Kass Fleisher: Utah Public Radio Interview, 2004

You might recall that 2023 got off to a heartbreaking start with a number of poets passing away in short succession. When we acknowledged the death of Kass Fleisher on January 13th, we also announced a newly-created author page for Fleisher, which housed a modest collection of recordings from throughout the PennSound archives. Today we're glad to announce a new addition that comes to us courtesy of her partner and literary executor Joe Amato: a June 2004 interview with Utah Public Radio's Access Utah regarding her first book, The Bear River and the Making of History (SUNY Press, 2004), which, as Amato notes in his correspondence with PennSound, "sparked controversy both for its subject matter and approach."

You'll find that recording on Fleisher's PennSound author page, along with a 1999 set for Boulder's Left Hand Reading Series, and "Personality to Configure" from the 2007 MLA Offsite reading in Chicago, along with "Lacrimae of the Medusa; or, Cixous (33 years later) and Cruci-Fictions: Let's Talk about Sex (Again)," a panel from the 2009 Belladonna* conference Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism, which was chaired by Laura Jaramillo and also featured panelists Dodie Bellamy, Bhanu Kapil, and Laura Mullen. Click here to start listening.

Kristin Prevallet and Steven Brent, "What She Said" (2018)

Here's a fascinating performance from Kristin Prevallet for your listening pleasure: a 2017 collaboration with musician Steven Brent, titled "What She Said," which first appeared on Brent's 2018 album, Even the Failures Are Beautiful, which you can listen to in its entirety here.

In "What She Said," Prevallet presents us with a lengthy inventory of questions asked of an unnamed "she," which casts a wide net, encompassing all manner of somatic and psychological experience, and occasionally folds back on itself, before evolving into a more objective narrative in the final section. It's undergirded by Brent's subtle soundscape, which blends a foundation of menacing drones, atonal guitar chime, and orchestral gravity with periodic overlays of ticking typewriters and threshing clacks, and Prevallet's performance here is just as musical and important, wavering from sedate calm to a more fervent delivery, sometimes speaking naturalistically and other times veering into stop-start Creeley-style hesitations, which interact beautifully with the sounds around it. Click here to listen now. It will be nine and a half minutes well spent.

Yusef Komunyakaa on PennSound

Today we're taking a closer look at PennSound's author page for Yusef Komunyakaa, which was created not long after our official launch in 2005. While it houses a modest set of recordings, it nevertheless has many of this much-anthologized poet's most iconic work.

The heart of our Komunyakaa page is a March 1998 reading at our own Kelly Writers House. This  segmented recording consists of twenty-four in total, including favorite poems like "Facing It," "The Smokehouse," "Ode to the Maggot," "The God of Land Mines," "You and I Are Disappearing," and "Ode to a Drum," along with "Rhythm Method," "Letter to Bob Kaufman," "Camouflage in the Chimera," "We Never Know," and "Thanks," which has been a cherished part of PennSound's "Poems of Thanks and Thanksgiving" playlist for more than a decade. There's also a July 1999 appearance with Deborah Garrison on BBC Radio 3's Contemporary American Poetry Program, and the single poem "Slam, Dunk & Hook," published as part of the 2005 anthology Rattapallax.

We're grateful and proud to have Yusef Komunyakaa as part of the diverse array of voices found within PennSound's vast archives. You can listen to all of the poems mentioned above my clicking here.

John Wieners on PennSound

Today we revisit our author page for pioneering queer poet John Wieners, whose long writing life took him from Black Mountain to San Francisco to New York City to Buffalo, and finally to Boston, where he spent the last three decades of his life. It's also a great opportunity for our listeners to reacquaint themselves with the recordings available on PennSound's Wieners author page.

