Caroline Bergvall

Caroline Bergvall is a London-based, French-Norwegian writer and cross-disciplinary artist working across media, languages, and art forms. Bergvall is best known for her multilingual poetics, her work around new literacies, cultural belonging, and accented practices, and for her investment in radicalizing writing’s modes of dissemination and access. Projects and research alternate between published poetic pieces and performance-oriented, often sound-driven writing projects. Her books are noted for their combination of performative, visual, and literary textualities. You can listen to a variety of recordings of Bergvall on her PennSound author page.

By this author

Excerpt from 'Goan Atom' (part 1)

Excerpt from 'Goan Atom (part 1)'

BODY & SIGN

A form of address

Speaking in Tongues

Handwriting as a Form of Protest

The Summer Tale (Deus Hic, 1)

Short aside to 'The Franker Tale'

The Franker Tale (Deus Hic, 2)

The surprise of love and writing

Four wheels and a broken glass

A conversation with Caroline Bergvall

A cat in the throat

Speaking in tongues

Recently in Jacket2

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

Anna de Noailles, translated by Chris Mustazza

Charles Bernstein

Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) was one of the most famous French poets of her day. While her work has mostly fallen out of fashion, I’ve opted to translate this poem because it was one of (if not the) first poems ever recorded to sound by a female poet. Her recording at the Sorbonne, made in the early 1920s, causes this ars poetica to realign itself with the performance of the poem rather than the written text. It speaks to pertinent questions of posthumous reception and the archive, through a light, playful, sexual mode: the nachlass as seduction. --Chris Mustazza