Happy Birthday Walt Whitman

It's the 206th birthday of Walt Whitman, "the Good Gray Poet," who rests eternally 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. Bunting's recording was featured in PoemTalk #74 in 2014. You can click on any of the links above to be taken right to the mentioned recordings.

In Memoriam: Paul Dutton (1943–2025)

Today we share sad news of the death of Canadian author Paul Dutton, who passed away at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto on May 27th. The news was confirmed by Gary Barwin, Dutton's longtime friend and collaborator, who also edited 2015's  Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poetry of Paul Dutton. 

One year before that collection's release, Barwin hosted a star-studded tribute event for Dutton (which we recently highlighted in these pages), where he took note of the many different roles Dutton has played — "poet, novelist, musician, improviser, essayist, mentor, collaborator, soundsinger, critic, friend" — before asserting that "Over the past forty years, 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 find that event on PennSound's Paul Dutton author page, which gathers a variety of recordings from 1979–2014, including two albums — Mouth Pieces: Solo Soundsinging (2000) and Oralizations (2005) — and a live staging of the collaborative text Six Fillious (alongside Steve McCaffery, Charles Bernstein, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, Charlie Morrow, et al.). There are also links to our Four Horsemen page and other collaborations, plus a series of useful links to external resources. We at PennSound send our condolences with Dutton's family, friends, and fans worldwide.

Celebrate 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.

Lorenzo Thomas, "Ego Trip," 1976

If you need a little energy boost to help you wrap up this week, allow us to humbly offer up this raucous musical collaboration from the late, great Lorenzo Thomas. "Ego Trip" features Thomas performing with the Texas State University Jazz Ensemble and was originally released on the album 3rd Ward Vibration Society (shown at right) on the SUM Concerts label in 1976. Lanny Steele is the composer for the track, which rubs shoulders with a cover of Carole King's "Jazzman" and the amazingly-titled suite, "Registration '74. The Worst I've Ever Endured / The Girl on the Steps / Drop and Add."

Internet commenter John Atlas provides a little context for the recording: "The TSU Jazz Ensemble was directed by Lanny Steele, who also founded and directed a nonprofit called Sum Arts. During the 70's and 80's, Sum Arts produced shows by, among others, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, The World Saxophone Quartet, Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, The Leroy Jenkins Octet, Old and New Dreams, and a host of notable poets. In the process he exhausted an inheritance from his parents, and more."

Thomas' solo voice starts us off riffing on "Stormy Monday"'s litany of days — "Every dog has his day. / Monday is my day / even if it is blue. / Come trifling Tuesday / that's my day too ..." — and is soon joined by congas and funky wah-wah guitars, then a defiant bassline, Rhodes piano, and a fuzzed out lead, before the full ensemble kicks in as Thomas' final syllable echoes out ("I ... I ... I ... I ..."). After a series of solos and some stop-start time changes Thomas returns over the band — "Let me testify! / Every day his his dog, / but I'm tired! / I want the sun shine just over me. / I want the wind blow just over me. / I want your policemen to be just to me." — which leads into the track's closing section.

You can listen to this smoldering track on PennSound's Lorenzo Thomas author page along with a slew of readings and talks from 1978 up until just a few years before his death in 2005.

In Memoriam: Alice Notley (1945–2025)

Today we mourn Alice Notley, a prolific and formidable poet, who passed away on May 19th at the age of 79.

Introducing her 2024 interview with Notley as part of The Paris Review’s “Art of Poetry” series, Hannah Zeavin observes that “Experimentation is the hallmark of Notley’s poetry; in nearly every book, a new method or idea arrives by which to channel her voice. Her work, which draws on traditional lyric forms but abandons their strictures when they fail to aid the poet, is often described as difficult,” noting that “some of her finest poems were written in the wake of loss.” “I am conscious of the facts of grief and poverty,” Notley tells Zeavin, “and I think that no one should ever forget that they exist. No poet has the right to.” 

