Pennsound Podcasts

In this episode, poet Larry Price joins Al Filreis and William Fuller for an interview in the Wexler Studio at the Kelly Writers House to discuss his new book 1/0, as well as some of his earlier work. The three discuss various influences on Price's poetry, including his love of Shakespeare and his former work as a performance artist, which are both reflected in the theatrical, monologic quality of his work.

In this PennSound podcast, poet Evie Shockley sits down in the Wexler Studio at the Kelly Writers House for an interview about her work with Al Filreis, Tyrone Williams, Aldon Nielson, and William J. Harris. In this wide-ranging conversation, Shockley, Filreis, Williams, Nielson, and Harris discuss the scope and trajectory of Shockley's poetry, from her 2011 book the new black, to her more recent books semiautomatic (2017) and suddenly we (2023). Shockley talks about the influences of various poets on her work, including Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Harryette Mullen, among others.

In this PennSound podcast, Sally Van Doren joins Al Filreis in the Wexler Studio at the Kelly Writers House for a discussion of her newest book, Sibilance (LSU Press, 2023). Van Doren reads aloud from her work, and the two discuss the practices of visual art and asemic writing that structure her life as an artist and inform her approach to poetry.

In this PennSound podcast, Willard Spiegelman sits down with Al Filreis at the Kelly Writers House's Wexler Studio for a discussion on the underappreciated 20th century poet Amy Clampitt. The duo embark on a long exploration of Spiegelman's biography on Clampitt, Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt (Knopf, 2023). Spieigelman reveals the challenges he faced connecting the dots on simple elements of Clampitt's biographical record, noting gaps in Clampitt's earlier life that she avoided discussing with even her close friends and family.

In this PennSound podcast, Christy Davids talks with Montréal writer Gail Scott about her recent release Permanent Revolution (Book*hug Press, 2021), a compilation of new and revised essays, including work that originally appeared in Scott's foundational feminist text, Spaces Like Stairs (Women's Press, 1996). The revolutionary character of richly polysemous, multiply path-winding texts is a recurrent thread in this conversation. Davids and Scott also query the role of feminist theory, including that which it avows to do, as well as that which it actually does, and for whom.

In this PennSound podcast, Jeff T. Johnson and Emily Abendroth exchange perspectives on how modular, nonlinear writing can open into enactive relationships that press readers and listeners alike beyond individual experience toward "critical empathy" and its relational tactics and strategies for living in common amidst social struggles that require collective reflection and navigation. The conversation is structured around a set of readings and commentary on material drawn from Johnson's Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics (punctum books, 2018) and Abendroth's Sousveillance Pageant (Radiator Press, 2021), two texts that employ complementary approaches to working across genres, formal and gestural structures, and disjunctive expressive modes.

In October 2020, Davy Knittle and Jill Magi spoke over Zoom about Magi's book Speech (Nightboat Books, 2019). Their discussion moved through many aspects of the relationship between the city and the woven object, such as the intersection of textiles and architecture; how weaving, like walking, teaches us to live in communities; and walking, weaving, and poetry as fragmentary practices. They also discussed how language habits further spatial inequalities in cities, and poetry's capacity to introduce questions about the language of climate change, citizenship versus belonging, and our understanding of value.

Levi Bentley, Ted Rees, and Danielle LaFrance met in the Wexler Studio in November 2019 to discuss LaFrance's books Just Like I Like It and Friendly + Fire as a part of the Housework series. Their conversation touched on the gross and grotesque, "it" as ideology, abolishing the self and the "sovereign I," empathy in a late-capitalist world, and the discomfort of being both a participant in and host to parasitic social injustice.

Sarah Rose Etter joined Jacket2 editor Julia Bloch in the Wexler Studio last September for a short reading from and discussion of her debut poetic novel, The Book of X, which appeared in 2019 from Two Dollar Radio. Etter and Bloch talked about the impact of open poetics and visual art upon Etter's prose style, the feminist politics of speculative narrative, the process of fact-checking menstrual blood output, and the etymology of the book's governing image — among other things.

