Amiri Baraka at the Naropa Institute, 1978

Earlier this month we announced the new addition of Transformation — a live musical collaboration with musicians Steve McCall and Fred Houn — to our author page for the one and only Amiri Baraka. Today we're back with a 1978 reading by Baraka recently segmented by Wes Matthews for your listening pleasure.

On July 26, 1978 Baraka gave a reading with Diane Di Prima and Robert Duncan as part of the Naropa Institute's famed summer program. Lasting nearly 45 minutes his set was introduced by Allen Ginsberg who traced his relationship with the poet, which started with a solicitation of poems for the groundbreaking journal Yugen. Baraka himself starts with a statement on art before reading the poems "Afro-American Lyric," "I Love Music (for John Coltrane)," "Malcolm X Remembers February '77," and "Against Bourgeois Art," before concluding with "Dope."

You can listen to this reading by clicking here and don't forget to browse the rest of the recordings you'll find on PennSound's Amiri Baraka author page that span the years from the mid-1960s to Baraka's final decade, including readings, performances, lectures, interviews, and commentaries on his work. 

Charles Reznikoff reads from "Holocaust" for International Holocaust Remembrance Day

January 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the day Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz seventy-seven years ago. In acknowledgment of the day and the six million European Jews who perished senselessly, we 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.

Congratulations to USA Fellowship Winner Dawn Lundy Martin

We send our heartiest congratulations to poet Dawn Lundy Martin, who was recently announced as a recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship. This $50,000 award recognizes "the most compelling artists working and living in the United States, in all disciplines, at every stage of their career." Martin joins poets Chen Chen, Emmy Pérez, JJJJJerome Ellis, and Leroy F. Moore Jr. as 2022 honorees, which also included musician Jeff Parker (of Tortoise) and author Kiese Laymon among many other worthy artists.

This is a great reason for our listeners to revisit PennSound's Dawn Lundy Martin author page, which is home to a variety of recordings from 2006 to 2016. The earliest pair of recordings come from an April 2006 visit to New York City, which yielded sets for both Belladonna* and the Segue Series; Martin would return for another Segue reading at the Bowery Poetry Club in December 2008. Our first recording from A. L. Nielsen's Heatstrings Theory archives is an October 2009 reading at Penn State University, and Nielsen was also kind enough to share a March 2016 appearance by the poet as part of a reading celebrating What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, held in Brooklyn for that year's National Black Writers Conference at AWP. Then, from Andrew Kenower's A Voice Box archives, we have a pair of Bay Area readings: a 2010 reading at David Buuck's house and a 2013 reading at Tender Oracle held as part of the East Bay Poetry Summit. Finally, we have "On Discomfort and Creativity," the 2016 Leslie Scalapino Lecture in Innovative Poetics, held at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Video of that event is available, along with a link to the text in Something on Paper.

Four of the earlier readings mentioned above have been segmented into individual MP3s, providing listeners the unique opportunity to listen to multiple iterations of the same poems — including "The Undress," "The Morning Hour," "Bearer of Arms 1775-1783," and "The Symbolic Nature of Chaos" — read at separate events. Taken together, they also provide an interesting document of Martin's evolving style from her first publications up to just before her most recent collection, Good Stock, Strange Blood (Coffee House Press, 2017), which earned Martin the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2019 for "creating 'fascinating, mysterious, formidable, and sublime' explorations of the meaning of identity, the body, and the burdens of history along with one’s own private traumas." You can experience Dawn Lundy Martin's formidable voice by clicking here.

Tuli Kupferberg: "No Deposit, No Return" (1966)

We begin this week with one of my favorite recordings from our archives and one I'm very proud that we can share with our listeners: Tuli Kupferberg's 1966 ESP-Disk release, No Deposit, No Return. While many know the late Kupferberg for his inimitable contributions to poetry-rock mavericks, the Fugs, this ambitious solo album is far more obscure, though not without its dedicated fans.