PennSound’s Alice Notley author page offers up a snapshot of her dizzying evolution across the breadth of her writing life, starting with a 1971 reading in Bolinas that showcases many of the poems that would appear in her C Press debut, 165 Meeting House Lane (a.k.a. Twenty-Four Sonnets, which was printed and assembled during Notley and Ted Berrigan’s trip to California), right up to an October 2023 reading at Hemingway Center at Boise State University, where she read from The Speak Angel Series, published that same year by Fonograf editions. While she started off writing sonnets addressing (to borrow the title of another early Notley collection) Incidentals in the Day World, by her final book she saw herself writing “international, interplanetary” epic poetry in the tradition of Virgil that was “reshaping the myth and defining the world.” Between those two points, listeners will find recordings of more than thirty events, including readings, talks, interviews, and class visits from New York City, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Boulder, Buffalo, Albany, Hoboken, as well as Paris and the University of Essex in the UK (where, improbably, Berrigan succeeded Robert Lowell as Poet in Residence).

I only had the pleasure of meeting Notley once, at the astounding Tulsa School Conference organized by Grant Matthew Jenkins way back in 2009, where she was a featured guest alongside Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, and her sons, Anselm and Eddie Berrigan, who I am thinking of now as they feel grief that's exponential compared to what we, her legions of fans worldwide, are feeling.

Introducing PennSound Rewind, a New Podcast Series

Today we are proud to launch PennSound Rewind, a new podcast series produced by PennSound (and Jacket2) editor Michael Hennessey. 

Guided by the notion that “an archive is a story that unfolds in real time,” PennSound Rewind aims to tell the tales hiding among our 50,000+ recordings and “to look back and pinpoint some of the people, recordings, and moments — both big and small — that made PennSound what it is today.”

The first episode, “Ashbery Week, 2007,” takes us way back to October of that year when “PennSound had only just started to resemble the site it is today,” as Hennessey tells us in his introductory note: “The PoemTalk team was preparing their first episodes in anticipation of launching that December and PennSound Daily had just started as well. In our first full week of posts we had something well worth celebrating: the addition of John Ashbery to our roster of poets.” The program goes on to explore the many positive effects that Ashbery and David Kermani’s enthusiastic support had for the site in our fledgling days, not just in helping us assemble an encyclopedic collection of Ashberiana (there are now nearly a thousand individual files on our Ashbery page), but also how “the presence of one of the most venerated names in contemporary poetry opened doors for us” by making other poets eager to be part of the project. We revisit all of that week’s PennSound Daily posts, highlighting recordings from the four different events announced, with Ashbery reading titles including “The Cathedral Is,” “Haunted Landscape,” “Redeemed Area,” “Crossroads in the Past,” “A Worldly Country,” “A Kind of Chill,” and “They Dream Only of America.”

Click here to listen to our premier episode, and if you'd like to read more about John and David’s early support for our site, click here.

Robin Blaser at 100

Today we celebrate beloved poet Robin Blaser (1925–2009) on the occasion of his centenary. Our own Charles Bernstein, in his afterword to The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser, begins by noting that "Robin Blaser's poems are companions on a journey of life, a journey whose goal is not getting someplace else, but, rather, being where you are and who you are — where you is always in the plural." You can see that focus in action by browsing through the four decades' worth of recordings archived on PennSound's Robin Blaser author page.

The earliest document there is a 1965 reading in Vancouver, BC, which features "The Moth Poem" and "The Translator: a Tale." From the following decade, we have recordings from the University of British Columbia in 1970 and the San Francisco Poetry Center in 1976, along with the original raw audio for The Astonishment Tapes, recorded in Vancouver in the spring of 1974 and edited for eventual publication by Miriam Nichols under the title The Astonishment Tapes: Talks on Poetry and Autobiography with Robin Blaser and Friends (University of Alabama, 2015). Next, there's a 1986 appearance at the Portland Poetry Festival and Blaser's 1987 appearance at SUNY-Buffalo to deliver that year's Charles Olson Memorial Lectures, which concluded with a March 29th reading from his own work. Blaser would return to Buffalo for readings and lectures in 1991, 1993, and 1996, which are also available on his author page. 

