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Transcription of PoemTalk #47 on Rosmarie Waldrop

'Shorter American Memory of the Declaration of Independence'

PoemTalk

Eilish Hansen has created a draft transcription of episode #47 of PoemTalk. We are making this available now and will improve it over time.—A.F.

Host: Al Filreis
Guests: Jessica Lowenthal, Julia Block, and Johanna Drucker

November 24, 2013

Gone is the word as word (PoemTalk #72)

Bob Cobbing, 'Portrait of Robin Crozier'

PoemTalk

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Bob Cobbing (1920–2002) — sound poet, visual and concrete poet, DIY printer, and active member of an alternative socio-poetic community in the UK — insisted that there’s no use in adding to poetry what’s already there. In “Some Statements on Sound Poetry” (1969) he wrote: “Gone is the word as the word, though the word may still be used as sound or shape.” And he added: “Poetry now resides in other elements.” In this episode, Al Filreis is joined by sound poet Jaap Blonk, phonotextualist Steve McLaughlin, and experimental archivist Danny Snelson as they approach a single work by Cobbing, “Portrait of Robin Crozier,” in an effort to identify generally those “other elements.”

November 19, 2013

Constrained to honor (PoemTalk #71)

Claude McKay, 'If We Must Die'

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Herman Beavers, Salamishah Tillet, and Kathy Lou Schultz joined PoemTalk producer and host Al Filreis to talk about Claude McKay’s widely anthologized sonnet, “If We Must Die” (1919).  Its content advocates counterviolence in response to racist violence; its form is the exquisitely constrained Shakespearean sonnet, aligned with English poetic mastery. Does pushing through this formal constraint bring McKay’s speaker toward freedom or fatedness? Does the sonnet as a formal choice befit a cultural inside or an outside?

October 7, 2013

On the convergence of war and wedding (PoemTalk #70)

Laura Mullen, 'Bride of the New Dawn'

PoemTalk

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Amy Paeth, Michelle Taransky, and Steve McLaughlin met up with PoemTalk’s host Al Filreis to talk about one of the poems in Laura Mullen’s book Enduring Freedom: A Little Book of Mechanical Brides (Otis Books, 2012). Enduring Freedom is a coherent project; its poems constitute a series — a number of approaches to the problem of war’s strange but also surprisingly obvious and true convergence with weddings (and wedding planning in particular). The poem we chose is “Bride of the New Dawn.” Our recording of Mullen’s performance of the poem comes from a reading she gave in October 2012, in Berkeley, as recorded by Ross Craig; it was a reading in which she read fifteen of the Enduring Freedom poems.

August 26, 2013

Fierce storehouses of articulation (PoemTalk #69)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, sections 16 & 29 of 'Draft 85: Hard Copy'

PoemTalk
Mary Oppen, George Oppen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis sitting on the deck of the DuPlessis house, 211 Rutgers Avenue, Swarthmore, PA, in 1979. Taken by Robert S. DuPlessis.

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In a special long episode of PoemTalk, Ron Silliman, Jessica Lowenthal, Randall Couch and PoemTalk’s producer and host Al Filreis gathered to discuss two sections of “Draft 85: Hard Copy,” which is the 85th “draft” or canto in Rachel Blau DuPlessis's ongoing long poem Drafts.  “Draft 85” is itself a long poem, running from pages 42 to 71 in the book Pitch: Drafts 77-95.  This big draft was written between February and May of 2007. All forty sections of “Draft 85” were recorded by the poet for PennSound, in our studios, in October of 2007. We decided to focus on two of those forty sections — sections 16 and 29. The forty sections of “Draft 85” are mapped onto George Oppen’s important long poem, Of Being Numerous, a typescript copy of which Oppen in 1965 had sent to Du Plessis, and to which she responded then, and has, in a sense, been responding here and there since, although never more fully than here in “Hard Copy.”

July 28, 2013