Help Preserve the Archives of Lawrence Upton

British poet Lawrence Upton passed away on February 19th at the age of 70, leaving behind no next of kin. That latter fact threatens to make the former an even greater tragedy. His old friend and compatriot cris cheek has organized a petition to avert this potential disaster, which we encourage you to read and sign here.

cheek cites a tribute in The Sutton and Croyden Guardian, which situates Upton as "a leading figure in [...] the British Poetry Revival," detailing his half-century as a poet, publisher, and performer, and highlighting his collaborations with figures like cheek, Bob Cobbing, Eric Mottram, and Philip Glass, among others. "Lawrence was extremely well regarded by academics and fellow artists around the world although he never gained commercial success in his lifetime," cheek notes. "The documents and letters in his house will contain materials that are invaluable and irreplaceable reference materials for scholars and practitioners alike," however there is a tremendous risk "that over half a century of artistic endeavour may end up in the landfill if his case is referred to the Local Authority and he is declared intestate," thus cheek's petition seeks to secure Upton's residence and belongings for long enough to survey the materials and make arrangements with interested institutions and archives including the British Library and Goldsmiths, University of London. You can read more and sign in support here.

To celebrate Upton's life and work, we've assembled a PennSound author page from materials scattered throughout our archives. They include two appearances on Martin Spinelli's program Radio Radio, the 2010 film The Sound of Writers Forum, Upton and John Drever performing "Speculative Scores" at the 2011 E-Poetry Festival at SUNY-Buffalo, and video from the Polycovalia festival at Birkbeck College in June 2011, where "Lawrence Upton, Chris Goode, cris cheek, Holly Pester and others revisit work by Sumner, bpnichol, Basinski, Cobbing, MacLow and other scores, poems and possibilities." You can browse these materials by clicking here.

Charles Bernstein, "Reznikoff's Nearness"

Charles Bernstein's latest Jacket2 commentary post takes a new look at a fascinating old recording from our archives. The story starts more than thirty years ago: "From September 29 to October 1, 1989, the Literary Center at Royaumont, outside Paris, put on the first conference devoted to the American Objectivist poets." Organized by Emmanuel Hocquard and Rémy Hourcade, the symposium featured a formidable array of poets and commentators including Bernstein, Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer, Stephen Rodefer, and David Bromige, along with Carl Rakosi — who, Bernstein notes, "seem[ed] startled to be the last surving member of a grouping about which he had often tenuous connections." He also laments that "[Lorine] Niedecker was not officially featured in the program, a regrettable omission that was often noted at the event."

Bernstein's recollection continues: "Fall 1989 was my first semester teaching at Buffalo — as a visiting professor. I flew direct from Buffalo to Paris for the event, which was a magnificent tribute to the these poets. It's remarkable that these four great Second Wave modernist Jewish American poets received the first grand tribute of this kind in France, not in the US." A ninety-minute recording of Bernstein's talk, with a lavish introduction by Hocquard and live translation ("with commentary!") by Pierre Alferi has been a part of the PennSound archives since 2013. The same talk, "after several more years of work [...] became 'Reznikoff’s Nearness' (first published in Sulfur and later collected in My Way)," but the version we're highlighting today is the transcribed version of the original conference presentation, first published in Notes #3 in June 1990. You can read that iteration here.

Happy 95th Birthday to Etel Adnan!

We start this week out with birthday greetings for Lebanese-American poet and painter Etel Adnan, who turns 95 today! PennSound's Etel Adnan author page is home to a modest collection of recordings that nevertheless give a sense of her diverse talents.

We begin with Adnan's 2006 appearance on episode #118 of Leonard Schwartz's program, Cross-Cultural Poetics, titled "Forms of Violence." Via phone from Paris, she "reads from her book In the Heart of A Heart Of Another Country (City Lights), and meditates on her mother city of Beirut and American violence, inner and outer."

