George Quasha Reads 'Hearing Other' and 'Dowsing Axis," 2019

Today we're highlighting two recently-added recordings of George Quasha made by Chris Funkhouser in Barrytown, New York during 2019 as part of a multi-year project to record his fellow poet's collected work. This latest installment features two recent books by Quasha read in their entirety.

The earlier session, which took place on July 30th, is focused on Hearing Other, which was published as a virtual chapbook by Dispatches from the Poetry Wars in March of last year. According to the poet, Hearing Other "differs from many previous joint efforts" with Susan Quasha in that it's "a coperformative engagement: my work in preverbs and hers in photography. Consisting of thirty-four sets of poems and photographs, the book was "created over about a month and a half, ending early December 2018."

Then we have Dowsing Axis, recorded by Funkhouser on December 28th of last year. Also available as a virtual chapbook from Dispatches, this is the second of five planned books in this series. In his introduction, "Toward a Poetics of Interacting Frameworks," Quasha offers some insights on the creative process here and situates this book within its own series and the larger "Preverbs" series that has occupied the poet for some time. Here's how he begins:

If every new approach to making poetry invites a new or adjusted sense of poetics, our
present modality of collaboration adds a particular quality to that invite, even a demand, with a further energy of redefinition. I'm thinking now toward a poetics of interacting frameworks. At the concrete level is the fact that there is a visual frame, Susan's photo (itself a literal frame), and my response, a preverbial poem (an aggregate of singular verbal frames). Each of these encompassing outer frames is a kind of lens on "reality" (meaning a framed relation to the world as experienced): Susan's constant companion, her camera, capturing what she sees on her walks and the like; and my collection of lines written by hand spontaneously throughout the day and night and worked into the poem-frame, intercalated with the lines generated in that interactive compositional process (the latter usually the most numerous).

Both of these recordings run approximately ninety minutes in length. You'll find Funkhouser's complete Quasha recordings, including these two latest installments, here.

Caroline Bergvall in Conversation with David Wallace and Orchid Tierney, 2014

Here's a wonderful recording from our archives that was recently segmented thanks to the efforts of PennSound staffer Wes Matthews: Caroline Bergvall's 2014 conversation with David Wallace and Orchid Tierney at our own Kelly Writers House. 

Recorded on November 14th of that year, this hour-long conversation has now been broken up into thirteen discrete files by topic, including "Connecting the contemporary and the medieval," "Transformations in the English language," "Gender and desingularizing voices," "Fascination with the letter H and phonetics," "Anonymity and voicing," and "Apocalyptic nature of medieval times," along with the all-important "On the artistic next steps." At the time, Bergvall had just release Drift, the second of three books in a planned trilogy of works influenced by medieval sources that also includes Meddle English and the recently-released Alisoun Sings. It's especially fitting to hear Bergvall and Wallace talk about the former's work since this trilogy has deep roots in her "Shorter Chaucer Tales," which was initially written at the invitation of Wallace and Charles Bernstein and first presented at the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the New Chaucer Society in New York in 2006.

You can hear much more from Bergvall's trilogy, along with earlier work like Fig and Goan Atom on her PennSound author page. Click here to start exploring.

Charles Reznikoff reads from 'Holocaust,' 1975

On the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we proudly revisit one of the more remarkable and harrowing recordings in our archives:

In late 2009, we were fortunate enough to be contacted by filmmaker Abraham Ravett, who offered us a treasure trove of rare recordings he'd made of poet Charles Reznikoff reading from his final collection, Holocaust, along with a number of photographs. Recorded December 21, 1975, these eighteen tracks — which include a number of retakes and an audio check — were originally recorded for inclusion in the soundtrack to the recently-graduated director's debut film, Thirty Years Later, which he describes as an autobiographical document of "the emotional and psychological impact of the Holocaust on two survivors and the influence this experience has had on their relationship with the filmmaker — their only surviving child."

In addition to the recordings themselves, Ravett graciously shared his recollections of that day — noting, "Mr. Reznikoff's West End apartment was located within a high-rise apartment complex reminiscent of where I grew up during my teens in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, N.Y. He was very kind and gracious to a rather nervous young filmmaker fumbling with his Nagra tape recorder and Sennheiser microphone who hoped that everything would work as planned" — along with a series of eight photographs of the poet, including the stunning image at right.

While Holocaust, as a text alone, serves as a viscerally pointed indictment of Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, not to mention a marvelous example of documentary poetics, in these selections, the auratic resonance of these appropriated testimonies are amplified dramatically, particularly when framed by the frail yet determined voice of the seventy-nine year old poet — who would pass away a month and a day from the date of this recording session — lending the work a gravid anger, a grand sense of monumental enormity.

