Commentaries - July 2007

A poet starting with X

My modern American poetry site is set up alphabetically. I’ve never had a link under “x.” The spoken word poet (“I have been involved in what is now called spoken word since 1982”) Emily XYZ wrote to me suggesting that I correct this omission, and so I have.

On recorded poetry: A discussion with Steve Evans

Does the ubiquity of recordings of poets reading their own poems change the way we teach modern and contemporary poetics? On April 23, 2007, I had a good conversation with Steven Evans about this in my office at the Writers House. Here is a slightly edited recording of that conversation: this link takes you directly to a downloadable mp3 file. Steve’s Lipstick of Noise site is subtitled “listening and linking to poetry audio files.” I visit the site at least twice weekly.

On Primo Levi's 'Gold'

At an event we called “7 Up on Gold” — featuring seven people speaking for seven minutes each about gold, the color or the element — I chose to speak about the chapter entitled “Gold” in Primo Levi’s brilliant book, The Periodic Table. I’ve taught the book a number of times in my course on the Holocaust.

My podcasts

I happily host two podcast series. One is PennSound podcasts, which features recordings from that vast archive of poetry recordings. The other series, Kelly Writers House podcasts, presents excerpts from various sorts of programs, events, seminars and discussions at the Writers House. Please listen and let me know what you think.

The very first news article about the Writers House (1995)


My former student Randi Feigenbaum was a big-wig at Penn’s student-run daily newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, at the time the Writers House at 3805 Locust Walk was just forming. It was in those weeks and months known as one of the “pilot” projects of the “Twenty-first-century Project for the Undergraduate Experience” at Penn. Randi’s news piece was published in the December 7, 1995, issue of the DP. It gives a pretty good sense of what we were trying to get started there. To this day, Randi is a big supporter of the Writers House.