When Charles Reznikoff was a guest on Susan Howe's radio show

Al Filreis

Recordings of Susan Howe's WBAI (NY)/Pacifica Radio programs are available at PennSound as the result of a collaboration with the Archive for New Poetry at the University of California, San Diego. Our digital copies were made from recordings housed at the archive. On May 13, 1975, Howe went on the air with her guest Charles Reznikoff and the outcome of this session was a show titled “Poems for the Jewish Holidays.” As of today, thanks to the work of Anna Zalokostas, PennSound is making this recording available in segments, one segment each for a poem or passage Reznikoff read, following Howe's introduction.

[] introduction by Susan Howe (1:11): MP3
[] Fable ["Inscriptions No. 50"] (0:36): MP3
[] “One of my sentinels, a tree” ["Inscriptions No. 3"] (0:11): MP3
[] “I have not even been in the fields” ["Rhythms II No. 1"] (0:13): MP3
[] “Blurred sight and trembling fingers” ["Inscriptions No. 48"] (0:18): MP3
[] “Heart and Clock” [excerpt, from "Separate Way No. 1"] (1:03): MP3
[] “Our nightingale, the clock” ["Jerusalem the Golden No. 61"] (0:12): MP3
[] “The clock” ["Jerusalem the Golden No. 62"] (0:12): MP3
[] “My hair was caught in the wheels of a clock” ["Jerusalem the Golden No. 63"] (0:08): MP3
[] “Hardly a breath of wind” ["Inscriptions No. 12"] (0:17): MP3
[] “After I had worked all day at what I earn my living” ["A Fifth Group of Verse No. 19"] (0:22): MP3
[] “Te Deum” ["Inscriptions No. 22"] (0:28): MP3
[] “The dogs that walk with me are now and here” ["Inscriptions No. 38"] (0:19): MP3
[] “God saw Adam in a town” ["A Fifth Group of Verse No. 17"] (0:18): MP3
[] “Look triumphantly” [from the original edition, "Rhythms No. 7"] (0:14): MP3
[] “It was in my heart to give her wine and dainties” ["Jerusalem the Golden No. 57"] (0:31): MP3
[] “The new janitor is a Puerto Rican” ["By the Well of Living and Seeing II, No. 10"] (1:48): MP3
[] “This Puerto Rican, just an ordinary laborer” ["By the Well of Living and Seeing I, No. 22"] (0:12): MP3
[] “During the Second World War, I was going home one night” ["By the Well of Living and Seeing II, No. 28"] (1:43): MP3
[] “Most of the stock in the hardware store” ["By the Well of Living and Seeing II, No. 13"] (2:01): MP3
[] “The Chinese girl in the waiting-room” ["By the Well of Living and Seeing II, No. 11"] (0:24): MP3
[] “Would I write a letter for him?” ["By the Well of Living and Seeing II, No. 3"] (1:53): MP3
[] “The company had advertised for men to unload a steamer across” ["Testimony I"] (2:07): MP3
[] “Amelia was just fourteen and out of the orphan asylum; at her first job” ["Testimony II"] (1:23): MP3
[] “Land of Refuge” [excerpt, from "New Nation" from "Separate Way No. 11"] (1:08): MP3
[] “Brief History” [excerpt, from "New Nation" from "Separate Way No. 11"] (0:39): MP3
[] “Brief History” [excerpt, from "New Nation" from "Separate Way No. 11"] (0:31): MP3
[] “A Citizen” ["A Fifth Group of Verse No. 10"] (0:21): MP3
[] “You are young and contemptuous” ["Inscriptions No. 5"] (0:12): MP3
[] “A well-phrased eulogy, a low-itched dirge” ["Inscriptions No. 25"] (0:31): MP3
[] “How grey you are! No, white!” ["Inscriptions No. 49"] (0:21): MP3
[] “Now it is cold: where the snow was melting” ["Autobiography: New York VI" from "Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down"] (1:13): MP3

November 27, 2011

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.