PoemTalk #187: on Mina Loy's "Love Songs"

Today saw the release of the latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which focuses on a pair of poems (numbers 1 and 4) from Mina Loy's series of "Love Songs." For this program, host Al Filreis was joined by a panel that included (from left to right) Maya Pindyck, Hoa Nguyen, and Laynie Browne.

In his Jacket2 post announcing the episode, Filreis provides a little background information on the recording under discussion: "in 1965 the poet Paul Blackburn, who loved nothing more than to tape recordings of poets reading and conversing — along with Robert Vas Dias — turned the mic on and interviewed Loy at her home in Aspen, Colorado, and asked her to read poems and offer spontaneous commentary." Framed by Loy's reputation as "the forgotten Futurist," Filreis and the panel find ample evidence but concludes that "this writing postdates Loy's abiding, if she ever did abided it, of Futurism's misogyny." He continues:

The poetry's "art of intuition," its sexuality, its "turning" radical rather than reactionary, its feminist version of modernism's rejection of romanticism, its interest in the fabulous blur and imprecision of the sexual body and its fluid unfixing of figurations of the body's expressions (tears / Are snowdrops or molasses / Or anything), its frank internality — these, in this discussion, move in a revolutionary direction mostly distinct from other modern movements or gatherings.

You can listen to this latest program, read the text of both poems, check out video of Nguyen's Kelly Writers House reading from the same day, 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.

Clark Coolidge on Philip Guston, 2013

Today we're highlighting a just-added recording from poet Clark Coolidge. Recorded on April 4, 2013 at New York City's Poets House, Coolidge's talk "The Painter’s Poet" is concerned with his longtime friend and collaborator (on 1991's Baffling Means: Writing/Drawing), Philip Guston.

Here's how Poets House originally described the event: 

Experimental poet and jazz musician Clark Coolidge discusses Philip Guston’s passion for poetry and wordplay as evidenced by the painter’s extraordinary series of poem-pictures, which incorporate poems by William Corbett and Stanley Kunitz, among others, against the backdrop of their friendship, collaborations and Guston’s Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations, which Coolidge edited.

Running just shy of eighty minutes, Coolidge's talk comes to us courtesy of Gryphon Rue. Listen to it now on our Clark Coolidge author page, which is home to a startling array of recordings — of readings, lectures, panel talks, interviews, podcast appearances, and more — spanning five decades.

Happy Birthday to Guillaume Apollinaire

We close this week out by marking the birthday of poet Guillaume Apollinaire, born 143 years ago on this day. Our Apollinaire author page is a point of pride for us, since it contains the earliest artifacts in our archives, documented on lacquer discs some fifteen years before the advent of magnetic tape.

Recorded on December 24, 1913 at the laboratory of Abbé M. Rousselot, these three brief recordings offer a rare opportunity to experience the work of germinal Surrealist author Guillaume Apollinaire through his own voice. "Le Pont Mirabeau," "Marie" and "Le Voyageur," all taken from his first significant volume of poetry, 1913's Alcools, reveal both a strengthened sense of rhythm and a lyrical, elegiac tone, when presented in the original French. 

You can listen to all three poems and read the full text of "Le Pont Mirabeau by clicking here. "Le Pont Mirabeau" has also been included in several PennSound Featured Resources playlists, including Charles Bernstein's Down to Write You This Poem Sat and Marcella Durand's 2011 list of recordings.

Jim Dine on PennSound

You probably know Jim Dine as an important early Pop Artist whose aesthetic has since evolved to encompass other styles and modes. You could be forgiven for not knowing that Dine has also been a poet across the breadth of his prodigious career, from an early collaboration with Ron Padgett presenting Guillaume Apollinaire's The Poet Assassinated through to the 2015 publication of Poems to Work On: The Collected Poems of Jim Dine (Cuneiform). Today, we take a look at the contents of his PennSound author page.

The earliest recording you'll find there comes from Robert Creeley's 70th birthday celebration, held at SUNY-Buffalo on October 11, 1996. This all-day event concluded with an hour-long conversation between Creeley, Dine, and Charles Bernstein. Next up, we have a September 2005 Segue Series reading from the Bowery Poetry Club, containing seventeen poems in total, including "From the Diary of a Non-Deflector," "I Wish All My Flowers Were Named Jesse Horowitz," "My Nose Goes Vibrating Down the Street," "Silver Printing: The Dance of Photography," "George Bush Poem," and "When Creeley Met Pep." That's followed by a December 2013 performance of Jewish Fate with accompaniment by Marc Marder on double bass, and a February 2014 reading in Paris that features eight titles, including "I Ran Into Him," "The Downfall of Your Eyes," "Peroxide," and "The Bartok Poem," among others.

