stylus

AIR RAID: Archibald MacLeish and the Radio as Literary Device

On October 19th, 1938, a year and a half after the Columbia Workshop debut of his first (and what is largely considered the first) verse play for radio, The Fall of the City, Archibald MacLeish sat down at a microphone in Holden Chapel at Harvard University to record (and more importantly to inform the reading of) his most ambitious verse drama to date: Air...

TWO SIDES FOR WALLACE STEVENS

I hear the “noise” and “skips”—products of a one-off experiment in digital playback and recording—as felicitous deformations of both the text and Stevens’ reading. They open up a way of listening to the poem’s own difficult re-reading of the substance of experience. In other words, in this recording I hear IRENE practicing a kind of unconscious deformative criticism.

A CONCERT OF WORLDS: On Ed Roberson & Joseph Donahue

It is a profound honor to introduce Ed Roberson and Joe Donahue, two poets who have enormously enabled my own writing and thinking, influencing me in ways I am still trying happily to discover. They are poets for me, and I trust for many here this evening, whose work is of such an astonishing, acute clarity and force that reading them is to learn...

OUR SKILL SOMETIMES TO RECORD IT: On W.C. Williams’ Debut of “The Desert Music”

When William Carlos Williams first agreed to speak at Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises in 1951, he did not realize that the delivery of the poem would truly require exercise. He could not have foreseen at the time of commission the stroke he would suffer the following month, and the toll it would take on his capacity to perform it.

MAGPIETY: An Interview with Melissa Green

Poetry is Melissa Green’s landbridge, her strongest connection to the wider world—though it would be more accurate to say that, through poetry, the rest of the world gains access to Green’s “tremendous intensity and tremendous intelligence,” as Joseph Brodsky put it. Marie Howe has written that “Melissa Green might well be a 21st century version of Emily Dickinson, poet of ecstatic states and extremity.”...

ODE TO THE INSTRUMENT: Liner Notes for a John Wieners’ Recording

“Now a poem from Black Mountain, written in 1955,” begins this affecting recital of “Ode to the Instrument,” recorded for the Woodberry Poetry Room at Boston’s Fassett Studio in March 1962. The crystal-clear track is the only known recording of this uncollected early poem, in which Wieners’ later lyricism—his soft-stated allusiveness and lovesick, apostrophic poise—can already be heard lifting into place. The poem, written...

IT’S ALL RIGHT: On Sean Cole’s “To Acropolis”

The Woodberry Poetry Room is pleased to announce a new online series called BOSTON ORIGINALS—a celebration of poets who hail from, dwell in, or write about the greater Boston area. Each BOSTON ORIGINALS post will feature a brief reflection on a Boston poet’s work (or interview with the poet) and an audio or video recording. The Poetry Room wishes to thank Audrey Mardavich (and videographer John Mulrooney) for generously...

NOT TO BE PLAYED: Liner Notes for an Exhibition

“NOT TO BE PLAYED, OR TRANSCRIBED…” Ezra Pound writes emphatically in an October 1955 permissions note to Yale professor Norman Holmes Pearson, in conjunction with that year’s WYBC broadcast “A Tribute to Ezra Pound”. The radio program was a part of a larger effort to secure Pound’s release from St. Elizabeths Hospital, where the poet had been held since 1946 as a result of...

“I Have You By the Ears”: Liner Notes for a John Wieners Exhibit

John Wieners and I spent much time hanging out in his apartment at 44 Joy Street in Beacon Hill. It was a ramshackle, railroad apartment with bamboo patio furniture and exotic crazy collages on the walls. There was a modest shelf of books and piles of papers and folders stacked in a shifting order throughout his three rooms. I spent a great many hours...

BOTH SIDES OF THE FOOTLIGHTS: On the Poets’ Theatre

They put on exotic European imports, like René Char’s balletic The Man Who Walked in a Ray of Sunshine, and earnest home-grown efforts like Lyon Phelps’ The Gospel Witch, a play about Salem fated to be overtaken by Arthur Miller’s. They staged the solemnity of Yeats’ Purgatory and the cheerful absurdity of Ashbery’s Pirandello-style comedy, The Compromise. Readers included metrical conservatives like Richard Wilbur,...