You can listen to these tracks by clicking here, where you'll also find a link to a separate page housing Ravett's photographs, and don't forget to visit Reznikoff's main PennSound author page, where you can listen to the poet's 1974 reading at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University (where he was famously introduced by his Objectivist compatriot, George Oppen) and his 1975 appearance on Susan Howe's Pacifica Radio program, "Poetry Today," among other recordings.

New on 'Jacket2': Olivier Brossard on Richard O. Moore's "Poésie-Vérité Documentaries"

One of the newest articles posted at Jacket2 will certainly be of interest to PennSound's listeners. Olivier Brossard, translator, editor, and Double Change co-founder, offers up "Richard O. Moore's Poésie-Vérité Documentaries," a survey of the groundbreaking films that Moore made for NET (National Educational Television, the precursor to PBS) in the 1960s under the title USA: Poetry, along with subsequent projects in the same vein.

In his introduction, he makes bold claims regarding "Moore's seminal work in the field of American letters": "not only did Moore contribute to making American poetry better known to the general public from the mid-1960s onwards, but the poets he chose to shoot were, for the most part, far from being recognized at the time the documentaries were made." He continues:

For a reader interested in the poetics, aesthetics, and politics of Donald Allen's New American Poetry (1960), Moore's tastes and choices were not only excellent but also prescient. For instance, Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery (USA: Poetry program #10) were not obvious choices for a filmmaker shooting a poetry documentary for educational television in the early 1960s. Today, however, Moore's films are considered invaluable archives of midcentury American poetry and poetics, as they documented the life and work of poets who have become some of the most influential writers of their time.

Eleven of the thirteen films Moore made for the USA: Poetry series are available on Moore's PennSound author page, thanks to the efforts of Brossard, along with Garrett Caples and Flinn Moore Rauck, Moore's daughter. They include episode #2 (with Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti), #3 (with Robert Duncan and John Wieners), #4 (with Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder), #9 (with Louis Zukofsky), #10 (the aforementioned program with Koch and Ashbery), #11 (with Frank O'Hara and Ed Sanders), and #13 with Robert Creeley. You can view the available shows by clicking here, and read more from Brossard's essay by clicking here.

PoemTalk #144: on Michael McClure's "Ghost Tantras"

Yesterday, we released episode #144 in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, which focuses on three poems from Michael McClure's Ghost Tantras: 39 ("MARILYN MONROE"), 49 ("SILENCE THE EYES!"), and 51 ("I LOVE TO THINK OF THE RED PURPLE ROSE"). Joining host Al Filreis for this program is a panel that includes (from left to right) Selena Dyer, Jonathan Dick, and Jerome Rothenberg.

After a lengthy cataloguing of the various recordings of these poems available on McClure's PennSound author page — including film footage the poet infamously reading to the lions in the San Francisco Zoo — Filreis' PoemTalk blog post on this episode reckons with the "compelling if grandiose claims made for McClure's bellowing with the lions, such as Dennis Hopper's quip, 'Without McClure’s roar there would be no 1960s.'" "Era-naming hyperbole aside," he continues, "what are the effects of McClure's 'mammal patriotism,' his effort to make central to poetry the notion of human utterance as archaic, nonsemantic sound?" For the answer to that question, you'll have to tune in. You can read more about the program by clicking here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.

William Rowe's Obituary for Sean Bonney at 'Jacket2'

The sudden passing of Sean Bonney late last fall still continues to reverberate through the poetic community. This past weekend, Charles Bernstein shared a lengthy tribute to the poet written by William Rowe — which was passed up by both The Guardian and The Independent — as part of his Jacket2 commentary series. We're honored to be able to share this thoughtful consideration of Bonney's life and work with our readers.

"Sean Bonney, one of the finest UK poets of our time, died in Berlin on 13th November 2019," Rowe begins. "He pushed at the limits of poetry, creating new forms in each single book. No other contemporary work destroys so thoroughly the universe of resurgent fascism." After discussing Bonney's upbringing and his influences and tracing his aesthetic development over the course of his published work, Rowe concludes with this unmitigated praise: "No other British poet of Bonney's generation so exposed themselves to the violence of the UK after Thatcher ('she faked her death'), to the violence ('police reality') that maintains the law. Rimbaud, Pasolini, Baraka, Diane di Prima, are some points of comparison. This is poetry in which defensive layers of the self become suspended, the poem sheds its traditional walls, the brutal injustices of history find expression."

It's well worth your time to read the entire piece, which you can find here. Our Sean Bonney author page, which is home to a modest yet important array of recordings from 2005–2018 can be found here.

Congratulations to Creative Capital Award Winners Foster, Nowak

This week brought monumental news for two PennSound poets who were chosen as recipients of 2020 Creative Capital Awards. These "exemplars of ... innovative, powerful, and challenging work" each received $50,000 in funding for their projects, along with $50,000 in career development services.

