Happy Birthday, Gregory Corso!

March is certainly the month for Beat Generation birthdays: we've already recognized Jack Kerouac earlier this month, and just fêted Lawrence Ferlinghetti on his centenary. March 26th would have been the eighty-ninth birthday of American poetry's Dead End Kid made good, Gregory Corso.

We launched our Gregory Corso author page in June 2017, with assistance from Raymond Foye. There, you'll find five full readings plus one individual poem recorded between the 1970s and 1990s. The earliest recording is a April 1971 reading at Duke University, which is followed by an August 1985 appearance at the San Francisco Art Institute as part of their "Art of Poetry" series. Jumping forward to the 90s, there's a March 1991 Brooklyn College reading notable for the appearance of Corso's iconic late poem "The Whole Mess ... Almost" and for the half-hour candid conversation recorded in the car on the way home. From December 1992, there's a stellar reading in New York City also featuring Herbert Huncke, John Wieners, and Allen Ginsberg, and finally, from March 1993, we have a half-hour reading from Rutgers University including "I Met This Guy Who Died," "Earliest Memory," "Youthful Religious Experiences," and "How Not to Die," among other poems.

Corso's birthday is a wonderful time to remember his unique voice and perspective. Ginsberg famously offered high praise for his dear friend, calling him ""a poet's Poet, his verse pure velvet, close to John Keats for our time, exquisitely delicate in manners of the Muse," who "has been and always will be a popular poet, awakener of youth, puzzlement & pleasure for sophisticated elder bibliophiles." He continues, judging Corso as "'Immortal' as immortal is, Captain Poetry exampling revolution of Spirit, his 'poetry the opposite of hypocrisy,' a loner, laughably unlaurelled by native prizes, divine Poet Maudit, rascal poet Villonesque and Rimbaudian whose wild fame's extended for decades around the world from France to China, World poet." Click here to start listening.

Celebrating Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 100th

Today is the 100th birthday of living legend Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose prodigious resumé is summed up by The New York Times thusly: "poet, retail entrepreneur, social critic, publisher, combat veteran, pacifist, poor boy, privileged boy, outspoken socialist, and successful capitalist." As Barry Miles observes, "Ferlinghetti's contribution to American literature is immense" and that's certainly cause for celebration of a life both long and well-lived.

We first launched our Lawrence Ferlinghetti author page a year ago in honor of the poet's 99th, and here's what you'll find there. Our most reading (which comes to us via Chris Funkhouser) is an hour-long set from 1994 at Page Hall in Albany. From there we jump back nearly a decade to two recordings from George Drury and Lois Baum, including an appearance on the program Word of Mouth and a forty-minute reading of selected poems at the Art Institute of Chicago. Next we have the Watershed Tapes release Into the Deeper Pools, recorded in two sessions in Bethesda and Baltimore, Maryland in 1984 and 1983, respectively.

We shuffle back a few decades for a few select poems recorded in 1969, including "Assassination Raga" and "Tyrannus Nix," which were digitized by Joel Kuszai for The Factory School, and the Ferlinghetti/Ginsberg episode of Richard O. Moore's Poetry USA series from 1966. Finally, we have  a short recording from the Berkeley Poetry Conference and a few assorted recordings without dates.

As we think back today about the impact Ferlinghetti has had on all of our lives, it's far too easy to foreground practically everything but his own poetry, so here's an excellent opportunity to connect directly with it and appreciate the ways in which it "constantly risk[s] absurdity / and death," as he so famously observed more than a half a century ago.

PoemTalk #134: on Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's "Hello, the Roses"

Earlier this week, we released episode #134 in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, focusing on the title poem of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s 2013 New Directions book, Hello, the Roses. For this program, host Al Filreis gathered a panel that included (from left to right) Joshua Schuster, Evelyn Reilly, and James Sherry 

Filreis begins his PoemTalk blog post announcing this new episode by discussing the poem's structure: "Our poem is in two sections. In the first, a woman meditates upon — and communicates with — a rose. In the second, the rose responds. The second begins: 'The rose communicates instantly with the woman by sight, collapsing its boundaries, and the woman widens her boundaries.' The poems of Hello, the Roses often feature a person's efforts to understand animals (especially 'Animal Voices' and 'DJ Frogs') and plants ('Slow Down, Now'). In 'Verdant Heart' communication flows back and forth between a rose and the speaker, although the emphasis in that poem is the increasing ecological awareness of the speaker." 

