PennSound - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

PennSound is a poetry

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

website

Website

A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

and online archive

The Archive

Described as the “iTunes for poetry” by co-director Charles Bernstien in an Associated Press

Associated Press

The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...

article, PennSound provides all of its recordings in the form of free downloadable MP3

MP3

MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

s. The files are intended to be used non-commercially by anyone interested in listening to them, and are furthermore available for use by teachers and libraries. Well over 1500 sound files are available for streaming and downloading, including historic recordings by poets such as Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

, Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire

Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....

, William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

and H.D.

H.D.

H.D. was an American poet, novelist and memoirist known for her association with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington...

, as well as more recent recordings by poets such as Allen Ginsburg, John Ashbery

John Ashbery

John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...

, Jack Spicer

Jack Spicer

Jack Spicer was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.-Life and work:...

and Lyn Hejinian

Lyn Hejinian

Lyn Hejinian is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is well known for her landmark work My Life , as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry .-Life:Hejinian was born in the San...

Manifesto

PennSound’s manifesto consists of 6 points:

Recordings on the site must be free and downloadable.
Recordings must be of MP3 or better quality.
Recordings must be broken down into singles.
All files must be named.
Bibliographic information must be embedded into each individual sound file.
Sound files must be indexed and retrievable from a library catalog under the poet’s name and from search engines on the web.

Content

PennSound recordings fall into different categories within the website. They can be included in an author page, a series page, an anthology, collection or group page, as a single recording contained in a singles archive, as part of PennSound's Cinema collection, podcast collection, or in the website's classics collection.

PennSound Authors

Many of the poets whose recordings are available on the website have individual pages called author pages. Author pages include both historical and contemporary recordings, generously provided to PennSound from the poets themselves, universities and institutions such as Harvard University's Woodberry Poetry Room, and from poets' estates. Recordings are broken down into singles, or song length recordings of individual poems. Complete readings are also available. PennSound authors include Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

, Louis Zukofsky

Louis Zukofsky

Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...

, Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, Bruce Andrews

Bruce Andrews

Bruce Andrews is a U.S. poet who is one of the key figures associated with the Language poets .-Life and work:...

, Bernadette Mayer

Bernadette Mayer

Bernadette Mayer is a poet and prose writer. In 1967 she received a BA from New School for Social Research. She has since edited the journal 0 TO 9 with Vito Acconci and the United Artists Press with Lewis Warsh...

, and many others.

Series Pages

PennSound hosts and updates recordings that were or are part of historic and ongoing poetry reading series. Represented series include, among many others, the Segue Series, a poetry reading series in New York that has been ongoing since 1977, Cross Cultural Poetics, a radio show hosted by poet Leonard Schwartz, Close Listening, a conversation series with Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein

, and the Emergency Reading Series, a poetry reading series hosted by the Kelly Writers House

Kelly Writers House

Founded in 1995 by a group of students, faculty, staff, and alumni of the University of Pennsylvania, the Kelly Writers House is a collaborative freespace dedicated to the literary arts that serves as a center for writers and writing of all kinds...

at the University of Pennsylvania.

Anthologies/ Collections/ Groups

PennSound hosts recordings that are part of anthologies, collections and groups, such as readings and discussions of poetics that took place as part of the same academic conference, readings from different poets at the same event, and readings from poetry and poetics symposiums. Such collections include the LEGEND recording from 1981, with readings from Bruce Andrews

Bruce Andrews

Bruce Andrews is a U.S. poet who is one of the key figures associated with the Language poets .-Life and work:...

, Ron Silliman

Ron Silliman

Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet...

, Ray DiPalma

Ray DiPalma

Ray DiPalma , is an American poet and visual artist who has published more than 40 collections of poetry, graphic work, and translations with various presses in the US and Europe...

, and Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein

, readings from a celebration of Hart Crane

Hart Crane

-Career:Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings , his first volume, ratified and strengthened...

, and readings from the Festival of Contemporary Japanese Women Poets.

Singles Archive

A searchable alphabetized archive of single recordings contains individual poems, introductions to readings, and other miscellaneous recordings on the PennSound website.

PennSound Cinema

PennSound recently added a selection of poetry related videos, including videos from the 2004 Louis Zukofsky Centennial Conference, films of Hannah Weiner

Hannah Weiner

Hannah Adelle Weiner was an American poet who is often grouped with the Language poets because of the prominent place she assumed in the poetics of that group.- Early life and writings :...

and Armand Schwerner

Armand Schwerner

Armand Schwerner was an avant-garde Jewish-American poet. His most famous work, Tablets, is a series of poems which claim to be reconstructions of ancient Sumero-Akkadian inscriptions, complete with lacunae and "untranslatable" words....

by Phill Niblock, and videos of Jerome Rothenberg

Jerome Rothenberg

Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known American poet, translator and anthologist who is noted for his work in ethnopoetics and poetry performance.-Early life and work:...

in conversation and discussion at the Kelly Writers House.

PennSound Podcasts

PennSound hosts its own podcast series, the PennSond Podcasts, which highlights recordings from the PennSound archive, including works by Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Cecile Rich is an American poet, essayist and feminist. She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century."-Early life:...

, Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...

, and George Oppen

George Oppen

George Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee...

. In addition, in collaboration with the Kelly Writers House and The Poetry Foundation, PennSound sponsors PoemTalk, a podcast that features a discussion of a different poet or poem each show. Past subjects include Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

's America, Rodrigo Toscano

Rodrigo Toscano

-Life:He lived in San Francisco from 1995- 1999. He works in Manhattan at the Labor Institute, and lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.-Poetry:* * Partisans * Arbiter -External links:***...

's poetics, and Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka , formerly known as LeRoi Jones, is an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism...

's Kenyatta.

Classics

In addition to relatively modern works, PennSound also includes readings and sometimes musical versions of classical Greek poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...

, John Milton

John Milton

John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...

, Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...

, and William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

Collaboration

PennSound works closely in collaboration with the Kelly Writers House

Kelly Writers House

, UbuWeb

UbuWeb

UbuWeb is a large web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives.-Philosophy:...

, The Electronic Poetry Center, Jacket2

Jacket2

Jacket2 magazine is an online poetry and poetics magazine that publishes articles, reviews, interviews, commentaries, podcasts, and reissued archival material. The magazine is the new, interactive incarnation of Jacket magazine, the poetry and poetics magazine created and run by poet John Tranter...

magazine, The Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

External Links

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