PennSound Podcasts

In Episode 60 of PennSound podcasts, Ted Rees, who recently relocated from Northern California back to his hometown of Philadelphia, and , who recently relocated from Philadelphia back to his previous home in Northern California, met up at the Wexler Studio at the Kelly Writers House in October to read from and talk about Ted's new book, In Brazen Fontanelle Aflame. Rees and Resnikoff explore the book's relationship to forgotten urban and rural landscapes in California, the felt effects of concentrations of capital and new wealth, and the question of how to "dwell in an otherwise space that is more interstitial," as Rees puts it, in these modern times.

In Episode 59 of PennSound podcasts, Christy Davids returned to the Wexler Studio at Kelly Writers House earlier this year to chat with Sue Landers, whose 2016 book Franklinstein represents a documentary-poetic engagement with the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. As she notes in this interview with Davids, Landers's work makes an argument against dehistoricized nostalgia as a documentary-poetics mode and instead toward a historically, politically alert poetic attitude toward our attachments to place. In this PennSound podcast, Landers and Davids draw out the significance of particular passages from Franklinstein and discuss what they have to teach us about the politics of mapping, memory, and place-based history.

In Episode 58 of PennSound podcasts, hosted poet 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 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, returned to the Kelly Writers House on January 27, 2016, to visit the Wexler Studio to speak with 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, , one of the founding participants of the PennSound archive, joins in the Wexler Studio to discuss Mike's top 5 PennSound picks.

In Episode 53 of PennSound podcasts, 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, re-visited the Kelly Writers House to give an evening reading. A few hours earlier, and 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 and Whitman with Austin Warren at the University of Michigan in the early 1950s; "the four great Jewish objectivist poets"; ; somewhat sudden access to major commercial presses for his anthologies in the late 1960s; '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 about queerness and medicalization of the body, about how poetry can explore the relationship between ethics and desire, about metaphor and embodiment, and more.