In Memoriam: Joshua Clover (1962–2025)

Today we bid a premature farewell to Joshua Clover, who passed away at the age of 62 on April 26th, as confirmed by the Marxist Institute for Research. 

Clover was a true polymath, packing three distinct careers into one lifetime. He started as a journalist focusing on pop culture and politics, serving as a columnist at both The Nation and Film Quarterly and in senior roles at The Village Voice and Spin (where I first encountered his writing in the 1990s). His work in this realm also yielded books on The Matrix, Jonathan Richman's single "Roadrunner," and the musical environment of 1989. After the financial crisis of 2008, Clover turned his attention primarily towards work as a political and economic theorist, writing about resistance movements, free speech, and issues facing college students and campuses. Finally, throughout these years, Clover was also a fine poet, publishing three collections — Madonna anno domini: Poems, The Totality for Kids, and Red Epic — and cofounding the celebrated press Commune Editions. 

On PennSound's Joshua Clover author page you'll find a number of recordings, including a 2001 reading for the Segue Series at Double Happiness, readings from Berkeley and Oakland from 2007 and 2009 respectively, and a number of MLA Off-Site Reading appearances. The most recent recording is a 2015 appearance on WFHB-FM's program Interchange, titled "Writing Red: Joshua Clover On The Poetry and Politics of Riot." You can browse all of these recordings by clicking here. We send our condolences to Clover's friends, family, and admirers all over the world.

"North of Invention: A Canadian Poetry Festival," 2011

As our Canadian neighbors head to the polls for a consequential election, it's a fitting time to revisit North of Invention: A Canadian Poetry Festival, which was co-organized by Sarah Dowling and Charles Bernstein, at the Kelly Writers House in 2011. Extensive audio and video documentation from the multi-day event is available on PennSound's homepage for the event. Here's a description of the festival's aims, taken from its event page on the KWH website:

North of Invention presents 10 Canadian poets working at the cutting edge of contemporary poetic practice, bringing them first to the Kelly Writers House, then to Poets House in New York City for two days of readings, presentations, and discussion in each location. Celebrating the breadth and complexity of poetic experimentation in Canada, North of Invention features emerging and established poets working across multiple traditions, and represents nearly fifty years of experimental writing. North of Invention aims to initiate a new dialogue in North American poetics, addressing the hotly debated areas of "innovation" and "conceptual writing," the history of sound poetry and contemporary performance, multilingualism and translation, and connections to activism.

Poets involved in the festival include Lisa Robertson, M. NourbeSe Philip, Stephen Collis, Christian Bök, Nicole Brossard, Adeena Karasick, a.rawlings, Jeff Derksen, Fred Wah, and Jordan Scott, and the full schedule includes both readings and presentations from all participants. You can start exploring this wonderful resource by clicking here. A companion feature of the same name, edited by Dowling, was published by Jacket2 in 2013, and is likewise well worth your time.

Bob Holman Discusses 'Language Matters,' 2015

Today we revisit a 2015 conversation between Al Filreis and Bob Holman, the host of Language Matters, David Grubin's documentary series that premiered on PBS stations earlier that year. "There are over 6000 languages in the whole world," the film's synopsis begins, "We lose one every two weeks. Hundreds will be lost within the next generation. By the end of this century, half of the world's languages will have vanished. What do we lose when a language dies? What does it take to save a language?"

This thirty-six minute recording was made on February 19, 2015 at the Kelly Writers House after a special screening of Language Matters, which brought out a very diverse audience of Philadelphians, from literary scholars to historians to language specialists, who offer their comments on the film and pose questions to Holman. What's perhaps most fascinating here is how balanced the dialogue is here, with audience members making considerable contributions to the discussion from their own experience and disciplines, alongside Holman's "language activist" perspective and Filreis' guidance.

You can watch this video on PennSound's Bob Holman author page, along with numerous recordings going back  as far as two Public Access Poetry programs from the late 70s. Other highlights include several appearances on Cross Cultural Poetics, and Holman's album In With the Out Crowd, produced by the legendary Hal Willner.

'Living and Seeing Charles Reznikoff' (2024)

Today we proudly announce the addition of Living and Seeing Charles Reznikoff to our site. The 2024 documentary, directed by Xavier Kalck, Naomi Toth, and Fiona McMahon, features contributions from Mark Scroggins, Norman Finkelstein, Stephen Fredman, Jena Osman, Dara Barnat, Sarug Sarano, Carlos Soto Román, Ranen Omer-Sherman, and Ariel Resnikoff. Here is how the filmmakers introduce the documentary:

Born in a Jewish ghetto in Brooklyn at the end of the 19th century, the poet Charles Reznikoff addressed the human experience in all its forms. Pioneering the appropriation of court records, Reznikoff's documentary poetry draws up a searing portrait of the United States, while his plain verse work eschews lyricism and teases out threads of Jewish history and diasporic identity. Through the words of nine contemporary poets and scholars from the United States and Latin America, archival material of Reznikoff's New York and extracts from his 1974 poetry reading at the Poetry Center, San Francisco, this film is an invitation to live and see with Charles Reznikoff.