Our earliest recordings include Wieners' participation in the Mad Monster Mammoth Poets Reading for Auerhahn Press in 1959 and a 1960s appearance on Paul Blackburn's radio program. That's followed by a trio of recordings from 1965: Wieners' July 14th set at the Berkeley Poetry Conference, another July reading possibly in Berkeley, and a brief recording from SUNY-Buffalo that September. Next, we have a October 1966 event from the 92nd Street Y's Unterberg Poetry Center and a pair of long recordings made at SUNY-Buffalo in 1967 and at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in 1968. Following that we have a wonderful conversation with Walter Lowenfels, Lillian Lowenfels, and Alan DeLoach in March 1969 and two recordings from Boston in 1972: two days' worth of visits to Robert Creeley's ENG-1670 class at Harvard and a short appearance on WBCN-FM.

Jumping forward to the 1980s, there are two tracks from The World Record: Readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, 1969-1980 and three poems recorded at Brooklyn College in 1988. The next decade starts in grand fashion with a pair of recordings from the spring of 1990: the first in San Francisco, followed by an appearance at the St. Mark's Poetry Project. There's another Poetry Project set from the fall of 1996, and an October 1999 reading at the Guggenheim to round things out, along with the recently-added film Hanuman Presents!

I also happily recommend that interested listeners check out the Wieners component of Jim Dunn and Kevin Gallagher's ambitious Jacket2 feature, Mass: Raw Poetry from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts," which we published in December 2012, as well as Wieners' page at the Electronic Poetry Center.

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.

Footnote: Daniel Ellsberg and the New York School

People worldwide are mourning political activist Daniel Ellsberg, whose courageous leak of the Pentagon Papers through the New York Times in 1971 changed the course of the war in Viet Nam. What many of our listeners might not know is that Ellsberg's brief connection to Harvard classmates John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara in the early 1950s.

Andrew Epstein first told the story on the excellent Locus Solus: the New York School of Poets in July 2013 (read his recent observations on the blog's 10th anniversary here). Specifically, Epstein discusses "the tiny chapter of poetic history where Daniel Ellsberg and the New York School poets collided, in the basement of Christ Church Parish House in Cambridge, MA, in 1951" — the event that brought these Harvard undergrads together was a Poets Theater staging of four short plays, including Ashbery's Everyman and O'Hara's Try! Try!, which Ellsberg reviewed for the Harvard Crimson. Epstein is kind enough to reprint the review (which was included in Amorous Nightmare of Delay: Selected Plays of Frank O'Hara). In his opinion, Everyman "showed typical defects," namely "[t]he lines occasionally gave hints of being good verse, but not of the sort whose meaning is apparent at one hearing." Nonetheless, he also finds reasons for praise: "the monologues were delivered with enough sincerity to make even dubious listeners suspend judgment."

First added to our site in January 2010, our recording of Everyman is the by far the oldest Ashbery document in our archives, and a fascinating document of the poet's budding talents. Listen in by clicking here and see whether you agree with Ellsberg's judgments.

William Bronk: on 'Poems to a Listener,' 1984 and 1989

Today we're highlighting a pair of appearances by poet William Bronk on Poems to a Listener, a pubic radio program hosted by Henry Lyman, which was produced for 88.5 WFCR-FM in Amherst, Massachusetts between 1976 and 1994. Bronk's two appearances took place in 1984 and 1989, and these half-hour programs certainly make for pleasurable listening.

Both shows are content-dense yet remarkably intimate, with Bronk offering poems at his own pace and Lyman posing questions, often hinging on a certain turn of phrase or image, as they come to him. Sometimes they're quick exchanges, sometimes protracted. Lyman isn't afraid to needle, and Bronk is willing to tussle as well — at one point, he says "I'm not going to tell you what the light is," then, after a pregnant pause, adds, "you know what the light is!" — and occasionally, if the edit's a bit too tight, it almost feels like Bronk offering his dissension to the line of questioning by moving on to the next poem, but that only makes the back-and-forth more charming. Both are fine examples of why we find public radio compelling, and, of course, recorded poetry as well: there's nothing more than human voices and the breathing space between them, and that's enough. Play one (or both) of these programs through a good set of speakers, sit back, and get carried away for half an hour. Click here to start listening.

