In Memoriam: Cole Heinowitz (1975–2025)

Regretfully, we begin this new week with news of another passing within our poetic community: Cole Heinowitz, poet and beloved professor at Bard College, died under tragic circumstances last week in Northern California. 

Heinowitz was last seen on May 27th when she fell into the roiling waters of the Yuba River while hiking with a friend. On the morning of the 28th, her drowning was confirmed by Bard, whose president Leo Botstein shared the news with the campus community, remembering Heinowitz as "an unforgettable and unique teacher and colleague [whose] mind and personality were magnetic and singular." He continued, "She combined a mesmerizing presence, uncommon perceptions, and a deep and intense enthusiasm for scholarship and art and the community of learning."

On PennSound's Cole Heinowitz author page, you'll find three complete readings recorded between 2002 and 2014, including Segue Series sets from Double Happiness and Zinc Bar, and a 2009 set for the Chapter and Verse Series in Philadelphia. We send our sympathies to Heinowitz's family and friends.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Memoriam: Pierre Joris (1946–2025)

All of us at PennSound are saddened by the passing of Pierre Joris. The Luxembourgish poet, translator, scholar, anthologist, and performer was 78 years old. 

Back in 2021, we celebrated Joris' selection for the PEN/Manheim Award for Translation, which recognizes the breadth of a translator's career. The judges' citation begins offers a fine summation of that career, starting by acknowledging his resistance to the "landscape of literary translation that is still beholden to linguistic and national silos." "Pierre Joris's work has long been and remains essential in mapping currents and countercurrents of global modernity," they continue. "As literary translation struggles to confront imperial histories of violence and erasure, and to engage with and encourage voices of cultural and linguistic differences, Joris has blazed a path for generations of emerging translators to follow." The citation notes Joris' "stunning and unparalleled career as a translator, poet, essayist, editor, critic, performer, and academic," and spotlights his "personal trajectory has fueled his articulation of a 'nomad poetics' that cannot be contained by national or linguistic boundaries, one in which Anglo-European perspectives are enriched and complicated by those of the Global South, and where translation models the potentialities and necessary complexities of cross-cultural contact.

PennSound listeners will probably be most familiar with Joris' work on Paul Celan or the groundbreaking series of Poems for the Millennium anthologies he co-edited with the late Jerry Rothenberg, but he translated a wide array of authors into both English (Adonis, Jean-Pierre Duprey, Safaa Fathy, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Pablo Picasso, Rainer Maria Rilke, Kurt Schwitters, Habib Tengour, and Tristan Tzara) and French (Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Sam Shepard, and Pete Townshend). Joris was also a good friend of PennSound and the Kelly Writers house, as evidenced by his PennSound author page, which is home to dozens of recordings spanning the nearly thirty years, including readings, talks, interviews, and podcast appearances., many at KWH.

We send our heartiest congratulations to Joris' widow, Nicole Peyrafitte, his family, friends, colleagues, and readers worldwide.

In Memoriam: Richard Foreman (1937-2024)

This week the world said farewell to groundbreaking playwright and founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater founder Richard Foreman, who passed away at the age of 87 on January 4th. Our own Charles Bernstein broke the news on his Jacket2 commentary page and has used the post to compile links to obituaries and tributes to Foreman.

"We have lost one of the most original and important theater artists of the last century," wrote Oskar Eustis, — artistic director of New York's Public Theater, with which Foreman had a long association — before concluding "He represented, for many, the model of what a committed downtown New York artist could be. He leaves a huge hole in our world." Helen Shaw echoed this sense of loss in The New Yorker, observing that with Foreman's passing, "an era came to an end." "You might define that era as a time of American aesthetic swagger, when artists such as Foreman, Mabou Mines, Meredith Monk, and Robert Wilson enjoyed international attention, helping make late-twentieth-century New York a performance mecca. Or you might think of it as the era of cheap Manhattan housing, gone now, when artists could afford to pour their often unpaid labor into hugely effortful collaborative projects," she continues. "Maybe you’d call it the era of downtown. But to me, and to many others, a whole half century was just . . . the era of Richard Foreman." Finally, Artforum hailed Foreman as one "who lifted up fresh voices as regularly and with as much gusto as he penned wild new plays—more than fifty, in all" and cited his award wins ("seven Obie awards [...] three of them for Best Play of the Year") as "the fruits of his fertile imagination and fearless devotion to plunging into untested waters, dragging his audiences with him." 

