For International Women's Day: Belladonna*

Today, in honor of International Women's Day, we're taking a look at the long-running and highly influential Belladonna* Readings Series, and the Belladonna* Collective, which will turn 24 in 2024. Here's how they define their mission:

Belladonna* Collaborative promotes the work of women and feminist writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, impossible to define, unpredictable, and dangerous with language. Belladonna* is committed to publishing and building literary community among women and LGBTQIA+ authors who write off-center, producing work that is political and critical; situational rather than plot-driven; inter-subjective, performative, or witnessing rather than personally revelatory; work that reaches across the boundaries and binaries of literary genre and artistic fields, and that questions the gender binary.

You'll find a vast archive of recordings on PennSound's series page for the collective, going all the way back to the summer of 1999. Recent Belladonna* events posted to our site have included performances by Erica Hunt, Anne Waldman, Carla Harryman, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Rachel Levitsky, Sawako Nakayasu, Tonya Foster, Julie Patton, Marcella Durand, Lyn Hejinian, Anna Moschovakis, Gail Scott, Bernadette Mayer, Stacy Szymaszek, Tina Darragh, K. Lorraine Graham, Mónica de la Torre, Patricia Spears Jones, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Orchid Tierney among many others. Start exploring this groundbreaking series' quarter-century history by clicking here. 

VOX Audio Collection, 2005–2011

Today we are proud to showcase the just-added VOX Audio collection, which archives poetry readings held mostly in New Mexico and Maine (with a handful of events recorded in Ontario, Minnesota, and New York State) between the years of 2005 and 2011. 

On the VOX Audio series homepage, you'll find solo readings by David Benedetti, Jim Bishop, Michael Boughn, Wayne Crawford, David Empfield, Gene Frumkin, Burt Hatlen, Mary Rising Higgins, Bruce Holsapple, Howard McCord, Carol Moldaw, Stanley Noyes, Margaret Randall, Janet Rodney, Lee Sharkey, Marilyn Stablein, Bill Sylvester, Nathaniel Tarn, John Tritica, Anne Valley-Fox, Lawrence Welsh, and Keith Wilson. Paired readings include events featuring Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Jonathan Skinner, Bobby Byrd and Joe Hayes, John Clarke and Charles Keil, Craig Dworkin and Mary Rising Higgins, Donald Guravich and Joanne Kyger, George Kalamaras and Alvaro Cardona-Hine, Jeffrey Lee and David Abel, Donald Levering and Janine Pommy Vega, Suzanne Lummis and Margaret Randall,  Anne MacNaughton, and Peter Rabbit, Amalio Madueno and Alvaro Cardona-Hine, and Michael Rothenberg and David Meltzer. A group reading with Mary Rising Higgins, George Kalamaras, Mary Ann Cain, and Gene Frumkin rounds out the collection.

We're grateful to Bruce Holsapple, who provided the majority of the recordings, along with Ron Silliman, who assisted with the remainder. Click here to start exploring this continent-spanning series.

Series Spotlight: Poetry in Conversation at The Centre for Stories

Today we're proud to offer our listeners another Series Spotlight, this time focusing on "Poetry in Conversation," which was hosted at the Centre for Stories in Northbridge, Western Australia between 2017 and 2019. Curated by Robert Wood — whose terrific ongoing Jacket2 feature, "On Australian Aboriginal Poetry," we recently mentioned in this space — the series sought "to tell good stories in the hope of strengthening connections between people and encouraging a more inclusive and informed community."

Recordings archived at PennSound include nine readings held between July and September 2017, with a tenth recording of Wood being interviewed by Dennis Haskell in Febuary 2018. Poets giving solo readings, each running from 50–60 minutes, include Amanda Joy, Susan Bradley Smith, Sampurna Chattarji, Siobhan Hodge, Jeremy Balius, James Quinton, Caitlin Maling, and Lucy Dougan, with one shorter Westerly Reading featuring Amy Hilhorst, Chris Arnold, and Wood himself.

You can listen to any and all of the aforementioned recordings by clicking here. From 2015 to 2016, Wood curated the Poets in the Cafe Reading Series at the School of Life: Melbourne, with sets from Autumn Royal, Melinda Bufton, Kent MacCarter, Matt Hall,  Jess Wilkinson, Luke Beesley, and Bonny Cassidy can be found here.

Series Spotlight: Jonathan Skinner's Steel Bar Reading Series

We're starting this week off with another Series Spotlight post, this time focusing on The Steel Bar Reading Series, curated by Jonathan Skinner in collaboration with his partner Isabelle Pelissier (whose sculpture studio provided the venue) during his time as a grad student at SUNY-Buffalo in the early oughts. While we've opted to catalogue the overall collection under that name, there are recordings from numerous other Buffalo venues — Rust Belt Books, the Just Buffalo Literary Center, the Albright-Knox Gallery, The Poetry Collection at UB, classes taught by Dennis Tedlock, and even the city's sidewalks — along with events held in Paris, Toronto, and New York City, recorded between 2000–2008.

Poets who participated in these readings include Alice Notley, Steve McCaffery, Brenda Coultas, Caroline Bergvall, Fiona Templeton, Julia Patton, Bruce Andrews, Paul Dutton, Christian Bök, Tom Raworth, Robert Grenier, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Bernadette Mayer, Stephen Rodefer, Cecilia Vicuña, Michael Basinski, Charles Alexander, Barbara Cole, and Peter Culley, among many others. We send our thanks to Kristen Hewitt and Katherine Zeltner for crucial help in preparing these recordings, without which this archive wouldn't exist.

To start listening, click here to visit our Steel Bar series page.

Series Spotlight: LA-Lit

Today we're taking a look back at LA-Lit, a groundbreaking series running from 2005–2009, which sought to capture "the shifting nature of Los Angeles as a place," through the voices of "poets, novelists, hybridists, and non-genre text authors" living in or visiting the LA area. Hosted by Mathew Timmons and Stephanie Rioux, these programs took place at Betalevel.

Altogether there are 36 episodes, in addition to "LA-Lit: Clouds" — a two day event from 2008 that aimed to "connect the de-centered literary culture of LA in an effort to investigate its current manifestations and to develop a sense of LA's inherent literary spontaneity" — and a pair of "Poetic Service Announcements" from 2006. The roster of guests over the series' four years is also sure to get listeners excited, with appearances from Ara Shirinyan, Stan Apps, Julien Poirier, Douglas Kearney, Jen Hofer, Diane Ward, Matvei Yankelevich, Anna Moschovakis, Bruna Mori, Will Alexander, Chris Kraus, Teresa Carmody, Susan Gevirtz, Suzanne Stein, Stephanie Young, Magdalena Zurawski, Sawako Nakayasu, Mark Wallace, Vanessa Place, Maggie Nelson, Lee Ann Brown, Masha Tupitsyn, Eileen Myles, Nada Gordon, Thérèse Bachand, Dan Machlin, Lisa Samuels, Harold Abramowitz, K. Lorraine Graham, and Demosthenes Agrafiotis. Better still, each episode is in the ballpark of 80–90 minutes, allowing for lengthy exchanges with the hosts as well as extended readings from the authors' work.

LA-Lit was a mainstay of my early days at PennSound, with regular updates as new episodes were added, but for obvious reasons we haven't had much reason to mention it lately since the series ended in 2009. We're aiming to correct that today, however, since there's so much amazing material across the breadth of the series that certainly merit greater attention. You can browse through the series' archives by clicking here.