Close Listening

Ear turned toward the emergent

Close Listening with Myung Mi Kim

Myung Mi Kim at the Kelly Writers House. Photo by Arielle Brousse.

Editorial note: Myung Mi Kim (b. 1957) is the author of Penury (2009), Commons (2002), Dura (1999), The Bounty (1996), and Under Flag (1991). She teaches in the poetics program at SUNY–Buffalo. The following has been adapted from a Close Listening conversation recorded March 15, 2007, at Studio 111 at the University of Pennsylvania with the engineering assistance of Molly Braverman. Listen to the audio program here. Charles Bernstein hosted and produced the show, which includes questions and comments from Pauline Baniqued, Julie Charbonneir, Nicholas Mayer, Heather Gorn, Sarah Yeung, and Jonathan Liebembuk (as well as Adam Tabor and Damien Bright). The interview was transcribed by Michael Nardone. — Katie L. Price

February 19, 2012

Joel Kuszai on Close Listening

Charles Bernstein

Appearing on Close Listening with Charles Bernstein, September 12, 2011

Program One: Reading from Accidency

complete reading (24:55): MP3

Program Two: Conversation

complete conversation (43:19): MP3

Sounding the Word: Foreword to Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (Routledge)

from Harper's, March 2011

Charles Bernstein

pdf

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.

Jerome McGann on Close Listening

Charles Bernstein

Jerome McGann
Appearing on Close Listening with Charles Bernstein
Kelly Writers House, April 4, 2011

Johanna Drucker on Close Listening

@ PennSound

Charles Bernstein

Drucker by Bernstein — photo © 2006 Charles Bernstein

complete reading (28:41): MP3
complete conversation with Charles Bernstein(29:47): MP3
Kelly Writers House, March 14, 2011

Joan Retallack on Close Listening

@ PennSound

Charles Bernstein

Joan Retallack: cover of How to Do Things with Words

Joan Retallack on Close Listening
February 26, 2011
reading (27:04) MP3
conversation with Charles Bernstein & Al Filreis (32:19) MP3

Recently in Jacket2

Making the invisible visible

Jennifer Scappettone and Tonya Foster in conversation, 2010

Tonya Foster

Jennifer Scappettone

Editorial note: The following conversation has been adapted from an Emergency Reading Series event hosted by Julia Bloch and Sarah Dowling on January 21, 2010, at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It was transcribed by Michael Nardone and edited for publication; additional commentary by the speakers is included below in brackets. The conversation, between Jennifer Scappettone and Tonya Foster, explores topics ranging from Disneyfication to the Greek chorus.

September 21, 2018

Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas (14)

Emily Dickinson, 'A Letter to the Master,' lineated

Jerome Rothenberg

[NOTE. I published this earlier in a nonlineated prose rendering in America a Prophecy, coedited with George Quasha in the early 1970s. Well-enough known as one of three Dickinson letters addressed to an unidentified “Master,” this version, following closely her handwritten draft, emerges (for me at least) as a near-projective forerunner to what would become a dominant form of North American experimental composition a century after her own writing. The result anyway is based on the transcription in The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin and published by Amherst College Press in 1986. It will likely be the version used by me and Heriberto Yépez in our transnational anthology of North and South American poetry, now in preparation for University of California Press. That the full-blown sense of thwarted intimacy here is both surprising and overwhelming is also to be noted, as is the quirky and volatile language that connects the voice behind the letter to that of her better-known poems. (J.R.)]

Summer 1861

A very serious joke beneath the (relatively soon to be) exploding sun

Review of Joseph Harrington's 'Of Some Sky'

Matt Reeck

“Lastly, there are birds — that other traditional poetic symbol of hope. ... Birds replace religious prophets. A group of crows is a murder; and, truth be told, crows are smart birds that work well in groups. (In crows, we trust.)” Image: Vincent Van Gogh, ‘Wheatfield with Crows’ (1890), via <a href= https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Wheatfield_with_crows_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg>Wikimedia Commons</a>. — “Lastly, there are birds — that other traditional poetic symbol of hope. ... Birds replace religious prophets. A group of crows is a murder; and, truth be told, crows are smart birds that work well in groups. (In crows, we trust.)” Image: Vincent Van Gogh, ‘Wheatfield with Crows’ (1890), via Wikimedia Commons.

Joseph Harrington’s first book of poetry, Things Come On, was both a memoir about his mother and a documentary of a time in American history. It was documentary in nature, if the document of history were subjected to aesthetic manipulations and personal refashioning. Of Some Sky, his new book, has a differently indeterminate generic structure: it asks the question of whether humor is possible in poetry whose subject is ecological collapse.