'Six Fillious' Reading at the Ear Inn, 1979

Here's an incredible document of a once-in-a-lifetime reading held during the early years of the Segue Series at the Ear Inn. Taking place on Februrary 7, 1979, we have a live staging and celebration of Six Fillious — a collaborative, homophonic work by bpNichol, Robert Filliou, Steve McCaffery, George Brecht, Dick Higgins and Dieter Roth, published by the Membrane Press in 1978. Organized by Higgins, this performance features McCaffery and his Four Horsemen compatriots, Paul Dutton and Rafael Barreto-Rivera, along with Charles Bernstein and Alison Knowles reading various selections from the volume.

Six Fillious has its origins in Robert Filliou's "14 Chansons et 1 Charade," a collection of "salty" rock lyrics penned in 1968, which inspired English-language translations (of varying faithfulness) by Georges Brecht and bpNichol, along with a German version by Dieter Roth. McCaffery then performed a homolinguistic translation of Brecht's text (i.e. an "English to English" translation, per Bernadette Mayer's famous experiments list), while Higgins translated Roth's translation into English, guided by the same puckish spirit. All six permutations are included in the volume, its convoluted lineage diagrammed on the image above, which comes from the book's back cover.

The work's cross-linguistic origins are made evident in a number of different ways: Higgins and McCaffery begin by each reading an example of homophonic translation, which is followed by a six-way reading of "No. 2 Rock," progressing line-by-line through each version, and individual readings of "No. 4 Blues" from all six sources. McCaffery reads two of his own translations, "Red No. 4" and "In to Lose," before Higgins concludes with the ultimate piece, translated as "Slut."

Simultaneously hilarious and serious, elegant and vulgar, Six Fillious is a germinal document in the history of language writing, which weds the sweaty fervor of youth culture to a high-minded conceptualism and transnational parlance. This ambitious performance not only commemorates the book itself, but also vivifies it, giving it an amplified voice, and an appreciative audience cheering for more. Appropriately enough, these rollicking lyrics might find their way into your playlist between a few favorite tunes. Click here to visit PennSound's Six Fillious event page, where you can start listening.

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-eight 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.

In Memoriam: Russell Banks (1940–2023)

There was one name that we missed in the midst of memorializing so many writers that died at the start of this month, and so we're amending the error today with a new author page for poet and novelist Russell Banks, who succumbed to cancer at the age of 82 on January 8th. 

Remembering the author in The New York Times, Rebecca Chace observes, "In much of Mr. Banks's writing, his concerns about race, class and power repeatedly surfaced, with particular attention given to the powerless and the overlooked, especially his outwardly unremarkable blue-collar characters." "There's an important tradition in American writing, going back to Mark Twain and forward to Raymond Carver and Grace Paley, whose work is generated by love of people who are scorned and derided,” Banks observed, speaking with The Guardian in 2000. "I have an almost simple-minded affection for them. My readers are not the same as my characters, as I’m very aware. So I'm glad when they feel that affection too."

Banks was a guest of Leonard Schwartz on his KAOS-FM radio program Cross Cultural Poetics a total of five times during the show's run, and these appearances constitute his new PennSound author page. First up, on Episode #33, "Addressing These Wars," Banks read his essay "Letter to My Granddaughter On The Eve Of Another War" and discussed the embedded writers of Operation Homecoming. Banks returned later that year for Episode #58, "History/Language/Silence," where he read from his Liberia-based novel The Darling and talked about Liberia's history as, effectively, an American colony. Jumping forward seven years, in Episode #231, "Abolitionist," Banks read from and discussed his critically-acclaimed novel Cloudsplitter, based on the life of John Brown. Three years later, in 2014, he'd make his final two appearances in two subsequent programs — Episode #291, "A Permanent Member of the Family," and Episode #292, "Lost Memory of Skin." In the former, Banks read from and chatted with Schwartz about his short story collection of the same name, while the latter focused on his latest novel, also of the same name.