Al Young, Tyrone Williams, and William J. Harris joined Al Filreis in the Wexler Studio to discuss Young and his work. The conversation covered the relationship between Young's poetry and the Black Arts Movement, the role of music and jazz in his writing, and other figures with whom he was acquainted, such as poets Ishmael Reed and Bob Kaufman. Young also gave readings of some of his poems: "A Dance for Militant Dilettantes," "Yes, the Secret Mind Whispers" (which was written in honor of Kaufman), and "January."

In September 2018 Davy Knittle hosted poet Rodney Koeneke in the Wexler Studio to discuss his book, Body and Glass (Wave Books, 2018). Their conversation touches on Koeneke's writing process and use of pronouns as a "distancing technique," the role of poetry — particularly experimental forms — in America today, and how joy might emerge from work about loss. In the podcast, the two also examine the traditions that poetry assembles for itself, drawing comparisons between modernists like Joyce and contemporary poets.

Davy Knittle and Eileen Myles had a conversation at Myles's home in the East Village in New York City in August, 2018, for this PennSound podcast. Their discussion began in the midst of an exchange about Myles's 1991 collection Not Me and changes in their neighborhood at the time. Conversation topics spanned "not-me-ness," gender, capitalism, sexuality, perception, and observation, among others.

Argentine poet Dani Zelko was joined in the Wexler Studio at the Kelly Writers House by Jennifer Ponce de León to discuss North Border: forced migrations (Gato Negro, 2019), the latest installment of Zelko's Reunión project. Zelko and Ponce de León's conversation explores the Reunión writing procedure as a "reciprocal work," the book as a political object, migrant and feminist agencies, and artistic production as means to form community.

Wendy Trevino joined hosts Levi Bentley and Ted Rees for this PennSound podcast, the first in a series of intimate conversations in Housework's transition from reading series to recording series. Conversation topics included Barack Obama's appearance in Best Experimental Writing 2016, post-arrest listmaking, "unequal collateral," the organizing-specific shifts of self, acknowledging messy comrade conflict, and further associations drawn from Trevino's 2018 collection Cruel Fiction.

William Corbett visited the Kelly Writers House in October 2017 for a retrospective reading and conversation with Stan Mir in honor of the poet Michael Gizzi. During his visit, Corbett and Knittle had a conversation in the Wexler Studio about the work of New York School poet James Schuyler, whose Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler Corbett edited (Turtle Point Press, 2009). In their conversation, they discussed Schuyler's early poems, his methods of perception, his fondness for children, his attention to New York and its qualities of light from his apartment window, and Corbett's long career of teaching Schuyler's poetry to undergraduate students.

Allison Cobb and Brian Teare joined Julia Bloch, Knar Gavin, and Aylin Malcolm in the Wexler Studio at the Kelly Writers House on April 2, 2019, following their lunchtime discussion with scholars and poets from Penn's Poetry and Poetics and Anthropocene and Animal Studies reading groups. Our discussion ranged from human embeddedness in the nonhuman world to the relationship between poetic duration and historiography to the role of affect in poetry that seeks to reckon with the ever-intensifying ecodisasters of our time.

The Reno, Nevada–based poet Jared Stanley visited Philadelphia and the Kelly Writers House in April 2017 during a book tour for the release of EARS, which Sam Lohmann in The Volta has called "a manifesto of interdependence and susceptibility, a theory of the senses, and a deliberate sequence of jokes about lyric address." In this PennSound podcast interview with Brian Teare, Stanley talks about how notions such as friendship, ethics, and animism inform the scope of his work.

Samantha Giles visited the Kelly Writers House during her reading tour last December to talk with Jenn McCreary about her new collection, Total Recall, which was published by Krupskaya Press and which Daniel Borzutsky has described as a book that "powerfully and strangely melds autobiography, poetry, ethnography, philosophical inquiry, and testimony." In this PennSound podcast, Giles talks about child-raising as "durational performance"; about studying with Juliana Spahr at Mills College; and about the role of research in the writing practice that produced Total Recall, which Giles tells us is "a book that centers itself around memory but when memory is impacted by trauma and the ways in which that trauma unwrites the memories in one's own brain."

Ted Rees, who recently relocated from Northern California back to his hometown of Philadelphia, and Ariel Resnikoff, 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.

Christie Davids interviews Sue Landers on her 2016 book, Franklinstein.