When we first announced our Dine author page, Cuneiform publisher Kyle Schlesinger wrote a lovely note on his own relationship to Dine's work, which ends with a link back to PennSound, along with the recommendation that his readers "log out of facebook, and kick back by the stereo with a tall glass of something or other, and check out Jim's poems." If that ringing endorsement doesn't convince you then nothing will!

In Memoriam: Pierre Alferi (1963–2023)

We start this week off by noting the death of Pierre Alferi, described by Fabrice Gabriel in his Le Monde obituary as "a wonderfully idiosyncratic and surprisingly multi-faceted author, whose books, like his many other works, were a regular and somewhat mischievous addition to a body of work that was always in motion – vibrant to the extreme, at the crossroads of poetry, the novel, cinema, music, philosophy, the visual arts and even, one might say, science and technology." Alferi passed away on August 16th at the age of 60.

Writing at Jacket2, our own Charles Bernstein shares his memories of Alferi, whom he first met "at the Objectivist conference at Royaumont in 1989. He goes to highlight Alferi's work as both translator and poet, offering this blurb for the  forthcoming collection In the Street, translated by Cole Swensen:

Personification meets enigma in the ellipsis of phantomine. Pierre Alferi’s poems, in Cole Swensen’s translations are rapiers that cut to the quick of political obscenity and ethical necessity, as if the two are locked in a death embrace, until poetry do them part. “It’s here that we meet”—on this street, in these words, at that parting. 

While we do not have a proper PennSound author page for Alferi, his work can be found in several places throughout the archive. Most prominent is Bernstein's essay "Reznikoff's Nearness," from the aforementioned 1989 Objectivist conference. He performed an "early talking version" of the essay, while "Emmanuel Hocquard [gave] a long introduction, and I [was] simultaneously translated (with commentary!) by Pierre Alferi." Alferi reads his own work at a 2009 event for the Double Change reading series in Paris, and finally, on the EPC Dance event page, one of the filmed performances, choreographer Sarah Burns' Do Not Forget It, employs the text of Alferi's poem "Ne I'oublie pas." Follow the links above to listen to each of these recordings.

'Getting It Together: A Film on Larry Eigner, Poet' (1973)

Today we are very proud to highlight Leonard Henny's groundbreaking 1973 film, Getting It Together: A Film on Larry Eigner, Poet, which George Hart — co-editor with Eigner biographer Jennifer Bartlett of Momentous Inconclusions: The Life and Work of Larry Eigner — called an "astounding document of disability history." Our own Charles Bernstein shared Hart's "Context for Getting It Together: A Film on Larry Eigner, Poet" through his Jacket2 commentary series, a valuable resource for understanding the complex history surrounding the film's creation. The brief essay draws heavily upon Hart and Bartlett's research into Eigner's correspondence for their "two books, my ecocritical reading of Eigner and her bio," however as he notes, "we have only begun to understand the intersection of disability, ecology, poetics, Jewishness, place, and community contained in Eigner's life and writing."

Eigner's "active social life in Swampscott, in the 1960s and early 1970s" frequently centered upon Frank Minelli's Parnassus Bookshop in nearby Marblehead, where he gave readings and attended workshops, so it was a natural choice for Henny to film Eigner there over the course of two days on March 19-20, 1971. Hart notes that "Eigner was resistant to the idea of being featured as a poet with disabilities because he had already seen a film on the Irish writer Christy Brown (whom Eigner once exchanged letters with)," however he eventually came around:

Eigner was willing to do it, as long as he was not the "star," and as long as he could get to "as much relevance as possible." Eigner had no control over the aesthetics of the film (the time lapse flowers, musicbox, and doll indicate that); the narration includes inaccurate information (some of which was corrected by Eigner in annotations on the transcription made by Jack Foley); some of the subtitles are inaccurate or incomplete. But in the documentary sections that capture him reading, talking with his friends, sitting in his wheelchair, and so on, we can see Eigner asserting his will to make what choices he was able to. He didn't want to feature disability; he wanted to talk about ecological issues: pollution, food shortages, overconsumption, overpopulation.