You can read more and listen in here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here

Amiri Baraka reads "Funk Lore," 2005

Thanks to the efforts of Howard Ramsby, we are able to share this recording of Amiri Baraka reading "Funk Lore," the title poem of his 1996 Littoral Books collection, Funk Lore: New Poems (1984–1994). This three-minute track comes from a visit to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville on October 24, 2005.

"We are the blues / ourselves," the poem begins, "our favorite / color / Where we been, half here

/ half gone" revisiting themes found at the heart of Baraka's poetry since his earliest output. By the middle of the poem, a transubstantiation has taken place: "We are the blues / the past the gone / the energy the / cold the saw teeth / hotness / the smell above / draining the wind / through trees / the / blue / leaves us / black," though he quickly comes full-circle — "& now black again we are the / whole of night / with sparkling eyes staring / down / like jets” — ending with a reassertion of identity: "“that’s why our spirit / make us // the blues // we is ourselves // the blues." 

You can listen to the complete poem here on our Amiri Baraka author page, along with a treasure trove of recordings going as far back as 1964.

Aural Monsoon, "Live in the Haight," 2017

Here's an opportunity to get to know another side of poet Will Alexander through his jazz duo, Aural Monsoon, where he plays piano alongside drummer Mark Pino. Today, we're proud to highlight Live at the Haight, an album recorded on August 13, 2017. Click here to listen to all nine tracks, including "Bamboo and Fire," "Calm and Furious Waters," "Verdigris Panorama," "Lyrical Jasmine Towers," "Aural Diamonds in Motion," and "Double Recognition."

Here's what Pino had to say about his their collaboration: "Los Angeles poet and musician Will Alexander's work been shaking my perceptions for several years now. I was happy to play with him on sets with Cloud Shepherd, and continue to love to read his writing. Hence, when Will contacted me to ask about my being available for a house show in San Francisco, with me on drums and he on piano, I jumped at the opportunity." Later, he says of the same gig, "Towards the end of the second set, I simply stopped playing my drums and listened to Will, more as a fan than a duo partner. I guess I kind of got lost in that for a few minutes. Will's Surreal Trance moves will have that effect!"

For those craving more of Alexander's work, click here to visit his PennSound author page, which is home to a variety of talks, readings, and interviews going back to 1994.

Barbara Henning and Maureen Owen (plus Ashley Smith Keyfitz), 2019

This winter, poets Barbara Henning and Maureen Owen undertook an amazing road trip, reading from coast to coast between January and March, and covering 5,547 miles in the process. We're lucky to have recordings of two of those fourteen readings to share with our listeners.

That includes the first event in the tour: a Belladonna*-sponsored reading at Williamsburg's McNally Jackson Bookstore, which took place on January 18th. The complete audio from this this hour-long event is available to stream or download.

Then, jumping forward a few weeks to February 2nd, we find ourselves in the much-warmer climes of Austin, TX, where Henning and Owen read with Ashley Smith Keyfitz at Malvern Books. Streaming video of this complete event is available for your viewing pleasure.

Henning and Owen have kept a journal of their travels on Henning's author site, which you can read here, and if you're in Denver, you can catch the last stop on their ambitious overland journey next Tuesday, when they'll read with Crisosto Apache at Mercury Cafe as part of the F Bomb Series. You can find the complete itinerary here.

For Jack Kerouac's Birthday: Coolidge and Gizzi Read "Old Angel Midnight," 1994

Since we're marking the birthdays of noteworthy authors, we'd be remiss to not acknowledge the March 12th birthday of Jack Kerouac, who would have turned ninety-seven today, had he not committed a slow alcoholic suicide, dying in the fall of 1969.

While we don't have permission from the Kerouac estate to share recordings of the poet's work — multiple albums, including collaborations with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, along with polymath Steve Allen, are widely available — we do have a truly astounding document of Clark Coolidge and Michael Gizzi reading Kerouac's iconic spontaneous prose piece, "Old Angel Midnight." This session took place at the studio of Steve Schwartz in West Stockbridge, MA in 1994, and served as the basis of PoemTalk #124, first released last May, where Coolidge was joined by J.C. Cloutier and Michelle Taransky to discuss the piece.

