Fred Moten: Two Newly Segmented Readings

Just a few weeks ago we celebrated Fred Moten's richly-deserved MacArthur Fellowship, and today we're back to start the new week with a pair of 2018 readings by the poet that were recently segmented by PennSound staffer Wes Matthews.

First up, we have Moten's September 20, 2018 reading as part of the Mackey Sessions — a.k.a. the 2018 Blackburn Literary Festival at Duke University — a three-celebration of the poet's life and work. Moten's set here consists almost exclusively of selections from the sequence "come on, get it!," sections 13–17, concluding (appropriately enough) with the poem "Nathaniel Mackey."

Then, jumping back six months to a March 10, 2018 Segue Series reading at New York City's Zinc Bar, we find Moten unintentionally continuing his future set, reading sections 18–23 from the same series, some of which you can read along with at The New Inquiry.

Tyrone Williams wrote about "come on, get it!" — which was published as part of Moten's book The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014) and was a finalist for the National Book Award — as part of his 2014 Jacket2 commentary series, "Hunches, Hedges, Etc.," noting that "like the novelist Charles Johnson, Moten is himself philosophically inclined, and so the Heideggerean echoes of the opening of the second section, 'come on, get it,' are very much on point: 'Performers feel each other differently,/ as material things that never happen,/ in persistent substance and their risen cities.'" Williams continues: 

The impasse here, a different kind of blockage, rests on the thing/event, material/substance, distinctions, and so "even if there’s no escape, their training in certain clinical tendencies,/or in the general structure of being a problem,//because of the pivot they never disavowed/in thrown-ness, begins the world where we are fallen…" And though this state of having fallen is our "falling down together in an accident we dream," the accident of race neither relieves the West of responsibility ("welcome to what we took from is the state.") nor justifies "our" slavish commitments to race (not the same as a "free" commitment to culture). Nowhere does Moten make this more clear than near the end of the middle section: "I mean to make something else all the time./the harder you look inside/the easier it is to forget about gary. black youth has/always been a project of sonic youth in the/everyday distortion. we clear? sharper? my/plan is based on human nature, from tutu/to biko, with a continental burst in my/gig bag, which is keene-toed, sharp as a tack…"

You can read more here.  You can listen to the two readings mentioned above, along with many more decades spanning two decades, on PennSound's Fred Moten author page.

PoemTalk #153: on Daphne Marlatt's "Arriving"

Today we are proud to release the newest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, number 153 in total, which addresses Daphne Marlatt's "Arriving," taken from her 1981 collection Here & There. This special program was recorded on location in Vancouver, British Columbia at the home of friends Richard Cook and Lucy Oh Cook, where host Al Filreis was joined by a panel that included Meredith Quartermain, Fred Wah, and Marlatt herself.

"'Arriving" ... seems to have been written during — and in any case is about — a summertime gathering of artist friends and others in the Kootenays in July 1980," Filreis notes in his PoemTalk blog post announcing the new episode. "Here & There is dedicated to 'my fellow swimmers.' And 'Arriving,' the first poem in the group, bears a dedication reading 'for Fred & Pauline,' and they would be Fred Wah and Pauline Butling, her hosts those summers — both present at Lucy and Richard’s home." He continues, explaining that "the poem records Daphne's nine-and-half-hour journey from the city of Vancouver to that remote haven in a steep mountain valley, and in its lines we sense a body in motion, the rushing occurrence of the environment, an 'ambushing' of the natural, and a sense of being seemingly always on the way, or a towardness."

You can read more about this latest show, read Marlatt's poem, and listen to the podcast or watch the unedited video footage of the session here. The full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, can be found here.

POG Reading Series: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge 2020

We've had the pleasure of mentioning Mei-mei Berssenbrugge quite a bit recently, due to her well-deserved nomination for this year's National Book Award in Poetry for her latest, A Treatise on Stars. Today, we're very happy to share a new video of Berssenbrugge, made in conjunction with our own Charles Bernstein (who served as an audience of one), which was presented as part of the POG Reading Series in lieu of the live reading she was originally scheduled to give in person on October 10th. This twenty-five minute set includes three poems from A Treatise on Stars: "Jaguar," "Lux," and "Wonder."