PennSound's Richard Foreman author page is a treasure trove spanning nearly fifty years, with a wide variety of materials, including complete recordings of many of his plays along with readings, interviews, talks, panel discussions, supplemental materials, and much more. For those looking for a few potential avenues into such an immense archive, may we make a few suggestions? There's no better starting point than Foreman's three-part appearance on Bernstein's Close Listening radio program, which features the two in conversation for nearly a half hour, then two segments of Foreman reading from his prose works and plays, respectively. Another worthy option is Henry Hills' short film King Richard, described as follows: 

A charming yet revealing interview on the set by pre-teen protagonist Emma Bee Bernstein is interwoven with footage focusing on the periphery of a recent production — the elaborate set design and lighting, the non-speaking supporting cast (the so-called "stage crew") with their frantic movement patterns, typical props and recurrent imagery, all shot & edited in a disruptive manner to mimetically compensate for the loss of actual presence.

Hills said of the film, "Curators don't seem to get this piece. I don't understand because I find it fantastic and endlessly interesting. This is my most misunderstood work in years!" 

Speaking of Hills, surveying the work collected on Foreman's PennSound page in her New Yorker piece, Helen Shaw offers the opinion that "The best one to start with, I think, is Henry Hills's extraordinary 2010 film of Astronome, which feels like a Kabbalistic ritual sped up into a panic attack." Finally, Foreman was also a frequent guest on Leonard Schwartz's long-running radio program Cross Cultural Poetics, appearing on a half-dozen episodes between 2004 and 2009, and one can track his evolution during this period across each visit. You can find all of the aforementioned recordings, along with a great deal more, here.

We'll give the final word to Bernstein, who, announcing the death of his close friend offered this simple summation: "His memory, and the memory of his work, is a blessing for all who had the pleasure to experience it."

In Memoriam: Jacques Roubaud (1932–2024)

We close out this week by remembering poet, novelist, mathematician, translator, and Oulipo member Jacques Roubaud, who passed away yesterday in Paris on his 92nd birthday.

In the introduction to her 2009 Bomb interview with the polymath author, Marcella Durand affirms that "Not many writers write from both the right and left brains, but Jacques Roubaud bridges that chasm much like an expert martial artist — in a way that makes it seem simple." "Or not," she continues: 

Roubaud is an encompassing author. He writes through a full spectrum of the "simple" (i.e. his poetry for children) to mind-bogglingly dense pieces underpinned by mathematical concepts incomprehensible to many left-brained creative folks. After all, the title for his first book was a mathematical symbol — graphic and discrete, yet to explain what it means would take more words than I have been allotted.

We're proud to be able to share two videos of Roubaud on his PennSound author page. The earlier of these is a 2012 "Lecture de Poète" filmed by François Sarhan in Paris, wherein Roubaud reads excerpts from his collection, La forme d'une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le coeur des humains: Cent cinquante poèmes, 1991-1998 (Éditions Gallimard, 1999). That's joined by a December 2019 celebration of the poet's then most recent book, Tridents (Éditions Nous, 2019), recorded at Paris' Librairie Texture. Éditions Nous publishers Benoît Casas and Patrizia Atzei were on hand to celebrate this latest book from their press, the sixth in total from Roubaud that they've published. This was also Roubaud's third time reading at the book store.

Both of these recordings can be found on our Jacques Roubaud author page. Click here to start watching.

In Memoriam: Breyten Breytenbach (1939–2024)

We start off this week on a sad note, bidding farewell to poet, novelist, painter, and anti-apartheid activist Breyten Breytenbach, who passed away yesterday at the age of 85. 

In early 1960s South Africa, Breytenbach emerged as the leader of the Sestiger movement of young white dissidents that sought to explore the literary potential of Afrikaans while rejecting its colonial associations. As he explained to The New York Times in 1986, "I'd never reject Afrikaans as a language, but I reject it as part of the Afrikaner political identity. I no longer consider myself an Afrikaner." Breytenbach would eventually settle in France, but during a 1975 trip home to provide support to the outlaw African National Congress, he was arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison, requiring the intervention of President François Mitterrand to negotiate his release. 