We're grateful to Schwartz as always for his excellent and much-missed program, especially when it allows us to honor the memory of a novelist beloved by many poets, myself included. You can listen to the programs listed above by clicking here.

George Quasha: Two Home Recording Sessions, 2022

Today we're proud to announce the latest batch of recordings from PennSound Contributing Editor Chris Funkhouser's long-running project to document the poetry of friend and neighbor George Quasha. Our last salvo — Quasha's September 2022 set from Rhinebeck, New York's 'T' Space, where he was receiving the tenth annual 'T' Space Poetry Award — was a break from the norm of home recording sessions, but we're back to the usual mode with two new sets of material.

The first of these was recorded at the poet's home in Barrytown, NY on November 20, 2022 and features the shadowing ideas in the rearview mirror section of Not Even Rabbits Go Down This Hole, which brings that book to a close. Funkhouser and Quasha next reconvened on December 29 for one last session before the year drew to a close. This time around, they recorded the tuning by fire section of Waking from Myself. Each of these sessions runs just shy of 90 minutes.

You'll find these recordings on PennSound's George Quasha author page, along with lengthy selections from many of his books including Not Even Rabbits Go Down This Hole, Dowsing Axis, Hearing Other, The Ghost In Between, Verbal Paradise, Glossodelia Attract: Preverbs, The Daimon of Moment: Preverbs, Scorned Beauty Comes Up Behind: Preverbs, Things Done for Themselves: Preverbs, and Polypoikilos: Matrix in Variance: Preverbs, among others. Click here to start listening.

Anne-Marie Albiach: 1978 Radio Interview for France Culture

We bring this week to a close by revisiting Anne-Marie Albiach's France Culture radio interview with Jean Daive recorded in 1978. For French-speaking fans of the late poet (who died in November 2012), this is sure to be an illuminating listen, and it's one of many great recordings you'll find on our site, including two later France Culture broadcasts — from the program Poésie sur parole — recorded in 2003 and 2004.

On PennSound's author page for Albiach, there are a number of home recording sessions, including a 1993 recording of « H II » linéaires and a 2005 recordings of ETAT and UNE GÉOMÉTRIE (triptych), along with a 2000 reading as part of the Paris-based Steel Bar reading series, and shorter recordings made for Grey Suit and Kenning. 

Charles Bernstein's 2012 Jacket2 commentary post marking the poet's passing includes this appraisal of her talents, written on the occasion of her volume, Figured Image: "Anne-Marie Albiach's words are never alone on the page, having each other for company, just as they find here ideal companionship in Keith Waldrop’s translation. In Figurations de l’Image, Albiach pursues her rigorous investigation into the possibilities of measure, the perceptible, luminescence, vulnerability, memory, contour, ardor, breath, oscillation, remonstration, trajectory, disparity, abstraction, antecedence, disparity, refraction, trace, tapestry, rehearsal, reverberation, and the irreparable. In these poems, the figures refute image as they bank, relapse, surge, palsy, recollect. Albiach scores space to twine time, abjures rhyme to make blank shimmer in the mark." You can read more of Bernstein's remembrance here, and browse our Anne-Marie Albiach author page here.

In Memoriam: Mark Weiss (1943–2023)

Today we regretfully mark the passing of poet, translator, editor, and anthologist Mark Weiss, who succumbed to leukemia on Monday, January 16th. The news was confirmed by a Facebook post from his brother Steve yesterday.

Reviewing Weiss' collection As Landscape in Jacket Magazine in 2010, M. G. Stephens began by offering this encapsulation of the poet's life:

Mark Weiss was an important figure in the New York alternative or underground poetry scene in the late Sixties and early Seventies, especially uptown in Morningside Heights where he ran the reading series at the legendary West End Bar and edited the magazine Broadway Boogie. Besides poetry, Weiss had other interests, which eventually took him away from the Upper West Side into art dealing, filmmaking, psychotherapy, social work, and teaching. Like the wandering Basho, who he writes about so briefly and tellingly in his new book of poems, As Landscape, Weiss wandered from New York to Baltimore, Paris, Tucson, San Diego, and rural Massachusetts and, again like Basho in his own circular journeys in Japan, Weiss wound up back in New York, even the Upper West Side, only this time way uptown in Inwood.

