Video and audio recordings of the University of Arizona Poetry Center symposium
Conceptual Poetry & Its Others

Audio
Keynote Address: Marjorie Perloff

Caroline Bergvall
Charles Bernstein
Christian Bök
Craig Dworkin
Kenneth Goldsmith
Tracie Morris
Cole Swensen

Videos
Reading with Tracie Morris and Charles Bernstein
Reading with Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith Reading
Reading with Cole Swensen, Christian Bök, and Caroline Bergvall
Roundtable with Jesper Olsson, Marie Smart, Linda Reinfeld, Vanessa Place, Charles Alexander, Brian Reed, and moderator Marjorie Perloff
Roundtable with Barbara Cole, Wystan Curnow, Jonathan Stalling, Graça Capinha, Stephen Fredman, Laynie Brown, and moderator Marjorie Perloff
Panel Discussion with featured poets, moderated by Tenney Nathanson

A question I'm often asked is, how is conceptual poetry's embrace of appropriation anything new when, after all, poets have been appropriating from time eternal. They claim that, particularly in the twentieth century, with the advent of collage and pastiche, it's all been done before. And then there's always the mention of Kathy Acker, who was a brilliant collagist, but less an appropriator. I find myself answering that, yes, while collage and pastiche are commonplace, actual appropriation is rare to non-existent in literary history.

What is the difference between collage / pastiche and appropriation? When a poet collages a non-aleatory work together, one selects choice fragments to construct a meta whole, often predicated upon the taste -- and whim -- of the poet, ripe with intention. Even types of writing that worked hard to eschew conventional textual construction, such as certain strains of Language Poetry, out for prioritized, highly specified textual fragments placed on a page next to each other for the ultimate "zing."

Christian Bök "Two Dots Over a Vowel"
(presented at Conceptual Poetry and Its Others Conference, University of Arizona, Tucson)

Christian Bök began by discussing a group of poets around UbuWeb (Caroline Bergvall, Craig Dworkin, Robert Fitterman, Kenneth Goldsmith, Simon Morris, Darren Wershler-Henry, and himself) to "disavow the lyrical mandate of self-conscious self-assertion in order to explore the readymade potential of uncreative literature." Bök claims that they resort to a diverse variety of anti-expressive, anti-discursive strategies (including the use of forced rules, random words, copied texts, boring ideas, and even cyborg tools), doing so in order to erase any artistic evidence of 'lyric style.' He cited the precedents for the group as being Perec, Warhol, Cage and Bruce Andrews and claimed the group to be inspired by movements such as Oulipo, American conceptual art of the 1960s.

Bök next showed an image of Steve McCaffery's "William Tell: A Novel," which is simply a lower case "i" with a colon atop of it instead of a dot. He recalled the story of William Tell and then conflated it with the William Tell episode of William S. Burroughs, where he shot his wife dead playing William Tell. Bök examined the linguistic implications of "the mark," in terms of self-expression, in relation to a target, as well as a graphic manner of mark making. And then he further extended these metaphors to examine the tension between literatures "will" and how much a work of literature "tells."

Kenneth Goldsmith "Conceptual Poetics"
(presented at Conceptual Poetry and Its Others Conference, University of Arizona, Tucson)

I presented the journal on Conceptual Poetics that I did here for the Poetry Foundation last year.

In brief, Conceptual writing or uncreative writing is a poetics of the moment, fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, one that proposes an expanded field for 21st century poetry. Conceptual writing's concerns are generally two-pronged, as manifested in the tensions between materiality and concept. Conceptual writing obstinately makes no claims on originality. On the contrary, it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos. Language as junk, language as detritus. Nutritionless language, meaningless language, unloved language, entartete sprache, everyday speech, illegibility, unreadability, machinistic repetition. Obsessive archiving & cataloging, the debased language of media & advertising; language more concerned with quantity than quality.