Subtitled "an evening of pop poetry" on the record sleeve, which devolves into "a nightmare of popular poetry" in Kupferberg's opening track, No Deposit, No Return is comprised exclusively of found texts performed with musical accompaniment "by Gary Elton on the various": "Real Advertisements," as the back cover explains, "As they appeared in newspapers, magazines, in direct mail. No word has been added. There are genuine ads. Parts of some ads have been repeated. Parts of some ads have been omitted. But these are the very texts. These are for real!" The end result is quite poetic, yet also drifts into the realm of pure comedy — albeit a comedy rooted in social critique — along with the golden age of radio, thanks to Elton's musical backings and sound effects. The invocation of sixties pop sensibilities and appropriative aesthetic also adds an element of the visual arts, creating a truly hybrid electric form that neatly parallels the contemporaneous sound poetry of John Giorno in building upon the foundational work of Charles Reznikoff.

"Everyone I suppose has always wanted to write his own commercial." Kupferberg notes in the introductory track, explaining the album's origins. "I have resisted this temptation strenuously, especially for this album, but when a certain well-known shampoo company came to the Fugs last summer, proposing that we do our own commercial for their new summer product, I countered with my own suggestion for a new product" — namely, Pubol, a pubic hair shampoo — and thus the project was born.

Aside from consumerism and America's culture of violence, No Deposit, No Return's major preoccupation is sex and sexuality, as Kupferberg performs advertisements for timid swingers, not-so-timid swingers, fetish photos, an erotic novel (Violations of the Child Marilyn Monroe, attributed to "Her Psychiatrist Friend") and a scary-looking penis pump,"the Hyperemiator," whose ad is one of two reproduced on the record's back cover. In a Foucauldian sense, particularly in the midst of a period of revolutionary sexual exploration, the poet reminds us that societal curiosity about sex and atypical sexual interest are nothing new. Regardless, there's a startling difference between the hidden, repressed and clinical nature of the poems on No Deposit, No Return, and the joyous and liberated carnality celebrated in Fugs' songs like "Supergirl" and "Coca Cola Douche." Thus, the album serves as both a strident cross-generational critique and a statement of shared beliefs, targeted at young audiences through one of their most popular media. In a fashion not dissimilar from what Kupferberg parodies in tracks like the heartbreaking "Social Studies," or the Fugs' "Kill for Peace," No Deposit, No Return is very effective propaganda.

We're grateful to Kupferberg's daughter, Samara, for her permission to share this groundbreaking record, which you can listen to in its entirety here. By clicking on the thumbnail images you can view large-format scans of the album covers and liner notes as well.

Jerry Rothenberg's 90th Birthday Celebration, 2020

We close out this week with video footage from the legendary Jerry Rothenberg's 90th birthday celebration, hosted by Charles Bernstein and Pierre Joris. This special event took place at the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation in New York City on December 12, 2021. Nicole Peyrafitte was kind enough to provide us with video from the event.

Sasha Davis and Mimi Gross provided a brief welcome to the audience before Bernstein offered up introductory comments. Speakers offering toasts, tributes, memories, and poems in Rothenberg's honor included Matthew Rothenberg, Steve Clay, Jeffrey Robinson, Al Filreis, Joris, and Diane Rothenberg, before Jerry took the mic.

You can watch this event by clicking here, and don't forget to explore the vast array of recordings available on PennSound's Jerry Rothenberg author page, which offers listeners an encyclopedic collection of interviews, performances, readings, talks, and much more, from the late 1960s to the present. 

Trish Salah on PennSound

Today we're highlighting our author page for Canadian poet and critic Trish Salah.

Our holdings included the poet's appearance at the 2009 ADFEMPO (Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism) conference, organized by Belladonna*, which took place on September 24th and 25th of that year. Salah appeared as part of a panel on "Body as Discourse" chaired by Kate Eichhorn that included Joan Retallack, Laura Smith, Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël), and Ronaldo V. Wilson in addition to Salah, which explored "questions of the body, referentiality, remapping bodies and borders, intertextuality, narrativity, aesthetics, and the challenges of de-essentialization as we scrutinize 'female,' 'queer,' 'raced' and 'othered' bodies."