Beyond his own books of poetry, Weiss was also known for two influential anthologies he co-edited — Across the Line / Al otro lado: The Poetry of Baja California (2002) and The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (2009) — as well other diverse pursuits including filmmaking, social work, and dealing in fine art prints.

On PennSound's Mark Weiss author page, you'll find audio and video from the poet's September 2010 visit to our own Kelly Writers House, where he read from and discussed The Whole Island as part of the Writers Without Borders series. Running just over an hour, Weiss' set includes selections by José Martí, Lorenzo García Vega, Vergilio Piñera, Gastón Baquero, Eliseo Diego, Fina García Marruz, Luis Rogelio Nogueras, Raúl Hernández Novás, Soleida Ríos, and Alessandra Molina, along with a Q&A session. There's also Weiss' brief contribution to a 2007 celebration of new publications from Chax Press at the Bowery Poetry Club. Click here to start exploring.

Judging from the outpouring of grief that's followed news of Weiss' passing, it's clear that this is another loss that will affect the poetry community greatly. To Weiss' family, friends, colleagues, and many fans worldwide, we offer our condolences.

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Remembering Gregory Corso

Today we remember poet Gregory Corso, who passed away at the age of 70 on this day in 2000. While a generation has come and gone since his death, Corso seems primed for a well-deserved resurgence with the recent publication of The Golden Dot: Last Poems, 1997–2000 (read William Lessard's Jacket2 interview with its editors here). With any luck, we might hope for a proper release for the late Gustave Reininger's criminally neglected documentary, Corso: The Last Beat to go with it.

We launched our Gregory Corso author page in June 2017, with assistance from Raymond Foye. There, you'll find five full readings plus one individual poem recorded between the 1970s and 1990s. The earliest recording is a April 1971 reading at Duke University, which is followed by an August 1985 appearance at the San Francisco Art Institute as part of their "Art of Poetry" series. Jumping forward to the 90s, there's a March 1991 Brooklyn College reading notable for the appearance of Corso's iconic late poem "The Whole Mess ... Almost" and for the half-hour candid conversation recorded in the car on the way home. From December 1992, there's a stellar reading in New York City also featuring Herbert Huncke, John Wieners, and Allen Ginsberg, and finally, from March 1993, we have a half-hour reading from Rutgers University including "I Met This Guy Who Died," "Earliest Memory," "Youthful Religious Experiences," and "How Not to Die," among other poems. Our most recent addition is a 1969 recording session at Fantasy Records' San Francisco studios on Natoma Street showcasing "In the Fleeting Hand of Time," "Vision of Rotterdam," "The Last Warmth of Arnold," "Mexican Impressions," "Botticelli Spring," "Sun — A Spontaneous Poem," "Ode to Coit Tower," and "I Am 25," among others.

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

PoemTalk #180: on Seven Short Poems by Lisa Fishman

Last week we released the latest episode in the PoemTalk Podcast series, its 180th episode in total, which is focused on seven short poems from Lisa Fishman's latest collection, Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Books, 2020): "Many People have heard" (51); "Others could tell the difference" (65); "Have sent a point" and "Who will confess that …" (73); "Taking a sick day to remember Mr. Fishman" (149); "A line through a forest" (150); and "Steering-wheel-in-the-field" (163). For this program, filmed live at the Poetry Foundation's Chicago headquarters, host Al Filreis was joined by panelists Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, Laynie Browne, and Fishman herself.

