Happy Birthday, Walt Whitman

Today would have been the 205th birthday of poetic pioneer Walt Whitman, who resides permanently just across the river from us in Camden, NJ.

While Whitman left behind no recordings of his poetry — you might be familiar with a wax cylinder recording of excerpts from the late poem "America" that's been deemed unlikely to be the poet himself — but that doesn't mean that we don't have recordings of Whitman's work for your enjoyment. Today we'll highlight performances and interpretations by three poets.

We start with UPenn professor emeritus John Richetti, who has recorded a wide variety of Whitman's work over the years, including "O Captain! My Captain!," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "The Sleepers," "Goodbye My Fancy," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "I Hear America Singing," and sections 1 and 2 of "Calumus." You'll find these tracks on a special page containing all of Richetti's renditions of Whitman's work, which also includes "Song of Myself" in its entirety,  among other titles. Sticking with "Song of Myself," we're also lucky to have a 1974 recording of Aaron Kramer reading sections I-XXXII of that poem, and Basil Bunting winds things up with a 1977 reading at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he read "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" as part of a performance that also included work by Louis Zukofsky, Ezra Pound, Thomas Wyatt, and Edmund Spenser. You can click on any of the poets' names above to be taken right to the mentioned recordings.

George Quasha Reads 'strange beauty by stranger attraction,' 2024

Today we are proud to present the latest recording session from Chris Funkhouser and George Quasha, their first of the new year. Consummate PennSound Daily readers will recall that Funkhouser has been periodically recording the complete poetic works of his friend and neighbor Quasha since at least 2017 to the benefit of listeners worldwide. 

This latest session — recorded in Barrytown, NY on March 18th of this year — consists of strange beauty by stranger attraction, a "preverbs" project that's part of the larger hearing other text and runs just over one hour and forty minutes. You can read selections from strange beauty by stranger attraction in both Marsh Hawk Review and SPACECRAFTPROJECT.

You'll find these and many more recordings on PennSound's George Quasha author page, along with lengthy selections from many of his books including waking from myself, gnostalgia for the present, not even rabbits go down this hole, dowsing axis, hearing other, the ghost in between, verbal paradise, glossodelia attract: preverbs, the daimon of moment: preverbs, scorned beauty comes up behind: preverbs, things done for themselves: preverbs, and polypoikilos: matrix in variance: preverbs, among others. Click here to start listening.

Spend Memorial Day with Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan

Today is Memorial Day in the United States and at  PennSound we're marking the occasion by revisiting Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman's collaborative masterpiece, "Memorial Day," and our recording of their May 5, 1971 reading of the work in its entirety at the Saint Mark's Poetry Project.

This recording is notable not only because "Memorial Day" is a landmark collaboration between two of the New York School's finest poets, but also due to its seeming rarity. Berrigan and Waldman were rumored to have only read the poem together and in its entirety once — in fact, "Memorial Day" was composed specifically for their joint reading in the spring of 1971 — and while the event was recorded, it would seem that the tape had been missing for several decades, presumably lost forever.

My brief Jacket2 essay from 2010, "Recovering 'Memorial Day,'"  is both a rumination on the poem itself and a retelling of its being lost and found again in the reel-to-reel tape collection of Robert Creeley. To listen to the recording directly, you can click here. In a wonderful twist, video footage of a 1973 reading of the poem by Berrigan and Waldman has since been located, and you can watch that here.

PoemTalk #196: on Hart Crane's "The Harbor Dawn"

Today we release the latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which focuses on "The Harbor Dawn," the third section of Hart Crane's The Bridge, which was begun in 1923 and published in 1930. For this 196th program, host Al Filreis was joined by just two interlocutors: Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué and Jonathan Dick.

