Ted Enslin: Newly Segmented 1992 Reading

Our latest addition to the site is a set of segmented MP3 files for Ted Enslin's March 16, 1992 reading at Wendell's in New York City. We have PennSound staffer Wes Matthews to thank for processing this thirty-five minute recording, which consists of nine poems and an introduction. Some of the poems Enslin read at this event include "The Weather Within," "Sweet Berry," "In Triples," "Word Lovers," "The Belongings," "The New Dress," and "The Understanding."

On PennSound's Ted Enslin author page you'll find a total of ten readings from the late poet, starting with a 1985 reading at the legendary Woodland Pattern bookstore and ending with a 2009 set as part of Jonathan Skinner's Steel Bar series at Bates College. In-between there are sets from the University of Maine, Granary Books, Bowling Green State University, a radio appearance from WMCS Malchias and more. Click here to start browsing.

PoemTalk #165: Stephen Collis Wants to Punch Fascists

Today we release episode #165 in the PoemTalk Podcast series, which focuses on Stephen Collis' poem “Yes I Do Want to Punch” from A History of the Theories of Rain (Talonbooks 2021), though as host Al Filreis points out, "perhaps [it] should be called “Yes I Do Want to Punch / fascists in the face,” proceeding to its key first line." Joining Filreis for this show are panelists Pattie McCarthy, Kate Colby, and Lily Applebaum.

After sorting out details of provenance, Filreis' Jacket2 blog post announcing the new episode turns to the poem itself: "The ecopoetic turn — an urgent one, although it can also be read as casual, even patient — from the power of a counter-violent radical reaction to a sweet comic catalogue of warblers occurs right at the beginning of the poem. One has no time to get one’s readerly bearings." "Typically," he continues, "we have time to ask, What kind of poem is this? What is its tone? What is the subject matter? 'But first' signals a rapid, mind-clearing, nearly immediate volta."

You can listen to this latest program and read 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. You can browse the full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, by clicking here.

Henry Hills, 'Plagiarism' (1981)

Today we're revisiting a remastered film from Henry Hills that was uploaded to the archive about a year ago. Filmed in 1981, Plagiarism features Hannah Weiner, Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, and James Sherry reading from Weiner's notebooks that would eventually be published as Little Books/Indians (Roof Books, 1980). Hills offers these notes on the film:

Begins jokingly proclaiming, "I'll make my Ernie Gehr film," a major preoccupation of my generation in the late 70s/early 80s, & then this very raw other thing proceeds to unfold, raw because I only had enough money (a loan from Abby Child) to do 4 shoots never having done sync & using outdated film stock from Rafik & an unfamiliar, undependable camera & trying to keep everything together & everything going wrong, yet determined to make concrete the ideas I had been abstractly developing over several years with whatever I got back from the lab no matter & so abandoning all caution to open a new area, I decided who could possibly talk better than poets? Edited in Times Square.

Fans of Hill's Money (1985) will recognize many familiar techniques at play here, with rapid-fire cuts creating a dense, rhythmic collage of sights and sounds punctuated by pregnant pauses, bursts of noise, and enigmatic, orphaned fragments of speech. It would be a mistake to judge it solely in its relationship to Money, however, since the two films differ radically in scope and spirit: while the latter is an expansive survey of the city and its scenes (including poets, dancers, and musicians), the feel here is much more intimate, between the smaller cast and the more limited visual vocabulary. At the same time it's fascinating to see hallmarks of Hills' style in a raw early state, particularly given the influence of the considerable technical challenges that Hills enumerates above. You can watch Plagiarism by clicking here.

Happy Birthday, Amiri Baraka

Today would have been the eighty-seventh 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, starting with the most recent addition, a 1978 reading with Diane Di Prima at the Naropa Institute.

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.

Davy Knittle: New Author Page

Our latest PennSound author page is for Davy Knittle, a recent UPenn Ph.D. graduate and an integral part of the Kelly Writers House community. 

That centrality is evident from the second you look over the listings on his page, which begins with four episodes of PoemTalk plus a PennSound Podcast interview with Rachel Levitsky and continues with the groundbreaking City Planning Poetics reading series that Knittle curated at KWH from 2016–2019. Other KWH-centric events include "A New Disability Poetics Symposium" from 2018 and the 2017 retrospective on poet Michael Gizzi.