Filreis begins his Jacket2 blog post announcing the new episode by acknowledging the uniqueness of this situation: "Typically at the start of a PoemTalk episode we play a recording of the poet performing the poems from the PennSound archive, but on this occasion we of course had the poet with us, so listeners will hear Lisa's performance as part of the mix." He also shares more exciting news concerning the PoemTalk team's trip to the Second City: "we are delighted to note that Chris Martin and Zach Carduner traveled with us to Chicago, helped us to make several new videos for the ModPo syllabus in various parts of the city (including one on Carl Sandburg's proletarian 'Chicago' filmed 'on location' under the enormous Union Stock Yard Gate)."

You can listen to this latest program, find the text of Fishman's poems, watch raw video from the Chicago trip, 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. Browse the full PoemTalk archives, spanning more than a decade, by clicking here.

In Memoriam: Kass Fleisher (1959–2023)

Today we pay tribute to the fourth PennSound poet to have died in recent days — and hopefully the last for some time — Kass Fleisher, who passed away on January 6th at the age of 63. 

A prolific writer of diverse talents, Fleisher's published work includes Dead Woman Hollow (a historical novel), Talking Out of School: Memoir of an Educated Woman, The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History (a nonfiction history), along with two hybrid works The Adventurous and Accidental Species: A Reproduction. Fleisher also co-edited, with Caitlin M. Alvarez, the anthology, Litscapes: Collected US Writings 2015, from her own Steerage Press, which she founded in 2011. As an obituary published in The Pantagraph observes, her myriad talents extended beyond the printed page: "Prior to pursuing her graduate degrees, she was Administrative Manager and Producer at Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, and while in grad school at Binghamton she became a champion country western line dancer." Fleisher also co-authored a number of lauded screenplays with her ex-husband and writing partner, Joe Amato.

We've created a new PennSound author page for Fleisher to house a handful of recordings that were previously scattered throughout our archives. They include a 1999 set for Boulder's Left Hand Reading Series, and "Personality to Configure" from the 2007 MLA Offsite reading in Chicago, along with "Lacrimae of the Medusa; or, Cixous (33 years later) and Cruci-Fictions: Let's Talk about Sex (Again)," a panel from the 2009 Belladonna* conference Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism, which was chaired by Laura Jaramillo and also featured panelists Dodie Bellamy, Bhanu Kapil, and Laura Mullen. Click here to start listening.

In Memoriam: Charles Simic (1938–2023)

Today we pay tribute to Charles Simic, who passed away on January 9th at the age of 84. Born in what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Simic was displaced by the Second World War, eventually settling in the US in the mid-1950s. From tumultuous beginnings, he'd rise to a place of prominence in international poetics, eventually garnering honors including a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also served as the fifteenth US Poet Laureate, succeeding Donald Hall in 2007.

Writing in The New York Times, Dwight Garner observes that "[Simic's] poems defied simple classification. Some were minimalist and surreal, others determinedly realistic and violent. Nearly all were replete with ironic humor and startling metaphors." He goes on to quote an earlier Times piece by D.J.R. Bruckner: "Only a very foolhardy critic would say what any Simic poem is about," he begins, continuing, 

"In rich detail they are all filled with ordinary objects, but they tend to leave the impression that the poet has poked a hole into everyday life to reveal a glimpse of something endless." Garner also takes note of Simic's unique voice and minimalist perspective, quoting the poet:

Before the Army I had become too literary, buttoned down, in tweeds, pipe-smoking, all that. After the Army I had a much humbler view of myself. I started thinking about a remark of the painter Paul Klee, that if a young man is to accomplish something he has to find something truly his own. Well, I had a kind of minimalist urge, and so I started writing poems about the simplest things. Household objects: a knife, a fork, a spoon, my shoes.

While our PennSound author page for Simic doesn't contain many recordings, we are nevertheless very grateful to be able to share what we have. That includes the poet's 2008 appearance on episode #186 of Leonard Schwartz's Cross Cultural Poetics radio program, where he discusses subversion and Sappho in his book of essays The Renegade. We also have a trio of poems — "The White Room," "Mirrors at 4 a.m.," and "The Friends of Heraclitus" — from his 2003 appearance at the Key West Literary Seminar. To listen to either of these recordings, click here.