In their self-reflexive use of appropriated language, conceptual writers embrace the inherent and inherited politics of the borrowed words: far be it from conceptual writers to morally or politically dictate words that aren't theirs. The choice or machine that makes the poem sets the political agenda in motion, which is often times morally or politically reprehensible to the author. With the rise of appropriation-based literary practices, the familiar or quotidian is made unfamiliar or strange when left semantically intact. No need to blast apart syntax.

Conceptual writing is more interested in a thinkership rather than a readership. Readability is the last thing on this poetry's mind. Conceptual writing is good only when the idea is good; often, the idea is much more interesting than the resultant texts.

On a recent radio interview, Language poet Bruce Andrews talked about how, back in the early 70s, using a paper cutter radically changed his work, breaking up his writing into a modular process. It was the correct response for the time. Today, we have immense information moving capabilities at our fingertips and new movements like Conceptual Writing or Flarf are the correct responses for our time. If writing is not taking these new conditions into its poetics, it simply cannot be considered contemporary. If nothing else, what the Conceptual Poetry and Its Others conference did was codify this tendency for the record.

The other significant notion that emerged from the conference was that conceptual poetics is a many-headed monster, showing itself wildly adaptable to a wide variety of interests and agendas, the baseline of the practices being floated by technology. In a sense, what the conference did was to bring the field of poetics up to date and in line with other art forms and long-established cultural trends. Words like "sampling," "appropriation," "cut-and-paste," "mixing" and "remixing" were in constant use as were frequent references to technology, globalization and multi-lingualism. The papers and discussions were very much focused on the concept of poetry off the page, bleeding into galleries, performances, sound installation, on the airwaves, interventionist strategies, websites and blogs, all of these not being the traditional spaces where poetry happens. Yet all the poets got up and "read," and all have published numerous books. Conceptual poetry is a poetry that, in fact, knows no bounds; in this, its wildly contemporary. As respondent Brian Reed put it, "Genres don't evolve, they get more confused over time." Reed claimed that the poet is now a post-production studio, enabling new notions of collaboration fueled by distributed agencies and sites of production.

Cole Swensen "What to Do Besides Describe it: Ekphrasis that Ignores the Subject"
(presented at Conceptual Poetry and Its Others Conference, University of Arizona, Tucson)

Cole Swensen began by stating: "In attempting to get beyond the 'emotions recollected in tranquility' paradigm, which is what it seems to me conceptual poetry in its widest sense is trying to do, I've been increasingly drawn to models of poetry as revealing something about the way we think and even expanding our perspectives or patterns of thought."

She then introduced the concept of ekphrasis and the theories of Semir Zeki, a scientist who argued that the visual arts, particularly painting, train us to see constants and to gradually develop overall perceptual constancy. Swensen wondered what the implications and parallels in poetry might be. She commented that in the visual fields, the ways in which we're asked to see and to "read" haven't changed all that much, based as they are on a primary figure/ground relationship. What has changed, she argues, is subject matter. Swensen argues that "Increasingly, the visual arts and some poetry have worked to distill subject matter so that core structural elements and their dynamics are laid bare or at least made much more apparent. but it seems that the visual arts have been more successful at this than poetry, and in part, it's because, after a very promising start, epitomized by Gertrude Stein, who recognized that there was something to be gained in translating cubism's geometric and perspectival shifts into writing, poetry took a turn which confused distillation with simplification, turning precisely away from that which would expose underlying dynamics apparent through rhythm, echo, juxtaposition, etc. and toward simpler language, where 'simpler' was understood to be both 'clearer' and 'truer,'" with the result being poetic language dominated by subject matter, by information.

Swensen posited that ekphrasis as a tool can help poetry by historically analyzing how the visual arts have accomplished this. She concluded with a lengthy participatory group discussion looking a numerous works of modernist visual art to show how a unifying principle between very different subjects could be seen as similar. She asked the audience to "think about how, in each case, subject matter has been modified, compromised, distilled in order to let the dynamics become a little more apparent."

Tracie Morris "Black conceptual poetics: examples for crafting"
(presented at Conceptual Poetry and Its Others Conference, University of Arizona, Tucson)

Tracie Morris states that "I hope that, by bringing the sonic, political and creative sensibilities, we can, as embracers of experimentation and variety, assert this as a critical component of American conceptual poetics through found art, uncreative writing, transgressions through otherness as well as conventional writing practice and utterance."

