The Illuminated Knot

Tina Darragh – Dreams Are Not Documents of Compromise (1’28”). • “Dream interpretation, retroviral. Dream language, autoinfection. A liberated world, unlikely when free plus association has no effect upon eternal plus trap.” • Recorded February 18, 1998 as part of a PhillyTalks event with Jena Osman. More Darragh on PennSound. And here.

Different Every Time It’s Intoned

Laura Elrick – “That sees process…” (1’51”). Excerpt from an audio project based on Fantasies in Permeable Structures, played and discussed on Kareem Estefan‘s Ceptuetics radio show at WNYU on April 23, 2008. “The audio piece is made of particles. It is in a sense almost an anti-text. It can’t really be written down. I’ve tried and failed to write it down. It’s different every time it’s intoned, as you’ll hear. It’s created by layered recordings of my own voice. So there’s overlap and diffraction and splitting open and infolding and repelling and redoubling of languages and words” (hear the description here). More Elrick and Ceptuetics on PennSound. • Tracklist here. Mirrored here.

A Deserter Reporting Why

Kaia Sand – Best Regards (1’24”). Recorded early October 2006 at the Contemporary Women’s Experimental Poetry in Cambridge, England. More Sand at Archive of the Now and on Leonard Schwartz’s radio program Cross Cultural Poetics (open mp3 here, or scroll to show 132 on this page). • Tracklist here. Mirrored here.

Raymond Roussel’s Living Room

Tom Raworth – Dormitory Life (1’04”). Recorded on October 16, 2008 in the UMaine New Writing Series. Previously on Lipstick of Noise: Catacoustics and Nothing. More Raworth on PennSound and MeshWorks. • “Certains (Olivier Cadiot, Tom Raworth), en précipitant le tempo de leur lecture à voix haut, parviennent aussi à déstabiliser le discours indirect continu” (Emmanuel Hocquard, Les Babouches Vertes). • Tracklist here. Mirrored here.

Google / Calls It 100% Relevant

Jennifer Scappettone – da s (3’02”). Recorded April 14, 2009 at Kelly Writers House. One of a series of poems Scappettone composed in response to the NYT obituary article “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Philosopher, Is Dead.” More Scappettone on PennSound. Her 2008 Attention Span. “da s” is included in From Dame Quickly, just published by Litmus Press. • Tracklist here. Mirrored here.

Direct Quotation, Translated with Noun Subtitution

Michael Gottlieb – “As Lenin helpfully noted…” (1’05”). Recorded October 11, 2008 at the Bowery Poetry Club. Whole set (27’17,” introduced by Kevin Davies), and much more Gottlieb, on PennSound. • Tracklist here. Mirrored here.

American Plimsoles

Philip Whalen – Tennis Shoes (1’39”). Recorded by Fred Wah in July 1963 at the Vancouver Conference. More from that reading on PennSound.

Mégapneume

Gil J. Wolman – La Memoire (3’17”). “It’s the breath that creates the poem: rhythm and scream, the scream until now inexpressed in poetry; scream of joy, of love, of anguish, of horror, of hate, but scream” (Dufrêne). “Less texts than sonic performances the ultralettristic poems comprise a high-energy expulsion of inarticulate sounds, cries, and grunts. In linguistic parlance ulltralettristic performance emancipates non- and subphonomatic material from the necessity of primary articulation” (McCaffery). More Wolman on Ubuweb.

A Terrible Wholeness

Amiri Baraka – I Love Music (2’15”). Recorded on reel-to-reel by Robert Creeley on December 8, 1978 in Buffalo. Background on event. More Baraka on Pennsound. “The poem ‘I Love Music’ was written to recall when I was locked up in solitary confinement after the Newark rebellions in 1967. I sat one afternoon and whistled all the Trane I remembered. And then later that afternoon they told me he had died. But I knew even then that that was impossible” (from Baraka’s liner notes to The Last Giant, cited here).

Awkward and Luminous

Ann Lauterbach – The French Girl (2’29”). Recorded December 4, 2006 for Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening radio program on WPS1. Text here. First collected in Clamor, 1991. More about Lauterbach here. Selection inspired by Wordsalad’s playlist from June 11, 2009, which features this track.