Rudy Burckhardt

Rudy & Jacob Burckhardt films on PennSound Cinema

The Automotive Story, 1954
A Cittadura Documentary

Rudy Burckhardt, Director
Jane Freilicher, Narration
Kenneth Koch, Text
Debussy, Poulenc, and Scriabin, Piano Music
Frank O'Hara, Music Player

Read the full transcription of a 1976 radio interview with Rudy Burckhardt about Automotive Story at Jacket Magazine.

Rudy Burckhardt Films: 1936-1999

Charles Bernstein

A three DVD boxed set of Rudy Burckhardt's films has recently been released by Microcinema (the web page has a detailed summary of each film).

Burckhardt is well known for his cityscape photographs and what's best in the films is an extension of what is great in the photos: the street signage, the criss-crossing motion of people walking in the street, the buzz and hum of the sidewalk. The DVD collection also includes a selection of Burckhardt's zany narrative films, starring Edwin Denby, John Ashbery, Mimi Gross, Alex Katz, Neil Welliver, Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Paul Bowles, Aaron Copland, John Latouche, Fairfield Porter, Anne Waldman, Virgil Thomson, Yoshiko Chuma, Grazia Della-Terza, Douglas Dunn, Harry Sheppard, and Red Grooms, among others, and music or texts by Joe Brainard, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and Ashbery.

Recently in Jacket2

Cry me a makar

On translating Lorca into Shaetlan

Christie Williamson

“Only if you want to, and it might not work, but do you think you could translate some of the poems into Shetlandic?” I’d been writing poems fairly consistently in Shaetlan for two or three years by this point, but my primary creative outlet remained theatre. Still, it was too good an idea not to pursue. I knew Shaetlan and knew how to write a decent poem in it. The Garcia Lorca poems whose English translations we’d been giving voice to were extraordinary so, why not? What could possibly go wrong?

“I’ve got a suggestion for you. Can I buy you a glass of wine?” The answer to that question is always yes. We were in rehearsal for Lorca’s Shadow, a devised theatre piece by Moving Parts Theatre Company, and this suggestion from Corinne Harris, the play’s director, was to change the course of my life.

December 5, 2024

Every flower a reminder (PoemTalk #202)

Harryette Mullen, "Chasing Dirt"

PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

November 20, 2024

The &vs. (andverse) of the Gurlesque

Becca Klaver

Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.

The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.

November 19, 2024