Event Report - Robert Kelly

Poet Robert Kelly read to a capacity audience of ninety-five people on Wednesday evening, 4 April 2007, in the charmless auditorium of Murrary Hall on the University of Maine campus. Despite the developing snowstorm outside, and the acoustical challenges presented by the room, Kelly connected powerfully with the audience during his wide-ranging and highly-musical forty-minute set.

A full event report, along with a detailed set list, can be consulted here.

Earlier in the day, Kelly visited Honors 180: A Cultural Odyssey, to discuss his work with students. Here he is shown reading from his book Threads.

Kelly also read an excerpt from “Samphire,” his 2006 contribution to the Backwoods Broadsides Pamphlet Series.

After his evening reading, Kelly fielded questions from the audience.

Archival record - A digital videotape recording was made of the event (sound quality very good; image quality poor due to lighting). In addition to the dv masters, vhs and dvd duplicates will be available shortly. An 8-bit mp3 recording of the reading was also made. Contact Steve Evans for more information about acquiring copies.

The Luster of Listening

“I suppose poetry is / Listening Out Loud,” writes Robert Kelly in a statement he prepared for a conference on contemporary poetry several years ago. You can hear Kelly read his statement here; to follow along, check out the text here. The whole of Kelly’s Manhattan performance in November 2005 can be heard online here.

Kelly reads in the New Writing Series tomorrow night, Wednesday, 4 April, at 8PM. The reading in 102 Murray Hall is free and open to everyone.

Some Tina Darragh Sound Files

Prior to giving her public reading in the NWS on Thursday, 25 January 2007, the poet Tina Darragh spent some time in Neville Hall talking about and reading from her work. Five tracks from that impromptu recording session are linked to below.

frommy hands to myself
from sputter plot - added 2/4/07
Ben Friedlander in New York City Dream
Charles North in Maine Dream
Collective Lament for Banishing Animals from History

Production notes: Recorded with a pretty good mic on a pretty cheap tape recorder, then digitized using Garageband and converted to mp3 with iTunes. More to come, time & technology permitting.

On Robert Kelly’s May Day

The poet Robert Kelly will read in the New Writing Series on Wednesday, 4 April, in an event co-sponsored by the Honors College’s Cultural Odyssey program. It so happens that today, two blogs converged in discussing Kelly’s recent book, May Day, published by the independent, Canadian-based press Parsifal. For John Latta’s remarks, click here. For Ron Silliman’s here.

Bob Grenier on “Close Listening” Radio Program

Close Listening is a poetry radio show hosted by Charles Bernstein (NWS S02) on WPS1. In the most recent installment, aired 20 October 2006, Bernstein hosted poet Bob Grenier for an hour-long conversation about his development as a poet, his relationship to Larry Eigner, and his long work “Sentences,” from which he reads in the second half of the program. The audiofiles, split into two mp3s of roughly 30-minutes each, can be heard here. The event report for Grenier’s 5 October 2006 reading in the NWS is here.

What Brian Evenson’s Been Listening To

Fiction writer Brian Evenson will read in the NWS on 7 December 2006. Last week, he shared with readers of Largehearted Boy, an excellent music-centered blog, some of the songs from his youth that he listened to while working on his newest novel, The Open Curtain. You can read his liner notes here.

NWS Event Report: Bob Perelman Reading

Event Report — The poet Bob Perelman read to a capacity audience of more than one hundred people in a NWS event co-sponsored by the Honors College on Wednesday afternoon, 18 October 2006. Perelman read exclusively from his new book, IFLIFE, published earlier in the month by the New York-based Roof Books. He opened his set with “Against Shock and Awe,” a poem that first appeared on the Op-Ed pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer in February 2003. He then read “The Revenge of the Bathwater” (to the audible amusement of the audience), “The Dream of the Bed,” and several other short poems, before turning to a substantial excerpt from the book’s title sequence, “Iflife.” He closed the set with another extended poem, “Tank Top.” About 35 people remained for a lively question and answer period afterwards.

Archival Record — The event was documented on digital video tape (VHS and DVD duplicates of which will be available shortly); an mp3 file of the reading is also available upon request (contact the English Department).

Earlier in the afternoon, Perelman had visited Honors 180: A Cultural Odyssey, where he read from, discussed, and entertained questions about his work. In the photo reproced below, Perelman is shown talking about a “word ladder” employed in his poem “Against Shock and Awe.”

Nathaniel Mackey (NWS F03) National Book Award Finalist

Poet Nathaniel Mackey’s New Directions book Splay Anthem has been named a finalist for this year’s National Book Award. Mackey read in the NWS in November of 2003; archival footage of his live reading is available through the English Department, as is a 45-minute “poet profile.”

Up next, Bob Perelman

The poet Bob Perelman, a recent recipient of the $50,000 PEW Fellowship, will read in the NWS on Wednesday, 18 October. He’s touring this fall in support of a brand new book from Roof Press, Iflife, some tracks from which can be heard via PennSound (scroll down to the 11 March 2006 reading at the Bowery Poetry Club). Later in October, he’ll be participating in Autostart, a festival of Digital Literature hosted by the Kelly Writers House.

You can read a 2002 interview with Perelman here. And check out slides from the “Playing Bodies” sequence, Perelman’s collaboration with his wife, the artist Francie Shaw, here. A videotape of Perelman’s 1 May 2003 reading in the NWS (with Kit Robinson) is available through the UMaine English Department (contact Steve Evans on First Class for more information).

Some bio! (Robert Grenier)

The Marianne Boesky Gallery in Manhattan did a show of Robert Grenier’s “Drawing Poems” in 2004. One senses the poet’s own hand in the dusie of a bio-note they put together: “Grenier is a 63-year-old, wiry/paunchy, white-haired, disaffected, formerly influential, prototypical/clean-shaven/Harvard-educated ‘Language Writer’ (from Minnesota) become wildly innovative, ‘neo-Romantic’/'old-fashioned’, hand-craft-writing/image-making, scruffy, corn, beans and squash-growing/blackberry-apple jam-making/set-in-his-ways type of opinionated, ‘archaic’-nuthead/vociferously ‘correct’, ‘liberal’/verbal/’extemporaneous’ person living in Bolinas, CA.” And there’s more where that came from!