In Memoriam: Naomi Replansky (1918–2023)

It's going to be a difficult week.

Today, we received word that Naomi Replansky — a poet very much beloved to us at PennSound, Jacket2, ModPo, and the Kelly Writers House — had passed away at the remarkable age of 104.

Writing in The New York Times yesterday, Margalit Fox summarized Replansky's rich life as follows: "a self-taught American poet — for decades keenly celebrated yet curiously unheralded — whose work portrayed a world of labor, oppression and struggle but was no less hopeful for all that." Later on in the same piece, she characterizes Replansky's voice as a marriage of "the vernacular blue-collar world of ... poet laureate Philip Levine," an avowed fan, and "the leftist New York Jewish milieu of the short-story writer Grace Paley," a dear friend. While lamenting a life largely lived without recognition, Fox notes some noteworthy late accolades, and concludes with an encapsulation of the spirit that guided her work and life: "If Ms. Replansky's work was suffused with loss and longing, it was also rarely devoid of hope." 

PennSound's Replansky author page is a true labor of love, inaugurated in 2015 when the late Richard Swigg (editor of our author page for Charles Tomlinson and a great friend of our site) sent along a pair of readings with the emphatic suggestion that the poet and translator, whose life in writing was then approaching 80 years, most certainly belonged as part of our archive. Those first two recordings — one session recorded for Lilith in 2009, the other a 2012 reading at Poets House in 2012 — were eventually joined by three more: a 2015 session capturing 37 poems from her Collected Poems and two sets also recorded in 2015 at the home of Marcia Eckert and Tom Haller. The first of which consists of 16 titles from her Collected Poems, while the other is comprised of favorite poems by other poets, including Shakespeare's "Full Fathom Five," William Blake's "The Sick Rose," Emily Dickinson's "After Great Pain," Wallace Stevens' "Anecdote of the Jar," Gerard Manley Hopkins' "I Wake and feel the Fell of Dark," Stevie Smith's "Not Waving but Drowning," and Paul Celan's "Death Fugue." 

Replansky's author page grew again in 2016 thanks to PennSound co-founders Charles Bernstein and Al Filreis, who first visited the poet at her New York City home in April of that year to record a special episode of Bernstein's Close Listening program. Here's how he described their conversation at the time: "Naomi Replansky discusses hearing Gertrude Stein as a teenager, her friendship with Bertolt Brecht, the tension between her Communist affiliations and her poetry, her early publication and subsequent review in Poetry magazine, her life as a poet on the margins of the poetry world, and her reaction to the changes she has seen living 98 years." Replansky would return the favor in November of that year by traveling to our own Kelly Writers House for a reading. Beyond the aforementioned recordings, Replansky's author page also includes a 2017 of the poet reading work by her friend Grace Paley at Brooklyn's Books Are Magic, along with PoemTalk #111, wherein Bernstein, Filreis, Ron Silliman, and Rachel Zolf discuss two early poems, "In Syrup, In Syrup" and "Ring Song." 

Naomi Replansky will surely be missed. To start exploring her author page you can click here.

In Memoriam: Dmitry Golynko (1969–2023)

We start this week off with shocking news from St. Petersburg: Dmitry Golynko (Дмитрий Голынько) — a leading voice in contemporary Russian poetry and poetics, as well as social comment — has died at the age of 53.

