Pennsound Podcasts

In Episode 58 of PennSound podcasts, Davy Knittle hosted poet Rachel Levitsky in the Wexler Studio to discuss her project during her residency at LMCC's Process Space on Governor's Island, "Mother of Separation." Their conversation centers on the role of space, scale, and queerness in Levitsky's work. Conversation topics spanned movement and desire, person-making, and gaps in cities.

In Episode 57 of PennSound podcasts, Christy Davids and Trish Salah visited Kelly Writers House on February 10, 2017, for a reading and conversation. Davids and Salah talked about lyric form, origin stories, and the "problems of the self" before Salah read passages from Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1, and Wanting in Arabic. Shortly after this reading, Salah presented research from her current research project, Towards a Trans Minor Literature, an inquiry into the aesthetic and political projects of trans, transsexual, genderqueer, and two-spirit writers.

In Episode 56 of PennSound podcasts, Christy Davids visited Kelly Writers House on October 24, 2016, to talk with erica lewis, who was passing through Philadelphia to give a reading in Jason Mitchell's Frank O'Hara's Last Lover series in between stops in Pittsburgh and Brooklyn. While in the studio, lewis read some work and talked about her box set trilogy, a three-part project that engages with pop music as memory device and formal procedure, reconsiders "the confessional" as a poetic mode, and delves into female family history in poems that are by turns performative, intertextual, and intensely sonic.

In Episode 55 of PennSound podcasts, CAConrad returned to the Kelly Writers House on January 27, 2016, to visit the Wexler Studio to speak with Julia Bloch and to read from ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, which appeared from Wave Books in 2014, as well as a number of new works generated from his ongoing performative and pedagogical practice of somatics and ecopoetics.

In Episode 54 of PennSound podcasts, Michael Hennessey, one of the founding participants of the PennSound archive, joins Al Filreis in the Wexler Studio to discuss Mike's top 5 PennSound picks.

In Episode 53 of PennSound podcasts, Brian Teare came back to the Kelly Writers House on October 30, 2015, to speak with Jaime Shearn Coan about his new collection of poetry, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, published in 2015 by Ahsahta Press. Shearn Coan describes Teare's collection as one that imagines "how to language what is un-languageable." In this PennSound podcast, Teare and Shearn Coan talk about writing out of chronic illness, the book's engagement with the work of American abstract painter Agnes Martin, and how poetry explores what sorts of shared communal narratives are possible.

In Episode 52 of PennSound podcasts, on September 10, 2015, Jerome Rothenberg re-visited the Kelly Writers House to give an evening reading. A few hours earlier, Ariel Resnikoff and Al Filreis met Rothenberg in the Wexler Studio for an extended interview/conversation that ranged across many epochs, poetic modes, and topics. Among them: the new young German poets of the mid- to late 1950s; the world of Jewish mystics Rothenberg discovered as a young poet; his time as a Masters student studying Dickinson and Whitman with Austin Warren at the University of Michigan in the early 1950s; "the four great Jewish objectivist poets"; Armand Schwerner; somewhat sudden access to major commercial presses for his anthologies in the late 1960s; Robert Duncan's recommendation of Gershom Scholem; Paul Celan; and Rothenberg's forays into the problem of representing the unsayable of genocide.

In Episode 51 of PennSound podcasts, the Los Angeles-based poet Brent Armendinger visited Philadelphia and the Kelly Writers House in April 2015 during a book tour for the release of The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying, which Bhanu Kapil has described as a book that "traces the index of an intense need: the kind of contact that can't be assuaged by touch alone." Armendinger read from the book and then spoke with Brian Teare about queerness and medicalization of the body, about how poetry can explore the relationship between ethics and desire, about metaphor and embodiment, and more.

In Episode 50 of PennSound podcasts, Emji Spero, an Oakland-based artist and poet exploring the intersections of writing, book art, installation, and performance, visited Philadelphia and the Kelly Writers House in April 2015 to talk about their book almost any shit will do, which uses found language from mycelial studies, word-replacement, and erasure to map the boundaries of collective engagement. In this interview at the Wexler Studio, Spero spoke with Gabriel Ojeda-Sague, a poet living in Philadelphia and author of the chapbooks JOGS (Lulu, 2013) and Nite [chickadee]'s (GaussPDF, 2015), about personal trauma, queer longing, surveillance states, public/private access, the Baltimore riots, and a new work on violence as the static and quotidian. The interview concludes with a ten-minute collaborative reading by both poets from almost any shit will do.

In Episode 49 of PennSound podcasts, this interview tracks William J. Harris' genesis and early development as a poet and intellectual. Harris' artistic and cultural education occurs during the late '50s, the '60s and the early '70s and takes place primarily in and around academic institutions: the liberal college, Antioch, which is in his hometown of Yellow Springs, Ohio, and the nearby black state university, Central State, in Wilberforce, and the story, if not exactly concluding, comes to "a momentary stay against confusion" at Stanford University in Northern California where he did his MA in creative writing and a PhD in English.

