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The 27th podcast in the “PennSound Podcasts” series features an anthology of eight introductions to Robert Creeley, culled from PennSound's many recordings of Creeley’s readings over the years. The introductions are, in order: by Paul Carroll (Chicago, May 15, 1961), at the Berkeley Poetry Conference (Berkeley, July 22, 1965), by Ed Saunders (New York, October 24, 1966), in the Woodberry Poetry Room of Harvard (Cambridge, October 27, 1966), at MoCA Los Angeles in 1983, by Reed Bye at Naropa (Boulder, July 1984), by Diane Wakoski (Washington, DC, 1984), and by Susan Howe (Buffalo, October 11, 1996).
This PennSound podcast is hosted and introduced by Amaris Cuchanski and edited by Nick DeFina. Be sure to listen to other PennSound podcasts. And find us on iTunes by typing “PennSound” in your iTunes music store searchbox.
Susan Howe's "Thiefth"
Susan Howe’s “Thorow” and “Melville's Marginalia” performed by Howe along with music and sounds composed by David Grubb. These recordings are available on PennSound. Click here.
Thiefth was the first collaboration between Howe and musician and composer Grubbs. The two were brought together when the Fondation Cartier proposed a collaborative performance. Grubbs had been an ardent reader of Howe’s for more than a decade, and the opportunity to work with Howe’s poetry and her voice immediately intrigued. In late 2003, the two set about to create performance versions of “Thorow” and “Melville's Marginalia,” two of Howe’s longer poems. Drawing from the journals of Sir William Johnson and Henry David Thoreau, "Thorow" both evokes the winter landscape that surrounds Lake George in upstate New York, and explores collisions and collusions of historical violence and national identity. "Thorow" is an act of second seeing in which Howe and Grubbs engage the lake's glittering, ice surface as well as the insistent voices that haunt an unseen world underneath. “Melville's Marginalia” is an approach to an elusive and allusive mind through Herman Melville’s own reading and the notations he made in some of the books he owned and loved. The collaging and mirror-imaging of words and sounds are concretions of verbal static, visual mediations on what can and cannot be said.