Bruce Andrews

New at PennSound (site link for these recordings)

a series of talks I curated in 1988 at The New School (New York) and collected in The Politics of Poetic Form, Roof Books (1990)

series curated and moderated by Charles Bernstein

Bruce Andrews
We'd just come to the party after Anne and Tonya's reading. Bruce'd just turned 60 on April 1. ... The Iraq war was five years old.

PennSound has replaced the low-res version of these tapes, so now possible to see in full-screen. The program took place at the Whitney's Philip Morris space, across from Grand Central terminal in New York.

In this 2001 reading, Bruce Andrews gives a “half an hour tour through the ten planetary bodies” of Lip Service, his recasting of Dante’s Paradiso.

Bruce Andrews
Segue Series at Double Happiness, New York City, April 7, 2001
Introduction by Brian Kim Stefans and Reading (from Lip Service, 2001):

from “Earth”:

• from “Earth 1” (“DEAR …” to “get over you circumlocution for Paradise”)

from “Moon”:

• from “Moon 2” (“And this” to “becomes a sexual part.”)
• from “Moon 6” (“But I’m jealous of your idiotic sleek smooth operator” to “declension of possessions in heat.”)
• from “Moon 9” (“Hell is psychology:” to “the rehabilitation of failure, make me fall.”)
• from “Moon 10” (“Why don’t you get” to “pretty crumbleable.”)

from “Mercury”:

• from “Mercury 6” (“Freedom of information act’s controversial vendetta” to “on your breath;”)
• from “Mercury 9” (“dressed to detoxify pliable dissection’s disobedience –” to “pride in bodystocking diaspora.”)
  

Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, and Ron Silliman’s tape for an unrealized transcript captures a wealth of improvisatory high-level thinking about particulars of contemporary American class structure and poetry. The result manifests a sustained thread about social formations in contemporary American poetry with strong relevance for the present. Near the end, a phone call is received from Ray DiPalma clarifying details about the group reading of their collectively authored LEGEND four days later.

Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, and Ron Silliman
Bernstein’s apartment, New York City, March 6, 1981
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

This photograph of Bruce Andrews, Michael Lally, and Ray DiPalma was taken by Elizabeth DiPalma in early September 1975, in Michael Lally's then Sullivan Street apartment. The print of the original photo, now among Ray DiPalma's papers at Yale, is 8"x10".  We at J2 are grateful to Ray DiPalma for making this reproduction available to us and our readers.

I just now listened (for what must be the third time overall) to a triple reading given by Andrews, Lally, and DiPalma together at the Ear Inn in New York on November 10, 1977. DiPalma read “Exile,” “It makes of nonsense,” and “I am in the mountains,’ and also a 4-minute section from The Birthday Notations. Andrews read mostly from Moebius (published as a chapbook much later, in 1993); one of these Moebius poems became the focus of an episode of PoemTalk ("Center").  As for what Lally read that night, I'm sorry to say that PennSound's Lally page needs work; it's not clear which recording is the November '77 reading (we'll work on fixing it).

One day, on the street, Bruce Andrews found several thousands of pages of scripts from the soap opera, As the World Turns. He then created an untitled piece we might call “This Is the 20th Century” (using its first line). It was apparently written to serve as a preface or blurb for a book by Johanna Drucker (Dark Decade). Andrews uses phrases from the TV scripts and also some language from Drucker. He read this stray-ish piece at an Ear Inn reading in 1994. Here is the recording — from PennSound's Bruce Andrews page where this '94 reading has been segmented (thanks to the talented Jenny Lesser). The blurb did not appear on or in Drucker's Dark Decade and remains unpublished.