From 2010, we have a Serpentine Gallery reading showcasing The Arab Apocalypse and a 2012 reading commemorating the release of Homage to Etel Adnan (Post-Apollo), which was held at The Green Arcade Books Ideas Goods and co-sponsored by The Poetry Center and Small Press Traffic. Adnan returned to the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London for a conversation with poet Robert Grenier a few weeks later. This chat between two hybrid artists was the inaugural event for the exhibition, "Etel Adnan: the Weight of the World."

Our most recent addition is a marvelous longform discussion with Jennifer Scappettone, recorded September 23–24, 2017, which has been segmented into individual tracks by theme, including "Home Life and School in Beirut," "Education in Philosophy and Beginnings in Painting," "English-Language Poetry and US Politics from the Vietnam War through Today," and "Cultural Identity, Multilingualism, and Translation". We're grateful to be able to share her work with our audience, and  likewise send our thanks to those who've shared resources with us. You can listen to any of the aforementioned recordings by clicking here.

Woodberry Poetry Room Oral History Iniative: Denise Levertov

We're closing out the week by shining the spotlight on a recording added to our archives nearly a decade ago that's well worth your time. While we don't have permission from Denise Levertov's estate to share her work on PennSound, that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of recordings of her peers and fans discussing and reading from her work. One of the most notable and revealing resources comes from the Oral History Initiative at Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room and features several of the poet's close friends and associates.

Recorded on March 26, 2010, this event begins with brief preliminary statements by the three participants — Mark Pawlak (poet and editor of Hanging Loose, who befriended Levertov at MIT in 1969), Dick Lourie (founding editor of Hanging Loose Press and a member of Levertov's very first writing workshop in 1965) and Donna Hollenberg (author of the first full-length biography of Levertov) — which is followed by a fifty-minute open discussion, including questions by audience members. Woodberry Poetry Room curator, Christina Davis, who was kind enough to record the proceedings and send them our way, notes that the event had, "some wonderful and unexpected and cacophonous content and its free-form quality elicited much that I could not have foreseen." We're grateful to Christina for her generosity and know that you'll enjoy this spirited and intimate discussion of Levertov's life and times. You can listen in by clicking here.

PoemTalk #145: on Tonya Foster's "A Swarm of Bees in High Court"

Today, we released the 145th episode in the PoemTalk Podcast Series, which addresses five pairs of haiku from Tonya Foster's 2015 Belladonna* collection, A Swarm of Bees in High Court. For this program, which was recorded on location at the Woodberry Poetry Room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, host Al Filreis was joined by a panel that included Stephanie Burt, Bonnie Costello, Anna Strong Safford.

Filreis' PoemTalk blog post on this episode includes more information on the specific poems discussed here, including the text of each haiku pair. There's also more on this special on-location program, including video footage of the full session, which was recorded alongside the podcast audio, and a preview of the next show. You can read more by clicking here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.

PennSound Podcast #68: Eileen Myles and Davy Knittle

The latest episode in the PennSound Podcast Series — program number 68 in total — was recently posted. Over at Jacket2, Gabriela Portillo Alvarado offers up a quick summary of the show: "Davy Knittle and Eileen Myles had a conversation at Myles's home in the East Village in New York City in August, 2018, for this PennSound podcast. Their discussion began in the midst of an exchange about Myles’s 1991 collection Not Me and changes in their neighborhood at the time. Conversation topics spanned 'not-me-ness,' gender, capitalism, sexuality, perception, and observation, among others."

Davy Knittle (he/they) is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. He works in the fields of feminist, queer, and trans theory, urban environmental humanities, and multiethnic US writing. His critical work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in WSQ, GLQ, Planning Perspectives, and Modern Language Studies. He is a reviews editor for Jacket2, curates the City Planning Poetics talk and reading series at the Kelly Writers House, and organizes with Penn's Trans Literacy Project. 

Eileen Myles has published over twenty volumes, including Chelsea Girls, Cool for You, and I Must be Living Twice. They studied at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and from 1984 to 1986, they were the artistic director of St. Mark's Poetry Project. Their works have earned the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, and the Lambda Literary Award for Small Press Book Award.