We've posted two versions of the film on our Charles Reznikoff author page: the original release as well as a version with French subtitles. There you'll also find the aforementioned Poetry Center reading (where he was famously introduced by his Objectivist compatriot, George Oppen), his 1975 appearance on Susan Howe's Pacifica Radio program, Poetry Today, film from the 1973 National Poetry Festival, and Abraham Ravett's 1975 session of Reznikoff reading Holocaust in his NYC apartment, among others. Click here to start exploring.

Kenneth Rexroth on PennSound

Today we survey the modest collection of recordings by groundbreaking San Francisco poet, translator, and editor Kenneth Rexroth that you'll find on his PennSound author page

Among many notable achievements, it's easily forgotten that Rexroth was a pioneer of poetry on the phonograph, as evidenced by "Thou Shalt Not Kill," his paean to the late Dylan Thomas, which served as the A side to the 1957 Fantasy LP Poetry Readings in the Cellar, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the B side, and accompaniment by The Cellar Jazz Quintet throughout. That twenty-two minute track is joined by a one-and-a-half minute recordings of "Climbing Milestone Mountain, August 22, 1937," for which we have no information regarding its date or location. 

In time, we hope to be able to make more recordings from this pioneering figure in the fields of both poetry-in-performance and poetry on record available. We're grateful to Bradford Morrow, who oversees the Rexroth estate, for granting us permission to share what we have, and also to Ken Knabb, who initially contacted us about the absence of a Rexroth PennSound author page, which started the process leading to the creation of one. You can listen in to the aforementioned recordings by clicking here.

Happy Birthday, Bob Kaufman

April 18th is the birthday of Bob Kaufman, a quintessential San Francisco poet of the post-war period, who served as a vital bridge between jazz poetry's development during the Harlem Renaissance and its ongoing evolution during the Beat era on both coasts. Kaufman was an innovator in the surrealist tradition, as well as co-founder of the germinal journal Beatitude, and a vital voice that continues to inspire generations of writers. Born in 1925, Kaufman — who died in 1986 — would have turned 97 today.

PennSound's Bob Kaufman author page, curated by Raymond Foye — who co-edited 2019's Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman from City Lights with Neeli Cherkovski and Tate Swindell — is anchored by Bob Kaufman, poet: the life and times of an African-American man, a stunning 1992 audio documentary written and produced by David Henderson, which comes to us courtesy of Naropa University Audio Archive, Henderson, and Cherkovski. Extensive timetables have also been generated for both one-hour installments, providing details on the various speakers, topics discussed, etc. Individual poems read by Kaufman have also been broken out into their own MP3 files.

Additionally, we're proud to be able to share a twenty-one minute recording made by A. L. Nielsen, for which we have no details regarding date or location, and a brief recording of Kaufman reading the poem "Suicide," which comes to us courtesy of Will Combs. Combs' recording forms the basis for PoemTalk #158, in which Christopher Stackhouse, Maria Damon, and Devorah Major join host Al Filreis for a discussion of the poem. Click here to start browsing.

PoemTalk #207: on Two by Rae Armantrout

Yesterday we released the newest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which focuses on two poems from Rae Armantrout's collection Go Figure: "Here I Go" and "Further Thought." Joining host Al Filreis for this program are Julia Bloch and Laynie Browne, along with Armantrout herself.

As Filreis notes in his program notes at Jacket2, Armantrout was visiting UPenn to take part in an interactive ModPo webcast and to give a poetry reading in addition to recording this podcast session. "Rae’s PennSound author page didn’t yet have any recordings of performances of poems from this new book," he notes, "so we asked the poet to read them during the podcast session."

You can listen to this latest program, listen to and read and the 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 two hundred episodes, by clicking here.

A Tribute to Paul Dutton (2014)

Today we're highlighting a 2014 tribute event to author Paul Dutton, which brings together numerous friends, collaborators, and fans to honor the venerable Canadian poet.

Recorded on March 4, 2014 at The Supermarket in Toronto, Ontario, this two-hour event was hosted by Gary Barwin, Jenny Sampirisi, and Stuart Ross, and features an impressive all-star roster of Dutton's friends, fans, and collaborators, including Phil Minton; Eric Schmaltz; Jay Millar; Mari-Lou Rowley; Steve Venright; Christian Bök; W. Mark Sutherland and Nobuo Kubota; Donkey Lopez (Ray Dillard, Stuart Ross, and Steven Lederman); a.rawlings; John Kamevaar; Karl Jirgens; Margaret Christakos; Chris Tonelli; Jenny Sampirisi and John Kameel Farah; Dan Waber, Gary Barwin, Gregory Betts, and David Lee; and Shannon McGuire, before concluding with a set from CCMC (Dutton, Kamevaar, John Oswald, and Michael Snow).