Allen Ginsberg lends a hand, providing both voiceover narration and performing Eigner's work, due to the poet's challenges communicating verbally. We're presenting this rare and fascinating document in two formats: the film in its entirety, and a leaner cut that eliminates the more whimsical touches to focus solely on Eigner's poetry. Choose from either by clicking here to visit PennSound's Larry Eigner author page.

Happy Birthday to Lew Welch

This August 16 would have been the 97th birthday of San Francisco Beat pioneer Lew Welch, who sadly disappeared into the California wilderness in 1971, never to be found. We first launched our Welch author page in the spring of 2009, with two key recordings representing some of the most notable work of his tragically brief career.

The centerpiece of our Lew Welch page is an April 1967 reading at Santa Barbara's Magic Lantern — a luxuriously long performance in which the poet reads practically all of his major works (save, perhaps, his "Taxi Suite"), including "Chicago Poem," "A Round of English," "Winter," "Graffiti," and "Maitreya Poem," as well as the entire sequence of Hermit Poems and most of its complementary volume The Way Back. Many of the poems are preceded by lengthy introductions (often longer than the poems themselves) in which Welch gives background information on his works and discusses topics as varied as politics, linguistics and popular music (some listeners might be familiar with Welch's stepson Hugh Cregg, whose stage name, "Huey Lewis," honors the father figure who took him to his first rock concerts).

Welch's musical interests — he was a former music major, and loved everything from Charlie Parker to James Brown to the Quicksilver Messenger Service with equal fervor — are on full display here, in pieces performed a cappella like "Graffiti" and "Supermarket Song," as well as sung portions of poems such as "A Round of English," which are marked off by musical notes (♪) in the printed texts. In one section of that poem, a somewhat unremarkable passage:

♪

Shakespeare Milton

Shakespeare Milton

Shelley as well

Shelley as well

Sarah something Teasdale

Sarah something Teasdale

Edith M. Bell

Edith M. Bell

♪

yields a breathtaking performance when Welch sings it to the tune of "Frère Jacques," going so far as to emulate the effect of multiple voices singing the lines in a round: "Shakespeare Milton / Shakespeare Milton / Shelley as Milton / Shelley as Milton / Shelley as Well / Sarah something Shelley as / Sarah something Shelley as / Sarah something Teasdale / Sarah something Teasdale / Edith M. Bell / Edith M. Bell." For Welch, poetic language was purely a spoken vernacular full of idiosyncratic American rhythms and melodies. He tells us: "A poet has his material absolutely free. It's coming out of the mouth of every American in the world. All he has to do is clean his ear out, listen to it, and put down what he has on his mind out of that material, because there is no other material."

Also included in the Magic Lantern set is Welch's epic "Din Poem," an ambitious pastiche of poetry, prose and song which most completely achieves his poetic goals, ventriloquizing numerous parallel discourses — the language of business and patriotism, of faith and lust, of marriages in disrepair and psychological breakdowns, along with virulent hate-speech — which are eventually woven together into a thunderous wave of American noise, against which he sets a parable of hope and escape. In this raw and uncompromising masterpiece, we see a complex portrait of America at numerous societal crossroads, as well as the personal hells Welch eventually sought to escape.

Our other recording at launch was made at San Francisco's Renaissance Corner in the spring of 1969. In that set in which Welch reads his collection, Courses, in its entirety. This suite of micro-poems, each named after a different academic subject, showcases both the poet's wit as well as his propensity for potent and memorable phrasing, honed during his years working in the advertising industry. Both of these recordings came to us through the reel-to-reel collection of Robert Creeley. We also recently added a third recording of Welch, which comes from the Mad Mammoth Monster Poetry Reading organized by Auerhahn Press that took place on August 29, 1963. At this event Welch also read excerpts from his Hermit Poems series.

Inspired by the optimism of poet Tom Mandel, I'd like to think that Welch is still out there in the wilderness, living on locusts and wild honey and "wear[ing his] hair / as long as [he] can / as long as [he] can." As a New American Poet that embodied the spirit of San Francisco poetics, had one foot in the Beat era and the other squarely set in the Summer of Love, and looked forward to the advances of Language poetry, Welch is endlessly fascinating. Click here to start listening to his work.

