new article about PennSound Radio

Here is a new article about PennSound Radio.

introduction to PennSound

Kramer reads Whitman's "Song of Myself"

Back in 1974 the poet Aaron Kramer, long a supporter of Walt Whitman's importance, recorded himself performing "Song of Myself." Kramer's daughter found this recording, and many others, in boxes of cassette tapes in her father's house after his death. PennSound's Kramer author page includes many of these recordings, including the Whitman. We've of course thus added Whitman to our growing "PennSound Classics" page, along with newly acquired recordings of Poe, Chaucer, Swift, Wordsworth, Fitzgerald and others. Here is your link to Kramer reading Walt, and here is the link to PennSound Classics.

Mark Nowak

Today PennSound launched its newest author page - for recordings of Mark Nowak. Included here is an 18-minute reading from Coal Mountain Elementary - recorded at Mills College in 2009.

Will Alexander on Rothko

Will Alexander reads "Rothko" in 1993: MP3. And then he takes a minute to discuss that poem. (These sound files are part of a reading recorded in 1993, segmented for the first time today. These and more are available on Alexander's PennSound page.)

PennSound in Russia

PennSound podcast on letterpress publishing

At left you see Charles Alexander and colleagues working on a publication of Chax Press, which Charles has been directing for the past 27 years. Charles was at the Writers House today, to give a reading and be part of a recording of an episode of PoemTalk. We took a few minutes to talk about letterpresses and other alternative presses--and some important twentieth-century figures in letterpress publishing. This discussion is episode #20 in the PennSound Podcast series.

new audio: Shakespeare's sonnets

We at PennSound are pleased to announce the newest addition to the PennSound "Classics" page: John Richetti reads an ample selection of Shakespeare's sonnets.

newly segmented reading by Olson from Maximus poems

Click on the image above for a larger view. We at PennSound are pleased to say that Charles Olson's reading from the Maximus poems at Beloit College has now been segmented. He read for 50 minutes total from many sections of the long work. Here is your link.

Lorenzo Thomas, "Otis"

New at PennSound - Lorenzo Thomas reads "Otis" (3:06). Listen and be amazed.

romantic and neo-romantic poems (audio)

At left: William Blake, "The Ancient of Days," 1794.

On October 7, 2009, Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey Robinson, editors of the third volume of Poems for the Millenium, came to the Writers House, gathering some friends and colleagues - and we all put on a show: readings from the anthology of romantic and post- and neo-romantic poems. The readings ranged from Black to Heine to Whitman to Perelman.

Now we (thanks to the talented Anna Zalokostas) present a fully segmented set of recordings from this event.

Download some romantic poems to your iPod this holiday and listen while you shop or while you drop.

Here is a link to the PennSound page, and here, below, are the segments described:

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Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffery Robinson reading "The Ancient Poets" and "The Voice of the Devil" from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; "Athenaeum Fragment 116" from Friedrich Karl Vilhelm von Schlegel; "To Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818" from John Keats; an excerpt from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Fifth Book; and "An Archaic Torso of Apollo" from Rainer Maria Rilke (11:51)

Charles Bernstein reading a poem after Edward Lear's "The Old Man of Whitehaven"; CB tr. of an 1847 poem from Victor Hugo's Les Contemplations; "The Ballad of Burdens" from Algernon Charles Swinburne; CB tr. of Heinrich Heine's "Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht" followed by poem after "Der Tod" from Shadowtime; his own "The Introvert," after William Wordsworth's "The Hermit"; excerpt from Walt Whitman's "RESPONDEZ!"; CB tr. of Charles Baudelaire's "Enivrez-vous": "Be Drunken"; William Blake's "The Sick Rose" from Song of Experience (12:12)

Jerome Rothenberg reading a Samuel Taylor Coleridge and JR tr. of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "Mignon's Song"; Coleridge on urine (3:38)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis reading from William Wordsworth's The Prelude, Book Five; followed by a brief selection from her own "Wanderer" (12:04)

Jeffery Robinson reading "Ode: Composed on A May Morning" by William Wordsworth; followed by his own "Vernal Song of Blithe May after William Wordworth"; an excerpt from Wordworth's "The Triad"; his own "Poem on the Letter 'A'" (6:29)

George Economou reading "The Shark" from Dionysios Solomos; "The Maldive Shark" from Herman Melville; "Shipwrecks and Sharks" from Isidore Ducassee, comte de Lautreamont; his own "The Amorous Drift of the First Hoplite on the Right Wing" (13:33) [At right: George Economou reading from Melville.]

