1991), Buyi from Guizhou; Mohammedyehya Tusunbaki (b. 2001), Uyghur from Xinjiang; Zhong Xiuhua (b. 1980), ethnic She from Jiangxi; Aku Wuwu (b. 1964), Nuosu Yi from Sichuan; Aliye Rusol (b. 1992), Uyghur from Xinjiang; Sugasela (b. 1976), Nuosu Yi from Sichuan; Tenzin Pelmo (b. 2000), Ü Tibetan from Lhasa, Tibet; Xi Chu (b. 1976), Miao (Hmong) from Guizhou; Chungkyi (b. 1978), Ü Tibetan from Lhasa, Tibet; Samer Darkpa (b. 1989), Amdo Tibetan from Gansu; Turahan Tohuti (1968), Uyghur from Xinjiang; Yungdrung Gyurmè (b. 1985), Tsang Tibetan from Back Tibet; Kongno (1968), Jingpho from Yunnan; Asu Sumur (b. 1962), Xibe from Xinjiang; Anaer (b. 1963), Oirat Mongolian from Xinjiang; and Nie Le (b. 1968), Wa from Yunnan. Translations were provided by Li Hui, Mark Bender, Neil Aitken, Al Lim, Megan Pan (edited by Ilya Kaminsky), and Ming Di. Click here to start watching this compelling representation of the breadth of China's ethnic poetry communities.

bill bissett and bpNichol Interviewed by Phillis Webb, 1967

We finish off this week with a new addition to our author pages for iconic Canadian poets bill bissett and bpNichol: a 1967 interview with the pair by equally iconic poet and broadcaster Phyllis Webb's CBC television program Extension, which sought to document that country's contemporary poetry scene. The voiceover introducing the episode and its guests is unambiguous in terms of what audiences should expect — "These two poets write sound poems, concrete poems, and just plain poems. They experiment with tape, typography, and the human voice." — and yet it's marvelous to think of the reactions unsuspecting viewers tuning in must have had to their appearance.

The show starts with a polyvocal setting of a piece by nichol concerned with the death of poetry, with bissett wearing a Halloween mask. Webb does an admirable job of translating this sort of unconventional poetry to her audience, speaking to the material interventions of processes like mimeography and foregrounding the performative and interpretive choices present for readers due to word choice and the poem's presentation on the page. This segues into bissett reading his poem "How We Use Our Lungs for Love," which ultimately settles into a cut-time fugue as each syllable spirals skyward. After a brief break the poets discuss the great influence of Allen Ginsberg, in terms of both poetics and lifestyle, particularly in inspiring both to find their own individual voices and styles. In the second clip, the poets discuss the centrality of poetry to their lives as well as the way in which poetry fits into a broader multi-modal aesthetic engagement. 

From there, they discuss the burgeoning poetry scene in Vancouver, including their compatriots and collaborators. They highlight the "Poet's Market," which brought out an audience of three thousand people to see two hundred poets reading their work, some with projections or other technological embellishments. Introducing the poem "Night," nichol talks about the spirit of frankness that guides his work: "the reason I got into concrete [poetry] was I always felt kind of that a lot of poets lied, that they said one thing in their poetry and then you'd talk to them and they were an entirely different way. And I wanted to get to the things behind the words, you know? So that I feel that I can say much more than I feel in my poetry now."

Afterwards, Webb asks "Is there any real point in trying to affix a label to a kind of poetry, like concrete poetry, sound poetry . . ." nichol invokes the concept of "border blur," that is an erasure of the boundaries between different aesthetic disciplines and even science and technology. bissett concurs and sees this shift as something thousands of poets worldwide are taking part in, noting of these new poems that "they're not based on the sentence and they're not based on a particular syndrome" before the clip cuts. When the conversation resumes the poets are in the middle of a conversation about tapework, with Webb asking whether the intention is "extending yourself" or "leaving the meaning out of the word," to which nichol replies "it's kind of giving a the voice a different context in which to be heard, like giving it an electronic context and seeing what happens to it." To demonstrate this, nichol plays an excerpt from a taped realization of the fifth sequence of his work Scrapture ("a long prose and comic strip and concrete thing"). that leads Webb to notice that the poets are "getting close to song," with which they agree, with bissett noting that "Mick Jagger is a great poet." They speak more about the diverse arts scene in Vancouver, which they see as something lacking in Toronto, Then bissett sits with legs akimbo on the floor and begins a sound poem performance that brings the recording to a close.

You can watch this fascinating historical document on either poet's PennSound author page. Click here to start viewing.