Some new PennSound singles, via Robert Creeley tapes.
Peter Schjeldahl Two readings from the New Yorker art critic, from before he was an art critic. Both readings are from around 1973 and are about 15 minutes each MP3 MP3
Warren Tallman Two essay by the Vancouver critic and key figure for New American Poetry and Tish: September: A Necessary Politics of Stan Persky, introduction by Robin Blaser (1978) (1 hour): MP3 Treatise on Alcohol (1979) (2 hours): MP3
Fielding Dawson Three readings by the Black Mountain-associated fiction writer on a new PennSound page
Last year City Lights published a new edition of McClure's 1964 Ghost Tantras. This early work of McClure's is composed in a partially invented vocabulary that he calls "beast language" (guttaral, expressive), which brings to mind Khlebnikov's zaum "Incantation by Laughter" (McClure references Mayakovsky). McClure wanted to find a level of language that invoked our animality and the recordings he made with lions in 1964 and 1966 remain powerful poetic documents.
This mp3 is a 1964 reading of "Tantra" 49 from that book; the recording was made by Bruce Conner. (4:07): MP3 The better known video, also a reading of "Tantra" 49, is an excerpt from a 1966 episode of Richard O. Moore’s television series U.S.A. Poetry.
PennSound has located a rare sound recording of Tom Weathelry, reading in Grand Valley Michigan in July of 1971. (21;07): MP3 Weatherly reads the complete serial poem "MAUMAU AMERICAN CANTOS" for the first ten minutes of the reading (text here); after that he reads various poems, including “Lady Fox” from Thumprint but nothing else from that book or MAUMAU.
Tom Weatherly -- full texs of these powerful, brilliant, often volatile (and distressingly unacknowledged) books at Eclipse: MAUMAU AMERICAN CANTOS (Corinth Books, 1970, via Eclipse) Thumbprint (Telgraph Books, 1971, via Eclpise)
