PennSound is a

poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek '' poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings ...

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wikip ...

and online

archive An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual ...

that hosts free and downloadable recordings of poets reading their own work. The website offers over 1500 full-length and single-poem recordings, the largest collection of poetry sound-files on the internet, all of which are available free for download. PennSound is codirected by Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein. It is a project of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universit ...

The Archive

Described as the “iTunes for poetry” by co-director Charles Bernstein in an

Associated Press The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. n ...

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

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Orig ...

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 Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works includ ...

Wallace Stevens Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) 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 an executive for an insurance comp ...

Guillaume Apollinaire Guillaume Apollinaire) of the Wąż coat of arms. (; 26 August 1880 – 9 November 1918) was a French French poetry, poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic of Polish-Belarusian, Polish descent. Apollinaire is considered ...

William Carlos Williams William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet, writer, and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. In addition to his writing, Williams had a long career as a physician practicing both ped ...

and

H.D. Hilda Doolittle (September 10, 1886 – September 27, 1961) was an American modernist poet, novelist, and memoirist who wrote under the name H.D. throughout her life. Her career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the ...

, as well as more recent recordings by poets such as

Allen Ginsberg Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Genera ...

John Ashbery John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic. Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in ...

Jack Spicer Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 – August 17, 1965) 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. H ...

and

Lyn Hejinian Lyn Hejinian (born May 17, 1941) is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is known for her landmark work ''My Life'' (Sun & Moon, 1987, original version Burning Deck, 1980), as ...

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

Louis Zukofsky Louis Zukofsky (January 23, 1904 – May 12, 1978) was an American poet. He was the primary instigator and theorist of the so-called "Objectivist" poets, a short lived collective of poets who after several decades of obscurity would reemerge a ...

, Bruce Andrews, Bernadette Mayer, 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, and the Emergency Reading Series, a poetry reading series hosted by the

Kelly Writers House The Kelly Writers House is a mixed-use programming and community space on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Founded in 1995 by a group of students, faculty, staff, and alumni of the University of Pennsylvania, the K ...

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,

Ron Silliman Ron Silliman (born August 5, 1946) 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 w ...

Ray DiPalma Ray DiPalma (1943-2016) (born in New Kensington, PA in 1943) was an American poet and visual artist who published more than 40 collections of poetry, graphic work, and translations with various presses in the US and Europe. He was educated at Duq ...

, and Charles Bernstein, readings from a celebration of

Hart Crane Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet. Provoked and inspired by T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylized, and ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, ''The Bridge ...

, 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 and Armand Schwerner by Phill Niblock, and videos of

Jerome Rothenberg Jerome Rothenberg (born December 11, 1931) is an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of ethnopoetics and performance poetry. Early life and education Jerome Rothenberg was born and raised in New Yor ...

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 Cecile Rich ( ; May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012) was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the ...

Robert Creeley Robert White Creeley (May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005) 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. He was close with Ch ...

, and George Oppen. 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

's America, Rodrigo Toscano's poetics, and

Amiri Baraka Amiri Baraka (born Everett Leroy Jones; October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014), previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and music criticism. He was the author of numerous bo ...

's Kenyatta.

Classics

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

John Milton John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem ''Paradise Lost'', written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense religious flux and polit ...

Alexander Pope Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 O.S. – 30 May 1744) was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, ...

, and

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's natio ...

.PennSound Classics
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Collaboration

PennSound works closely in collaboration with the

UbuWeb UbuWeb is a 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. Phil ...

, The Electronic Poetry Center, Jacket2 magazine, The Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

References

External links

PennSoundKelly Writers HouseUbuWebElectronic Poetry CenterJacket2 Magazine
{{Penn American literature websites Literary archives in the United States Online archives of the United States Non-profit organizations based in Pennsylvania American poetry collections Poetry organizations