Off the Record

Steve Evans – “On Coteries, Infrastructure, and Gossip” (12’14”). A contribution to the first panel of the first week of the 2010 Naropa Summer Writing Program, which was chaired by Anne Waldman and featured Joanne Kyger, David Trinidad, and Jennifer Scappettone. My extemporaneous remarks focus on the way that sound recordings function as an often unrecognized form of “publication,” with special reference to the various manifestations of group identity—and the “gossip” that inevitably accompanies it—to be found in three important archives of recorded poetry: the Paul Blackburn tapes at UCSD’s Archive for New Poetry, Andrew Kenower’s website A Voice Box, and Naropa’s own audio archive.

Still in Chaos

Alice Notley – The Body Is in the Soul (2’30”). Track seven of the CD that shipped with the double-issue of Jacques Darras‘s magazine In’Hui devoted to Poésie Américaine 1950-2000, which grew out of a conference Darras organized at the Université de Picardie in December of 1999. I first read the poem in April of 1998, when it appeared in the second issue of Gare du Nord, the stapled zine that Notley edited with her husband the poet Douglas Oliver, and can still remember the tense jangly set Notley delivered at the conference. The poem is now included in Reason and Other Women.

Is That Too Much To Ask?

Bobbie Louise Hawkins – “As a writer, on paper…” (4’04”). Recorded on June 15, 2010 at the Naropa Performing Arts Center, where Hawkins read with Thalia Field, Ross Gay, Joanne Kyger, and Linh Dinh as part of a Summer Writing Program Faculty Reading. Much more Hawkins, including readings, talks, and panel presentations, at the invaluable Naropa Poetics Audio Archive. Her most recent books are Absolutely Eden and Bijoux. “When you put the importance in the answer and hand it over to someone else, you get stuck with somebody else’s answer.”

No Other Boy Will Do

Aaron Kunin – The Sore Throat (1’40”). Text at Boston Review (scroll down). Recorded for the first (and only) issue of Frequency Audio Journal, edited by CA Conrad and Magdalena Zurawski in 2004 and archived at PennSound. The Sore Throat, long-playing version. Event report from Kunin’s November 2007 reading with Sawako Nakayasu. More phonotexts by Kunin at PennSound.

Try to Take It

David Trinidad – Ode to Dick Fisk (5’52”). Recorded June 19, 2010 at the Performing Arts Center at Naropa, where Trinidad closed the final set of the first week of the Summer Writing Program with this poem, which was published in the inaugural issue of Lo-Ball earlier this year and is slated for inclusion in Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems, forthcoming from Turtle Point Press in 2011. • The site that still returns when one chooses “I’m feeling lucky” in a Google search for Dick Fisk. • More Trinidad, including four soundfiles, at Poetry Foundation. • A 2003 interview in which Trinidad talks about his friend Rachel Sherwood, mentioned in this poem. • The Blondie track—on this, Debbie Harry’s sixty-fifth birthday!

Get It Right

Julie Carr – from Think Tank (1’56”). Recorded June 18, 2010 at the Naropa Summer Writing Program. Four more from the manuscript “Think Tank,” a “polyamorous love poem,” at Mary Magazine. Counterpath Press, co-directed by Carr with poet, editor, and book designer Tim Roberts.

The Signature Wobble

Bob Perelman – Revenge of the Bathwater (5’39”). Recorded on October 18, 2006 in the UMaine New Writing Series. Event report here. Alternative takes: October 2003 (3’21”), January 2004 (4’45”), January 2006 (5’51”). All on Perelman’s PennSound page. • David Kaufmann’s review of Iflife (Roof, 2006); Ron Silliman’s take. Jennifer Moxley included the poem, heard when still in manuscript in May 2003, in her Attention Span list for that year.

Artificial Paradise

John Wieners – Cocaine (0’58”). Recorded on reel-to-reel tape by Robert Creeley in Berkeley sometime after June 1965 and archived on PennSound (see “Part 2” of the “Reading of Various Works at Berkeley,” which begins with poems “from the original manuscript of The Hotel Wentley Poems“). • Earlier this summer, I featured Jeremy Prynne’s reading of this poem, which I include for comparison below. • Update: the audio file has now been segmented and labeled, here.

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Wieners

Prynne

A Public Quality

George Oppen – Ballad (1’18”), from Of Being Numerous. Text, courtesy Languagehat. About Swan’s Island. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, writing about “Ballad” for Big Bridge. More of DuPlessis’s dialog with Oppen, as presented at Eric Baus’s To The Sound. • One of the tracks on a tape from Robert Creeley’s archive (4’16”), newly available on PennSound. The tape opens with Oppen’s remarks, clearly in medias res, on Paris and an unnamed reviewer who inspired his “Epigram: I have been insulted in St. Peter’s” (New Collected Poems 297). He then reads (at 0’48”) “Ballad” (NCP 207-08) and (at 2’25”) “Power, the Enchanted World” (NCP 204-06).

When Will She Finish Her Necklace?

Kim Rosenfield – from Chapter Six (3’44”) of re:evolution (Les Figues, 2008). Recorded October 7, 2006 as part of the Segue Series at the Bower Poetry Club and archived (38’00) on PennSound. Nada Gordon’s photos of the gig. Dirk Rowntree’s reading report. Robin Tremblay-McGaw’s report on Rosenfield’s reading with Kaia Sand and Yedda Morrison at SPT in February 2009.