We were lucky to play host to Breytenbach in December 2008, when he read at the Writers House as part of the Writers Without Borders series. His seventy-five minute reading includes the titles "A Black City," "Letter to a Butcher from Abroad," "In a Burning Sea," "Goya," and "The Way Back," among others, ending with a long Q&A session. You'll find a segmented recording of that event on PennSound's Breyten Breytenbach author page, along with his 2005 appearance on Leonard Schwartz's program Cross-Cultural Poetics, during which he discussed his essay "The Middle World" and his then latest collection, Lady One: Of Love And Other Poems. Click here to start listening.

We send our deepest sympathies to Breytenbach's family and his fans worldwide.

In Memoriam: James M. Cory (1953–2024)

Sadly, we bring this week to a close with news of another member of our poetic community lost: James L. Cory, a pioneering queer author known to many in Philadelphia and beyond, passed away after a heroic battle with cancer on Saturday, October 12th. 

Cory's good friend (and longtime Electronic Poetry Center managing editor) Jack Krick broke the news, and offered this remembrance: "He was an inventive, reflective, and earnest poet and writer, one whose work was often comic, but sublimely so. He was an inveterate reader and collector of books, a studied and discriminating listener to both jazz and classical music, and a sterling friend. I will miss him very much, as, I'm certain, so will his many, many friends and admirers." Cory offered up this beguiling autobiography in the collaborative online anthology Elective Affinities that bears witness to his diverse passions and influences, as well as his character:

Born 1953 in Oklahoma, grew up in NYC suburb (of Connecticut) and a few years in the Midwest. My father sold carpet and made a science of non-communication. Seven brothers and sisters, most of them difficult. Learned about modernist poetry and how to read same when a house painter came down off his ladder one afternoon and explicated a Wallace Stevens poem in the anthology I was reading, circa age 14. Studied European history at Penn State. Wrote poetry beginning late teens. Active in radical politics. The most interesting person I’ve met was a threadbare and anonymous gentleman who one afternoon in the late 80s appeared to give me an impromptu, room-by-room tour of the Art Institute of Chicago, then the architectural treasures of the Loop, full of ingenious explanations and insights, before vanishing around a corner. I believe this was Louis Sullivan’s ghost. Recently I stopped watching television.

While we don't have a proper PennSound author page for Cory, we wanted to highlight two recordings from him that you can find in our archives. First, from 2003's landmark The Philly Sound: New Poetry Weekend you can hear Cory's contributions to the opening event, the "9x9 Panel," hosted by CA Conrad, which featured Cory along with Jim Behrle, Edmund Berrigan, hassen, Sofia Memon, Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, Deborah Richards, Molly Russakoff, and Prageeta Sharma. Next, there's Cory's brief set from a 2007 launch event for EOAGH issue #3 ("Queering Language") at Philly's legendary Robin's Books, which includes the poems "Chat," "He," and "Memory at 53." 

We send our condolences to Cory's family and friends, in Philadelphia and worldwide, and mourn his passing.

In Memoriam: Roy Miki (1942–2024)

Today we mark the passing of Canadian poet, editor, and activist Roy Miki, CM OBC FRSC, who rose from a childhood of forced relocation and internment to become one of the nation's most decorated and beloved literary figures. Miki died earlier this week at the age of 81.

A prolific author, Miki published a half-dozen volumes of poetry and one essay collection, edited compilations by Muriel Kitagawa and Roy Kiyooka, and published critical volumes on William Carlos Williams, bpNichol, and George Bowering. His most influential book, however, was 2004's Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice, which complemented his passionate activism to seek acknowledgment and retribution for the more than 20,000 Japanese-Canadian citizens that were sent to internment camps during WWII. This work was acknowledged with numerous honors including being made a Member of the Order of Canada, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Member of the Order of British Columbia, along with the Gandhi Peace Prize.

While we don't have a proper author page for Miki, you can find two readings from The Kootenay School of Writing on their series page, the first from 1992 and a 2002 launch reading for Miki's Governor General's Literary Award-winning collection Surrender in two parts. Miki can also be heard on our bpNichol author page in conversation with the Nichol, Bowering, and Sharon Thesen after a reading the poet gave at Simon Fraser University in 1983 at Miki's invitation. Miki is also responsible for several key recordings on our Nichol page.