In Episode 48 of PennSound podcasts, on March 18, 2015, Canadian poet Rachel Zolf visited Philadelphia and the Kelly Writers House and came into the Wexler Studio to record a conversation with Brian Teare. Zolf and Teare discussed Zolf's most recent book, Janey's Arcadia, which Teare described in his introduction to Zolf's reading at Temple University in November 2014 as a work that "situates us in a Canadian national history in which the ideology of nation building prescribes genocide for indigenous people, and enlists all its settler-subjects in the campaigns of conversion, dislocation, assimilation, and disappearance." Zolf created a film, a sound performance, and a number of polyvocal actions related to Janey's Arcadia and has written recently about the "mad affects" generated by the reading/audience event.

In Episode 47 of PennSound podcasts, the poet and translator Yosuke Tanaka visited Philadelphia and the Kelly Writers House in late 2014. The purpose of his visit was threefold: to join a scientific conference on cell biology; to see the Writers House in person after spending much time there virtually as a participant in the open online course called "ModPo"; and to sit down in the Wexler Studio with Ariel Resnikoff to talk about contemporary Japanese poetry.

In Episode 46 of PennSound podcasts, Eric Alan Weinstein and Al Filreis spent some time in the Wexler Studio of the Kelly Writers House talking about the problematics of the modern long poem. Can it be taught? Why is it so challenging, despite its central importance? The discussion is intentionally general at first, but soon Eric and Al turn to Eliot's The Waste Land, and in particular to two modally quite distinct passages from the poem.

In Episode 45 of PennSound podcasts, Al Filreis convened an hourlong conversation with Alan Golding, Orchid Tierney, Bob Perelman, and Ron Silliman. They began by reflecting on Golding's 1995 book From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry twenty years later, beginning with a discussion about anthologies in the digital era, and soon talk shifted to Golding's assessment then of opposition to Language poets' anti-academic stance. Finally, the group discussed Golding's distinction between the Poundian long poem — mytho-informational — and Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Drafts.

In Episode 43 of PennSound podcasts, Amaris Cuchanski has edited and now introduces a 20-minute excerpt from a one-hour recording made of an October 17, 2012, event at the Kelly Writers House featuring conceptualist writing by women, celebrating the publication of I'll Drown My Book. This excerpt is episode 43 in the PennSound podcast series. You can hear the entire recording — and indeed watch a video recording — of the event by visiting the Kelly Writers House web calendar entry and by visiting the speak PennSound page created for the audio recordings, which have there been segmented.

In Episode 41 of PennSound podcasts, on February 20, 2012, Erin Moure traveled from Calgary, Alberta, to read at a Belladonna* event, part of the "HOT TEXTS" project. She read with Rachel Levitsky and Christian Hawkey, and was introduced by Emily Skillings. Skillings and Krystal Languell hosted the event, which took place at The Way Station in Prospect Heights Brooklyn. Episode #41 of the PennSound podcasts series, hosted and edited by Emily Harnett, features a twenty-minute excerpt from the reading after a three-minute introduction.

In Episode 40 of PennSound podcasts, David Abel visited the Kelly Writers House recently in order to record his poems for PennSound, 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 (including readings by David Rattray and Gene Frumkin), and to participate in a recording session of PoemTalk (on a poem by Muriel Rukeyser). Al Filreis spoke with David about his own poetry (particularly in Float, published by Chax in 2012), about his work as bookseller, convener of poetry communities (through readings series, etc.), librarian, and editor/publisher. They also discussed the poems and lives of Rattray and Frumkin.

PennSound podcast 39 is devoted to Ann Lauterbach — a nine-minute excerpt from a reading she gave at the Kelly Writers House in November of 2013. Allison Harris introduces and hosts. For a full video recording of the reading and/or a full audio recording, see the Kelly Writers House web calendar entry. Charles Bernstein introduced the event, and a few seconds of his remarks can be heard in the podcast.

Episode 38 in the PennSound podcast series presents a fifteen-minute excerpt from Robert Duncan's lectures on Walt Whitman presented at New College in three sessions between June 11 and 18, 1981. The full recordings are available on PennSound's Duncan page. The excerpt was edited by Nick DeFina and the podcast is introduced by Emily Harnett.

In Episode 37 of PennSound podcasts, at a Segue Series event at the Bowery Poetry Club hosted and curated by Trace Peterson on April 25, 2009, Robert Kocik, Benjamin Aranda, and Vito Acconci each speak for about twenty-six minutes about relations between poetry and architecture. Peterson wrote this about the event afterward: "People really turned out for this event: I counted over seventy in the audience including David Antin, Ellen Zweig, Gail Scott, Wystan Curnow, Eileen Myles, Andrew Levy, Abigail Child, Walter Lew, Jonathan Skinner, Jennifer Scappetone, Andy Fitch, and many Segue regulars. But a portion of the audience was people I had never seen before, people connected with architecture who would otherwise perhaps not have the experience of attending a poetry event."