PoemTalk

Bernstein on PoemTalk

Charles Bernstein

Allen Ginsberg Sings Blake
Tuli Kupferberg
Vachel Lindsay
Jackson Mac Low
Akilah Oliver: transcription
Charles Olson
Maggie O'Sullivan
Ezra Pound
George Quasha
Naomi Replansky
Armand Schwerner
Wallace Stevens
Hannah Weiner
William Carlos Williams
Louis Zukofsky (with transcription)

Composition of life, as life (PoemTalk #175)

Joan Retallack, 'The Poethical Wager'

PoemTalk
From left: erica kaufman, Joan Retallack, Laynie Browne

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PoemTalk went on the road, along with PoemTalk’s editor Zach Carduner, our tech guru pal Chris Martin (Zach on video, Chris on audio), and our colleague Laynie Browne. We wandered up some PA/NJ/NY highways into the mid-Hudson Valley, landing at Annandale-on-Hudson, the home of Bard College, where we decamped with all our gear and were joined by Joan Retallack, erica kaufman, and Laynie.

August 26, 2022

Damned fruitflies (PoemTalk #156)

Steve Dalachinsky, 'with shelter gone'

PoemTalk
Photo credit: Robert Yarra

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Al Filreis, with help from Zach Carduner in our virtual Kelly Writers House control room, convened Bonny Finberg, Julien Poirier, and Jake Marmer to talk about a poem by Steve Dalachinsky. The poem is titled “with shelter gone,” and our recording of Dalachinsky performing it is clipped from a video documenting a reading that took place at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City in 2008. The reading was hosted by Jake Marmer.

January 21, 2021

Worker's tanka (PoemTalk #139)

Six tankas by Christine Yvette Lewis, Lorraine Garnett, and Davidson Garrett of the Worker Writers School

PoemTalk

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This episode of PoemTalk was cocurated by Mark Nowak and Al Filreis. In it we discuss with Meg Pendoley and Husnaa Hashim six short poems following the tanka form. The tankas were composed by three poets, two tankas each by Christine Yvette Lewis, Lorraine Garnett, and Davidson Garrett. The poets are members of the Worker Writers School, which meets regularly in New York City. The recordings we hear in the episode were made by Brooklyn-based filmmaker Zardon Richardson at a meeting of the workshop on February 2, 2019. With our program notes, we make available the films of these poets performing their poems.

August 26, 2019

Wai Chee Dimock, 'Education Populism'

Al Filreis

Wai Chee Dimock, editor of PMLA, published her editor’s comment during fall 2017 on the “education populism” she discerned in several affiliated projects hosted at the Kelly Writers House — among them, PennSound, PoemTalk, ModPo, and the programs offered in the old house at 3805 Locust Walk itself. A PDF copy of the article is available HERE.

A PoemTalk retrospective (PoemTalk #100)

PoemTalkers each respond to two episodes

PoemTalk
From left to right: William J. Harris, Tracie Morris, erica kaufman, Steve McLaughlin, Herman Beavers, Maria Damon, and Charles Bernstein.

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To celebrate the one hundredth episode of PoemTalk — the series began in 2007 and is ongoing — producer and host Al Filreis convened seven poet-critics who had participated in previous episodes: Herman Beavers, Maria Damon, William J. Harris, erica kaufman, Tracie Morris, Steve McLaughlin, and Charles Bernstein. These seven were asked to listen again to the series and choose two episodes that in particular stimulated new thinking or the desire to revise, restate, reaffirm, assess, and/or commend.

May 5, 2016

Additional notes on Will Alexander's 'Compound Hibernation'

Tracie Morris

Erica Hunt sets this reading up by calling Alexander a metaphysician. One of her students said “like Jimi Hendrix.” Hunt says yes and also Aimé Césaire, Jayne Cortez. How are they all metaphysicians? What permutation of Black Magic is this political postmodern grimoire? What is it evoking?

Just before reading my bullet points and notes on Will Alexander’s poem, I read a story, saw a video that speculated on how Mars looked before it lost its atmosphere. There are speculations about how this happened, how it lost its magnetic poles, but it went from earthlike with seas and air and clouds to a rusty tomb, where our small land robots search for evidence of microfossils from billions of years ago. I thought about this kind of sifting from a whole to atomic, from the big bang’s busting to dust.

April 8, 2014

Cole Swensen responds

PoemTalk

What follows is a response to PoemTalk #52 written by Cole Swensen, whose poem “If a Garden of Numbers” is discussed by Al Filreis, Ann Seaton, Gregory Djanikian and Michelle Taransky in that show.

I wanted to respond to the reading given to one of my poems in a recent number of PoemTalk. I was thrilled to hear that it was on the program because it’s such a wonderful series, but then I was disappointed to hear the actual discussion. It seemed dominated by Ann Seaton’s very particular agenda, which is an extremely important one, but not the only lens through which to look at 17th-century French gardens.

As Seaton herself stated, she was interested in “everything that wasn’t in the poem,” but because of that, what is in the poem never got addressed. Even its basic subject — the construction of the concept of nature by the sciences, which characterizes the modern world — wasn't discussed, nor was the dominant image in the poem, the golden section. And by extension, geometry as a whole, and with it, perspective, subject positioning, and the constitution of collective subjectivity were all left out. Discussing these, which are the agenda of the poem, might have opened the talk up to the critique attempted by many parts of the book.

PoemTalk commended in the "New York Times"

PoemTalk

Jacket2 and “PoemTalk” are recommended in a recent “What We're Reading” section of The New York Times.

Why apples can cause riots (PoemTalk #51)

Linh Dinh, "Eating Fried Chicken"

PoemTalk

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Linh Dinh playfully and bitterly engages food, war, and race in a poem called “Eating Fried Chicken.” The poem appeared in his book American Tatts, published by Chax in 2005. For PoemTalk’s 51st episode, Thomas Devaney, Susan Schultz (visiting from Hawai'i), and Leonard Schwartz (visiting from Olympia, Washington) joined Al Filreis to talk about this work of apparently straightforward address yet tonal complexity. 

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