Click here to listen to this fascinating conversation. You can browse the full archive of PennSound Podcasts by clicking here.

Congratulations to PEN/Nabokov Award Winner M. NourbeSe Philip

We close out this week with news of a wonderful honor for author M. NourbeSe Philip, who will receive the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature. The prize of $50,000 will be presented on March 2nd at New York's Town Hall ("the largest venue in the history of the PEN America Literary Awards") as part of a ceremony "hosted by Late Night host, comedian, and 'influential recommender of books' (The New York Times) Seth Meyers." Here is the complete prize citation from PEN America:

Founded in 2016 in collaboration with the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature is conferred annually to a living author whose body of work, either written in or translated into English, represents the highest level of achievement in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and/or drama, and is of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship. Previous winners of the award include Sandra Cisneros, Edna O’Brien, and Adonis. 

This year's PEN/Nabokov Award judges — Alexis Okeowo, George Elliott Clarke, Hari Kunzru, Lila Azam Zanganeh, and Viet Thanh Nguyen — have chosen poet, novelist, and essayist M. NourbeSe Philip, who has bent and pushed poetry and prose in exhilarating directions, via vivid and fragmentary portraits of the pluralities of African Diasporic experience and searing indictments of the oppressive structures — legal, linguistic, social — carried across history into our present. The Tobago-born, Canada-based writer's many singular, varied works include She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, and Zong!

The organization's Director of Literary Programs, Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, notes that "Fostering and celebrating international literature is central to the mission of the PEN America Literary Awards; we seek to champion original and promising writers of the global community and promote their work to an American audience." She continues: "This year we are incredibly proud to honor such urgent and diverse voices, which we know have the power to awaken empathy and redefine public discourse." Philip is in fine company alongside Tom Stoppard, Tanya Barfield, and Rigoberto González, who will also receive awards at the ceremony.

In anticipation of next month's event, you might want to check out PennSound's M. NourbeSe Philip author page, which archives more than a half-dozen complete readings by the poet, along with individual tracks, radio appearances, discussions, and much more, including numerous selections from her most iconic book, Zong!. We congratulate Philip for this well-deserved honor.

Lev Rubinstein at Hunter College, 2020

In a recent Jacket2 commentary post, Charles Bernstein presents audio and video from Lev Rubinstein's recent reading at Hunter College. Recorded on February 6th, this set consists of selections from Ugly Duckling Presse's 2014 collection, Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, which collects all of Rubinstein's "note-card poems" written during the 1970s. These minimalist poems embody Rubinstein's sense of "hybrid genre,": "at times like a realistic novel, at times like a dramatic play, at times like a lyric poem, etc., that is, it slides along the edges of genres and, like a small mirror, fleetingly reflects each of them, without identifying with any of them."

As Bernstein notes in his post, reading Compleat Catalogue engendered "an enormous affinity between work we both were doing, unknown to one another, in the the 1970s." He continues: "Rubinstein's is a poetry of changing parts that ensnares the evanescent uncanniness of the everyday (in ways that bring to mind the seriality of both Reznikoff and Grenier). By means of rhythmically foregrounding a central device — the basic unit of the work is the index card — Rubinstein continuously remakes actual for us a flickering now time that is both intimate and strange."

Rubinstein reads his work in the original Russian, while the collection's translations by Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky are read by Matvei Yankelevich (shown above to the right of Rubinstein). A short video excerpt is available along with audio of the complete reading. You'll find both by clicking here.

Remembering Gerrit Lansing

Today is the second anniversary of the passing of poet Gerrit Lansing, who lived to the ripe old age of eighty-nine. His loss is still felt among his friends and the broader poetry community, which makes it an excellent opportunity to revisit the recordings available on his PennSound author page.

