Clark Coolidge's PennSound page is one I happily recommend. I think my favorite set of recordings there is from his March 2000 reading at the University of California at Santa Cruz, hosted by Peter Gizzi. Peter's introduction — also among the recordings — is itself a fine introduction to Coolidge's life and importance to contemporary poetics. After the reading Coolidge took a few questions. Someone asked about burn-out (a writer reaching the end of writing) and Coolidge responded by speaking of Kerouac's line, Where pain don't take you by surprise. Coolidge discusses Kerouac's line and Kerouac, and then he re-reads the poem in which Kerouac's idea occurs. The Coolidge-Kerouac connection is edifying. Here's the recording. And here is Coolidge's essay on Kerouac's sound or “babble flow,” which I ask my students to read. Here's a sampling of the babble flow: "Black black black black bling bling bling bling black black black black bling bling bling bling black black black black bling bling bling...." The essay was first published in the January/February 1995 issue of American Poetry Review.
screenshot of video of Robert Creeley reading at CUE in 2005
The recording of this reading was segmented into thirteen poems just yesterday. Go here to see the special PennSound page devoted to this event:
When I Think (2:22): MP3 War (0:59): MP3 Talking (1:08): MP3 Paul (1:49): MP3 Old Song (0:53): MP3 Oh, do you remember (2:22): MP3 Mediterranean I (1:17): MP3 Mediterranean II (1:39): MP3 Jumping with Jackson (1:23): MP3 Shimmer (4:01): MP3 Sad Walk (1:32): MP3 The Red Flower (2:54): MP3 Old Story from The Diary of Francis Kilver (1:13): MP3
Robert Creeley and son Will (photo by Bruce Jackson)
Will Creeley sent us at PennSound this great note after hearing a PoemTalk episode about one of his father's poems:
I saw word of this latest episode via PennSound's excellent & useful Twitter feed, and figured it was a good opportunity to say thank you again to Al, Charles and everyone at PennSound & Kelly Writers House for taking in our big cardboard boxes and digitizing the reel-to-reel recordings inside with such care and precision.
Harry Mathews came to the University of Pennsylvania to give a performance/talk on February 26, 1997, an event hosted by the “Friends of the Library” group, which is an open-minded organization the library's supporters and external overseers. Ruth and Marvin Sackner (Penn alumni) are close to the staff of the library, and have collaborated from time to time on exhibitions of concrete, visual, and sound poetry and also of artists' books. I attended Mathews's 1997 reading but cannot quite remember how it came about: I'm guessing that Bob Perelman, the Sackners', and very possibly Dan Traister (the brilliant and super-eclectic special collections librarian) were all involved. Someone had the forethought to record the event. The sound isn't perfect, especially during the Q&A. Nonetheless, the newly segmented reading is certainly worth a listen.
On January 29, 1992, David Bromige read a great many short pieces at a reading he gave at Buffalo. The recording has long been available at Bromige's PennSound page, but today for the first time it has been segmented. The segmentations are, as I say, quite new, so if readers and listeners have suggestions for improvement or correction, please by all means pass them along to me (afilreis [at] jacket2.org) and we will apply the fix. PennSound is, to say the least, an ongoing and interative process. Here now are the poems Bromige read that night:
We at PennSound are pleased to present a segmented recording of George ’s May 3, 1972, reading at San Francisco State University. The recording was then broadcast on KPFA (Berkeley) on June 2, 1972. Follow this link to PennSound’s George Oppen author page. The readings are presented in chronological order, beginning with our earliest recording dated 1963.
We at PennSound have segmented Jennifer Moxley's reading in the Segue Series at the Bowery Poetry Club (New York), October 6, 2007. Click here for links to the recordings - the complete reading and individual poems by title.
My foreword to Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, just out from Routledge, which appeared in the March Harper's. Most closely related to PennSound, see an article by Michael Hennessey on the Giorno Poetry Systems and also Jesper Olsson on the poetics of the tape recorder.
Happily, we inaugurate Jacket2. For all the complexity of the work in poetry and poetics you’ll read on these screens, what we’re doing here is I think explained rather simply. We want to preserve what John Tranter has done with Jacket in its first forty issues, and to a significant extent — although in a somewhat new mode and a somewhat different context — continue and extend it. The new mode? A site pushing technically past what’s been called 2.0, with all the vaunted interoperabilities: collaborative editing and rostering of new articles; a rotation of three-months-each guest commentators, able themselves to post contemporaneous responses to various poetics scenes they “cover”; a means of laying out features that enables readers to see at once all diverse elements of materials and responses to a single poet or topic as gathered by a guest editor; an image gallery for uncluttered viewing of many images associated with an article or feature; podcast series (such as PoemTalk and Into the Field) both streamable right on the page and downloadable for free; video players both inline and linked; a Reissues department for making otherwise inaccessible archival material available in full digital facsimile; advanced searching through both new Jacket2 pieces and every single article, review, and announcement ever published in old Jacket; and seamless server-side linked cross-relations between critical responses written for J2 about readings and recordings on one hand and, on the other, all the digital audio (and video) stored in the vast archive known as PennSound. Even as we just get started, dig around and you’ll find a great deal here — and tons of potential.
Coolidge on Kerouac