UPenn's Kevin M. F. Platt, who has curated the vast majority of PennSound and Jacket2's Russian content over the years, offered a succinct summation of Golynko's talents in his 2014 essay "Now Poet: Dmitry Golynko and the New Social Epic": "Dmitry Golynko writes about the now." He continues:

Since his debut in the early 1990s, Golynko’s ear has been tuned with extraordinary sensitivity to present linguistic conditions. His subject has been current social and political experience, which he studies with precise, close concentration. His writing — honed responses to his environment — constitutes a critical analysis, or perhaps an anatomy, of contemporary subjectivity. And as social and political reality, both in Russia and globally, has grown over the past two decades by stages more agonizing, more charged by crisis, and less obviously leading to any predictable or desirable future, Golynko’s work has engaged more and more intensely with this work of critique.

Platt's essay was part of his excellent feature, "Russian Poetic Counterpublics," which also contains his translation of Golynko's "The Keys to Yonder." As mentioned above, he is also responsible for much of the content found on PennSound's author page for Golynko, as well as providing Cyrillic translations for the poet's titles. There you'll find four full-length readings from Russia and throughout the US, as well as Charles Bernstein's two-part 2009 Close Listening program where Golynko reads his work and talks with the host (a transcript is available in the journal Sibila). Bernstein is also responsible for a 2018 video of Golynko reading his poem "Government Funding."

We send our condolences to Golynko's family, friends, and colleagues worldwide.

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.

Lorenzo Thomas, "Ego Trip" (1976)

We keep this first week of the new year going with a frenetic favorite from the PennSound archives by Lorenzo Thomas that comes to us courtesy of A.L. Nielsen.  

"Ego Trip" features Thomas performing with the Texas State University Jazz Ensemble and was originally released on the album 3rd Ward Vibration Society (shown at right) on the SUM Concerts label in 1976. Lanny Steele is the composer for the track, which rubs shoulders with a cover of Carole King's "Jazzman" and the amazingly-titled suite, "Registration '74. The Worst I've Ever Endured / The Girl on the Steps / Drop and Add."

Internet commenter John Atlas provides a little context for the recording: "The TSU Jazz Ensemble was directed by Lanny Steele, who also founded and directed a nonprofit called Sum Arts. During the 70's and 80's, Sum Arts produced shows by, among others, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, The World Saxophone Quartet, Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, The Leroy Jenkins Octet, Old and New Dreams, and a host of notable poets. In the process he exhausted an inheritance from his parents, and more."

Thomas' solo voice starts us off riffing on "Stormy Monday"'s litany of days — "Every dog has his day. / Monday is my day / even if it is blue. / Come trifling Tuesday / that's my day too ..." — and is soon joined by congas and funky wah-wah guitars, then a defiant bassline, Rhodes piano, and a fuzzed out lead, before the full ensemble kicks in as Thomas' final syllable echoes out ("I ... I ... I ... I ..."). After a series of solos and some stop-start time changes Thomas returns over the band — "Let me testify! / Every day his his dog, / but I'm tired! / I want the sun shine just over me. / I want the wind blow just over me. / I want your policemen to be just to me." — which leads into the track's closing section.

You can listen to this smoldering track on PennSound's Lorenzo Thomas author page along with a slew of readings and talks from 1978 up until just a few years before his death in 2005.

Robert Creeley and Company: Home Movies by Bobbie Louise Hawkins

As we slowly ease into the new year we leave behind the pleasures of family and the holidays I was reminded of a truly remarkable document from our archives that shows that the quotidian can also be historically significant: "Robert Creeley and Company: Home Movies by Bobbie Louise Hawkins."

Charles Bernstein provided some background information in a 2014 Jacket2 commentary post announcing the addition of these films, along with a timetable of its contents: "Bobbie Louise Hawkins took these home movies from 1962 to 1965. She provided them to Robert McTavish for his film about the Vancouver poetry conference of 1963, The Line Has Shattered (2013), and then asked McTavish to send them to PennSound. Penelope Creeley and McTavish provided most of the annotations. We welcome any further identifications: let us know!"

Above, we see a screenshot of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and John Wieners; other captures Bernstein has selected from the films include Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Tuli Kupferberg, Ed Sanders, and John Cage. You can see them here and watch the films here.