Podcasts

Dead to me (PoemTalk #114)

Claudia Rankine, 'Don't Let Me Be Lonely'

PoemTalk

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Simone White, Kyoo Lee, and Gabriel Ojeda-Sague joined Al Filreis to discuss a passage from Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. The discussion follows Rankine's extrordinarily synthesis of various huge issues: illness and death, memory loss and the misery of forgetting, the ubiquitous frame-setting of television, incarceration, police violence, useful and useless language, antidepressants, and the poem as a social assertion of “here.”

July 15, 2017

Christy Davids interviews erica lewis

PennSound podcast #56

PennSound podcasts
erica lewis (left) and Christy Davids (right).

Christy Davids visited Kelly Writers House on October 24, 2016, to talk with erica lewis, who was passing through Philadelphia to give a reading in Jason Mitchell’s Frank O’Hara’s Last Lover series in between stops in Pittsburgh and Brooklyn.

June 17, 2017

Truth flies (PoemTalk #113)

Robin Blaser, 'A Bird in the House'

PoemTalk

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Brian Teare, Jed Rasula, and Kristin Prevallet joined Al Filreis to talk about Robin Blaser’s “A Bird in the House.” The poem dates from the late 1980s or possibly the early 1990s. The text of the poem is now available at the Poetry Foundation. Blaser’s PennSound page includes two performances — one from a reading he gave in Buffalo in September of 1993, the second from a visit to the Writers Institute in Albany on October 26, 1994. The version we hear for our discussion is the one made in Albany; we chose this in part because there Blaser set up the poem with a short introduction. The group marvels at how Blaser manages to take the idea of Other (that which is, like the bird in a house, “otherous”) into an expanded field that is nonetheless domestic.

June 5, 2017

Listen to everything you love disappear (PoemTalk #112)

Patrick Rosal, 'Instance of an Island'

PoemTalk
Patrick Rosal.

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Ross Gay, Josephine Park, and Herman Beavers joined Al Filreis to talk about Patrick Rosal’s “Instance of an Island.” The poem was collected in Rosal’s book Brooklyn Antediluvian (Persea, 2016). Our recording of Rosal performing the poem comes from a Wexler Studio reading done at the Kelly Writers House in March of 2016, just weeks before the book was published. This episode of PoemTalk, number 112 in our ongoing podcast series, is being made available in two versions — the usual audio, downloadable from this Jacket2 page, through iTunes, and on the Poetry Foundation site; and an uncut video recording (see below).

May 4, 2017

Trish Salah with Christy Davids

PennSound podcast #57

PennSound podcasts
Photo of Trish Salah (left) by Kaspar Saxena, courtesy of Cordite Poetry Review.

Christy Davids and Trish Salah visited Kelly Writers House on February 10, 2017, for a reading and conversation.

April 25, 2017