Other 90s-era recordings include a 1994 set at the Albany Writers Institute, 1995 readings at the University of British Columbia and the Kootenay School of Writing (where he'd also read in 1997), a 1997 appearance on the BBC Radio 3 program Night Waves hosted by Patrick Wright, and a lecture on Dante Alighieri delivered at Universita d'Annuzio that same year. The final years of Blaser's life are documented via a 2003 reading at Vancouver's Cultural Centre, a reading and talk at Woodland Pattern in 2004, and a 2008 conversation with Robert Hass at UC Berkeley, courtesy of Cloud House Poetry Archives, along with a trio of appearances on Cross-Cultural Poetics in 2003, 2004 and 2007 (a transcription of the first interview was published by Jacket2 in 2015), and in conjunction with that last visit, we've recently added video of Blaser's reading at Evergreen State College (home base of Cross Cultural Poetics and host Leonard Schwartz), which Leonard was kind enough to send our way. Last but certainly not least, Blaser's poem "A Bird in the House," was the subject of PoemTalk #113, featuring Kristin Prevallet, Jed Rasula, and Brian Teare, You can listen to all of the recordings mentioned above by clicking here.

Ted Greenwald, "Voice Truck" (1972)

Here's a fascinating recording from the late Ted Greenwald that we added to the site in January 2015. "Voice Truck" was assembled as part of Gordon Matta-Clark's installation Open Space (a similar contemporary work is shown at right). Our own Charles Bernstein announced the new addition in a Jacket2 commentary post, which includes this description of the recordings:

In May 1972, the artist Gordon Matta-Clark installed a dumpster in front of 98 Greene Street in Soho (Manhattan). The work was called both Open Space and Dumpster. The Dumpster was filled with construction debris and other material, formed into three corridors. For Ted Greenwald's contribution to the installation, he created a special audio work. Greenwald installed a tape recorder on the delivery truck for the Village Voice, his long-time day job. Six reels were recorded. One of the tapes, featuring the most dramatic action of the day, was stolen from the cab of the truck: in the middle of Times Square, mounted police galloped up to a subway entrance, tied their horses to the entrance, and ran down into the subway. The other five reels survived and are being made available by PennSound for the first time (one of those cassettes is listed below in two parts)."

You can listen, read more about the work, and find a link for further discussion of Open Space as well as a short video on Matta-Clark on Bernstein's J2 commentary. They're also linked on our Ted Greenwald author page, where, among many other recordings, you can also listen to a March 1971 reading by Greenwald with Matta-Clark. Finally, PennSound editor Michael Hennessey used excerpts from Voice Truck in his 2021 composition "Voice Trunk," which you can hear on his PennSound author page. Click here to start listening.

Sean Bonney and Joshua Clover at the University of Warwick, 2015

Today we're proud to be able to share a newly-added recording from two dearly missed, politically uncompromising poets: Sean Bonney and Joshua Clover. Clover's recent passing prompted Jonathan Skinner to dig up the recording of a reading by the two that he hosted at the University of Warwick on June 11, 2015. Skinner notes that " in June of 2015, Nick Lawrence and I hosted [Clover] as an IAS (Institute of Advanced Studies) fellow at U of Warwick. As part of that visit, [he] gave a reading with Sean Bonney for the 'Warwick Thursdays' series I was curating at the time." 

On our Sean Bonney author page you'll find a modest collection of recordings made between 2009 and 2012, including readings at at Manchester's The Other Room, London's Birkbeck College, the University of Cambridge, and London's The Apple Tree, among others. Our author page for Clover is home to recordings from the Segue Series at Double Happiness, Berkeley, Oakland, and WFHB-FM's program Interchange. You'll find this new ninety-minute recording on both author's pages. 