Bernstein recently posted Charles Alexander's introductory comments for the event on Jacket2. Here's a little of what he had to say about Berssenbrugge: 

Berssenbrugge, in her many books (Hiddenness, Empathy, Mizu, Hello the Roses, Endocrinology, and many more, including the recent A Treatise on Stars, finalist for the National Book Award at present) has sought to create a space for the mind, the breath, the perceptions, to intertwine in long lines which draw in and include the reader in a variety of observations and meditations based on the world in which we live and think, and the impacts of such life & thought. Long ago, Mei-mei told me that she had made two important commitments for and through her work — to the sentence, and to beauty. She has also, in the course of her oeuvre, entirely interrogated those two notions, how they might work, what they might mean, how we might find beauty, and what we may have to say about it. We are fortunate witnesses to her imagination, which I find nothing less than visionary. In the company of such writers as William Blake and Hildegarde of Bingen, she expands us.

You can read more here. PennSound's author page for Berssenbrugge is home to more than two dozen individual recordings going back as far as 1986, including interviews, radio programs, and a great many readings. You can hear more from A Treatise on Stars specifically by checking out her 2019 Kelly Writers House Fellows reading.

Jacques Roubaud Reads in Paris, 2019

We're hopping across the Atlantic for this week's first post, highlighting a recent addition to the site from mathematician, translator, and Oulipo member Jacques Roubaud. 

This reading, celebrating Roubaud's most recent book, Tridents (Éditions Nous, 2019), was recorded at Paris' Librairie Texture on December 4th of last year. Éditions Nous publishers Benoît Casas and Patrizia Atzei were on hand to celebrate this latest book from their press, the sixth in total from Roubaud that they've published. This was also Roubaud's third time reading at the book store.

You'll find video footage of this nearly hour-long reading on our Jacques Roubaud author page, which is also home to a thirty-five minute "Lecture de Poète" filmed by François Sarhan in Paris in 2012. Click here to start watching.

'Poker Blues' (1991) by Les Levine and Ted Greenwald

Let's stay in the realm of poetry/film collaborations to close out this week. Today we're highlighting Poker Blues a 1991 video collaboration by artist Les Levine and Ted Greenwald, and published by Museum of Mott Art, Inc. (the conceptual museum Levine founded in 1970).

A marvelous fugue constructed from the lexicon of card players, Poker Blues is filmed in a two-camera setup, alternating between perspectives so that Greenwald becomes his own interlocutor, while Levine remains faceless off-screen. The claustrophobic feel is underscored by quick edits and tight close-ups, along with the looped soundtrack of Diana Ross' "I Love You (Call Me)."

Over at Mimeo Mimeo, Kyle Schlesinger offers up a brief write-up of the film as well as the mimeographed book that resulted from it, noting that "according to Greenwald, the performance was improvised and later transcribed by Levine for the book (above) along with several stills from the film."

We've made video footage of the sixteen-minute film available, along with the isolated audio track. You can experience both by clicking here.

Henry Hills, 'Plagiarism' (1981)

Today we've got an exciting new addition to the site from filmmaker Henry Hills. 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.

John Richetti reads Poe, Tennyson, Coleridge

We've recently highlighted a number of recordings of the poetry of Walt Whitman made by beloved UPenn emeritus professor John Richetti. Today we're going to cover the rest of the poets whose work he performed in his most recent session, including Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

 

Given the season, how can we not start with Poe? Richetti's September home recording sessions included several of the poet's more iconic titles, including "Annabel Lee," "To Helen," "El Dorado," "Israfel," and "The Conqueror Worm." Interestingly, Richetti's selections all appear in Jerome McGann's 2011 set of Poe recordings, where you'll also find "The Sleeper," "Dream-Land," "The Haunted Palace," "The Raven," and "Ulalume - A Ballad." 

Next, Richetti revisits Coleridge, reading "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in its entirety. Richetti performed a number of works by the poet in a 2014 session, including "The Rose," "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," "Kubla Khan," "Dejection: An Ode," and "Frost at Midnight," which you can hear on the same page. Finally, Richetti returns to Tennyson — the focus of the recordings he made for us this past April — with one new poem, "The Eagle."

