Podcasts

Something in the way (PoemTalk #126)

Amiri Baraka, 'Something in the Way of Things (In Town)'

From left: Aldon Nielsen, Tyrone Williams, and William J. Harris.

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Tyrone Williams, Aldon Nielsen, and William J. Harris joined Al Filreis to talk before a live audience about Amiri Baraka’s poem “Something in the Way of Things (In Town).” The printed poem has been published in several versions; one version can be read below. It is best known as a cut on The Roots’ Phrenology album (2002). Baraka came to the lower Manhattan studio where The Roots were recording some of the album’s tracks; there Baraka performed the poem as the band backed him. The result can be heard here.

Sue Landers with Christy Davids

PennSound podcast #59

Christy Davids (left) and Sue Landers (right). Photo of Sue Landers by Natasha D
Christy Davids (left) and Sue Landers (right). Photo of Sue Landers by Natasha Dwyer.

Christy Davids returned to the Wexler Studio at Kelly Writers House earlier this year to chat with Sue Landers, whose 2016 book Franklinstein represents a documentary-poetic engagement with the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. At the beginning of Franklinstein, Landers writes that the project began as a “monster” made out of language from Benjamin Franklin and Gertrude Stein.

Fallout from cooling (PoemTalk #125)

Erica Baum, 'Dog Ear'

Detail of 'Enclosing' in Erica Baum's 'Dog Ear.'

Christine NelsonDavy Knittle and Erica Baum joined Al Filreis to talk about Erica’s Dog Ear, a book of photograph-poems, in which each poem is a meticulous reproduction of a dog-eared page of a mass-market paperback photographed to isolate the small, diagonally bisected squares or rectangles of text.

Our endless ear (PoemTalk #124)

Jack Kerouac, 'Old Angel Midnight'

From left to right: J. C. Cloutier, Michelle Taransky, and Clark Coolidge.

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J. C. Cloutier, Michelle Taransky, and Clark Coolidge joined Al Filreis to talk about Jack Kerouac’s Old Angel Midnight, a sprawling work of prose poetry consuming forty pages of the Library of America Kerouac: Collected Poems. A recording of Kerouac performing the first page is available here. His model was Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Up late in the Low East Side, he listened for sounds coming through a tenement window from the court below and made words of them. Such making is the plot of the book. The effort sometimes results in what Clark Coolidge has called “babble flow.” Old Angel Midnight is an interlinguistic record of voices augmented by “neologisms, mental associations, puns and wordmixes” and “nonlanguages.”

Bugging the circles (PoemTalk #123)

David Antin, ‘War’

On March 26, 2003, before an audience gathered for an event sponsored by the SUNY Buffalo Poetics Program, David Antin performed a fifty-minute talk-poem called “War.” It seems to have been a tense gathering. The second US incursion into Iraq had begun six days earlier, led by George W. Bush, who features prominently in Antin’s talk that evening. After delivering “War” this once, Antin apparently never transcribed it — nor apparently then, in his usual mode, lineated this talk-poem. Did he not sufficiently value it, then or later? Is it perhaps too unlike his usual talking performance? Perhaps it too directly referred to the political problem of the moment in relation to the poet’s work?