PennSound Daily

We've just added two new recordings to our homepage for the Contemporary Writers Series at Mills College. Recorded on consecutive Tuesdays last November, these fully-segmented sets from Mark Nowak and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge are now available for your listening pleasure.

Nowak was first up on November 3rd. In her introduction, Juliana Spahr (a longtime friend of the poet) praised Nowak for producing, "some of the most interesting work in our time that explores how poetry is a cultural practice with the potential to transform our thinking, not just about aesthetic things, but also about political things." He begins by showing a short film about workshops he's conducted with Ford Motors workers in the Twin Cities, a project that grew out of the aftermath of his collection, Shut up shut down: poems and a trip to Argentina where he visited cultural centers founded in factories: "I'm always consistently thinking about how the next thing I do emerges from a critique of what I've just finished," he explains. That's followed by a lengthy excerpt from his latest collection, Coal Mountain Elementary, written about the 2006 Sago Mine Disaster in West Virginia and a series of similar disasters in China, which takes on added significance in light of this year's Upper Big Branch Mine disaster (also in West Virginia) and the recent rescue of thirty-three miners from the Copiapó mine in Chile. That's followed by a brief discussion of his blog, "Coal Mountain," which continues the mission of the book, and a lengthy question and answer session with Mills students.

Berssenbrugge read one week later on November 10. Stephen Ratcliffe starts off the event with a deadpan and detailed introduction full of uncertain coincidences, near misses and book dimensions, in which he professes, "You may find yourself getting lost in the long sentences in Mei-mei's books, but then you'll realize that you've found yourself. Imagine something which distinguishes itself, yet that from which it distinguishes does not distinguish itself from it. Inside those long lines, there lives something of the mysterious being we sometimes, in those special revelatory moments, that sometimes, if we're lucky, do seem to occur." Berssenbrugge starts off with "The New Boys," which is concerned with New York, where "the boys are getting more and more slender and very very carefully dressed [...] they're more carefully dressed than the girls and very attenuated." That's followed by "Green" ("about the relation between perception and description") and "Glitter" (a work in progress about "the relationship between plants and healing," which "started out as being a poem about narcissism then it really kinda fell back into identity") before concluding with two fragments, "Slow Down Now" and "Hello the Roses."

You can hear both of these sets, along with previous readings in the series from Kenneth Goldsmith, Ron Silliman, Clayton Eshleman (reading Cesar Vallejo), Bruce Andrews, Edwin Torres, Spahr and Robert Grenier by clicking on the title above.

Today, we're very glad to announce a new recording from Anne Tardos, which she was kind enough to pass along to us.

Recorded at KGB Bar on October 4, 2010, this thirty-five minute reading is dedicated to Michael Gizzi and features the poet reading from the first forty-six sections from her series, "Nine," a large selection from which was recently published in Web Conjunctions. "Nine words per line and nine lines per stanza," she begins, describing the form of the series, which, through polyglot sound and syntax enters into conversation with the noise of the world and the voices of her fellow poets, maintaining the mournful, elegiac tone as well as the animal attentions that marked her last collection, I Am You.

You can hear this recording on PennSound's Anne Tardos author page, along with a great many more, including readings from the Segue Series, the Line Reading Series, Cross Cultural Poetics and Ceptuetics Radio, as well as numerous collaborations with her long-time partner, Jackson Mac Low and one of my personal favorites, a 1975 recording of her refrigerator defrosting. Click on the title above to start exploring.