Tracie Morris

Launch for The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies

with Tracie Morris, Christian Bök, Tan Lin, Felix Bernstein, & Charles Bernstein

at Giorno Poetry Systems in New York, Dec. 5, 2024

My thanks to Alan Thomas and Randy Petelos at the University of Chicago Press. This is my tenth book with Chicago, going back 25 years. Thanks also to Anthony Huberman and Eli Coplan (sound engineer) of GPS for hosting this event. 

Of shredded love (PoemTalk #192)

“For Billie Holiday” & “Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One” by Owen Dodson

from left: Herman Beavers, Tracie Morris, Amber Rose Johnson

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Al Filreis convened Herman Beavers, Tracie Morris, and Amber Rose Johnson to talk about two poems by Owen Dodson: “Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One” and an elegaic sonnet “For Billie Holiday—Finally, Lady, You are Gone From Us.” Our recordings of these poems come from the Library of Congress, where on December 13, 1960, Dodson entered the Recording Laboratory there to perform a selection of his verse. Our poems are the fifth and thirteenth Dodson read, respectively, during that recording session.

Adore adore (PoemTalk #159)

bpNichol, “Dada Lama” and “A Small Song That Is His”

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Al Filreis and PoemTalk engineer and editor Zach Carduner took to our virtual Wexler Studio and convened Tracie Morris, Douglas Kearney, and Derek Beaulieu, from Brooklyn, Minneapolis, and Banff, respectively, to talk about two sound-poem/performance pieces by poet, editor, fiction writer, sound poet, and publisher Barrie Philip Nichol, best known as bpNichol. The two pieces we discuss are “Dada Lama” of 1966 (recorded in 1969) and “A Small Song That Is His” of 1974.

These squiggles (PoemTalk #142)

Charles Bernstein, “As If the Trees by Their Very Roots Had Hold of Us”

From left: Charles Bernstein, Tracie Morris, Marjorie Perloff, Danny Snelson

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Tracie Morris, Danny Snelson, and Marjorie Perloff joined Al Filreis to talk about one of Charles Bernstein’s early poems, “As If the Trees by Their Very Roots Had Hold of Us.” It originally appeared in Senses of Responsibility (1979) and in 2010 was chosen by Bernstein to be included in All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems. We know the writing of the poem dates at least to 1977, which is when he performed it at a reading at the Place Center in New York (on December 18); he read that day with Kathy Acker. 

Steve Cannon: New Orleanian, Black Bohemian, Art World Giant

by Tracie Morris

Photo by Sarah Ferguson.

Sunday, July 14th, New York City: It’s been one week since the death of gifted multi-hyphenate writer, publisher, gallerist, mentor, and community-builder Steve Cannon, founder of the magazine and organization “A Gathering of the Tribes” in New York City. Although many of us are still in a state of shock at the loss, it is important that his recent passing is noted. This comment is a brief mention to mark this time. I’m sure more extensive commentaries by others will follow. Steve Cannon was a great writer. The roots of his work are as a proud New Orleanian. He often mentioned the city of his birth in his reflections on his life and cited his upbringing there in how he expansively considered life, culture, the spirit, art, and organizing disparate people and points of view. (One of his last publications was the book Black Jelly, with poetry by fellow New Orleans native Melanie Maria Goodreaux. 

Question therefore the age (PoemTalk #118)

M. NourbeSe Philip, 'Zong!'

From left: Amber Rose Johnson, Alexandria Johnson, and Tracie Morris.

Joined by Alexandria Johnson, Tracie Morris, and Amber Rose Johnson, Al Filreis hosts this discussion of six short poems or sections from the long poem Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip. The sections discussed are numbered 2, 3, 6, 11, 21, and 26. They can be found, respectively, on pages 5, 6, 14, 20, 37, and 45 of the Wesleyan edition of the book, published in 2008. NourbeSe Philip’s PennSound author page includes several compelling performances of Zong! given over the years. For this PoemTalk episode we listened to a Segue Series reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, given on February 17, 2007.

Tracie Morris, five pieces (video)

Tracie Morris performed five of her poems in honor of William J. (Billy Joe) Harris on March 11, 2017, in Brooklyn, New York. Thanks to the efforts of Dylan Leahy, we are making them available as video segments. In the order in which the videos are presented below, they are: “Blackout, 1977,” “Enclosed” (a response to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons), “Morenita,” “Postcard of Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” and “Queens.”

I believe that we will win

On tears and trains

Ripped up copy of James Baldwin's 'Another Country'
Carolyn Grace's copy

 So, AWP happened. It sometimes seems a bit shameful, a little shameful, to go. Like a form of selling out that also includes fessing up to your departmental cash and admitting to your desire, that might be worse than everyone’s desire, for attention, but might be more kindly described, by you to yourself, as only the human longing for company. But I did go and those mixed feelings, which also include feeling obliged to represent: the press, the other press, the program, the other program, one’s friends, one’s fanboy or fangirl desires and crushes, one’s “self,” got mixed up even more with other things.

But too beautiful (PoemTalk #108)

Tracie Morris, 'Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful'

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Camara Brown, Edwin Torres, and Brooke O’Harra joined PoemTalk producer-host Al Filreis for a discussion of Tracie Morris’s “Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful.” The recording used as the basis of this conversation was made at the 2002 Whitney Museum Biennial Exhibit and is available on Morris’s PennSound page. The performance piece/musical poem was first performed at NYU in the 1990s, in a graduate performance theory course, a last-minute improvisation after Morris discovered she misplaced or lost her planned text, accompanied by — and intuitively responsive to — two colleagues whose dance movements, in part, reproduced the sweeping up-down motions of rice harvesting.