The first thing you'll see there is a marvelously intimate Close Listening program with Charles Bernstein and special guest Susan Howe, which was recorded in two parts at Lansing's Gloucester, MA home in 2012. The first half features Lansing reading selections from his 2009 collected poems, The Heavenly Tree / Northern Earth, including "The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward," "The Castle of Flowering Birds," "The Milk of the Stars From Her Paps," "In the American Forest," and "Conventicle." The second half is a nearly hour-long conversation between the three that covers a remarkable array of topics: Charles Olson, discusses the wild of Gloucester, the relation of the magic (and the magical) and the occult to poetic practice, Nerval, queer politics and the poetics identity, New York in the immediate postwar period, parapsychology at Harvard in the late 1940s, Gnosticism versus neo-Platonism, Jewish mysticism, and his connections with Henry Murray, Harry Smith, Alan Watts, Aleister Crowley, Carl Jung, and John Ashbery.

Other recordings found there include Lansing's reading as part of the Olson 100 conference in 2010 — which includes "The Curve," "Auguries in Autumn," "Honey from the Rock," "Sunset as Early Warning System," "Egg Breakfast," and "Tabernacles" — and a 1987 reading at the Ear Inn, along with a few selections read as part of a Poems for the Millenium Vol. III, launch reading at Harvard in 2009. Thanks to Chris Funkhouser, we also have a Lansing tribute reading held in Kingston, NY in October 2018. The event begins with introductions by Michael Bisio (who also performs) and Pierre Joris, then continues with sets by Tamas Panitz, T. Urayoán Noel, Nicole Peyrafitte, George Quasha, Joris, Don Byrd, Charles Stein, and Robert Kelly. Those who'd like to learn more about the late poet should also check out the "Mass: Gerrit Lansing," feature at Jacket2, which is part of Jim Dunn and Kevin Gallagher's sprawling and marvelous 2012 feature, “Mass: Raw Poetry from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”

PennSound Sends Our Best to David Abel

This week David Abel made headlines for good news in the wake of bad news. The poet and owner of Passages Bookshop in Portland, OR started off this new year by discovering that his shop had been burglarized, with thieves smashing their way into a locked case and taking approximately a hundred rare volumes, including two editions of the Jerry Rothenberg and David Antin-edited Some/thing with covers by Andy Warhol. The Oregonian has the story of what happened next: he received a phone call from Patti Smith, who'd read about his plight and noted that one of her own books — a signed hardcover edition of Patti Smith Complete: Lyrics, Reflections & Notes for the Future — was among those taken. "I can't replace the Warhols," she told him, "but I can send you a box of my books" and that's just what she did, sending signed copies of seven of her titles (shown below), including several rarities. "I really love bookstores," Smith explained to Abel. "They're important to me." 

Smith's generosity was just the beginning, with other authors and artists sending books and fellow booksellers setting aside special titles to help restore Passages' stock. As The Oregonian's article reports, "Abel also received many other calls, offering assistance cleaning up the store, suggesting an online fundraiser. And there was a meaningful uptick in customers as word got around about the burglary." "These kinds of gestures of support and solidarity are kind of amazing," he admitted. On the Passages website you'll find a detailed list of many of the missing titles, including identifying information and inventory numbering. Should you come across any of these books, or have any other relevant information, please contact Abel at the bookstore (503-388-7665, [email protected]) or Officer Anthony Hill at the Portland Police Bureau (503-545-3436, referring to report 20-1394).

We're sorry for what Abel's had to go through in the past month, but heartened to see the generosity from the poetry community in the aftermath of the break-in. We're also grateful to Abel for the generosity he's shown to PennSound in the past, and this is a wonderful time for our listeners to revisit our collection of recordings from his personal archives that he shared with our site c. 2014. Spanning the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties, they include recordings of a stunning array of poets, including George Oppen, Kenneth Irby, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jackson Mac Low, Tina Darragh, George Quasha, Lewis Warsh, Johanna Drucker, David Rattray, Alice Notley, Sharon Mesmer, Larry Fagin, Elizabeth Willis, Pierre Joris, Ann Lauterbach, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Nathaniel Tarn, and Robert Creeley. Abel's own PennSound author page is also well worth your time.