We'll give the final word to Talonbooks, Miki's longtime publisher, who posted a tribute that concludes as follows: "His passing will be widely mourned and his presence sorely missed. Our condolences to all who knew him, loved him, and were enriched by his words, wisdom, and activism."

In Memoriam: Robert Coover (1932-2024)

We start this week off with the sad news that postmodern novelist Robert Coover passed away on Saturday, October 5th at the age of 92. 

In his New York Times obituary, John Williams situated Coover "along with Donald Barthelme, John Barth and others" as "the vanguard of postmodern American fiction in the 1960s and 1970s" and hailed his "long and prolific career writing and teaching" at Brown University. The tribute also quoted Michiko Kakutani, who "called Mr. Coover 'probably the funniest and most malicious' of the postmodernists, 'mixing up broad social and political satire with vaudeville turns, lewd pratfalls and clever word plays that make us rethink both the mechanics of the world and our relationship to it.'" While best known for the workshop staple "The Babysitter" (no, I had no clue that the Alicia Silverstone film was an adaptation) or The Public Burning, his critique of wrongheaded American politics from McCarthyism to Watergate, but my favorite will always be The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., which I taught many times in my Baseball Literature course over many spring semesters.

While not many novelists have PennSound author pages, Coover does. It houses audio and video footage from the his two-day visit to UPenn as one of the 2009 class of Kelly Writers House Fellows. The February 23rd reading includes excerpts from The Public Burning, Pinocchio in Venice, and Noir, along with "The Grand Hotel Nymph Light" from The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell), "In Anticipation of the Question 'Why Do You Write?,'" and "The New Thing." You can also listen to his complete conversation with Al Filreis from the following day, as well as a condensed version and several excerpts cut from the longer conversation. Click here to start exploring.

We send out our heartfelt condolences to Coover's family and friends, as well as his generations of fans worldwide. 

In Memoriam: Michael Brownstein (1943–2024)

Today we mark the passing of poet and novelist Michael Brownstein, whose influences and affiliations bridged the Beat Generation and the New York School. According to his obituary, Brownstein died unexpectedly on September 18th at the age of 81. It continues:

[H]e moved to New York City in 1965 and quickly became part of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. In his poetry and prose, Brownstein drew on shamanic and indigenous healing practices from South America as well as non-Western wisdom and mystic traditions, including Hinduism and Buddhism. He published numerous collections of poetry, including Behind the Wheel (1967); Highway to the Sky (1969), which won a Frank O'Hara Poetry Award; 3 American Tantrums (1970); Strange Days Ahead (1975); and Oracle Night: A Love Poem (1982); Slipping the Leash (2017); Let's Burn the Flags of All Nations (2018). His novels include Country Cousins (1974), The Touch (1987), and Self-Reliance (1994). His experiences in the anti-globalization movement led him to write the "treatise/poem" World on Fire (2002). Brownstein taught at the University of Colorado, Columbia University, and the Naropa Institute.

We're proud to be able to share a broad selection of audio and video recordings on our Michael Brownstein author page, spanning from the 1979 S Press Tonbandverlag cassette release Brainstorms to a 2018 video of Let's Burn the Flags of All Nations being read in Woodstock, NY. In-between, you'll find a number of readings, an interview conducted by Joanna Harcourt-Smith, the 1979 lecture ""Imagination for Adults," a 1977 appearance on Public Access Poetry, a 1989 reading at the Library of Congress, and the 2006 short film Healing Dick. 

We send our condolences to Brownstein's family and fans. Click here to start exploring the artistic legacy of Michael Brownstein.

In Memoriam: Russell Atkins (1926–2024)

Today we share the sad news that beloved Cleveland poet, playwright, and composer Russell Atkins passed away at the age of 98 on August 15th. Kevin Prufer — editor of both the 2012 essay collection Russell Atkins: On the Life & Work of an American Master and 2019's World'd Too Much: Selected Poetry by Russell Atkins — shared the news and posted a tribute this weekend.

Prufer notes Atkins' centrality and commitment to Cleveland's poetry scene, serving as "a playful and wry presence, a figure of kindness and piercing intelligence, a questioner of the status quo and a rigorous intellectual force," before noting some of the honors that his hometown had bestowed upon him, including "an honorary doctorate from Cleveland State University as well as the Cleveland Arts Prize for Lifetime Achievement," as well as the dedication of "Russell Atkins Way" in 2017.

