Articles - March 2013

A Belladonna* anthology

Podcast features seven readings from the series

erica kaufman and Rachel Levitsky.

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From the excitingly varied PennSound page hosting recordings from the Belladonna* reading series from 1999 to the present, PennSound podcasts now presents, for its twenty-eighth episode, an anthology of seven Belladonna* performances.  The seven are: erica kaufman, “A Conventional Hero” and “PS 54”; Rae Armantrout, “Seconds”; Lydia Davis, “City People”; Rachel Levitsky, “In the Wee Hours”; Sharon Mesmer, “Gait Signatures”; Tim Trace Peterson, “Bricky”; Jennifer Moxley, “Taking My Own Advice After Skylar.” 

The straight path gone astray (PoemTalk #64)

Caroline Bergvall, 'VIA'

Caroline Bergvall, Dante Alighieri

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Amaris Cuchanski, David Wallace, and Laynie Browne converged on the Writers House one day recently to talk about a remarkable performance piece (later text) by Caroline Bergvall, “VIA.”  In the piece, Bergvall intones forty-seven English translations of the opening tercet of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (1321): “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita.” She arranges the translations alphabetically according to first word, from “along” to “when,” reciting the translator’s name and date after each.  Our PoemTalkers discuss the poem’s pre-textual state as aural performance, the remarkable title which seems to connect every manner of issue and mode, the relative literary value and literary-historical place of individual verse translators, translation itself as inherently open, and, of course, the ur-relevance of Dante’s always-interpretable infernal foray into the experience of being lost in words.

Eight introductions to Creeley, 1961-1996

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The twenty-seventh 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 Sanders (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.

Kenneth Sherwood & Loss Pequeño Glazier on electronic poetics in 1995

From the LINEbreak series

Left, Kenneth Sherwood; right, Loss Pequeño Glazier

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In this episode of the LINEbreak series, co-editors of RIF/t, Loss Pequeño Glazier and Kenneth Sherwood, talk with Charles Bernstein about electronic publishing and the politics of editing the first online hypertext journal of poetry and poetics, RIF/t magazine. Their program was recorded in the Music Department at SUNY Buffalo in 1995. An audio recording of the full program (29 minutes) can be heard here: MP3

Daytime never ends (PoemTalk #63)

Laynie Browne, 'Daily Sonnets'

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PoemTalkers Jessica Lowenthal, Lee Ann Brown, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee gathered with Al Filreis to talk about five poems from Laynie Browne’s Daily Sonnets, which was published by Counterpath Press of Denver in 2007. We chose two of Browne’s “fractional sonnets,” two of the sonnets in which the talk of her children is picked up partly or wholly as lines of the poem, and one of her “personal amulet” sonnets.