Numerous previous sessions with Richetti are available on PennSound Classics, spanning more than a decade. They include his prodigious "111 Favorite Poems for Memorizing," "The PennSound Anthology of Restoration & 18th-Century Poetry," and his audio anthology of English Renaissance Verse. Richetti has additionally recorded selections from Matthew Arnold, W.H. Auden, William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, John Dryden, George Herbert, Ben Jonson, John Keats, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walt Whitman William Wordsworth, and William Butler Yeats. These lovingly-made recordings, rendered in Richetti's distinctive tenor, are a tremendous resource for the classroom or for any lover of poetry. 

With the exception of the aforementioned anthologies, PennSound Classics is divided by author, so you can see Richetti's ample contributions alongside those of many other poets and scholars. To start browsing, click here.

Congratulations to 2020 MacArthur Foundation Fellow Fred Moten

It's been an auspicious week for PennSound poets, and it's only Wednesday! Yesterday we celebrated the news that Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Don Mee Choi were finalists for the National Book Award in Poetry, and today brings the astounding news that Fred Moten has been named a 2020 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. His citation merits reproduction in full:

Fred Moten is a cultural theorist and poet creating new conceptual spaces that accommodate emergent forms of Black cultural production, aesthetics, and social life. In his theoretical and critical writing on visual culture, poetics, music, and performance, Moten seeks to move beyond normative categories of analysis, grounded in Western philosophical traditions, that do not account for the Black experience. He is developing a new mode of aesthetic inquiry wherein the conditions of being Black play a central role.

Moten's diverse body of work coheres around a relentless exploration of sound and its importance as a medium of Black resistance and creativity. His first book, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003), offers seminal insights that emerge from taking sound, as opposed to visual or textual imagery, as the point of departure for interpretation. For example, in considering Frederick Douglass's famous account of the 'terrible spectacle' of slavery, Moten identifies the screams of Douglass's Aunt Hester as the materialization in sound of Black resistance, thus opening onto a new way of understanding the trauma of slavery as something not just seen but emphatically heard as well. Moten's recently completed three-volume theoretical treatise, collectively called consent not to be a single being (2017–2018), includes essays written over the course of fifteen years. The breadth of his theoretical insights in these volumes extends across the arts and humanities — from the music of Curtis Mayfield and Billie Holiday to the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Theodor Adorno — as he explores notions of performance and freedom and formations of Black identity.

Moten continues the project of his theoretical work in his poetry. In his 2014 collection, The Feel Trio, for instance, language hovers at the edge of sense so that sound rises to the fore and the reading of the poem approaches musical performance. Through his writing and lectures, Moten is demonstrating the power of critical thinking to establish new forms of social actualization and reconfiguring the contours of the cultural field broadly.

We are immensely proud to be able to share Moten's work as part of our archive. His PennSound author page is home to a wide array of recordings from the past two decades, including readings, talks, and conversations, which demonstrate Moten's prodigious and multifarious talents. We congratulate Moten heartily for this life-changing honor, and will continue to track the trajectory of his career with great excitement.

Congratulations to National Book Award Finalists Berssenbrugge and Choi

A few weeks back, we celebrated the news that Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Don Mee Choi were included on the longlist for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry. Today brought the exciting news that both poets had made it through as finalists as the field shrank from ten to five.

Berssenbrugge is up for consideration for her most recent book, A Treatise on Stars, which, in the words of the judges, "extends Berssenbrugge's intensely phenomenological poetics to the fiery bodies in a 'field of heaven…outside spacetime.'" "These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree," the citation continues,"Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought 'a form of organized light.'" They conclude: "All of our senses are activated by Berssenbrugge's radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where 'days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.'" As we noted in our last post, Berssenbrugge was one of our Kelly Writers House Fellows in 2019, and during her visit she read a number of poems from A Treatise on Stars, including "Star Beings," "Lux," and "Chaco and Olivia." You'll find audio and video from that visit here, while our PennSound author page for Berssenbrugge houses more than two dozen individual recordings going back as far as 1986, including interviews, radio programs, and many, many readings.

Choi was nominated for her latest, DMZ Colony, which the judges hailed as "a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts." "Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders," they continue, "it explores Edward Said's notion of 'the intertwined and overlapping histories' in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics." "Like its sister book, Hardly War," the judges conclude, "it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind." While we don't have a PennSound author page for Don Mee Choi, you can also hear her reading her work as part of Poetry Politic and as part of the 2012 MLA Offsite Reading. 