"Poetry Is for Breathing" (2019)

Organized by Orchid Tierney,  "Poetry Is for Breathing: A Reading Against Islamophobia" took place at our own Kelly Writers House on April 17, 2019, with sets by Aditya Bahl (poet, translator, and a current Johns Hopkins Ph.D. candidate), Husnaa Hashim (2017-2018 Youth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia), and Fatemeh Shams (shown at right, a poet and UPenn professor of Persian literature). 

The announcement for this event situates it as a direct response to both recent tragedy and and long-simmering prejudices: "On March 15, 2019, a white supremacist murdered fifty people at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, Aotearoa-New Zealand. Please join us for a special lunchtime poetry reading in support of the survivors and victims of this terrorist attack. Invited poets will read their works, and we encourage the audience to share their thoughts as we collectively examine the intersections of white supremacy in Christchurch and Philadelphia."

You can experience this very special reading via streaming video or MP3 format by clicking here. More recordings by both Tierney and Shams are available on their respective PennSound author pages.

Happy Birthday to Susan Howe

Today is the 86th birthday of iconic poet Susan Howe. Howe was an early supporter of the PennSound project and as a result her author page serves as an extensive documentation of her prodigious career, with recordings going back nearly fifty years. To celebrate her today, we'll explore some of those recordings.

Our earliest reading by Howe is a 1978 Segue Series reading at The Ear Inn — one of six total Segue sets between then and 2008. We also have readings, talks, performances, interviews, and lectures from the St. Mark's Poetry Project, the Kootenay School of Writing, the New School, SUNY-Buffalo, the Naropa Institute, the 92nd Street Y, London's Southbank Centre, Paris' Double Change series, the Walker Art Center, Harvard University, the CUNY Graduate Center, Dia Art Foundation, and our own Kelly Writers House among others. Beyond that, it's well worth mentioning a few particularly special recordings. First, we must start with Howe's radio program on WBAI-Pacifica Radio, which ran from 1975–1981 and featured an all-star roster of poets including Helen Adam, Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Greenwald, Barbara Guest, Eileen Myles, Bernadette Mayer, Maureen Owen, Charles Reznikoff, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde. Next, there are Howe's electric musical collaborations with David Grubbs, which encompass both live performances and studio albums including Thiefth, Souls of the Labadie Tract, Frolic Architecture, and WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER. Finally, for those looking for a solid introduction to Howe's life and work, we might point you towards Howe's reading and conversation with Al Filreis from her 2010 Kelly Writers House Fellows visit, or Howe's 1995 appearance on Charles Bernstein's LINEbreak radio program.

To start exploring PennSound's Susan Howe author page click here.

Vincent Katz: Green Arcade Reading (Recreated), 2022

We wrap up this week with a new addition to our PennSound author page for poet Vincent Katz: a recorded recreation of his November 18, 2022 reading at San Francisco's Green Arcade Books alongside Norma Cole and Aaron Shurin. 

Running just shy of an hour, Katz's set is comprised of twenty-two titles in total, which show the breadth of his talents. There are generous selections from his most recent collection, Broadway for Paul ("Propensities," "Autumn Days and Hours," "Six Figures Fire," "Winter Window") as well as his current manuscript-in-progress ("Keys and Ripples," "Pulling Out," "The Sign on the Closed Theater Marquee," "Time Marches On," "Walk Beside You") and Previous Glances, a recent retrospective collection published in Italy ("Poem," "The Sky," "Wellsprings"). Katz also reads a pair of translations from the works of germinal Roman elegist Sextus Propertius.

Listen to this sprawling set on our Vincent Katz author page, where you'll also find a broad array of readings, talks, and films spanning the past forty five years. Click here to start exploring.