Filreis starts his write-up of the new episode by explaining the source of the recording under discussion: "We don't alas have a recording of Crane reading this poem; nor do any recordings of Crane survive. But PennSound's Hart Crane author page includes two of Crane's poems as performed by Tennessee Williams! So before our discussion began, we listened to Williams's transatlantic/southern American inflection." He continues, "Crane the Ohioan who spent a good deal of time around working-class New Yorkers, would not have sounded this way. Yet listen and get a sense of how our talk was perhaps affected by Williams's performance. Nonetheless we heard in Crane's poem major traces of Whitman, Eliot, O'Hara, Schuyler, the Romantics (that window casement...), Samuel R. Delany, even Jack Kerouac."

You can listen to this latest program, read "The Harbor Dawn," 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.

Boise State University: Spring 2024 Readings

As we ease into summer break let's check in with the Boise State University MFA Reading Series and their spectacular spring roster of readings. This past fall's lineup of Peter Gizzi, Dan Beachy-Quick, Srikanth Reddy, and Alice Notley was quite formidable and this semester kept up the pace with five events held between February and April.

First up on February 16th was Christina Piña, who was introduced by Martin Corless-Smith. CAConrad followed on March 8th, with an introduction by Trey Hayden — one of two March readings, along with Jennifer Moxley (who was introduced by Savy Butler) on March 29th. Finally, the program hosted two events during National Poetry Month: Endi Bogue Hardigan and Rob Schlegel (introduced by Caleb Merritt and Christofer Arbudzinsky, respectively) on April 5th, and Ian Dreiblatt on April 12th (with introduction by Adam Ray Wagner).

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

David Antin Discusses Kathy Acker, 2002

Here's a hidden gem from our archives that deserves your attention: a half-hour video of David Antin discussing Kathy Acker — who he calls "a dazzlingly charming and funny and brilliantly powerful writer, whose work I've always felt very close to" — as part of a symposium on her work held at New York University on November 8, 2002.

"Let me point out I knew Kathy before she was the Kathy Acker you all know," Antin begins, discussing his first meeting her at UC San Diego in 1968, when she was working as a teaching assistant and associating with other "refugees from Brandeis," along with her husband Robert (nominally a student of Marcuse). He goes on to discuss "the climate in which Kathy came to be a poet" — specifically "the proclaimed sexual revolution" and "the year of the assassinations" (Antin's arrival in the city coincided with Robert Kennedy's murder and Valerie Solanas' shooting of Andy Warhol) — then recalls the guidance that he provided to young and aspiring writers like Acker, Mel Freilicher, and others from their social circle, the conceptual art projects he worked closely with (including a Fluxus retrospective), and associations with figures like his wife, Eleanor, Jerry and Diane Rothenberg, Lenny Neufeld, George Quasha, et al., all of which proved to be very influential. "She was exposed to all of these people in various ways that were useful to her," he observes. 

He goes on to talk about her compositional use of constraint ("Her engagement was with so many things but she had to restrain herself to not be all over the place all at once."), her means of getting her work out to wider audiences, and the qualities that made her a singular talent: "Kathy had both intelligence and energy, and she had desire [...] It was the intensity of her desire for life." It's a gossipy, raucous recollection that also reveals deeper truths about how Acker came into her own. You can watch it here.

Trish Salah on PennSound

Today we're highlighting our author page for Canadian poet and critic Trish Salah.

Our holdings begin with 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."

Beyond that panel, we had 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. Since then, we've added several more recordings, including "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 "Gossels in Fugue."

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

In Memoriam: David Shapiro (1947–2024)

Last week, while the world was focused on pro-Palestine campus occupations at Columbia University and elsewhere one photo that frequently made the rounds was this one of students occupying the office of Columbia's president in 1968. Those in the know will recognize the central figure as poet David Shapiro, who died yesterday at the age of 77.

A precocious and prolific polymath, Shapiro first hit the cultural scene as a teenager, working as a professional violinist with several orchestras and publishing his first work in Poetry at the age of sixteen. That infamous photo was taken during the end of the first of three tenures at Columbia: he earned his BA in 1968, returned for a Ph.D. in 1973, and eventually joined the faculty. Beyond his own poetry, Shapiro published both art and literary criticism, along with work as a translator and editor (perhaps most notably, An Anthology of New York Poets with Ron Padgett). His influence was felt widely and he will be missed by many.

