LISTEN TO THE SHOW
David Abel visited the Kelly Writers House recently in order to record his poems for PennSound (his PennSound author page will be available soon), to check with us about our progress in digitizing a box of rare recordings on cassette he has given us for adding to the PennSound archive, and to participate in a recording session of PoemTalk (on a poem by Muriel Rukeyser), to be released later. Among the cassettes are readings by David Rattray and Gene Frumkin.
March 28, 2014
Antonin Artaud's 'Hyper-Negation'
When I asked the poet David Abel what first drew him to Antonin Artaud’s work, he said, “At least one dimension of that work is a grand negation. A gigantic no, which at a certain time in my life was absolutely thrilling. […] I feel like ‘no’ is a landscape that now is very rich and three-dimensional. And what I got from Artaud is foundational, a part of the architecture or a part of the geology of the no, but which now has lots of other structures in it.”[1] David Abel’s response captures a fundamental celebration of Antonin Artaud’s writings.