The Speed of Sound

Penn Arts and Sciences Magazine: Spring/Summer 2012 issue
by Blake Cole
photo by Lisa Godfrey

 

Imagine reading the lyrics to your favorite song for the very first time. The only catch? You never get to hear the music. It's not so different with poetry, professors of English Charles Bernstein and Al Filreis will tell you—to fully experience the art, you need to hear it performed. Their solution is PennSound, an online database of poetry readings that includes tens of thousands of recordings in an easily digestible audio format, from both up-and-coming poets and giants of the genre. It's a project that is not only changing the way we experience the poetry we love—it's also offering up a case study in how technology can pave new paths in the liberal arts.

A resource this vast might seem too good to be true to poetry lovers, and for a while, it was. In 1995, Bernstein, the Donald T. Regan Professor of English, was working with the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) in Buffalo, which was, at the time, the most extensive and innovative project to present poetry on the newly emerging World Wide Web. The only drawback was that the EPC was entirely text-based, and due to technological constraints, the idea of hosting recordings of readings online was a pipe dream. But Bernstein—who has published close to 50 books and pamphlets of poems, essays, libretti and translations—remained committed to the idea that audiences needed to hear the sound of the poems, qualities like rhythm and tone, to truly appreciate them.

A public radio show that Bernstein began hosting, called "LINEbreak," finally provided a bridge to this goal. Breakthroughs in audio formats were changing the landscape of Web-hosting capabilities. This eventually allowed him to place the show's original recordings of readings online, via RealAudio files, giving his program's listeners and the public alike the chance to experience the poems as they were meant to be heard. "This was before MP3s were easily downloadable. Back then you didn't have the high-speed connections," says Bernstein. "There was a barrier to the size of sound files you have now. Getting them online was a huge priority, because it revolutionized the way poetry was consumed and archived."

In 2003, when Bernstein came to Penn, he found an ally in Al Filreis, the Kelly Family Professor of English, Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary

Writing (CPCW) and Faculty Director of Kelly Writers House (KWH). Along with an active community of poets and writers, Bernstein encountered an entirely new pool of recorded readings that KWH had accumulated over the years.

The unassuming KWH, nestled alongside Locust Walk, looks almost out of place set against the backdrop of the high-rise dorms. Inside, however, is a bustling space for the literarily inclined, who will tell you the aging cottage's appearance is all part of its appeal. The House had already been cultivating a rich literary community for almost a decade by the time Bernstein arrived at Penn, hosting performances featuring a wide swath of notable poets from all around the country—a perfect resource for what was to become PennSound. Combining Bernstein's recordings from his time at The State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo, and readings from KWH archives, the CPCW launched PennSound with Bernstein and Filreis as co-directors, and the world's first comprehensive online database of poetry readings was born.

Soon, PennSound began receiving recordings from all reaches of the community, including those of Robert Creeley, Bernstein's colleague from SUNY, Buffalo, and a past Kelly Writers House Fellow. "Robert Creeley, the great poet then living in Bolinas, California, fetishized the reel-to-reel tape player," says Filreis. "He captured conversations with poets who'd just show up at his house. After he died, his son Will delivered his father's tapes to us."

Because poetry isn't known for its lucrative earnings, permission to host readings of previously published material turned out to be a non-factor. "There's not the conflict in the case of poetry as there is, say, in a new Hollywood movie," says Bernstein. "The new Hollywood movie costs a fortune to make and will generate millions of dollars. What we are doing is putting a great deal of value, through PennSound and the University, in archiving and preserving the material that otherwise has no real potential for revenue, which, in turn, grants these poets an increased reader base." This open-source environment allowed for PennSound to host audio from masters like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein—content that lent credibility to the project in its infancy.

