PennSound (original) (raw)

Inside PennSound

From "Down To Write You This Poem Sat" at the Oakville Gallery

Contemporary

  1. Charles Bernstein, "Phone Poem" (2011) (1:30): MP3
  2. Caroline Bergvall, "Love song: 'The Not Tale (funeral)' from Shorter Caucer Tales (2006): MP3
  3. Christian Bôk, excerpt from Eunoia, from Chapter "I" for Dick Higgins (2009) (1:38): MP3
  4. Tonya Foster, Nocturne II (0:40) (2010) MP3
  5. Ted Greenwald, "The Pears are the Pears" (2005) (0:29): MP3
  6. Susan Howe, Thorow, III (3:13) (1998): MP3
  7. Tan Lin, "¼ : 1 foot" (2005) (1:16): MP3
  8. Steve McCaffery, "Cappuccino" (1995) (2:35): MP3
  9. Tracie Morris, From "Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful" (2002) (3:40): MP3
  10. Julie Patton, "Scribbling thru the Times" (2016) (5:12): MP3
  11. Tom Raworth, "Errory" (c. 1975) (2:08): MP3
  12. Jerome Rothenberg, from "The First Horse Song of Frank Mitchell: 4-Voice Version" (c. 1975) (3:30): MP3
  13. Cecilia Vicuna, "When This Language Disappeared" (2009) (1:30): MP3

Historical

  1. Guillaume Apollinaire, "Le Pont Mirabeau" (1913) (1:14):MP3
  2. Amiri Baraka, "Black Dada Nihilismus" (1964) (4:02): MP3
  3. Louise Bennett, "Colonization in Reverse" (1983) (1:09): MP3
  4. Sterling Brown, "Old Lem " (c. 1950s) (2:06): MP3
  5. John Clare, "Vowelless Letter" (1849) performed by Charles Bernstein (2:54): MP3
  6. Velimir Khlebnikov, "Incantation by Laughter" (1910), tr. and performed by Bernstein (:28) MP3
  7. Harry Partch, from Barstow (part 1), performed by Bernstein (1968) (1:11): MP3
  8. Leslie Scalapino, "Can’t’ is ‘Night’" (2007) (3:19): MP3
  9. Kurt Schwitters, "Ur Sonata: Largo" performed by Ernst Scwhitter (1922-1932) ( (3:12): MP3
  10. Gertrude Stein, If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1934-35) (3:42): MP3
  11. William Carlos Willliams, "The Defective Record" (1942) (0:28): MP3
  12. Hannah Weiner, from Clairvoyant Journal, performed by Weiner, Sharon Mattlin & Rochelle Kraut (2001) (6:12): MP3

Selected by Charles Bernstein (read more about his choices here)

PennSound Daily Subscribe in a reader Viewing entries

"Talking About David Antin," 2018

Posted 1/13/2025
Antin's "Sky Poem," 1987

Today we're highlighting "Talking About David Antin," an event featuring Eleanor Antin, Charles Bernstein, Julien Bismuth, and Ellen Zweig, which took place at New York's Artists Space on March 27, 2018.

Artists Space Director Jay Sanders provided introductory comments for the two-hour event, which featured individual talks by the aforementioned friends and colleagues, followed by a half-hour collaborative Q&A session. As the venue's blurb for the event notes, "David Antin's influential work as a poet and artist led him to develop the hybridized format of 'talk poems' in the 1970s, whereby he would compose literary texts in an improvised, conversational manner in a public setting." Those assembled offer up "performances and interventions" that pay tribute to his prodigious, "multidimensional literary and artistic output."

You can enjoy video and audio versions of this event on PennSound's David Antin author page, which is home to forty years' worth of recordings highlighting his singular talents, which are sorely missed.

In Memoriam: Richard Foreman (1937-2024)

Posted 1/12/2025

This week the world said farewell to groundbreaking playwright and founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater founder Richard Foreman, who passed away at the age of 87 on January 4th. Our own Charles Bernstein broke the news on his Jacket2 commentary page and has used the post to compile links to obituaries and tributes to Foreman.

"We have lost one of the most original and important theater artists of the last century," wrote Oskar Eustis, — artistic director of New York's Public Theater, with which Foreman had a long association — before concluding "He represented, for many, the model of what a committed downtown New York artist could be. He leaves a huge hole in our world." Helen Shaw echoed this sense of loss in The New Yorker, observing that with Foreman's passing, "an era came to an end." "You might define that era as a time of American aesthetic swagger, when artists such as Foreman, Mabou Mines, Meredith Monk, and Robert Wilson enjoyed international attention, helping make late-twentieth-century New York a performance mecca. Or you might think of it as the era of cheap Manhattan housing, gone now, when artists could afford to pour their often unpaid labor into hugely effortful collaborative projects," she continues. "Maybe you’d call it the era of downtown. But to me, and to many others, a whole half century was just . . . the era of Richard Foreman." Finally, Artforum hailed Foreman as one "who lifted up fresh voices as regularly and with as much gusto as he penned wild new plays—more than fifty, in all" and cited his award wins ("seven Obie awards [...] three of them for Best Play of the Year") as "the fruits of his fertile imagination and fearless devotion to plunging into untested waters, dragging his audiences with him."

PennSound's Richard Foreman author page is a treasure trove spanning nearly fifty years, with a wide variety of materials, including complete recordings of many of his plays along with readings, interviews, talks, panel discussions, supplemental materials, and much more. For those looking for a few potential avenues into such an immense archive, may we make a few suggestions? There's no better starting point than Foreman's three-part appearance on Bernstein's Close Listening radio program, which features the two in conversation for nearly a half hour, then two segments of Foreman reading from his prose works and plays, respectively. Another worthy option is Henry Hills' short film King Richard, described as follows:

A charming yet revealing interview on the set by pre-teen protagonist Emma Bee Bernstein is interwoven with footage focusing on the periphery of a recent production — the elaborate set design and lighting, the non-speaking supporting cast (the so-called "stage crew") with their frantic movement patterns, typical props and recurrent imagery, all shot & edited in a disruptive manner to mimetically compensate for the loss of actual presence.

Hills said of the film, "Curators don't seem to get this piece. I don't understand because I find it fantastic and endlessly interesting. This is my most misunderstood work in years!"

Speaking of Hills, surveying the work collected on Foreman's PennSound page in her New Yorker piece, Helen Shaw offers the opinion that "The best one to start with, I think, is Henry Hills's extraordinary 2010 film of Astronome, which feels like a Kabbalistic ritual sped up into a panic attack." Finally, Foreman was also a frequent guest on Leonard Schwartz's long-running radio program Cross Cultural Poetics, appearing on a half-dozen episodes between 2004 and 2009, and one can track his evolution during this period across each visit. You can find all of the aforementioned recordings, along with a great deal more, here.

We'll give the final word to Bernstein, who, announcing the death of his close friend offered this simple summation: "His memory, and the memory of his work, is a blessing for all who had the pleasure to experience it."

William Carlos Williams Burns the Christmas Greens

Posted 1/6/2025

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.

Want to read more? Visit the PennSound Daily archive.

Search PennSound

New at PennSound