Coolidge is, of course, well-known for, as Al Filreis phrases it, "his advocacy for Kerouac as properly belonging to the field of experimental poetry and poetics." Here's how he lays out his sense of what he refers to as Kerouac's "babble flow":

[S]ound is movement. It interests me that the words "momentary" and "moments" come from the same Latin: "moveo, to move. Every statement exists in time and vanishes in time, like in alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy's famous statement about music: "When you hear music, after it's over it's gone in the air, you can never capture it again." That has gradually become more of a positive value to me, because one of the great things about the moment is that if you were there in that moment, you received that moment and there's an intensity to a moment that can never be gone back to that is somehow more memorable. Like they used to say, "Was you there, Charlie?" 

Kerouac said, "Nothing is muddy that runs in time and to laws of time." And I can’t resist putting next to that my favorite statement by Maurice Blanchot: "One can only write if one arrives at the instant towards which one can only move through space opened up by the movement of writing." And that’s not a paradox.

Here's how Kerouac himself described the project (which famously appeared in the premier issue of Big Table, along with excerpts from William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch — content liberated from the suppressed Winter 1958 issue of The Chicago Review): 

"Old Angel Midnight" is only the beginning of a lifelong work in multilingual sound, representing the haddalada-babra of babbling world tongues coming in thru my window at midnight no matter where I live or what I'm doing, in Mexico, Morocco, New York, India or Pakistan, in Spanish, French, Aztec, Gaelic, Keltic, Kurd or Dravidian, the sounds of people yakking and of myself yakking among, ending finally in great intuitions of the sounds of tongues throughout the entire universe in all directions in and out forever. And it is the only book I've ever written in which I allow myself the right to say anything I want, absolutely and positively anything, since that's what you hear coming in that window... God in his Infinity wouldn't have had a world otherwise — Amen."

You can listen to Coolidge and Gizzi's rendition of this classic here.

Happy Birthday, Joe Brainard!

With so many staggering losses in the poetry community as of late, it's worthwhile to celebrate life as well, and today we're remembering the one and only Joe Brainard, who was born seventy-eight years ago today.

Our Joe Brainard author page is anchored by four readings from the St. Mark's Poetry Project recorded between 1971 and 1981. They include copious excerpts from his magnum opus, I Remember, along with selections from his journals and numerous other pieces such as "Thanksgiving," "Insomnia," "Worry Wart," "The Zucchini Problem," "Today (Monday, February 23rd, 1981)," and "Sick Art." Additionally, you'll find excerpts from Train Ride read at SFSU in the mid-1970s and a stellar reading with Bill Berkson at Intersection for the Arts in 1971, plus more I Remember selections taken from a 1974 Giorno Poetry Systems session and a recording session at home in Calais, VT in 1970. 

We're also very proud to be able to present an exclusive excerpt from Matt Wolf's 2012 documentary short, I Remember: a Film About Joe Brainard. Here's how we announced the film's addition to our archives in August of that year:

Filmmaker Matt Wolf (who directed the much-lauded Wild Combination, a documentary on the life of avant-pop cellist Arthur Russell) is back with an exciting new project — I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard — a haunting and gorgeous meditation that deftly intertwines both imagery and audio to create a compelling tribute to the artist and author. We're very glad to see Brainard commemorated in such grand fashion, and happier still that Wolf was was kind enough to share an exclusive clip with PennSound. In it, longtime friend, collaborator and confidante Ron Padgett discusses Brainard's early development as a visual artist and his ability to work confidently in a wide variety of media and forms, never becoming complacent in one style.

You'll find all of the recordings mentioned above by clicking here.

In Memoriam: Carolee Schneemann (1934–2019)

We have very sad news to report that will have repercussions throughout the worlds of both poetry and contemporary art: iconic artist Carolee Schneemann has died at the age of eighty-four.

Schneemann's passing has been marked by entities as diverse as Artforum and Jezebel. The former observed that "While best known for her performance and body art that challenged notions of gender and sexuality — as well as for her expressive paintings, installations, and photography — Schneemann considered herself first and foremost a painter. 'I'm still a painter and I will die a painter,' she said in an interview in 1993. 'Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas.'" Jezebel offered this summation of her life's work: "As an artist, Schneemann centered her often nude body in her practice, both challenging how male artists have long fetishized and objectified the nude female form in art, but also drawing attention to the creative force of the female body (or more specifically, the vulva) as many women artists were doing at the time." Their tribute continues, "Her interests were clear even from when she started as an art student in the 1950s, when she was kicked out of Bard for painting herself naked. (Scheenmann went to college despite her father’s objections; he refused to pay for a woman's education)," concluding, "The frequent messages of Schneemann's work, especially that the female body still demands to be reclaimed in fine art on the terms of those who exist in them rather than those who love to look at them, still resonate in 2019." 