We offer our congratulations to Berssenbrugge, Choi, and all of this year's worthy nominees. This year's panel, which will announce its final decision on November 18th, is chaired by Layli Long Soldier, and also includes Rigoberto González, John Hennessy, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Elizabeth Willis.

Edmond Jabès on PennSound

We're starting the week off by taking a dive back into our archives for a remarkable document that only some of our listeners will be able to enjoy fully. We created our Edmond Jabès author page back in February 2017 to house one recording: a 1974 documentary on the Egypt-born French author made by Jean-Pierre Prevost.

Originally broadcast on French television, the film features Jabès in conversation with Claude Royet-Journoud and Lars Fredrikson. As our own Charles Bernstein noted at the time of its addition, the film had gone unseen for more than four decades. It's presented as it originally aired, i.e. in French and without subtitles, so if you are a native speaker or your quarantine hobby was trying to work on bettering your rusty high school French, you're in luck. In any case, this film is too important a document not to share with our listeners. Click here to start watching.

More Whitman Read by John Richetti

About a month ago we announced new renditions of two beloved Walt Whitman poems (specifically, "O Captain! My Captain!," and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd") read by UPenn emeritus professor John Richetti. Today were back with more recordings from the same session, including "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "The Sleepers," "Goodbye My Fancy," and sections 1 and 2 of "Calumus." You'll find these tracks on a special page containing all of Richetti's renditions of Whitman's work, which also includes "Song of Myself" in its entirety, "I Sing the Body Electric," and "I Hear America Singing," among other titles.

We last heard from Richetti this past spring, when he delivered a set of five poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.  Numerous previous sessions with Richetti are available on PennSound Classics, spanning more than a decade. They include his prodigious "111 Favorite Poems for Memorizing," "The PennSound Anthology of Restoration & 18th-Century Poetry," and his audio anthology of English Renaissance Verse. Richetti has additionally recorded selections from Matthew Arnold, W.H. Auden, William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, John Dryden, George Herbert, Ben Jonson, John Keats, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Edgar Allan Poe, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Wordsworth, and William Butler Yeats. These lovingly-made recordings, rendered in Richetti's distinctive tenor, are a tremendous resource for the classroom or for any lover of poetry. 

With the exception of the aforementioned anthologies, PennSound Classics is divided by author, so you can see Richetti's ample contributions alongside those of many other poets and scholars. To start browsing, click here.

Jacket2 Reissues: O Books

It's been a little while since we've heard from Jacket2's Reissues section, but they're back with a very exciting new collection of materials related to O Books to share with eager readers. We'll let Reissues editor Danny Snelson make the announcment himself:

Breaking with standard Reissues format, this release celebrates an extraordinary set of editorial projects by a single editor over three related initiatives. Spanning twenty-one years from 1988 until 2009, Leslie Scalapino produced four O Books Anthologies, a single-issue magazine coedited with Rick London called enough, and a four-issue run of a magazine called War and Peace (coedited with Judith Goldman for issues 2–4). From O/One: An Anthology's focus on "writing that questions and transgresses genre lines between forms of poetic and critical discourse" to the final issue of War and Peace, Scalapino's editorial project continuously blurs categorical lines while challenging dominant discourses in both politics and poetics. Each collection gathers what Bernadette Mayer might call a "plural dream of social life."

"Each publication takes a particular focus or theme as its organizing principle," he continues. "Tracking these publications, an editorial through-line emerges: a focused bead on poetry's capacity to speak to the politics of the present. War is ever-present in these pages. From the Gulf War to the post-9/11 global war that continues to this day, the on-the-ground responses of poets in these collections presciently address our ongoing situation." "Proper names may have changed," he concludes, "but the news stays new. To read these pages is to see differently. As Scalapino contends in enough: 'Seeing what's happening is a form of change.'"

You'll find the O Books archives in Jacket2's Reissues section, alongside M/E/A/N/I/N/G, Chain, Secession, Alcheringa, Combo, Zuk, Roof, New Wilderness Letter, Reality Studios, Infolio, Big Allis, Aufgabe, and Calque. Click here to start browsing.