"He was a poet of enormous significance," he writes, "often complexly at odds with the Black Arts Movement of his time, a figure who embraced playful typography, complex musicality, and often sinister and gothic content, a writer in love with the sonic and visual complexities of language," attesting that "No history of the intersection of African American poetry and the avant garde can be written without careful attention to Russell Atkins' work." He concludes by noting:

Russell's friends, students and admirers in Cleveland will remember him as a person of boundless intelligence, playfulness, and wit, and a figure central to Cleveland's literary and African American cultural scene.  Beyond his friends and admirers, Russell will be remembered as one of America's most distinctive poets, a true literary genius able to see not just the world, but language, anew.

While we do not have a PennSound author page for Atkins, there are a few related video recordings in our archives, which our own Charles Bernstein details in this Jacket2 commentary post. They include footage of the poet reading "Night and a Distant Church," "Train Yard at Night," and "It’s Here in The" for TV20 Cleveland in 2017, and Julie Patton performing Atkins' work with accompaniment by guitarist Paul Van Curen as part of a 2019 Cleveland Book Week tribute to the poet. You'll find both of those clips, along with links to numerous Atkins books at Eclipse by clicking here.

In Memoriam: Norman MacAfee

We start this week off with the tragic news that poet, visual artist, translator, and librettist Norman MacAfee passed away on July 2nd after a brief illness. While we do not have a PennSound author page for MacAfee, his "Sixteen Drawings for Helen Adam's San Francisco's Burning" (published by Jacket2 in 2013) is a marvelous complement to the 1977 radio play staging of the drama by Charles Ruas and the Audio-Experimental Theatre, which you'll find on PennSound's Helen Adam author page. 

MacAfee starts off his introductory notes to the gallery by explaining how he first made Adam's acquaintance: "My first poet friend in New York was William Leo Coakley. He and his lover, the actor and writer Robin Prising, lived on the Upper West Side, and they introduced me to Helen Adam in the early 1980s. I spent several jolly Victorian Christmas dinners at Robin and Willie's, with Helen and her sister, Pat, and others of the hosts' friends." He then goes on to explain how these remarkable drawings came to be, explaining, "One evening in the fall of 1983, Helen, Bob Holman, and I read our poems at a reading organized by Chris Kadison at No Se No Cafe on the Lower East Side. Over the next months Bob, Helen, and I began planning a production of San Francisco's Burning." He continues, "Helen gave us photocopies of the libretto manuscript and score. One afternoon in March of 1984, I made twenty color production drawings and planned more. Around the same time Bob directed a video of Helen, in costume as the Worm Queen, singing songs from the piece. We asked the composer Raphael Mostel to be music director, and he made an audiotape of himself singing and playing the openings of each of the opera's songs." While the production never came to pass, we are still left with MacAfee's stylish and charming artwork, which he was kind enough to share with Jacket2. 

You'll find that piece here, and MacAfee's Jacket2 contributor page also includes links to two earlier publications in Jacket Magazine. We send our condolences to MacAfee's spouse, Miguel Cervantes-Cervantes, and his friends and family at this time.

In Memoriam: Nathaniel Tarn (1928–2024)

Today we're sad to share the news that poet, translator, and anthropologist Nathaniel Tarn has passed away just a few days shy of his 96th birthday. Born in France in 1928, Tarn's peripetitic life took him to Belgium, England, and eventually the US, where he'd teach at Rutgers for more than a dozen years before retiring to New Mexico in the mid-1980s. 

His life as a poet spanned nearly 60 years, with the most recent publications including Atlantis, an Autoanthropology; The Hölderliniae; and Palenque: Selected Poems 1972-1984. Forrest Gander has praised Tarn's poetry, observing that "Tarn’s books have inspired a wild, almost religious devotion among readers. His work is a tremendous force field in which world and perception collaborate in the construction of innovative formal 'architextures' for a sensual language that has no like." He concludes, "Tarn is one of the most elegant and formidably intelligent minds in contemporary poetry. His books open up a means for us to be delighted again to belong to this world."