Jerome Rothenberg reading "On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery" from Percy Bysshe Shelley (3:02)

Rochelle Owens reading "Judith" from Adah Isaacs Menken; her own "Song from Out of Ur" (16:05)

Jeffery Robinson reading Emily Dickinson's "I think I was enchanted" (1:50)

Bob Perelman reading his own work "Transcription" (13:33)

Jerome Rothenberg reading his own poem "Romantic Dadas, for Jeffrey Robinson" (1:23)

now you can listen to Michelle Taransky

I'm listening right now, as I type this, to an audio recording on Michelle Taransky's brand new (as of yesterday) PennSound author page. She reads from her book, Barn Burned, Then. She reads at the exhibit opening for "Spin Glasses and Other Frustrated Systems" in 2009. She gives a presentation at the "William Carlos Williams and the Women" symposium in 2008. She teaches Creeley's "The Sentence" to high-school students (video and audio of this). She introduces several "Whenever We Feel Like It" readings. And more.

EdTech today

We're featured today in "EdTech" here.

poets from Wuhan, China

Yesterday morning (12/9/10), a large delegation of poets from Wuhan, China, visited the Writers House. For nearly all of them, this was the first visit to the U.S. Getting visas, dealing with protocols, was a major business, as you can imagine--much of it, on our end, handled nobly by Charles Bernstein, who, with Marjorie Perloff, chairs our Chinese/American Association of Poetry and Poetics (CAAP, which is housed at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing here at Penn). After a welcome and reception, poems by the Chinese poets were performed--by the author himself or herself, and, in translation, by one of the KWH-affiliated poets. Then poems by these American poets were read in English and then in new Chinese translations by various Wuhan poets. Gifts were exchanged and promises to do more collaborating were made. Of course we made both video and audio recordings of the event. We're pretty excited that presumably for the first time poems by certain contemporary American poets, translated into Chinese, will now be available to Chinese poets and scholars of contemporary poetry any time through the web, e.g. Bob Perelman's "China," Michelle Taransky's "Banking Rules," Charles Bernstein's "Let's Just Say," Gregory Djanikian's "Years Later."

F. Scott Fitzgerald reads Keats

Jackson Mac Low

Thanks to the efforts of Anna Zalokostas, we at PennSound have now segmented every one of the readings by Jackson Mac Low for which we have recordings. Through this work we re-discover that Jackson read four sections of Forties at the Ear Inn in '92; that in 1995 at a Little Magazine seesion he read "This Occasion, a Poem for John Cage after his 79th birthday"; that at a Radio Reading Series Project session in 1998, he explained Forties and discussed how he applied the diastic method to Pound's Cantos; that he read "Baltimore Porches" at the Ear Inn in '82...and much more. Have a look at our newly revised Jackson Mac Low author page.

be thankful for poets

Click here to see the "PennSound Daily" entry for the Thanksgiving weekend. This is Mike Hennessey's survey of Thanksgiving poems in the PennSound archive, and there are some very good ones. So go there, have a listen, and be sure to include poets in your list of folks for whom to be thankful.

tribute to Barbara Guest

We at PennSound have now segmented the entire audio recording made of the Barbara Guest Praise Day Tribute at The Bowery Poetry Club, October 21, 2006. These people performed selections of Guest's poems, offered interpretations of them along with reminiscences: Lewis Warsh, Marcella Durand, Charles Bernstein, Africa Wayne, Charles North and Erica Kaufman. The event was hosted by Kristin Prevallet. Anna Zalokostas has nicely arranged all the readings on our Barbara Guest author page. Lewis Warsh, for instance, remembered Guest in connection with The New American Poetry of 1960. Africa Wayne read "Negative Possibility." Charles North read "Roses." Lytle Shaw read "Sante Fe Trail." And much more.

Above left: Guest in 1968.

praise for PennSound

Sina Queyras talks to Johanna Skibsrud and the transcript of their conversation appears now (entry dated November 9, 2010) on Sina's wonderful blog, Lemon Hound. Along the way, I'm pleased to say, Johanna praises PennSound (see above). Johanna Skibsrud's The Sentimentalists is up for a Giller Prize (the "darkest horse" in the race according to the Toronto Star), but she is also a poet, and the author of two collections, most recently I Do Not Think I Could Love a Human Being.

the snake according to Eileen Myles

In January 1998, during a reading at the Ear Inn in New York, Eileen Myles read a poem called "Snakes." We recently "found" this poem in that reading; it hadn't been segmented and we just didn't know "Snakes" was one of the poems Myles read that day. I for one am glad of the find. It's quite an interesting poem: story-like but defiant about its story-ness, to say the least. A kind of kunstlerroman, a portrait of this particular artist as a young girl. And not surprisingly it plays with and against the powerful gendered associations of snake. Here is a link to the recording of the poem. And here is the text of the poem as it once appeared in The Massachusetts Review (in 1998).