Happy 80th Birthday to bpNichol

This September 30th would have been the 80th birthday of iconic Canadian multiform poet bpNichol, who passed away far too soon at the age of 43 in 1988. PennSound's bpNichol author page — edited by media archeologist Lori Emerson — is testament to Nichol's diverse talents and affinities, and it's telling that it would take a media archeologist to construct a proper archive, given that it collects work originally released on flexi-disc, LP, cassette, and even floppy disc, in addition to traditional formats. 

That last piece, 1984's "First Screening: Computer Poems" — initially written in Apple's BASIC programming language and converted into a Quicktime emulation in 2007 by a team of poets and media specialists — is a clear highlight of the collection. Another is a series of lengthy recordings (totaling nearly six hours) from Nichol's unfinished magnum opus, The Martyrology, made in 1983 and 1987. Our most recent addition, from the spring of 2023, is Nichol and bill bissett's 1967 interview with Phyllis Webb on the CBC television program Extension (read the PennSound Daily write-up here) You'll find these and many more recordings from the late 1960s through to posthumously-released work by clicking here.

Listeners will also want to check out our author pages for The Four Horsemen and Owen Sound — collaborative projects in which Nichol participated — as well as the 1979 Six Fillious reading at the Ear Inn (which features Paul Dutton reading Nichol's contributions to the book). Finally, we'd be remiss if we didn't point you in the direction of the official bpNichol archive, which is a truly marvelous resource.

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

Today we look back at "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.

PennSound and Jacket2 Resources on Australian Poetry

Today we take stock of materials at from both PennSound and Jacket2 that relate to the Australian continent.

There's no better place to start than our Australian Poets anthology page, which is home to a comprehensive anthology of contemporary Australian voices, organized by the indispensable Pam Brown and first unveiled in 2013. In addition to links to preexisting author pages for Kate Lilley and John Tranter, it includes (then-)new recordings from a total of twenty-five poets: Adam Aitken, Ali Alizadeh, Judith Bishop, Ken Bolton, Bonny Cassidy, Stuart Cooke, Laurie Duggan, Kate Fagan, Michael Farrell, Liam Ferney, Duncan Hose, Jill Jones, Kit Kelen, John Kinsella, Peter Minter, Tracy Ryan, Jaya Savige, Pete Spence, Amanda Stewart, Ann Vickery, Corey Wakeling, Alan Wearne, Fiona Wright, Tim Wright, and Mark Young. This astounding collection of recordings is amazing in and of itself, but even more so when you realize that it's a supplement to an even more momentous Jacket2 feature: "Fifty-One Contemporary Poets from Australia", also organized by Brown, which was released in five installments over the course of 2012. Here's how she she opens her preface to the collection:

When it comes to poetry anthologies, I agree with David Antin's long-ago quip — "Anthologies are to poets as zoos are to animals" — and I think that journals and magazines are probably better indicators of what's current in any country's poetry than grand, often agenda-driven anthologies. Here I am presenting the work of fifty-one contemporary poets from Australia. My aim was to make it broadly representative by including innovation and experimentation alongside quasi-romanticism, elegy, and the almost-pastoral. No one in this group writes like another. The common link is simply that each poet is an Australian whether by birth, residence or citizenship.

She continues: "This collection could probably be read as an anthology, and so I grant a comment on omission. There are many other poets writing and publishing in Australia, probably around four hundred, who aren't included here. A problem for any editor assembling a collection of writing from Australia is the inclusion of multiracial poetries. At the outset, I should say that there are no Australian indigenous nor Torres Strait Islander poets in this selection of poems." That omission, however, is answered somewhat by Robbie Wood's astounding 2012 Jacket2 feature "On Australian Aboriginal Poetry: 'The Last Evening Glow Above the Horizon.'" Unlike typical Jacket2 features, which publish all of their content in one shot, Wood has filed new addenda to his anthology in 2015, 2016, and 2017, and I presume we might have further installments to look forward to in the future as well.

Taken together, these features represent some of my favorite PennSound and Jacket2 content over my long tenure with both sites. They also serve as an important reminder of the tireless work done by John Tranter — through Jacket, but also long before that through various publishing and broadcasting ventures — that both helped foster Australia's thriving poetry scene and also brought worldwide attention to it. Click on any of the links above to start browsing.

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

We start off this new week by 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.

Congratulations to National Book Award Longlist Poets Willis, Laux

We close out this week by celebrating PennSound poets Elizabeth Willis and Dorianne Laux, who were both named this week to the longlist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry. In their announcement of this year's preliminary list of nominees, the National Book Foundation touted the diversity and pedigree of the included poets, noting that it "includes poets in all stages of their publishing careers, and nine of the ten poets on the Longlist are first-time National Book Award honorees," among them "five Guggenheim Fellows and two Pulitzer Prize winners" as well as winners of "the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award, the Pushcart Prizes, and more." It's also worth consideration that "[f]ive of the books come from independent publishers and two come from university presses, including one publisher that is appearing on the National Book Award Longlists for the first time: Texas Review Press."