On PennSound's Nathaniel Tarn author page, you'll find a modest collection of recordings, including readings at SUNY Buffalo, Hoboken, Harvard University, the Louisville Conference (as part of the Lute & Drum series), London (for the Shearsman reading series) and our own Kelly Writers House. There are also a number of album releases, including two New Mexico readings from the VOX Audio collection and Tarn's 1985 collaboration with musician Billy Panda, I Think This May Be Eden. There's also a link to PoemTalk #42, which covers Tarn's poem "Unravelling / Shock."

We send our condolences to Tarn's family and his network of friends and fans worldwide.

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.

In Memoriam: Andy Clausen (1941–2024)

We are sorry to report the death of latter-day Beat poet Andy Clausen, who passed away at the age of 83 on April 11th. Clausen came a long way from bomb-scarred Belgium to Woodstock, NY, where he was a mainstay of the poetry scene for the last quarter century. 

A tribute by Eliot Katz on the website of the National Beat Poetry Foundation provides a rollicking biography as well as a bibliography, listing his publications including "The Iron Curtain of Love, 40th Century Man, Songs of Bo Baba, Without Doubt, and Home of the Blues [and] an extraordinary memoir, Beat, about his adventures with well-known and lesser-known Beat Generation writers." Katz also frame Clausen's poetry as "extend[ing] the democratic-left and imagination-filled traditions of poets like Walt Whitman, William Blake, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, the French surrealists, and the Russian Futurists, especially Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was always one of Andy’s favorites." He also provides this fascinating description of Clausen's Pauline transformation from a Marine into a poet:

Andy was physically stronger than most poets. After graduating from high school, he became a talented Golden Gloves boxer and, for a brief time, joined the Marines, which he left in 1966 after watching Allen Ginsberg on TV read his anti-Vietnam War poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra."  The line from Allen's poem that caught Andy's attention and changed the direction of his life was the simple but poignant, humanizing question: "Has anyone looked in the eyes of the dead?"

Folks wanting a taste of Clausen's poetry should head over to our archive page for the recordings of Chris Funkhouser, where you'll find several recordings: two tracks from issue #14 of We Magazine (one a collaboration with thelemonade), a December 1991 We Press/Gargoyle Mechanique Laboratory Benefit from New York City, and Clausen's set from the 27th Annual Subterranean Poetry Festival, held in Rosendale, NY in 2017. We send our condolences to Clausen's friends and family.

Amish Trivedi on Jerry Rothenberg at Jacket2

As I noted in this week's tribute to the late Jerry Rothenberg, we were honored to publish his "Poems and Poetics" commentary series at Jacket2 since our launch in 2011. Jerry's partner and technical liaison in that endeavor since 2008 was Amish Trivedi, who has penned a moving and illuminating memorial detailing their long collaboration. While I made mention of this in Monday's note, I wanted to highlight the piece on its own because our listeners will definitely appreciate spending a little time with it.

I'll admit I chuckled a little when I read about the decision to join us in our new publishing endeavor:

I told him at the time that I thought the whole blog thing was dying, that we had all slowed down on Blogger, and that with the Buffalo List seemingly on fumes at that point, Ron Silliman having slowed as well, and social media booming, the age of the poetry blog was winding down. Did we want to move to Jacket2's new thing just to watch it all end? "Of course!" Jerry shouted into the phone. There was a crackling sound as the receiver hit its max volume and the audio broke slightly. I didn't argue — just agreed. Whatever Jerry was up to, I wanted in.

And needless to say, we are grateful for Jerry's enthusiasm and everything that's followed! Later, after lamenting their distant friendship, Trivedi shares a luminous memory of seeing Rothenberg read in person:

We had been lucky to run into each other a few times in person over the years, despite entire books of the Americas of our own in the middle. I was doing an MFA and a PhD and adjuncting and broke but there was always an invite on every call to visit Encinitas. Thankfully, the last year I was in person doing my PhD, we managed to get Jerry out for a couple of nights to do a reading and interview to Normal, Illinois. Watching him read to a packed room after a few glasses of wine, all of us sweaty and tired on an April night, is going to be a happy memory a lot of us get to carry forward.

As I say, anyone mourning the loss of Jerry Rothenberg will take solace from Trivedi's remembrance. Click here to read it in its entirety.