Again we thank Jonathan Skinner for passing this important recording along. If you'd like to explore more readings he curated, check out the Steel Bar Reading Series, which he curated in Buffalo between 2000 and 2009.

Mimi Gross and Red Grooms: 'FAT FEET' (1966)

Today let's revisit one of the hidden gems of our PennSound Cinema page: FAT FEET, a groundbreaking short film made by the then-husband-and-wife team of Mimi Gross and Red Grooms.

In addition to the twenty-minute film, we've assembled remembrances from Gross and Yvonne Andersen (who served as photographer, artist and editor, as well as constructing sets and props). Here's Gross describing the film's origins and inspirations:

As I worked with Red at various intervals of time and projects, from 1960-1976, our collaborations became increasingly intense, and often lost the boundaries of ideas, aesthetics, and in the real time of making, craft and painting.

FAT FEET (1965-66) was directly inspired by the early animated films of Georges Melies, Emil Kohl, and the marvelous movie, The Invisible Moving Co, all of which we saw from the collections of Joseph Cornell (via Robert Whitman and Rudy Burckhardt). In 1962-3, together with Rudy Burckhardt, we made a 16mm film called Shoot the Moon. It is a direct homage to Georges Melies. There are some brief scenes with stop-action animation. Red and I made little cut outs, and Rudy showed us how he filmed the scene. A few years later, we experimented with animating life-sized props with live actors (long before "green screens").

When Yvonne Andersen and Dominic Falcone visited us in New York, we planned to make a film together the following summer where they lived near Boston. Red and I had just moved into lively "Little Italy" (1964), a neighborhood where daily fires, violence, and long term elderly residents lived near the Bowery, filled with bums, and (pre-immigration quota) Chinatown. I was busy drawing in the streets, and making objects based on street life, and Red was obsessively chasing fires, fire engines, street life, he was incorporating into his work.

The explosion of making FAT FEET resulted from our excitement living in the new neighborhood. Later, we made an ad, and called FAT FEET: "A day in the life of 'nervous city'!"

And here's Andersen describing the spirit of collaboration among friends that guided the project:

Each morning the four of us along with Dominic and our two children Paul, 7 and Jean, 5 went to the studio to build the sets and props. We painted cartoonish black and white buildings on the paper walls of the set, painted and and constructed 3/4 size flat automobiles with movable wheels from heavy building cardboard. Red built a dog which could be animated to walk in front of a live person.

Red was creating a cartoonish atmosphere depicting the types of city people who might be seen walking the street of a big city. For this reason the people wore giant shoes to connect them to the sidewalks. Those shoes were heavy! A normal shoe was screwed into a giant shoe manufactured by Red.

In the beginning this was supposed to be a four person project, but people heard about it. Each night people came to be in the winter crowd scenes. Some were friends of Red and Mimi, some were my animation students and neighbors. We got old coats from Morgan Memorial and there was a large make up table. People could come in, put on a coat, do their own make up, and become who they wanted to be for the evening.

From a personal perspective, it was truly wonderful to finally get to see this charming film when we initially announced it over a decade ago, since I had first heard about (along with its creators) under strange circumstances from my childhood. My grandfather spent many years working as a printer for the Curtis Publishing Company, and one of the few concrete mementoes from his time there (aside from the missing tip of one finger) was a copy of the February 8, 1969 Saturday Evening Post (shown at right) — the magazine's final weekly edition after seventy-two years of publication, which featured Red Grooms on the cover and a lavish article on Grooms and Gross inside. Their technicolor art and lifestyle was immediately appealing to me, connecting with my kindergartener logic (as did the work of Keith Haring, who I likely discovered around the same time), and I found my first favorite artists.

