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.