Other recordings include a 2018 Segue Series reading at Zinc Bar, the MLA Offsite Reading from 2017, and a 2016 appearance as part of Housework at Chapterhouse. Finally, there's a 2020 reading and group discussion of Jerome Rothenberg's poem "A poem of fears, in seven installments, for David Antin" that was recorded at KWH for ModPo.

Click here to start listening to all of the aforementioned tracks on PennSound's new Davy Knittle author page.

Congratulations to MacArthur Foundation Fellows Hanif Abdurraqib, Don Mee Choi

This week brought very auspicious news for a pair of poets that you can find in the PennSound archives: both Hanif Abdurraqib and Don Mee Choi (along with Reginald Dwayne Betts) were awarded fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation (commonly referred to as "genius grants") for their life's work.

Hanif Abdurraqib was hailed as "a music critic, essayist, and poet using the lens of popular music to examine the broader culture that produces and consumes it." "With an intimate and welcoming writing style that establishes an immediate connection with readers," they continue, "he blends autobiography, social history, and keen insights into specific technical and emotional aspects of a song, an album, or a performance." "Omnivorous in his influences and prolific in his output," they conclude, "Abdurraqib is forging a new form of cultural criticism, one that is informed by lived experience and offers incisive social and artistic critiques." 

Our recently-constructed author page for Abdurraqib,  is anchored by his virtual reading at our own Kelly Writers House last spring. 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). 

Don Mee Choi was a perennial presence in our PennSound Daily entries last fall as she won the National Book Award for her latest collection, DMZ Colony (Wave Books) so it's no surprise to see her return to these pages for an even greater honor. The MacArthur committee singled her out as "a poet and translator grappling with the effects of military violence and U.S. imperial legacies on the Korean Peninsula." "In her three volumes of poetry and numerous essays," they continue, "she explores themes of dislocation, fractured identities, trauma, and memory, while amplifying civilian voices that have been obscured by the history and looming threat of war in her homeland." In closing, they observe how "Choi’s intertwined practices as poet and translator bear witness to otherwise unspeakable histories and expand the range of expressive possibilities for writers from diasporic and multilingual backgrounds."

While we don't have a PennSound author page for Don Mee Choi, you can hear her reading her work as part of Poetry Politic and as part of the 2012 MLA Offsite Reading. 

We congratulate both Abdurraqib and Choi for this life-changing honor. Click the links above to listen to the aforementioned recordings.

Happy 90th Birthday to Marjorie Perloff

We couldn't let the day go by without sending our heartiest birthday greetings to the one and only Marjorie Perloff, who reaches the major milestone of 90 today! 

Perloff has been a good friend to the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, and Jacket2 over the years as is evidenced by her PennSound author page, which is home to a wide array of talks, interviews, and readings from 1991 to the present. If you're looking for a starting point amidst so many wonderful recordings, we might humbly suggest Charles Bernstein's three-part 2009 Close Listening program, which features a half-hour reading from Perloff's memoir Vienna Paradox and two full segments containing a wide-ranging biographical conversation.

Another wonderful resource we're glad to point our listeners towards is "Marjorie Perloff: A Celebration," a 2012 Jacket2 feature co-edited by Al Filreis and J. Gordon Faylor. Here's how they introduce the feature:

This feature celebrates the life and work of Marjorie Perloff at almost exactly the moment she receives the honor of induction into the American Philosophical Society, headquartered in Philadelphia, which happens to be — some blocks west of that venerable institution — home base for Jacket2. APS election is something like what in L.A., Perloff's own home, is called "a lifetime achievement award." So it seemed time for us to bring together not just friends but also critical admirers at various distances to write brief retrospective reviews of her work over the years.

Inside, you'll find contributions from Jerome McGann, Joan Retallack, Richard Sieburth, Maggie O'Sullivan, Charles Bernstein, Caroline Bergvall, Johanna Drucker, and Jean-Michel Rabaté, among others. You can start browsing the table of contents by clicking here. We wish Perloff the loveliest of days and many happy returns!