We direct listeners to Shapiro's PennSound author page, where you can browse a small collection of more recent recordings, including a pair of Segue Series events and a reading for Dia Art Foundation, and a 1976 ten-year memorial for Frank O'Hara at the Poetry Project, which also featured Joe LeSeuer, Patsy Southgate, Jane Freilicher (reading James Schuyler), Anne Waldman as MC, Kenneth Koch (reading "Awake in Spain"), Carter Ratcliffe, Tony Towle, Patsy Southgate, and Peter Schjedahl. Click here to start exploring.

In Memoriam: Paul Auster (1947–2024)

Unfortunately we close this week out with word of yet another major literary figure's passing: Paul Auster, best known as a novelist, but also a poet, translator, essayist, and screenwriter, died on April 30th at the age of 77. 

Our cofounders both shared remembrances of the author this week. Al Filreis recalled that "Paul Auster's two visits to the Kelly Writers House were fabulously memorable — one in 2001, the second 17 years later during his time as a Writers House Fellow in 2018. I had the honor of hosting him, and hanging out with him, for the 3 days of that second stay. What a literary mind! What a voice (in all senses)." Concluding by noting that "his passing is a major loss," he encouraged folks to "look at his PennSound page and have a listen."

Charles Bernstein shared this photo of him flanked by three authors who've passed away recently, with the caption, "Ave atque vale: Paul Auster, Jerome Rothenberg, Marjorie Perloff, 20 years ago at a panel I organized on Radical Jewish Poetry / Secular Jewish Practice at the Center for Jewish History in NY. Our talks and much more were later collected in a book in the Alabama series: Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture."

The recordings highlighted in their notes are just some of the treasures waiting for you on PennSound's Paul Auster author page, along with a 1995 LINEbreak interview with Bernstein and a contemporaneous reading from The Red Notebook at SUNY-Buffalo as part of the Wednesdays @ 4Plus series, along with a 1989 reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project with Paul Violi. The 2004 Secular Jewish Culture / Radical Poetic Practice event at Manhattan's Center for Jewish History/American Jewish Historical Society — which also included Kathryn Hellerstein and Stephen Paul Miller — can be found here along with more information on the event.

We send our condolences to Auster's family, friends, and fans worldwide.

Steve McCaffery, "Wot We Wokkers Want" b/w "One Step to the Next"

There's probably no more fitting recording for May Day in the PennSound archives than Steve McCaffery's "Wot We Wokkers Want" b/w "One Step to the Next," This album was released on LP and cassette in 1980 by the Underwhich Audio Collective, a small Canadian independent label (based in Toronto, Ontario and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) that also issued small run releases (usually about 100 copies) by the likes of Owen Sound, the Four Horsemen, Paul Dutton, Bob Cobbing, Susan Frykberg, Larry Wendt, and DUCT, among others.

Better known by its full title, The Kommunist Manifesto or Wot We Wukkerz Want Bi Charley Marx un Fred Engels, the leadoff track is McCaffery's translation of The Communist Manifesto into the dialect of West Riding of Yorkshire, or, as he puts it, "Redacted un traduced intuht’ dialect uht’ west riding er Yorkshuh bi Steve McCaffery, eh son of that shire. Transcribed in Calgary 25 November to 3 December 1977 un dedicated entirely to Messoors Robert Filliou and George Brecht uv wooz original idea this is a reullizayshun." You can read the piece in its entirety here as part of the PECP Library. Side A also includes "Mid●night Peace" ("a nostalgic translation of the Dadaphony of hell") and "A Hundred And One Zero S One Ng," which is McCaffery's translation of Brecht's translation of the closing section of Robert Filliou's 14 Chansons et Charade.

Side B starts with "One Step Next to the Next," co-created with Clive Robertson, which centers around turntable manipulations of a National Geographic flexi-disc on the Apollo space flights. The closing track, Emes¹ in which "a phrase is intercepted, reversed, synthesized, and obsessively repeated as a stolen micro-unit." As the liner notes explain, "it represents McCaffery's first theft from himself." Listen in to all of these tracks here.