'Dome Poem NC,' a Film by Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn, 2011

Let's start the week off with an old favorite from the marvelous Lee Ann Brown, which takes us back to 2011. 

As you might know, Brown and her husband, Tony Torn, split their time between New York City and North Carolina, where they run the FBI or French Broad Institute (of Time and the River). This short film, Dome Poem NC, is a product of the pair's time down south,  and was produced coterminously with Brown's work on the book The Spirit of Black Mountain College (co-edited by Rand Brandes). Brown calls it a "lecture demo and call for work" inspired by R. Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes. Blending text, images, music and live action scenes, Dome Poem NC includes poems by Brown ("Geodesic Dome"), along with Erin O'Neal ("Ephemeralization"), Cheryl J Fish ("Pleasure Dome/Supine Dome"), Timothy Dyke ("Symmetry to Mound and Minds Are Bumps") and Leah Souffrant ("My Long Short Talk on Black Mountain Which Is Invisible") and invites viewers to consider what their own geodesic dome poems might be. 

You'll find Dome Poem NC on PennSound's Lee Ann Brown author page, which is home to a wide variety of readings, performances, talks and films from 1988 to the present. Click here to start watching.

Ted Joans on PennSound

We close out this week by taking a look at our holdings from legendary poet Ted Joans.

First, thanks to the S Press Collection, we have Joans' Jazz Poems, tape #72 in the series, which was recorded in Germany in November 1979 and released the following year. Running nearly seventy minutes, this album sees Joans run through fourteen poems in total — "The Truth," "Jazz Is My Religion," "Bed," "Ouagadougou Ouagadougou," "I Am The Lover," "Nine Month Blues," "Africa," and "Long Gone Lover Blues" among them — with laid-back accompaniment from a combo that included Uli Espenlaub on keys, Andreas Leep on bass, Dietrich Rauschtenberger behind the drums, and Ralf Falk on guitar. Jazz Poems is a substantial addition to our collection of Joans recordings, and a welcome one given his influence upon multiple generations of poets.

For those interested in learning more about Joans, there's no better place to start than Wow! Ted Joans Lives!, the 2010 documentary by Kurt Hemmer and Tom Knoff that we've been proud to share with our listeners for the past five years. Envisoned as "a visual and aural collage," the film "examin[es] the life and works of the legendary, tri-continental poet Ted Joans, who was born in Cairo, Illinois on 4 July 1928 and went on to become one of the significant poets of his generation performing his work in the United States, Europe, and Africa." Hemmer and Knoff continue, "The film has the sound of jazz and the flavor of surrealism. As Ted Joans declared, 'Jazz is my religion and Surrealism is my point of view.'" You'll find the complete award-winning documentary here, along with a short clip of Joans reading in Amsterdam in 1964 — taken from Louis van Gasteren's film, Jazz & Poetry — and the aforementioned S Press cassette.

Kathy Acker: SUNY-Buffalo Talk and Creeley Interview, 1979

Here's a fascinating document from our archives that certainly merits your attention. On December 12–13, 1979, Kathy Acker was a guest of Robert Creeley's at SUNY-Buffalo. Over those two days she read from her own work, delivered a talk on French novelists, and was interviewed by Creeley. Both events have been segmented, and are available on our Kathy Acker author page.

After introductory comments by Creeley, Acker begins with "Tangier," a long chapter (the recording is forty-six minutes long) from Blood and Guts in High School about meeting Jean Genet in Tangiers. She and Creeley then talk briefly about Erica Jong before the first day's event ends. 

The second day begins with Acker offering introductory comments on the pair of French novelists "whose work I'm absolutely fascinated with" that she'll be discussing in this session: Pierre Guyotat and Laure (the pen name of Colette Peignot). "You can't get these books in this country. Don't even try," Acker warns, however she explains that "I wanted to present what I'm doing with their work to you" — even though her translations are rough first drafts and "my French is very bad," ("I knew it enough to know I didn't know it," she later tells the audience) — because of how captivated she became with these authors on a recent trip to France. Specifically, this interest ties into language: both her experience of their language and mediation inherent to encountering a foreign language of which one only has a basic knowledge, but also concerns that have followed her for much longer: "It seemed to me that more and more — I've lived in New York for the last seven years — [that] language is almost impossible now. It's as if ... to have a language, to be able to really speak to someone, seems to be almost like total freedom, in my mind."