Jumping forward several decades, I should add that I'm still very fond of the work that Grooms and Gross produced in the 1960s, and, for that matter, I still have that issue of The Saturday Evening Post, stored next to the 2004 Rizzoli retrospective of their art. Seeing FAT FEET for the first time, that childlike awe is certainly rekindled by its Chaplin-esque grace, its engaging bustle, the warmth of its handmade aesthetic and its dizzying juxtapositions (of black-and-white and color, two- and three-dimensional forms, live actors and stop-motion animation). Check out the film on our FAT FEET homepage and perhaps you'll have the same magical experience.

I See Words: The Life and Work of Hannah Weiner, 2022

Today we're revisiting I See Words: The Life and Work of Hannah Weiner, a loving tribute to the late poet held at New York Artists Space on June 18, 2022. The event was presented by Artists Space and Zoeglossia in conjunction with the exhibition Attention Line "a multi-voice reading of Weiner's Clairvoyant Journal as well as a panel of thinkers and artists who were close to Weiner's visionary poetry practice."

Introduced by curator Jennifer Bartlett, the day started with screening of Hannah Weiner: A Film by Phill Niblock, 1974, recently revised to add closed captioning. That was followed by an ensemble reading from Clairvoyant Journal by Darcie Dennigan, Farnoosh Fathi, and James Sherry. Next up there was a panel discussion moderated by Lee Ann Brown with Susan Bee, Judith Goldman, Declan Gould, and Phill Niblock, before Charles Bernstein (Weiner's literary executor) brought the event to an end with closing remarks.

You can view a video recording of the complete proceedings on PennSound's Hannah Weiner author page, which is also home to a startling array of readings, performances, interviews, and more from the first stirrings of the poet's career in the late 1960s right up to her premature death in 1997, as well as a number of posthumous tributes. Click here to start exploring.

PoemTalk #208: on Tyrone Williams' "Charon on the Potomac"

Today we released the newest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, a discussion of the late Tyrone Williams' "Charon on the Potomac." For this program, host Al Filreis was joined by (from left) Simone White, Erica Hunt, Aldon Nielsen.

As Filreis explains in his program notes at Jacket2, this was a very special episode: "For years a group of us convened annually at the Writers House to talk about a poet we admired. Our group always included the late Tyrone Williams. On the occasion of this special episode of PoemTalk, we re-convened once more, although this time, sadly, without Tyrone as part of the conversation." However, Filreis is quick to correct himself, "Well, Tyrone's poetic genius was of course present." The recording under discussion comes from a 2017 reading at our own Kelly Writers House, and fittingly, the panelists sat on the same Arts Cafe stage for this hour-long live recording session.

You can listen to this latest program, listen to and read and the poem, watch the raw feed of the session, 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.

Hanif Abdurraqib on PennSound

We kick off this week by taking a look at our author page for poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib.

This modest collection of recordings begins with his virtual reading at our own Kelly Writers House on April 19, 2021. Video footage from that event is available, along with segmented MP3 audio that you can stream or download. In the first half, Abdurraqib reads the ten-part poem "All the TV Shows Are About Cops," which is split into individual tracks. The Q&A session that followed has also been split into thematic segments, such as "on the writing process," "on making an office space," "tips for aspiring cultural critics," "on being influenced by his favorite books," and "on sneakers."

These new tracks join an old favorite, a January 2019 reading of "USAvsCuba," taken from his debut collection The Crown Ain't Worth Much (Button Poetry, 2016). Listeners can read along with that poem in Western Beefs here. To listen to all of the aforementioned recordings, click here.

George Quasha reads 'surface retention," 2025

We always take great delight in announcing the latest installment in Chris Funkhouser's ongoing project to document the work of his prolific friend and neighbor, George Quasha, and if you're a PennSound Daily regular, you've followed this endeavor through periodic releases that trace all the way back to 2017. This latest session is especially exciting in that it was recorded at the Wexler Studio at our own Kelly Writers House on March 26th of this year during a mini-residency featuring both Quasha and Funkhouser. The one hour, forty minute recording — which documents Quasha's surface retention in its entirety — was engineered by Zach Carduner and edited by Funkhouser.

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 syntactic sentience, laryngeal uterus of the word, 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.