Barwin opens the show by highlighting the many hats Dutton has worn — "poet, novelist, musician, improviser, essayist, mentor, collaborator, soundsinger, critic, friend." "Over the past forty years," he continues, "Paul has created an impressive body of great work: sound poems, visual poems, collections of poetry, short fiction, a novel, CDs, countless performances (both as a solo artist and as a part of groups such as the Four Horsemen and CCMC). He has been a significant part of major works by R. Murray Schafer and has performed and collaborated with a wide array of other artists. Paul is a sensitive, exacting, witty, and inventive performer and explorer of language out of the human. As a writer, he has plumbed the musicality of the paragraph, the sentence, and the word. As an oral sound artist, Paul has helped redefined the musical potential of human utterance." You can listen to the rest of his introduction, and view all of these marvelous performances here. We'd also like to thank Laurie Kwasnik and ChromaSonic Pictures for making this footage available to us.

Appropriately enough, Barwin is also the editor of Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poetry of Paul Dutton, released in late 2015 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press — a collection hailed for "demonstrat[ing] Dutton's willingness to (re)invent and stretch language and to listen for new possibilities while at the same time engaging with his perennial concerns — love, sex, music, time, thought, humour, the materiality of language, and poetry itself." And, of course, don't forget PennSound's Paul Dutton author page, which houses solo recordings from 1979–2001, as well as links to our Four Horsemen page and other collaborations, and a series of useful links to external resources. First created in 2005, our Dutton page was one of our earliest author pages, but its materials continue to surprise us.

Ted Enslin Centenary Reading, 2005

We're grateful to Mark Nowak for organizing this event commemorating the 100th birthday of Ted Enslin (1925–2011), the avant-garde poet long associated with Maine's wilderness. The all-star roster for this celebration, which was held over Zoom on March 25th of this year, included John Taggart, Ben Friedlander, Denver Butson, John Phillips, Jonathan Skinner, Margaret Randall, Maria Damon, Mark Nowak, Michael Heller, and Stacy Szymaszek.

You'll find the complete audio from the event on PennSound's Ted Enslin author page along with ten full readings, from a 1985 reading at the venerable Woodland Pattern Book Center to his final reading 2009, held as part of Skinner's Steel Bar Reading Series. In-between, there are recordings from WMCS-AM, Bowling Green State University, Granary Books, and the University of Maine, among others.

You can browse the aforementioned readings by clicking here.

Happy Birthday, Charles Baudelaire

Okay, perhaps one doesn't wish a notorious curmudgeon a happy birthday . . . let's just say that we are cognizant of the fact that Charles Baudelaire was born on this day in 1821. We created a Baudelaire author page several years back, which gathers resources related to the groundbreaking poet from across our archives.

First, there's Ariana Reines reading and discussing Baudelaire's "My heart laid bare" as part of a 2009 Segue Series Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club. That's followed by Keith Waldrop reading "To the Reader," "The Bad Glazier," "The Dog and the Flask," and "Invitation to the Voyage" at Harvard University in 2009 as part of a launch event for Poems for the Millenium Vol. III. Waldrop returns to read eleven of his translations in a 2006 recording session engineered by Steve Evans. 

Charles Bernstein also makes two appearances on the Baudelaire page, first presenting a bilingual reading of "Be Drunken" with Pierre Joris at the aforementioned 2009 Harvard event, and also reading "Venereal Muse," his take on "Muse Venale" at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2006. A twenty-seven minute video of Sean Bonney reading Baudelaire in English in London's Abney Park during the winter of 2008 round out our collection, though we've also included a brief bonus clip of Marjorie Perloff discussing Eliot and Baudelaire's concepts of evil, from a 2012 talk on "The Waste Land."

Click here to listen to any and all of the recordings detailed above on PennSound's Charles Baudelaire author page.

Adonis on PennSound

Today we take a look at our author page for Syrian poet, essayist and translator Adonis, for which we owe our gratitude to the late Pierre Joris (shown at left with the poet), who provided the recording to us back in 2013. 

This Poets House-sponsored reading took place on March 7, 2013 as part of that year's AWP conference in Boston. For this event, Adonis was joined by Khaled Mattawa, whose Adonis: Selected Poems was shortlisted for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize, and after the reading, the two engaged in a lively discussion about poetry and contemporary issues.

Unfortunately, in the intervening years, we have not had the opportunity to add more recordings to our Adonis author page, but this modest gem is still well worth sharing with our listeners. 