In addition to that panel, we have a brief set as part of a Belladonna* Reading Series event on Transfeminism and Literature from 2012, and Salah's Segue Series reading at the Zinc Bar in March 2013. More recent recordings, include "Nevada: A Reading and Panel" that also included Imogen Binnie, from the Young Centre for Performing Arts in 2013; 2014's Wanting in Arabic: A Conversation with Poet Trish Salah," recorded as part of the Asia Pacific Forum for NYC's WBAI-FM; and a 2014 reading at the East Bay Poetry Summit, hosted by the Manifest Reading and Workshop Series. There's also a very exciting PennSound Podcast episode (#57) in which Christy Davids interviews Salah and Salah reads her poetry, including "Two Self Portraits," "Interlude for the Voice," "Future Foundered," and "Gossels in Fugue."

You can listen to any and all of the recordings mentioned above by clicking here.

Two Rudy Burckhardt Films Featuring Kenneth Koch

Today we're revisiting two remarkable films by Rudy Burckhardt, featuring his New York School compatriot Kenneth Koch that you can see on our PennSound Cinema page for filmmaker and photographer.

 

The earlier of the two, The Apple (1967), features a lyric and spoken interlude written by Koch, which was set to music by Tony Ackerman and Brad Burg, and sung by Kim Brody. In stop-motion and live action, it traces the sprawling adventures of its titular fruit. Running just one minute and fifty-four seconds, the film is nevertheless the subject of a marvelous essay by Daniel Kane — "Whimsy, the Avant-Garde and Rudy Burckhardt's and Kenneth Koch's The Apple" — in which he praises it for "the ways in which ideas of temporality, spontaneity, childishness, and parody are expressed within this tiny little film work," thus "revealing the latent and hilarious power of the whimsical affect."

The latter film, On Aesthetics (1999) has a sense of finality about it, coming during Burckhardt's last year and not long before Koch developed leukemia that would ultimately take his life in 2002. Running nine minutes and taking its name from the last poem in Koch's 1994 collection One Train, On Aesthetics — charmingly presented by "KoBu Productions" — features the poet's voice-over reciting the various micropoems contained under that title, from "Aesthetics of the Man in the Moon" and "Aesthetics of Creating Light" to "Aesthetics of Being with Child" and "Aesthetics of Echo," while Burckhardt's camera eye finds appropriate accompanying images, whether literary or abstract.

We're grateful to be able to share this work with our listeners, along with two other Burckhardt films: — The Automotive Story (1954) and Central Park in the Dark (1985) — which you can find here. Our Kenneth Koch author page also houses these films, along with a 1998 reading at our own Kelly Writers House and a few brief recordings from the St. Mark's Poetry Project.

PoemTalk #168: on Jayne Cortez's "She Got He Got"

Today we launched the latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, #168 altogether, which is concerned with Jayne Cortez's poem/performance piece entitled "She Got He Got." For this program, host Al Filreis was joined by a panel consisting of Amber Rose Johnson, Daniel Bergmann, and Yolanda Wisher.

Filreis begins in his Jacket2 blog post announcing the new episode by providing some provenance for the reading: "This poem was apparently the final number — or possibly the encore — concluding a set presented under the title 'A Dialogue Between Voice and Drums,' before a live audience at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, New York, on October 23, 2010. ... Jayne Cortez is of course the voice, while Denardo Coleman (her and Ornette Coleman's son, and a member of the Ornette Coleman Quartet) is on drums." He continues discussing the "gendered binarism" that characterizes the poem: "'She Got He Got' is comprised of a 'She' half and an 'He' half, she giving variations of hot, while he instantiates variations of cold. Hot means passionate, frustrated, warm, impatient, explosive, ambitious, sweaty, hurt, born again, volcanic, 'frigid' (somehow), fashionable. She — is she the speaker/performer? — runs hot from the variability of hotness itself. Cold — a quality not of the speaker, but of an imagined other — finds him taped to a bar stool, glued to a subway booth, kissing himself in the mirror, harried by police, married to a race track, 'artistically cold,' mercenary, dispassionate, percussive." 

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.