"One of my favorite poets, a guy named Peter Gizzi, who had apparently never really taken to Ezra Pound, happened to download his readings and put them on his iPod for a driving trip. We get a letter from him soon after saying the experience changed his life," says Filreis. "And so here we have Gizzi finally able to 'hear' Pound. And who knows, at some point, years from now, when Peter Gizzi is gone, and somebody's writing criticism about him, maybe they're going to say there's this point in his work where Pound starts to become a tremendous influence, and we'll know why."

Filreis and Bernstein hope to foster even more experiences like Gizzi's through Jacket2, a revival of a first-of-its-kind online magazine that originated over a decade ago. A section of the publication is dedicated to identifying captivating recordings from the PennSound database, which are then contextualized by handpicked poets and scholars. This commentary, in tandem with the recordings, allows for a much more intimate experience for listeners, and is yet another way in which PennSound is redefining the Web's role in the literary community.

"We have people participating actively in writing and thinking about poetry and poetics in real time from all over the world," says Jessica Lowenthal, the director of KWH and associate publisher of Jacket2. "Jacket2 commentators provide briefs and backgrounds on items in the PennSound archive so that PennSound listeners now have textual guides to supplement their listening.  The combined effect is a breakthrough not only for PennSound and KWH, but for the greater subject of literature, which, in the past, hasn't necessarily been the closest of allies with technology."

In one Jacket2 commentary, Filreis detailed a visit by poet Charles Alexander, who had come to KWH in 2001 to celebrate the life of legendary Philadelphia poet Gil Ott. Alexander read from a series of experimental sonnets called Near or Random Acts, an acronym for his daughter, Nora. "I wrote a kind of bibliographical, contextual piece," says Filreis. "I posted photographs and links to the readings and described the event in detail, then put it up on Jacket2. You could do this with tens of thousands of our recordings—there's a story behind all of them."

Taken together, PennSound and Jacket2 are proving to be a powerful combination in engaging new audiences with poetry far beyond the Penn campus. "We have a staff member here named Amelia, who knew of the Writers House because her instructor in Olympia, Washington, used the materials in his classroom, specifically readings from the Writers House," says Lowenthal. "So the space was familiar to her, even though she had never stepped foot in the building. She contacted us and said, 'Can I do an internship at the Writers House? Is there anything like that available?' And because we knew her professor through the project we said, 'Yeah, Amelia, come on down.'"

In addition to their work on PennSound, both Bernstein and Filreis host "radio" shows—available through iTunes and through PennSound's Web site—committed to enlivening the poetry community. Bernstein hosts a program called "Close Listening," which includes readings of selected poems followed by a conversation with the poet. "The show provides listeners with not only a voice for the poem, which will hopefully lead to a new understanding and appreciation of the text, but also a deeper window into the poet," says Bernstein. "Some of the shows even involve questions from Penn undergraduates." Filreis' program, "PoemTalk," gathers three poets to discuss a single reading from the PennSound archive. Jacket2 posts summaries of these discussions, along with links to the full episodes. "PoemTalk" is additionally available through the Poetry Foundation.

PennSound's collection continues to acquire new material at an exponential rate, including international readings from New Zealand, Australia, the U.K. and Canada. A page on the site, called PennSonido, even features Spanish-speaking poets.

In their pursuit to expose poetry to an even wider audience, Filreis and Bernstein have launched multiple new initiatives, including PennSound Cinema, a collection of films that are in one way or another related to poetry. The movies are currently streamable on the PennSound site and Bernstein and Filreis are constantly working with different filmmakers to make more poetry-related films available. PennSound Radio, the most recently launched project, streams over the Web and can be accessed on smartphones. Readings from the PennSound archive are shuffled in an attempt to expose audiences to myriad poetic experiences. Bernstein and Filreis hope these various media will advance their goal of delivering poetry to a global audience.

"I was in line at the grocery store one day and the guy in front of me was moving kind of slow so I glanced over his shoulder and he was listening to PennSound on his iPod. I said, 'That's me, I helped make this!'" Filreis laughs. "What better way to shop, after all, than to modern poetry?"

Visit PennSound at http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/.

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