Happy 85th Birthday to Amiri Baraka

Today would have been the eighty-fifth birthday of legendary poet and provocateur Amiri Baraka, born LeRoi Jones in Newark, NJ in 1934. That means that it's a great time to revisit the recordings housed on our Amiri Baraka author page.

The earliest two recordings found there — the first from the Asilomar Negro Writers Conference in Pacific Grove, CA, which took place in early August 1964; the second from March 1965 at San Francisco State University — are particularly interesting because they show the author in flux, still LeRoi Jones but quickly being pushed by current events (most notably the assassination of Malcolm X in early 1965) towards his rebirth in Harlem. These sets include a number of notable poems, including "A Poem for Speculative Hipsters," "Short Speech to My Friends," "Black Dada Nihilismus," "A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand," "Kenyatta Listening to Mozart," and "Black Bourgeoisie."

We take a massive leap forward to a pair of Buffalo recordings from the archives of Robert Creeley: a short set from 1978 accompanying a much larger reading by Ed Dorn at the Just Buffalo Literary Center, and a two-part performance from 1985 at the Allentown Community Center. We owe Chris Funkhouser a debt of gratitude for several full-length recordings — from the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2000, a home recording for Kenning in 2001, the Newark Public Library in 2002, and the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival, also in 2002 — along with many miscellaneous recordings presented without date or location information. Our final major recording is a 2007 appearance on Leonard Schwartz's Cross Cultural Poetics program, where he read his work and discussed a number of topics including the recent controversy over "Somebody Blew Up America." There are also, as mentioned before, a healthy collection of miscellaneous audio recordings, joined by a fine selection of video clips made by Optic Nerve. Finally, Baraka's work has served as the subject for not one, but two episodes in the PoemTalk Podcast Series: episode #20 on "Kenyatta Listening to Mozart" and episode #126 on "Something in the Way of Things (In Town)." Click here to access all of the aforementioned recordings and more.

Eva Macali on PennSound Italiana

We're closing this week out with a series of new audio visual recordings by Eva Macali, which were recently added to our PennSound Italiana page (lovingly edited by Jennifer Scappettone).

The first of these is GAR, "a project about the Proto-Indo-European languages theory (PIE) inspired by the semiology research of Zoltán Ludwig Kruse," which states that "the majority of languages spoken today have a common ancestor language [whose] seed-words can be found in today's spoken languages with similar meanings." Here, Macali explores one of these seed words, "gar," which means "circle," in two pieces, "Gar," (recorded at Tapetenwerk, Leipzig, Germany with sound design Benjamin Leal) and "Har" (recorded at Campus Allegro, Jakobstad Pietarsaari, Finland with sound design by Matteo Polato).

Next, there's The Fire of 'Bu, an operetta "developed with jazz singer Alice Ricciardi in 2016-2017 and performed in different locations and with different musical arrangements." There are three selections from this project — "Y'am," "Tip Tap Shoes," and "Savoy Savoy" — recorded at various locations and presented in both video and audio forms. The libretto for this project is also provided. That's followed by "Ustica ha il ritmo suo" from I Luoghi, a "live recording performed with jazz drummer Armando Sciommeri and piano player Pietro Lussu," and AL5B5RI "a poetry film produced with Joakim Finholm and installed in the exhibition AL5B5RI at Energiverket in Jakobstad Pietarsaari, Finland." Finally, we have Löyly, another short poetry film also based on Kruse's Proto-Indo-European languages theory.

You can listen to or watch all of the aforementioned recordings by clicking here and while you're there don't forget to check out the many other astounding poets housed on our PennSound Italiana homepage.

Finally, we have two more projects, each represented by one 

Jeff Preiss Discusses the Jon Lovitz / Charles Bernstein Yellow Pages Ads, 2019

Since we talked about our co-director Charles Bernstein's recent ad for PennSound, it's a great time to revisit his classic Yellow Pages ads from the late 1990s, particularly since we recently added a somewhat spontaneous recording — as evidenced by the turn signal clicks that punctuate his spiel — in which Jeff Preiss, who conceived and directed the spots, shares how they came to be.

It all started with a well-received ad Preiss directed for the NBA starring Bill Murray. "Then the Yellow Pages — poor Yellow pages — they were about to just die. There was no saving the Yellow Pages. Yellow Pages were on life support and they hired an agency to try to figure out a way of keeping the Yellow Pages relevant. Now in hindsight it was really just hopeless." That "absolutely terrible" idea was disposing with the beloved "let your fingers do the walking" slogan and imagery and switch their iconography to a light bulb, thus making the book "a kind of an inspirational text and a work of literature, where it gives you ideas." "A beautiful idea, but a doomed one," as Preiss recollects.

Because the Yellow Pages didn't have the money to get Bill Murray they wound up with Jon Lovitz instead, but Lovitz was reluctant because "the scripts [weren't] funny," though working together Preiss and Lovitz were able to revise them into something workable. Now they needed a literary critic to deliver a few lines, "and I had this idea to cast Charles and I figured Charles, it's so perfect for him, he'll be able to just go for it." Everyone at the agency was please with the results — "Charles is amazing ... like, it's beyond" — to the extent that they wrote and shot a second series of spots starring Bernstein exclusively.

They then took all of this back to the Yellow Pages, and that's where things start to break down. Listen in to hear the company's reaction, Preiss discussing his long friendship with Bernstein facilitated through filmmaker Henry Hills, and more. We're very proud to be able to host the full set of radio and TV ads Preiss made, along with outtakes, which are well worth checking out whether you already know and love them or if you're just seeing them for the first time. We're grateful to Davide Balula, who made the recording and serves as interlocutor throughout, for sharing this with us. Click here to start listening.