Tonya Foster was selected for her project Monkey Talk, which combines "poetry, dialogues, fictive FBI records, and non-fiction prose" to follow "a 20th Century artist-philanthropist relationship that is being tracked by government surveillance." "Focused on the ways that artistic creations act as monitors and are also monitored," the citation continues, "the multi-volume project tracks parallel, contesting conversations around race." You can read more about Monkey Talk here.

Mark Nowak was chosen for his Worker Writers School: Mobile Unit project, which "expands [the poet's] ongoing, twenty-year project of bringing poetry workshops directly to the working class." "Like bookmobiles or food trucks," the citation explains, "WWSMU visits laundromats, street corners, restaurants near construction sites, bus stops, and other locations that workers frequent to offer brief, intensive poetry writing classes." You can read more about Nowak's project here.

We congratulate these two richly-deserving poets for this tremendous honor. You can click on their names above to browse through recordings of their work housed on their respective PennSound author page.

Sophia Naz: Wexler Studio Session, 2019

One of our latest additions to the site is a Wexler Studio session with Sophia Naz, recorded on April 3, 2019. Naz, a bilingual poet, essayist, author, editor and translator, as well as a regular contributor to Dawn, poetry editor and columnist at The Sunflower Collective, as well as the founder of rekhti.org, a site dedicated to contemporary Urdu poetry by women. She has published three poetry collections — Peripheries (2015), Pointillism (2017) and Date Palms (2017) — while her latest book is Shehnaz; A Tragic True Tale of Royalty, Glamour and Heartbreak, a biography of her mother.

This half-hour session consists of sixteen titles in total, including "Black Butterflies," "Eye of the Labyrinth," "The Heart of the Matter," "Habeas Corpus," "If You Spoke, Firefly," "Odysseys of an Onion Moon," " Chappan Churi," "Ode to a Scar," "In the Margins," "Atomic Nocta," and "The Department of Wronged Rights." You can listen in by clicking the title above, or here, to be taken to our PennSound Singles page.

Fatemeh Shams on PennSound

We're kicking off this week by highlighting the work of Persian poet, translator, and scholar Fatemeh Shams, who is also an Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania.

On March 2, 2017 Shams and translator Dick Davis took part in a lunchtime event at our own Kelly Writers House on Persian Literature in Translation, which is available on her author page in video and audio form. Later that day, the two stepped into the Wexler Studio for a bilingual reading, with Shams reading in Farsi and Davis sharing his translations in English. In total, the pair read ten poems including "Mashhad," "Three Years Later," "Never to Fall Asleep," "Ash and Mist," "In Search of a Homeland," "Home," and "Persecution."

These earlier recordings are joined by "Poetry Is for Breathing: A Reading Against Islamophobia" an event that took place at the Kelly Writers House on April 17, 2019 with sets by Shams, Aditya Bahl (poet, translator, and a current Johns Hopkins Ph.D. candidate), and Husnaa Hashim (2017-2018 Youth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia), with Orchid Tierney serving as host. Shams' poem, "When They Broke Down the Door," was also the subject of PoemTalk Podcast #119, with a panel that included Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Leonard Schwartz, and Mahyar Entezari joining host Al Filreis for the show. You can listen to all of the aforementioned recordings by clicking here.

PennSound Podcast #67: "Taking Up Space: Sarah Rose Etter"

In the latest episode in the PennSound Podcast series, Sarah Rose Etter joined Jacket2 editor Julia Bloch in the Wexler Studio last September for a short reading from and discussion of her debut poetic novel, The Book of X, which appeared in 2019 from Two Dollar Radio. Etter and Bloch talked about the impact of open poetics and visual art upon Etter’s prose style, the feminist politics of speculative narrative, the process of fact-checking menstrual blood output, and the etymology of the book’s governing image — among other things. 

Sarah Rose Etter is the author of Tongue Party, selected by Deb Olin Unferth as the winner of the Caketrain Press award, and The Book of X, her first novel. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cut, Electric Literature, Guernica, VICE, New York Tyrant, Juked, Night Block, The Black Warrior Review, Salt Hill Journal, The Collagist, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residences at Disquiet International program in Portugal and the Gullkistan Writing Residency in Iceland.

As the World Watches Australia ...

It's difficult to watch the daily news coming out of Australia and not feel a profound sense of helplessness — for the lives lost or disrupted, the sheer scale of the destruction, and the lack of any foreseeable end to the wildfires. In trying times like these, we find poetry to be a useful means of standing in solidarity with those suffering far away, therefore today we're highlighting Australia-centric content from both PennSound and Jacket2.