Willis is nominated for Liontaming in America (New Directions), which the citation hailed as a "visionary work that delves deep into the ancient enchantments of the circus and its timeless disciplinary displays" and "investigates the utopian aspirations fleetingly enacted in the polyamorous life of a nineteenth-century religious community, interweaving archival and personal threads with the histories of domestic labor, extraction economies, and the performance of family in theater, film, and everyday life." On Willis' PennSound author page you can browse a wide array of recordings spanning three decades, including a great many readings, plus talks, interviews, and appearances on both podcasts and radio programs.

Laux's Life on Earth was praised by the judges for the way in which the collection "tenderly examines the quotidian — a shovel and rake, Bisquick, salt, and even a can of WD-40 — alongside motherhood, aging, and loss." They continue, observing how Life on Earth "reflects on the many delights and heartbreaks of life, compels us to embrace the abundant beauty of the natural world, and, perhaps most importantly, invites us to consider that even the most ordinary aspects of our messy humanity can be worthy of poetry." Laux's PennSound author page is far more modest that Willis', but you'll find both a 1999 reading at our own Kelly Writers House there, along with a 1994 panel discussion at San Francisco State University, "The Whole Matter of the Human: Voicing Difference in Poetry," which also included Ben Hollander, Tino Villanueva, Jane Miller, and Cyrus Cassells.

We congratulate both Willis and Laux, along with their fellow longlisted poets: Anne Carson, Fady Joudah, Gregory Pardlo, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Octavio Quintanilla, m.s. RedCherries, Dianne Seuss, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Finalists will be announced on October 1st and the winner will be crowned in exactly two months at the 75th National Book Awards Ceremony on November 20th.

H.D. Reads from 'Helen in Egypt,' 1955

Today we consider our recording of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) reading an extended series of excerpts from Helen in Egypt. Altogether, there are a total of forty-six tracks, which include ten selections from the book's "Palinode" section, eleven from "Leuké," and eleven from "Eidolon," along with fourteen tracks of commentary by the poet scattered throughout the set.

As Aliki Caloyeras observes in her notes that accompany these recordings, "H.D. made these recordings of Helen in Egypt in Zurich in 1955. In a letter dated February 3, 1955, to her friend and literary executer, Norman Holmes Pearson, H.D. describes the recordings: 'I am so happy about the disk-work [sic], went in yesterday by car and E[rich Heydt] came along and helped me.  I did just 21 minutes this time, some of the first section with captions.  It came up quite well — the first set, of Jan. 26, sent surface, is really the second disk, in time.  The first one I did is more lyrical and has sections from Eidolon; this one of Feb. 2 has Egypt and Some Leuke; one side of disk is Achilles, the other, Paris. . .'" She continues, "Since these recordings were made before Helen in Egypt was completed and published, the ordering of the sections read does not exactly coincide with the subsequent published text version.  The prose sections were not yet written (as H.D. came up with the idea of adding the prose sections while making the recordings).  So, in the recordings, the lyrics are interspersed with H.D.'s preliminary commentary, which she later reworks into the published prose sections." Thanks to Caloyeras, we're also able to provide page numbers for each excerpt in New Directions' edition of Helen in Egypt.

You can read more about the recordings and listen in by clicking here. Selections from Helen in Egypt from this session were the subject of PoemTalk # 84, which you can listen to here. 

Madeline Gins on PennSound

Today we'll be exploring PennSound's author page for multi-genre artist and author Madeline Gins, who passed away in January 2014. Taken together, the recordings found there offer a broad sense of her diverse talents.

Our earliest recording, from the archives of Robert Creeley, is a 1979 seminar with Gins and her long-term creative (and romantic) partner, Arakawa at SUNY-Buffalo. That recording is nicely complemented by the pair's two-day appearance at the school in 2000 as part of the Wednesdays at 4-Plus series, along with "Blank and Other Relatives of Indeterminacy," a lecture given in the spring of 1984 as part of the New York Talk series.

We also have a number of readings by Gins, from throughout the long history of the Segue Series, with a 1992 set at the Ear Inn (featuring excerpts from "To Not to Die" and Helen Keller or Arakawa), a 2001 set at Double Happiness (including "Poetics or Architectonics," "Electron Transport Chain One," "Spaghetti A," "Spaghetti A,'" and "Krebs Cycle"), a 2007 set at the Bowery Poetry Club (with selections from Making Dying Illegal, Architecture Against Death: Original to the 21st Century and parts one and two of "A Work of Procedural Architecture"), and finally a 2013 set at Zinc Bar (including "This Poem Precedes Its Title," "Why Don't I Have The Courage of the Wind of My Bones," "Krebs Cycle," "This Deeply Poignant Poem," "An Introduction to Elementary Biotopology," and "What The President Will Say and Do," along with excerpts from Hellen Keller or Arakawa). Finally, we have Gins' 1995 appearance on LINEbreak, where she read the "Th" section from Hellen Keller or Arakawa, and a brief track, "Reversile Destiny Decaration," recorded circa 2013 by Léopold Lambert.

