Podcasts

General introduction to Oulipo in 15 minutes

by Harry Mathews

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In 1999 the Literature faculty and the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT invited Harry Mathews to present on Oulipo. The complete recording is available at Harry Mathews's PennSound page. And we have segmented the audio — making available separate links to audio recordings of his introduction, his remarks on the Oulipo group, a brief Q&A session, and several readings of lipograms and N+7 writing.

PennSound 10 years after

Featuring Michael Hennessey's recollections of his own work with the archive

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Transcription of PoemTalk #47 on Rosmarie Waldrop

'Shorter American Memory of the Declaration of Independence'

Eilish Hansen has created a draft transcription of episode #47 of PoemTalk. We are making this available now and will improve it over time.—A.F.

Host: Al Filreis
Guests: Jessica Lowenthal, Julia Block, and Johanna Drucker

John Ashbery explicates

PennSound podcast #18

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Rare it is that John Ashbery explains one of his poems. But, in a radio interview in 1966, he did that just. He read “These Lacustrine Cities” and then went line by line offering various sorts of explanations - paraphrase, sources for phrases and words, a sense of the process of composition. Here is a PennSound podcast, the 18th in our series, featuring this recording, which aired on WKCR. The podcast is 18 minutes long.

Gone is the word as word (PoemTalk #72)

Bob Cobbing, 'Portrait of Robin Crozier'

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Bob Cobbing (1920–2002) — sound poet, visual and concrete poet, DIY printer, and active member of an alternative socio-poetic community in the UK — insisted that there’s no use in adding to poetry what’s already there. In “Some Statements on Sound Poetry” (1969) he wrote: “Gone is the word as the word, though the word may still be used as sound or shape.” And he added: “Poetry now resides in other elements.” In this episode, Al Filreis is joined by sound poet Jaap Blonk, phonotextualist Steve McLaughlin, and experimental archivist Danny Snelson as they approach a single work by Cobbing, “Portrait of Robin Crozier,” in an effort to identify generally those “other elements.”