Morris examined how Black poetics undermines notions of typification based on the initially non-human status of Black standing in the Americas, in particular, by means of creativity in Black speech as code. Black code is continuously constructed and assimilated through American identity, it is at once a fixed and fluid medium. Morris noted that one way this is negotiated in African American contexts is through the humorization of Black misery.

Morris then discussed the Ring Shout as being both multidisciplinary and "performative." Shouting performances incorporate dance (the ring shout), singing and music in a quasi-ritual context, using grammatical codification as codes for survival.

She claims that "There are two issues being presented here. One of African linguistic traits interfacing with the everyday language of Standard American English, the other of encoded meaning within the speech that has an entirely different significance... Gatherings by the enslaved were codified so in many instances."

A more focused discussion of language ensued with the 1980s occurrences of "Yo" and "mira" that were practically synonyms in the coagulated lingua franca of Brooklyn streets. Morris discussed how language Caribbeanisms from English-speaking nations and other cultural elements from the French Caribbean also became part of the mainstream African American landscape.

What followed was a look at musical artists who emphasized the relationship between uttered sound and music as performative utterance. This flow in Hip Hop is conveyed through the artists' use of assonance, consonance, internal rhyme, speed, shifting of metrical stresses and creative uses of language. Examples were provided by Rakim and Missy Elliott.

Morris summed up her talk by commenting that the intersection of African American poetic presentations in the context of popular song was compelled by a coded survival strategy and is now an established aesthetic.

Caroline Bergvall "Social Engagement of Writing"
(presented at Conceptual Poetry and Its Others Conference, University of Arizona, Tucson)

Caroline Bergvall spoke about several recent projects that correspond to the questions of bilingual awareness and conceptual structure. Her main points touched upon question of multiple languages: where and how does one write when one has not one language of origin, but several? What is the site of such practices, the site multiple forms and spaces of inscription? Bringing poetry through a combination of modes and histories. Some from visual arts, some literary, some sonic. Body representation as a space. Exploring the authored body, giving it signs, finding its signals. Verbal and libidinal. Restrictions and actions of social readings of bodily space on what one calls one's own body. Body as marker of an extended authorial space: performances/sitework/soundwork. Space itself becomes a field of work, a local/e, precise with its own histories.

She discussed her multi-national -- and hence multi-linguistic -- background as a problematic situation of self-definition as an artist and how sending bios & summaries for shows and readings for her is a complex affair; the social and cultural difficulties in calling oneself a poet in the first place.

Bergvall said, "I am inclined to consider conceptualism not primarily along strict critical lines but rather in the open-ended, integrative and often conflicted and socially engaged approaches that have also defined conceptual arts practices... A conceptual writer or conceptual poet so defined has a stake in arts practice, as much as they have one in poetics. Or perhaps one could simply say, they have a stake in broader cultural practice, one in which verbal and non verbal inscriptive methods coexist and are coextensive."

She concluded by showing extensive documentation of her sound and visual works which illustrated the above notions of the multi-lingual, mishearing, translation, and identity.

Craig Dworkin "The Politics of Conceptual Writing"
(presented at Conceptual Poetry and Its Others Conference, University of Arizona, Tucson)

Dworkin's premise is that formal techniques (such as appropriation, citation, or the filtering of databases, or any of the procedures that might define 'uncreative' or 'conceptual' practices) always necessarily signify, but they do so in contingent, contextual, historicizable ways (rather than in fixed a priori ways). He asks, how and in what ways can we assess such techniques? Dworkin cited a Language poet who bragged about the daring of his pirated literary appropriations but then across the bottom of every page in big block letters -- and without apparent irony -- was a warning stating that it was forbidden to quote from the essay without permission.

Dworkin went on to discuss the unchecked ventriloquism of George W. Bush's speeches, which are self-plagiarizing and formulaic. Dworkin states that, when Bush recycles the words of his speechwriters and handlers, it's unremarkable, but when a poet does the same thing, it's a distinctive statement, and an alignment without or against certain poetic protocols and ethoi.