You can check out all of the recordings mentioned above by clicking here.

Bernstein Wins America Award for Lifetime Contribution to International Writing

We couldn't be more proud of PennSound co-founder Charles Bernstein, who has been named as the 2025 recipient of the America Award, given for "lifetime contribution to international writing" by Contemporary Arts Educational Project, Inc., in memory of Anna Fahrni. 

The award is given annually, with selections made by a panel of six to eight judges (including poets, prose writers, playwrights, and literary critics) led by Green Integer publisher Douglas Messerli. Previous recipients of the award, conceived in 1994 as an alternative to the Nobel Prize in Literature, include Aimé Cesaire, Friederike Mayröcker, Jacques Roubaud, Eudora Welty, Adonis, John Ashbery, Edward Albee, Tom Stoppard, Haruki Murakami, Nicole Brossard, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Rosmarie Waldrop, just to name a few. You can read more about the prize and last year's recipient, Chinese author Can Xue, on Green Integer's website. Meanwhile, those eager to learn more about Bernstein and experience his work should head to his PennSound author page, where you can browse a diverse array of readings, talks, interviews, panel discussions, podcasts, short films, and more, spanning fifty-five years.

Once more, we at PennSound congratulate our dear colleague for this momentous and well-deserved achievement.

Lila Zemborain Reads from Her 9/11 Poem, 'Rasgado/Torn'

Today we mark the anniversary of the September 11th terror attacks by revisiting Argentinian poet and critic Lila Zemborain's 2021 reading of selections from Rasgado/Torn (Buenos Aires: Tse-Tse, 2006), her poetic diary written one year after 9/11. As this predated our Zemborain author page, Charles Bernstein first shared the video in a Jacket2 commentary post.

This footage was shot at a reading in New York City on August 25, 2021 presented by Rebel Road. Zemborain is accompanied by Lorenzo Bueno, her son and also  translator (with Rosa Alcala) of Rasgado/Torn. You can watch their performance below.

Poet and critic Lila Zemborain (Argentina) is the Director of Creative Writing in Spanish at NYU. She is the author of several poetry collections: Abrete sésamo debajo agua (1993); Usted (1998); Guardianes del secreto (2002), translated into English as Guardians of the Secret (2009/2015); Malvas orquídeas del mar (2004), translated into English as Mauve Sea-orchids (2007); Rasgado (2006), translated into French as Déchiré (2013); El rumor de los bordes (2011); Diario de la hamaca paraguaya (2014); Materia blanda (2014); and the chapbooks Ardores (1989) and Pampa (2001).

'Alcheringa' Audio Inserts: 1971–1978

Not long after the debut of our sister site Jacket2, its Reissues section announced the launch of an archive of Alcheringa, the groundbreaking ethnopoetics journal that was edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock and ran from 1970–1980. This massive undertaking was commissioned by Tedlock and Jon Cotner with site design and information architecture by PennSound senior editor and Jacket2 Reissues editor Danny Snelson.

In conjunction with that project, we unveiled a new Alcheringa page on PennSound edited by Snelson. It's home to the flexidisc inserts that accompanied nine of the journal's issues from 1971 to 1978. These "audio inserts" include work from a number of PennSound poets including Rothenberg, Jackson Mac Low, Armand Schwerner and Anne Waldman (whose 1975 reading of "Fast Speaking Woman" at New Wilderness Event #20 at New York City's Washington Square Church is shown above), along with myriad other recordings, from the Reverend W.T. Goodwin's "Easter Sunrise Sermon" and bluesman Son House's "Conversion Experience Narrative" to Somali folktales, "Songs of Ritual License from Midwestern Nigeria" and Jaime de Angulo's "The Story of the Gilak Monster and his Sister the Ceremonial Drum."

You can read more about the Alcheringa discs on Jacket2, and explore the journal's archives here. To listen to the audio inserts, click here to visit PennSound's Alcheringa audio page.

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

Today we are highlighting 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.

George Quasha Reads 'laryngeal uterus of the word,' 2024

Today we  are highlighting the latest installment in  Chris Funkhouser's ongoing project to document the work of his prolific friend and neighbor, George Quasha. Regular PennSound listeners have been following this endeavor through periodic releases that trace all the way back to 2017. This newest session — recorded in Barrytown, NY on June 17th of this year — presents the whole of laryngeal uterus of the word in a single ninety-six minute MP3.

You'll find this new track and many more recordings on PennSound's George Quasha author page, along with lengthy selections from many of his books including strange beauty by stranger attraction, 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.

For Labor Day: Steve McCaffery's "Wot We Wukkers Want"

Today is Labor Day in the US and there's no better listening to commemorate the day than Steve McCaffery's "Wot We Wukkers 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.