PennSound in 90 Seconds

PennSound co-director Charles Bernstein recently sat down with Bob Greenberg to record a few poems, and while the camera was rolling he asked Bernstein to record a short, spontaneous ad for our site (something, of course, he has a little experience with). You can watch the pitch above and here's a little of what he had to say:

PennSound is the largest archive of poets reading their work on the internet and it's a giant site — [it] goes from very early recordings such as complete Williams, Stein, Stevens to readings that are taking place just this year all around the country and internationally. The files are all completely downloadable and many of the readings are broken up into individual poems and for many of the featured poets we have enormous numbers of readings by each one. So it's ideal for a way to enter into contemporary poetry by listening rather than reading.

Don't forget that you can read more about our site — its history and methodologies, as well as the long roster of wonderful poetry fanatics who've been involved with PennSound since its inception — on our About PennSound page. You might also enjoy browsing our Praise for PennSound and PennSound in the News pages.

PoemTalk #140: on Barbara Guest's "The Blue Stairs"

Today, we release episode #140 in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, which is focused on the title poem from Barbara Guest's 1968 collection, The Blue Stairs. As befits so wonderful a poet, host Al Filreis brought together a trio of equally formidable women to discuss Guest's work: (from left to right) Simone White, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Kirstin Prevallet.

Filreis offers some vital background info on the poem in his PoemTalk blog post on the episode: "'The Blue Stairs' was inspired by a stairway in the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, and yet, the group agrees, the poem is not really about those stairs — nor, really, any known sort of stairs other than what one could wildly imagine. Guest's stairs will not accommodate concepts of ascent, orderly progress, step-wise elevation, nor even gradation." He continues, "The stair of the poem — the poem as itself stair, the textual thing which readers attempt to scale — offers an experience that is 'spatially selective,' a counter-intuitive means of 'Reading stairs / as interpolation.' Such antihierarchical step-taking offers its 'code' as a variable language not meant to be cracked or deciphered, or even read, so much as spatially felt." 

You can read more about the program and find links to three recordings of Guest reading the poem (in 1969 [used for this show], 1984, and 1996) by clicking here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.

Madeline Gins on PennSound

Today we're highlighting our author page for multi-genre artist and author Madeline Gins, who passed away in January 2014. Taken together, the recordings found there offer a broad sense of her diverse talents.

Our earliest recording, from the archives of Robert Creeley, is a 1979 seminar with Gins and her long-term creative (and romantic) partner, Arakawa at SUNY-Buffalo. That recording is nicely complemented by the pair's two-day appearance at the school in 2000 as part of the Wednesdays at 4-Plus series, along with "Blank and Other Relatives of Indeterminacy," a lecture given in the spring of 1984 as part of the New York Talk series.

We also have a number of readings by Gins, from throughout the long history of the Segue Series, with a 1992 set at the Ear Inn (featuring excerpts from "To Not to Die" and Helen Keller or Arakawa), a 2001 set at Double Happiness (including "Poetics or Architectonics," "Electron Transport Chain One," "Spaghetti A," "Spaghetti A,'" and "Krebs Cycle"), a 2007 set at the Bowery Poetry Club (with selections from Making Dying Illegal, Architecture Against Death: Original to the 21st Century and parts one and two of "A Work of Procedural Architecture"), and finally a 2013 set at Zinc Bar (including "This Poem Precedes Its Title," "Why Don't I Have The Courage of the Wind of My Bones," "Krebs Cycle," "This Deeply Poignant Poem," "An Introduction to Elementary Biotopology," and "What The President Will Say and Do," along with excerpts from Hellen Keller or Arakawa). Finally, we have Gins' 1995 appearance on LINEbreak, where she read the "Th" section from Hellen Keller or Arakawa, and a brief track, "Reversile Destiny Decaration," recorded circa 2013 by Léopold Lambert.

You can check out all of the recordings mentioned above by clicking here.

New Segue Series Readings at Zinc Bar, 2016–2019

We recently made extensive additions to our series homepage for the Segue Series at Zinc Bar (its home since 2012). In total, there are recordings from several dozen events that took place between 2016 and 2019. Poets taking part in these readings include Korakrit Arunanondchai, Nathan Austin, Amelia Bande, Caleb Beckwith, Chase Berggrun, Mahogany L. Browne, Marie Buck, Allison Cobb, Charity Coleman, CAConrad, Jorge Ignacio Cortinas, Natalie Diaz, Anais Duplan, Farnoosh Fathi, Dia Felix, Jennifer Firestone, Jack Halberstam, Saidiya Hartman, Angela Hume, Lucy Ives, Sasha Aisha John, Mark Francis Johnson, Krystal Languell, Lonely Christopher, Matt Longabucco, Anna Moschovakis, Angel Nafis, Fred Moten, Eileen Myles, Precious Okoyomon, Jasmine Reid, Evelyn Reilly, Sarah Riggs, Ed Sanders, Sophie Seita, Christopher Stackhouse, Diamond Stingily, Stacy Szymaszek, TC Tolbert, Wendy Trevino, Simone White, Uljana Wolf, Wendy Xu, and Stephanie Young. 

You can browse through these new additions and many more recordings from the Segue Series at Zinc Bar by clicking here. Don't forget that the series' complete archives are available on PennSound, starting with the Ear Inn (1978–1998), and continuing through HERE Cafe (1998), Double Happiness (1998–2001), and the Bowery Poetry Club (2001–2012).