She then reads brief translations from each author's work: an excerpt from Guyotat's novel, Eden, Eden, Eden, followed by a piece by Laure about her childhood.  A half-hour lecture on the two authors comes next, with a discussion session of about the same length wrapping up the event. That conversation has been segmented into five thematic parts: "on self-expression," "on self-reflection," "on subjectivity and perception," "on the writer's perspective," and "on the divided self." You can listen in by clicking here. 

Aaron Kramer on PennSound

Way back in April 2010, we created an extensive author page for left-wing poet, Aaron Kramer. This project was initiated by PennSound co-director, Al Filreis, who provided some useful historical contexts for Kramer and his work in a blog post accompanying the new materials.

Kramer was (for a time, and perhaps for a long time) a member of the Communist Party of the U.S. He was involved in just about every radical issue, cultural and straight-out political, of this time: the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Perhaps his first big break as a poet was his inclusion in the anthology, Six Poets in Search of An Answer (1944), which at a (brief) hopeful moment in the liberal-left alliance brought Aaron in with Max Bodenheim, Joy Davidman, Langston Hughes, Alfred Kreymborg (by then a vintage modernist who'd joined the radical left), Martha Millet, and Norman Rosten. His "Garcia Lorca" memorialized that poet murdered by Spanish fascists. "Berlin Air Raid" begins: "For ten years they were listening to different / sounds." "Natchez" is about southern racist violence, a place where "a hundred tabloid writers ran to the flame." I have been in touch with Aaron's daughter Laura for years. Recently she went through the attic and gathered together three shoeboxes of cassettes and VHS tapes and delivered them to us at PennSound. We are slowly going through them, digitizing them, and make them available — as always — for free download through our archive. 

In total, there are fifty-two discrete recordings made between the mid-50s and the mid-90s, including one complete Smithsonian Folkways album (1959's Serenade: Poets of New York) and numerous programs made for public radio for series including "University of the Air" and "Poets of the Sweatshops," along with individual tributes to many poets. Aside from offering a broad selection of Kramer's own work,  he also reads from and provides commentary on a stunning array of poets, including Walt Whitman (he reads the first thirty-two sections of "Song of Myself," talks about "Drum Taps," and gives a talk at the poet's birthplace), William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Herman Melville, Langston Hughes, John Greenleaf Whittier, Charles Lamb, Walter Savage Landor, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost, among others. 

In a time when we need poetry to do vital work for justice and equality, it's never a bad idea to remember those who helped fight the good fight in previous generations. If you're not already aware of Aaron Kramer and his work, there's sure to be something to hold your interest on his PennSound author page.

PoemTalk #185: Two by Frank O'Hara

While announcing the latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, it occurred to your humble correspondent that he had neglected to announce the previous episode, and that's a shame because it's subject, Frank O'Hara, is an icon. For episode #185 host Al Filreis and company set up their microphones at the Pacific Palisades home of Marjorie Perloff, where they were joined by Robert von Hallberg and Charles Altieri for a lively conversation about two poems by O'Hara:  "Song (Is it dirty)" and "Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed)." 

In his Jacket2 post for the episode #185, Filreis provides details on each of the recordings under discussion. "Poem" was recorded at SUNY-Buffalo's Lockwood Memorial Library in 1964, while "Song" was filmed for Richard O. Moore's groundbreaking NET series USA: Poetry at O'Hara's NYC apartment in 1966. Links to the full text of each poem are also provided.

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.

PoemTalk #186: on Tina Darragh's "Wire Boxes"

This week we released episode #186 in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which focuses on "Wire Boxes," taken from Tina Darragh's 2020 book My Hands to Mutant Solidarities. For this program, host Al Filreis was joined by a panel comprised of (left to right) Joan Retallack, Simone White, and erica kaufman.

Writing on Jacket2, Filreis explores the poem's composition and evolution: "Given the dates of the wire service stories Tina cites and the reference to the Seattle WTO protests of 1999, we choose to date the composition of the first part of the poem to that year. The second half of our poem had already appeared in the 1989 book Against the Odds under the title 'Letter Boxes.'" Listeners can read both that earlier poem and a "transcription/reproduction" of the complete “Wire Boxes” on his post as well.

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.