In Memoriam: Kamau Brathwaite (1930–2020)

This afternoon brings sad breaking news via Barbados Today of the passing of a legendary poet: Kamau Brathwaite, who died today just a few months short of his 90th birthday. In a 2011 Jacket2 review of Brathwaite's book Elleguas, Matthias Regan offers this succinct summation of the poet's life and work:

Those not acquainted with Brathwaite should know that he was born in Bridgetown, Barbados, in 1930, won a scholarship to Cambridge University, served in the Ministry of Education in Ghana during the years that it won its independence from Great Britain in the late 1950s, and cofounded the Caribbean Artists Movement from London in 1966. His poetry includes two epic trilogies: The Arrivants (1973), which collects three books, Rights of Passage, Masks, and Islands, about African-Caribbean rituals and their transmission through practices of daily life; and Ancestors (2001), which collects and “reinvents” three books: Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self, about the maternal, paternal, and newborn selves of island life. His histories of Caribbean culture include Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970), The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (1971), and History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (1984). Together, these are among the most thoughtful and influential elements of the Afro-Caribbean Nationalism that flourished on both sides of what Paul Gilroy calls the “Black Atlantic” throughout the 1970s.

Edited by Jacob Edmond, PennSound's Kamau Brathwaite author page is home to a modest collection of recordings spanning four decades, starting with readings from Islands recorded in 1973 and an undated recording of Masks. Jumping forward to the 80s, there's a segmented reading at Philadelphia's Robin's Books on November 9, 1982, and a pair of recordings from the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh in February 1987. From the 90s, we have a recording of the poem "Angel/Engine" taken from the 1997 XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics Conference at the University of Minnesota (via Ken Sherwood), along with Chris Funkhouser's recording of a December 2000 reading at New York University that's been segmented into individual tracks. Brathwaite made two noteworthy appearances on Leonard Schwartz's Cross Cultural Poetics radio program in 2004 and 2005, and our final recording is a forty-five minute Segue Series Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club that's also been broken up into individual MP3s. 

We offer our sincere condolences to Brathwaite's family and friends, along with his devoted readers throughout the world.

Peter Lamborn Wilson reads "Hoodoo Metaphysics,' 2019

We'll start this new week as we ended the last, with another recently-added recording from Chris Funkhouser as part of his ongoing project to document the work of another poet in his neck of the woods: Peter Lamborn Wilson. In "Peter Lamborn Wilson: A PennSound archive," a Jacket2 essay published in December 2015, Funkhouser describes his relationship with the poet and the origins of their documentary collaboration. Here's his short version of the long history leading up to their reacquaintance several years ago:

I met Peter Lamborn Wilson in the late '80s at Naropa Institute, and after acquiring his pamphlet Chaos, written under the takhallus Hakim Bey, became a devotee to his work. His support of DIY efforts was encouraging and validating, and We Press took up the invitation to "pirate" Chaos by way of corporate resources we had at our disposal at the time. 

After falling in and out of touch over the years, on a visit to Woodstock in 2013 I learned he now resides there. Less than a year later — two days after my family moved to the Hudson Valley in August 2014 — I found my way to a poetry reading featuring Wilson, Sparrow, and Michael Brownstein at the Golden Notebook in Woodstock. Knowing him primarily as a cultural critic and writer of prose, to hear Wilson'\'s verse was something new, and a delight. He read from an "unpublished six hundred page-long collected poems"; these works are animated, elegant, erudite, conclusory, sometimes humorous exhortations (e.g., "Bumpersticker": "If you’d 'rather be fishing' / then fish for fuckssake").

Today, we're focusing on Hoodoo Metaphysics, published by Bearpuff Press in 2018 as a collaboration with artist Tamara Gonzales. While her illustrations (like the one shown above) are missing from the audio recording, you can read some examples from the series with their corresponding drawings in The Brooklyn Rail and see several more examples of Gonzales' artwork from the book on her website. Funkhouser's recording runs approximately ninety minutes and can be found here, along with his nine-installment anthology of Home Recordings available on PennSound's Peter Lamborn Wilson author page.