Our modest Carolee Schneemann author page is home to a trio of Segue Series sets spanning nearly thirty years. First, there's a 1979 reading at the Ear Inn, where Schneemann read "Accident" and the final part of "Home Run Muse." Then, there are two readings from the Bowery Poetry Club from 2004 and 2008: in the first, she reads "Like Totally Like," "Thanksgiving Diary," and "From Dreams," while in the latter, she reads "State of Confusion" and "Americana Eating Apple Pie." You'll also find Schneemann's contribution to a 40th anniversary celebration of Technicians of the Sacred from the BPC, and video from Jerry Rothenberg's 80th birthday tribute at CUNY in 2011. You can listen to any and all of the aforementioned recordings here.

Our thoughts are with Schneemann's friends and family, as well as the multiple generations of authors and artists who were inspired by her groundbreaking work.

Three New Belladonna* Readings, 2018

It's been a while since we've announced new additions to our Belladonna* Reading Series homepage. To remedy that, here are three new readings from the fall of 2018 that were added to our site in the recent past.

The earliest of these readings took place on October 14th, featuring Anaïs Duplan and Yumi Shiroma reading at BGSQD for the Queer Zine Fair. James Loop and Rachael Guynn Wilson provided reader introductions for this forty-minute event.

Next, from November 5th, we have a Belladonna* Roll Call Reading Series event at Williamsburg's McNally Jackson bookstore. This reading showcased poets Marta López-Luaces and Montana Ray, who were presented by Mercedes Roffé and Mónica de la Torre, respectively. 

Finally, from December 7th, there's another Belladonna* Roll Call Reading Series reading, this time at Printed Matter, with Elaine Equi presenting Laura Buccieri and Tina Darragh presenting K. Lorraine Graham.

Now approaching its twentieth year, Belladonna* continues to be as vital a force as ever in our contemporary poetry scene. On our Belladonna* reading series homepage, you'll find an astounding array of audio and video documentation of the organization's ambitious work promoting "the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, and dangerous with language," going back to its very origins. Click here to start browsing, or click any of the individual dates above to visit that specific reading.

New at PennSound: Ezra Pound's Radio Speeches

We're starting this week off with a timely historic curio: a new PennSound page for Ezra Pound's radio speeches, curated by Ben Friedlander and Richard Sieburth. In total, there are three speeches from 1942, which were recorded by the US government — "Power" from February 19th, "The Pattern" from March 30th, and "With Phantoms" from May 18th — along with two undated speeches on E. E. Cummings, which are presented in both full and abridged formats.

In conjunction with these recordings, we've gathered a few pertinent resources, including texts by Friedlander and Sieburth on Pound's radio broadcasts, and the complete text of Pound's radio speeches via Leonard W. Doob's book, Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War II. In his introduction to that volume, Doob observes that "Reproducing Pound's admittedly controversial speeches over 30 years later requires justification." "Why publish this volume?" he asks. Here's what he offers by way of justification:

Pound wrote these scripts; they are part of his legacy. He is so important in American and British literature of the twentieth century that whatever he wrote cannot be ignored. The speeches, more over, are valuable from a historical standpoint: they reveal what one man, broadcasting from an enemy radio station during World War II, believed his countrymen should hear. On the basis of what he said, moreover, Pound was arrested and accused of treason; he spent 13 years in St. Elizabeth's Hospital (a government institution for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C.) as a result. Anyone who seeks to understand Pound or to write about him and his times cannot overlook these speeches. Although Pound's reputation will forever rest on his poetry and other writings, and not upon these scripts, the broadcasts are part of his record. Actually, the speeches should be of interest of Poundians not only because, according to Mary de Rachewiltz, they reflect his earlier writings but also because they affected his subsequent poetry. 

You can listen in and read more here, and don't forget to visit PennSound's main Ezra Pound author page, where you'll find an extensive archive of recordings organized by Sieburth, which spans from 1939–1972, along with innumerable supplemental materials.