There's no better place to start than our Australian Poets anthology page, which is home to a comprehensive anthology of contemporary Australian voices, organized by the indispensable Pam Brown and first unveiled in 2013. In addition to links to preexisting author pages for Kate Lilley and John Tranter, it includes (then-)new recordings from a total of twenty-five poets: Adam Aitken, Ali Alizadeh, Judith Bishop, Ken Bolton, Bonny Cassidy, Stuart Cooke, Laurie Duggan, Kate Fagan, Michael Farrell, Liam Ferney, Duncan Hose, Jill Jones, Kit Kelen, John Kinsella, Peter Minter, Tracy Ryan, Jaya Savige, Pete Spence, Amanda Stewart, Ann Vickery, Corey Wakeling, Alan Wearne, Fiona Wright, Tim Wright, and Mark Young. This astounding collection of recordings is amazing in and of itself, but even more so when you realize that it's a supplement to an even more momentous Jacket2 feature: "Fifty-One Contemporary Poets from Australia", also organized by Brown, which was released in five installments over the course of 2012. Here's how she she opens her preface to the collection:

When it comes to poetry anthologies, I agree with David Antin's long-ago quip — "Anthologies are to poets as zoos are to animals" — and I think that journals and magazines are probably better indicators of what's current in any country's poetry than grand, often agenda-driven anthologies. Here I am presenting the work of fifty-one contemporary poets from Australia. My aim was to make it broadly representative by including innovation and experimentation alongside quasi-romanticism, elegy, and the almost-pastoral. No one in this group writes like another. The common link is simply that each poet is an Australian whether by birth, residence or citizenship.

She continues: "This collection could probably be read as an anthology, and so I grant a comment on omission. There are many other poets writing and publishing in Australia, probably around four hundred, who aren't included here. A problem for any editor assembling a collection of writing from Australia is the inclusion of multiracial poetries. At the outset, I should say that there are no Australian indigenous nor Torres Strait Islander poets in this selection of poems." That omission, however, is answered somewhat by Robbie Wood's astounding 2012 Jacket2 feature "On Australian Aboriginal Poetry: 'The Last Evening Glow Above the Horizon.'" Unlike typical Jacket2 features, which publish all of their content in one shot, Wood has filed new addenda to his anthology in 2015, 2016, and 2017, and I presume we might have further installments to look forward to in the future as well.

Taken together, these features represent some of my favorite PennSound and Jacket2 content over my long tenure with both sites, and while I wish there were more auspicious reasons for Australia to be on the minds of people all over the world. For those who are capable of donating to help victims of the wildfires, The New York Times offers a rundown of various charities on the ground offering assistance, and if you're feeling crafty, there are other important ways you can help as well. 

We send our sincere best wishes to the people of Australia and hope for a swift end to these fires so that the long and arduous process of recovery can begin in earnest. Moreover, we hope that sanity may prevail in regards to the looming climate crisis, such that disasters of this scope are no longer treated as normal occurrences.

William Carlos Williams Burns the Christmas Greens

In Irish culture January 6th is traditionally recognized as Little Christmas, which marks the official end of the holiday season. On a chilly day like today, even a lapsed Catholic such as myself can't help but shudder just a little at the sight of the previous year's Christmas trees stripped bare and piled at the curbside waiting on trash day. Richard Brautigan's portrait of the grim holiday season after JFK's assassination, "'What Are You Going to Do With 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees?'" (from The Tokyo-Montana Express) does a fine job of paying tribute to this strange phenomenon — the sense of loss that haunts the promise of a fresh new year — but even it pales in comparison to the stark beauty of William Carlos Williams' "Burning the Christmas Greens," one of my favorite hidden gems on PennSound's encyclopedic Williams author page.

First published in the January 1944 issue of Poetry, the poem would later appear in The Wedge that same year. Altogether we have four recordings of Williams reading the poem: one from a May 1945 session at the Library of Congress Recording Library, another from a June 1951 home recording by Kenneth Burke, the third from a reading at Harvard in December of that year, and the last from the 92nd Street Y in January 1954; we also have a 1990 rendition of the poem by Robert Creeley.

"At the winter's midnight" — the thick of the dark / the moment of the cold's / deepest plunge" — "we went to the trees, the coarse / holly, the balsam and / the hemlock for their green," Williams tells us, before launching into a litany of the season's decorative delights. "Green is a solace / a promise of peace, a fort / against the cold," something that "seemed gentle and good / to us," and yet now, "their time past," Williams finds a different sort of solace in the "recreant" force of the conflagration, "a living red, / flame red, red as blood wakes / on the ash." Surrendering ourselves to the experience, we find ourselves, like Williams, "breathless to be witnesses, / as if we stood / ourselves refreshed among / the shining fauna of that fire," ready and grateful to be able to begin the cycle once more.

So even though the calendar's turned over, the presents are put away, and the all-too-swift delights of the season are gone, here's one last chance to reflect on what we've experienced and an opportunity to prepare ourselves for what lies ahead. You can listen to our four recordings of Williams reading the poem on his PennSound author page, or click here to hear the earliest.