Commentaries - April 2011

Johanna Drucker on Close Listening

@ PennSound

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

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

The Son of Chico Dusty

Bernstein's Web Log now at Jacket2

Bernstein@J2
Bernstein@J2

I am putting on a new Jacket: New "web log" posts will be right here at Jacket 2 <https://jacket2.org/commentary/charles-bernstein>, while archives of posts from previous years will be accessible from link on the sidebar.

Dear PennSound

Listening to letters

image by Noah Saterstrom
(image by Noah Saterstrom)

I’ll begin with a playlist of PennSound recordings having to do with letters. While listening to this playlist on repeat, I was interested in the ways the tracks expanded, derailed, parodied, critiqued, or otherwise complicated the idea of intimate address. The addressees include imagined ancestors, public figures, an owl, various abstractions and inanimate objects, as well as the workings of language itself. Recently I’ve been listening to this playlist on random and I keep noticing new connections and contrasts between tracks.

J2 launches

A preface from the publisher

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.