Davy Knittle: New Author Page

Today we're visiting a new author page for Davy Knittle, a recent UPenn doctoral graduate and Fellow in Poetic Practice as well as Reviews Editor for Jacket2. The various recordings found there show just how central a role Knittle played in the affairs of the Kelly Writers House over his years here.

First and foremost, you'll notice a lot of podcasts, both PoemTalk appearances and PennSound Podcast episodes created by Davy. There are numerous events at KWH as well, most notably the City Planning Poetics series Knittle organized from 2016–2019 and events like "A New Disability Poetics Symposium," a Michael Gizzi retrospective, Charles Bernstein's retirement celebration, and introductions to a number of readings. Stepping outside of campus you'll also find a 2018 Segue Series reading at New York's Zinc Bar, the 2017 MLA Offsite Reading, and a set from the Housework at Chapterhouse series from 2016.

With a wide variety of recordings from various venues you're sure to find something of interest. Click here to be taken to our new PennSound author page for Davy Knittle.

 

Stephen Ratcliffe and the Thingamajigs Performance Group: "Sound of Wave in Channel," 2021

Today we're highlighting a recent addition to the author page of Stephen Ratcliffe: a sprawling recent performance of his epic work, Sound of Wave in Channel. This event, staged with the Thingamajigs Performance Group, was staged at Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland, CA from 9:00AM to 8:00PM on June 27, 2021 and followed by a Q&A session with the participants, who were no doubt exhausted after their eleven hour performance.

Here's a little bit of the write-up BAMPFA (the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive at UC Berkeley) described the event on their website: 

The work is built around Bay Area poet Stephen Ratcliffe’s work of the same name that documents one thousand poems written in one thousand consecutive days. Recorded at BAMPFA with Ratcliffe and the Thingamajigs Performance Group, this work explores the relationship between things as they are observed in the world and how they might be transcribed or transformed as works of art. 

For the sake of aiding listeners navigate this massive recording, the performance has been broken into six segments averaging 90–120 minutes, named according to the dates covered (for example the first track contains poems written between 10/1/13-4/10/14). You can listen in by clicking here.

Our Stephen Ratcliffe author page you'll find documentation of most of his major poetry projects, including c o n t i n u u m,  CLOUD / RIDGE, HUMAN / NATURE, and Remarks on Color/Sound, along with talks, interviews, podcast appearances and much more.

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.

Amiri Baraka: Transformation (Live), 1984

Today we've got a new addition to our author page for the legendary Amiri Baraka. Transformation comes to us via the Roulette Concert Archive, and features the poet in performance "with two generations of masters who emerged from Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Steve McCall (1933-89) on percussion and Fred Houn (1957-2014) on baritone sax." Presented as one nearly hour-long track, Transformation ebbs and flows from riff to riff, rhythm to rhythm, while Baraka's masterful delivery slips in and out of the proceedings. It's a wonderful performance and one we're glad to be able to share with our audience. Click here to listen.

While it's always a good time to be thinking of Baraka, this feels especially appropriate since we are approaching the eighth anniversary of his passing on January 9, 2014. You can listen to this track and many more from the mid-1960s through to his final decade on PennSound's Amiri Baraka author page, including readings, performances, lectures, interviews, and commentaries on his work. 

Mark Van Doren: Portrait of a Poet' (1994)

We start this new week and new year off with a very exciting addition to our author page for Mark Van Doren: Mark Van Doren: Portrait of a Poet, a 1994 short film produced by Adam Van Doren, the poet's grandson. Running just over a half hour, this fascinating documentary includes wonderful photo and video footage of Van Doren in conversation and reading his work, along with interviews with Robert Giroux, Allen Ginsberg, Alfred Kazin, John Hollander, Louis Simpson, Daniel Hoffman, Richard Howard, and more.

You can watch this documentary on PennSound's Mark Van Doren author page, alongside recordings from several sources, including a 1935 set for Columbia University's Speech Lab, a 1960 set for the Spoken Arts Treasury and the 1967 Smithsonian Folkways album, Mark Van Doren Reads from His Collected and New Poems. Listen in to any and all of these recordings by clicking here.