Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

“For more than 30 years the Shortwave radio spectrum has been used by the world’s intelligence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are transmitted by hundreds of Numbers Stations.”
The Conet Project
Thank you Sara Veglahn for introducing me to these! This is my ideal soundscape.


This is my August Muxtape Mix.
The tracks are:
Gertrude Stein, Interview
Dorothea Lasky, Some People Do It
John Cage, from Silence
Sawako Nakayasu, Texture Notes: Texture of a Conductor
Barbara Guest, Windy Afternoon
John Yau, Russian Letter
Peter Gizzi, Masters of the Cante Jondo
CAConrad - distorted torque of FLORA’S red [from (Soma)tic Midge]
Eileen Myles, Maxfield Parrish
Joe Brainard, Vincent Van Gogh
Grace Paley, Living
Lesley [...]


Bhanu Kapil discusses The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers


Me reading Rebecca’s poem Caught in the Maw
Rebecca reading some poems from Tuned Droves


This is my July Muxtape Mix.
The tracks are:
Alice Notley, All My Life
Tomaz Salamun, Red Flowers
Nicole Brossard, Si Ceci est Mal
Bhanu Kapil, from Autobiography of a Cyborg
Bernadette Mayer, from Studying Hunger
Dorothea Lasky, Two Assholes
Lorine Niedecker
Susan Howe & Dave Grubbs, Thorow - Part One
Nathaniel Mackey, from Atet A.D.
Lucky Dragons, Schjeldahl’s Party
I like using muxtape for poetry [...]


Bhanu Kapil reads from “Incubation: A Space for Monsters” and “Humanimal: A Project for Future Children”
“Am I alive? Am I alive now? I am alive.”-BK


Jesse Seldess reads Hum With from his book Who Opens (Kenning Editions).
Dear Jesse, I like the hiss behind your voice.


Moten Lecture
Currently looping/listening to this.


Bird in Snow


This discussion between Steve Evans and Al Filreis raises so many important questions about audio files, scholarship, and pedagogy. I would really like to segment and annotate parts of this soon. This is worth downloading. Please listen to it.


Dorothea Lasky & Thom Donovan read their collaboration Deadpan.


I met and became friends with Ryan Eckes when I lived in Philadelphia. What I like about Ryan’s poems is the way they often drift between concrete physical landscapes and language as its own landscape, and between humility and harshness. I re-read Ryan’s chapbook the other day while taking a bath and I ended up [...]


New MP3’s picked by Danny Snelson.
I really like the Darren Wershler-Henry recording.


C.D. Wright reads all of Deepstep Come Shining


Alvin Lucier’s The Only Talking Machine of its Kind in the World (for speaker and tape-delay system)
LINK to page on UBUweb
Performers:
Chris Cogburn - speaker
Christopher Burns - computer and electronics
Matt Ingalls - computer and electronics
The Score:
Alvin Lucier - “The Only Talking Machine of Its Kind in the World” for any stutterer, stammerer, lisper, [...]


Juliana Spahr reading Thrashing Seems Crazy


This is a recording of Nathaniel Mackey reading from Will Alexander’s Letters to Rosa. Some excerpts of this project appear in Chain #6.
This is Nathaniel Mackey reading from his first epistolary novel Bedouin Hornbook. It is one of my favorite recordings of anything ever. I remember listening to this recording in the late 90’s [...]


PENNsound has just made all of their William Carlos Williams recordings available as singles. This is a big deal, especially for anyone teaching his work. Yay!


These are some MP3’s I’ve been listening to lately:
Stacy Doris, Initial
Brian Kim Stefans, Um, Uh
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Health and Safety
John Godfrey, This Big Wingspread


Summi Kaipa reads The Epics on PENNsound.
Here’s a link to a brief print excerpt and ordering information via Leroy Chapbooks.


I was excited to see this recording of Rachel Blau DuPlessis reading her poem “Draft 85: Hard Copy” up on PENNsound. In the poem’s footnotes, DuPlessis explains: “This poem, as will be evident, is mapped loosely on, thinks about, and responds to George Oppen’s 1968 work ‘Of Being Numerous.’” I thought it might be useful [...]


Since moving to Denver last week, I had a chance to use my Olympus Digital Voice Recorder with my Sony digital recording microphone. This combination of relatively cheap equipment (~$200 total) creates good quality recordings in .wav format which can easily be converted to MP3’s using Switch, a free audio format converter. Once a file [...]


Two Joseph Ceravolo readings have just been posted to PENNsound. These are both wonderful recordings.
These are some of my favorites:White Fish in Reeds and Dangers of the Journey to the Happy Land.
See earlier posts on Ceravolo (with excerpts from these readings) here and here.


This recording of Spicer reading all of Language was just posted to PENNsound.
A recording of Spicer reading all of The Holy Grail is also available on the PENNsound Spicer Page.
I’m hoping to comment on these readings in more detail when I get the chance.


Andrew Joron in Amherst (2005)
See previous posts on Joron here and here.


Alice Notley in Buffalo (1987)
This is one of my favorites from the 1987 reading. All My Life
The following poem is from a 2006 reading in Philly: More Important… Notley’s comments at the end of the poem (”I don’t know if that’s true or not. I think about it a lot.” ;) create an interesting [...]


