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.

poets of New York via Folkways

In 1959 Aaron Kramer recorded a Folkways album called Serenade: Poets of New York. Thanks to Aaron's daughter, we have a copy of the LP and permission to make the recording available through PennSound. Among the "New York" poets he reads is the remarkable (and personally although not literarily bizarre) Maxwell Bodenheim, a bohemian who became a communist who eventually was murdered in the Bowery. Aaron concludes the recording by reciting a poem by Alexander Berkman. Here is a link to PennSound's Aaron Kramer page. This is the only public source of recordings of him.

Aaron Kramer

We at PennSound have now created a new author page - that of the left-wing poet Aaron Kramer. Kramer was (for a time, and perhaps for a long time) a member of the Communist Party of the U.S. He was involved in just about every radical issue, cultural and straight-out political, of this time: the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Perhaps his first big break as a poet was his inclusion in the anthology, Six Poets in Search of An Answer (1944), which at a (brief) hopeful moment in the liberal-left alliance brought Aaron in with Max Bodenheim, Joy Davidman, Langston Hughes, Alfred Kreymborg (by then a vintage modernist who'd joined the radical left), Martha Millet, and Norman Rosten. His "Garcia Lorca" memorialized that poet murdered by Spanish fascists. "Berlin Air Raid" begins: "For ten years they were listening to different / sounds." "Natchez" is about southern racist violence, a place where "a hundred tabloid writers ran to the flame." I have been in touch with Aaron's daughter Laura for years. Recently she went through the attic and gathered together three shoeboxes of cassettes and VHS tapes and delivered them to us at PennSound. We are slowly going through them, digitizing them, and make them available--as always--for free download through our archive. Thanks to the work of Rebekah Caton, the first three readings are now up. Coming soon: a recording of a radio program featuring a discussion and performance by Kramer of poems from the sweatshops - verse of radical Jewish immigrants of the first years of the 20th century.