In Memoriam: Lou Rowan (1942–2025)

We wrap up this week by saying farewell to Lou Rowan, who passed away at the age of 83 on March 25th. Beyond his own writing, Rowan was perhaps best known as the editor of Golden Handcuffs Review. A tribute posted by the UK press Reality Street notes that "neglected graduate school to participate in the independent presses, little magazines and readings flourishing in New York’s Lower East Side during the late 60s. He earned his living as a teacher, and then an institutional investor – the latter taking him to the Northwest United States, where he worked on his fictions and edited Golden Handcuffs Review for many years, until moving to Nice, France with his partner Andrea Auge."

While we don't have a proper author page for Rowan, you can listen to his two appearances on Leonard Schwartz's Cross Cultural Poetics on our series page for the program. Rowan was first featured on Episode #170, "Sharma/Zolf/Rowan," in 2008, reading from his then-latest release, Sweet Potatoes (AhaDada Books). He returned in 2011 for Episode #229, "McElroy's Trail," in conversation with fiction writer Joseph McElroy about the latest issue of Golden Handcuffs Review, which included a feature focusing on McElroy's work. You'll find both programs here.

Happy Birthday, Anne Waldman

PennSound sends birthday greetings to the one and only Anne Waldman, who turns 80 today. It is staggering to think of the myriad ways in which Waldman has shaped contemporary poetics for seven decades and counting, starting with her prolific output, which, while always evolving, still feels immediately and unmistakably recognizable. As an editor for Angel Hair and United Artists all the way up to her present guidance of Fast Speaking Music, she has made space for voices that would otherwise get lost in the shuffle and broadened our worldview. Finally, her fostering presence as an early Artistic Director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project and her co-founding of Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics has created vital communities that span generations.

PennSound's Anne Waldman author page provides a thorough survey of the poet's long and fruitful career, provides a thorough survey, with recordings from 1969 ("Three Minutes of My Life" from the LP anthology Tape Poems) all the way up to a 2017 reading at the Dia Art Foundation. There are numerous full readings for Belladonna*, the Bowery Poetry Club, the Naropa Institute, the Sue Scott Gallery, the CUNY Graduate Center, Zinc Bar, the St. Mark's Poetry Project, and our own Kelly Writers House, along with a number of complete album releases and myriad individual tracks, talks, radio interviews, films, and more. There's no better way to celebrate this legendary poet on her birthday than to share some of her work. Click here to start browsing and listening!

For April Fool's Day: PigeonSound

As is our usual April Fool's Day tradition, we revisit the 2009 announcement of our PigeonSound ™ service, which sadly never got off the ground given — among other things — global warming, habitat destruction, and mites of various types. While cassette tapes are the new vinyl and high schoolers proudly use dumb phones, sadly this retro-enthusiasm could not be rekindled for avian poetry delivery, and so our fleet coos in waiting for more genteel and discerning times.

Here's our original announcement, which, in true April Fool's Day fashion, came a month early, alongside the unveiling of our Twitter account:

It's been less than 24 hours since we launched our PennSound Twitter page, and already we have 50 followers. Sign up to follow our feed to get micro-updates — from co-directors Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein, and managing editor Michael S. Hennessey — highlighting changes to the site, new additions and favorite recordings from our archives. Recent tweets have featured Bernadette Mayer & Lee Ann Brown, Tracie Morris, the PennSound Podcast series and our video page. 

Are you getting the most out of your PennSound experience? Aside from Twitter, don't forget all of the other ways in which you can keep up to date with the site through the web or your cell phone: first, there's the PennSound Daily newsfeed, which automatically delivers entries like this one to your iGoogle page, Google Reader, or favorite feed reader.PennSound is also on FaceBook, along with pages for our sister sites, including the Kelly Writers House and the Electronic Poetry Center. One additional option is the Kelly Writers House's Dial-a-Poem service: just dial 215-746-POEM (7636), and aside from news on upcoming KWH events, you can also hear a recording from a past reading, courtesy of the PennSound archives.

Finally, for those of you who feel overwhelmed by all this new technology, and liked the world a lot more before it Twittered, Tumblred and Bloggered, we're currently beta-testing yet another, more traditional means of transmission. Utilizing homing pigeons equipped with state-of-the-art (well, state-of-the-art circa WWI) wire recording technology, PigeonSound ™ (see prototype at right) will be able to deliver three minutes of telephone-quality audio up to several hundred miles from our home base at UPenn's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (our apologies to the rest of the world). Though there have been numerous unfortunate setbacks to date, we hope to have the program up and running by the first of next month with our inaugural offering: The Selected Poems of Ern Malley (read by the author himself). From sites that tweet to birds that tweet, we have all of your poetry options covered at PennSound.