Piero Heliczer reads You coul(d) hear the snow dripping and falling into the deers mouth.
See earlier post on Heliczer.


In an earlier post I discussed aspects of Bhanu Kapil’s 1999 reading in Colorado. PennSound recently posted a 2001 reading in Hawaii which includes Kapil reading some of the same poems.
I wanted to place some brief but notable moments from both readings next to one another. I’ve become very interested in paying attention to [...]


The following recordings are from “In The American Tree” a radio show hosted by Lyn Hejinian & Kit Robinson (8-11-78):
From a List of Delusions of the Insane (What They Are Afraid Of)
Berrigan discusses his various methods


#1 Catullus #48 (studio recording)
#2 Catullus #48 Naropa (1987)
#3 Catullus #48 from Rattle Up A Deer (Live at Penny Lane 1989)
*
#1+#2 overlapped


As I mentioned in the Baraka post, when I heard Mackey’s live reading on PENNsound of “Song of the Andoumboulou: 19″ I had another version in my memory that included music.
1) This is the live PENNsound recording: Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou: 19″ without music
2) This version is from Mackey’s studio recording “Strick: Song [...]


The versions of Baraka’s “Black Dada Nihilsmus” and Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou: 19″ that I picked for the PENNsound MP3 feature are not accompanied by music. However, when I picked these tracks I had the echoes of other versions that were accompanied music in the back of my head. (I’ll discuss the Mackey in [...]


As I was listening to this Eileen Myles recording from Boston in 2002 this particular sentence stood out: Myles’ comments
(See the previous Eleni Sikelianos post for more context about paratextual comments as poems.)


My friend Stan Mir recently let me borrow a bunch of tapes so that we could digitize them. One of the tapes that I was really excited about was a George Stanley reading from 2000 at the Poetry Project. Happily, the cassette was labeled well and had a listing of poems. I’ve had the tape [...]


These are featured MP3’s that I picked on PENNsound.
Featured MP3’s


I would like to point out that this site allows multiple clips to play simultaneously. If you hold the cursor over any of the pink text (without clicking on it) an audio player application will pop up and you can hit play. Once one of the files is playing you can move on to another [...]


Sometimes while I’m listening to audio files (or listening during a live reading) a reader will say something in between poems that seems like a poem itself. For example, several years ago (late 90’s?) I heard Forrest Gander read in Fort Wayne, Indiana and he had a bad cold. He was carrying around a carton [...]


A month or two ago my friends Sara Veglahn and Noah Eli Gordon, who live in Denver, hosted a reading at their house by the poets Andrew Joron, Brian Henry, and Laynie Brown. Noah knew that I would want to hear Andrew’s reading in particular, so he called me up on Andrew’s cellphone then [...]


I typed the word “applause” into the search window of my iTunes library and 3 tracks came up. Apparently, I had separately tracked off applause on Jack Spicer’s July 15th 1965 reading of The Holy Grail, David Shapiro’s 2004 UMass reading, and Mark McMorris’ 2005 UMass reading. Recorded applause seems like something no one really [...]


These are 3 different versions of Frank O’Hara’s “Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!” ;) 1) The first one I think I got somewhere on the internet as a streaming RealAudio file in 2001. At that point, in order to get the file off the internet and onto a CD I had to loop a mini cable from [...]


This was at the end of a cassette tape I digitized. It’s from the same reading as “Migratory Noon” (see a few posts ago). This kind of thing is usually not listened to and generally gets clipped from digital presentations on websites such as PennSound. I like to put it on repeat on headphones. I [...]


I’m interested in the instances when poets bring the work of other writers into their readings. How do these other texts/authors function in relation to the reader’s work/performance? This clip is from Andrew Joron’s Spring 2005 reading in Amherst, MA. Joron began his reading with some comments about the relationship between culture, politics, physics, and [...]


I thought it might be useful to talk a little bit about the specific tools I’ve used in digitizing and segmenting files. I used to record live readings with a SONY MD Walkman MZ-R700 recorder with a plug in mic. Then I would play the minidisc record in real time back into my Macintosh (the [...]


This Piero Heliczer reading is interesting to me for any number of reasons. First, it’s always mindblowing to hear someone’s actual voice after reading them for several years without it. I think it’s always great to hear someone like Heliczer or Ceravolo read because up until recently it was hard to find their work even [...]


This Bhanu Kapil recording made me think more about the phenomenon of laughter as a crowd response as well as false starts or re-voicings within an audio text. In this clip, Kapil’s volume and emphasis shifts radically at a few points. One of the effects this has on the audience is that they laugh: Bhanu [...]


Another case of a recording that exists in a space between public and private reception is a recording of Joseph Ceravolo reading in his New Jersey apartment with the radio on in the background. What is the status of this recording? The music in the background seems to complement the poems in places. This recording [...]


This is a Bernadette Mayer recording that seems like it was created by Mayer to either practice the performance of a set of poems or to help her revise them. I’m especially interested in these types of recordings that exist in a space between private and public. Is this a private recording that somehow slipped [...]


This is an excerpt from a reading John Ashbery gave at St. Marks Church in NYC in 1971.
Ashbery comments: “It is kind of an environmental work, if I may be so bold. If you feel like leaving at any point it won’t matter you will have had the experience.” I’m beginning this blog with [...]