Poet's quotes compiled by Frances Sjoberg on the occasion of the Conceptual Poetry and Its Others Conference, University of Arizona

CHARLES BERNSTEIN

1. In poetry, they talk about finding your voice, which is too often a way of evading the voices to be found in the writing.

2. Not only do I consider works of official verse culture to be poetry (which is not, for me, an honorific category), but also one of the key features of official verse culture [is] that it could necessarily include some poetry that I like quite a lot.

3. I prefer minerals to insects but I have been working on this with my ontologist.

4. As an alternative to National Poetry Month, I propose that we have an International Anti-Poetry Month. As part of the activities, all verse in public places will be covered over--from the Statue of Liberty to the friezes on many of our government buildings...Parents will be asked not to read Mother Goose...Religious institutions will have to forego reading verse passages from the liturgy...with hymns strictly banned...No vocal music will be played on the radio or sung in concert halls. Children will have to stop playing all slapping and counting and singing games and stick to board games and football.

5. Oddly, it is a form of dissent these days to hold out that art that doesn't get the market share can actually be as valuable as the art that does....I'm for the ketchup that loses the race.

6. Attention: Write down everything you hear for one hour.

7. There is still a great deal of conceptualizing that leads up to any intuition.

TRACIE MORRIS

1. Conceptual frameworks always determine the scope and form of my poems. Particularly the improvised ones.

2. We often associate medical advances as helping the body, but here I want to emphasize the structural or conceptual dystopia of sexism that impacts the structure of the female body.

3. We will be looking at...the performative utterances of Black women poetically and in some cases, musically. The interpretation...gives us insight into how different vocal modes, sounds and tones are understood by the listener and reader.

4. Philly! If I ate cheesesteak I'd be in heaven but as it is, I'll be happy to be back east with the hard core language school posse as they beat me into submission before I join the club!

5. The text is the body. The body tests text.

6. Racial and sexual power dynamics have not changed for 500 years, Morris says, and she doens't expect a change for 500 more.

7. The requirements are consistent attendance and promptness (this is mandatory. No late papers will be accepted and no incompletes are offered for this class.

TUCSON, May 31 — Charles Bernstein, best known as the co-editor of the influential 1970s journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and a prime proponent of the poetry movement by same name publicly renounced many of the positions that he had abided by over the past three decades.

Bernstein, who has a volume of Selected Poems forthcoming from a major New York trade publisher, appeared before a crowd of several hundred at the Conceptual Poetry conference at the University of Arizona Thursday afternoon and admitted his mistakes in the form of a lengthy poem, "Recantorium (a bachelor machine, after Duchamp after Kafka)."

Mr. Bernstein backed away from his negative opinion of what he has termed "official verse culture," saying that these poets do, in fact, "represent the best and the finest, the most profound and significant, the richest and most rewarding, poetry of our nation."

Mr. Bernstein, who once held the opinion that only elitist and obscure poetry should be praised, now claims that "only poets working in solitude and individually can produce poems of enduring value" and has embraced "a poetry without limits of time or place, a poetry universal address and true to the timeless human spirit." In addition, he now advocates that "clearly written expository prose, with a delineated argument including a beginning, middle, and end, is the only guarantor of Rational Mind."

Marjorie Perloff's keynote for the Conceptual Poetry Conference in Tucson set forth a clear agenda: making a distinction between the poetics of thirty years ago and now: Language Poetry vs. Conceptual Poetry. She claimed that the poetics of, for example, Ron Silliman's anthology In the American Tree -- with its play on William Carlos Williams's Modernist classic In the American Grain -- is being superceded by the new transnational and global culture of the internet.

Perloff went on to ask how has the digital dissemination of new poetry and poetics -- whether in journals, or on sites such as Ubuweb, Pennsound, Ron Silliman's blog or here on Harriet -- affected the writing of poetry itself?

She also questioned the values of a poetics based on identity in a time when neither phone numbers nor email addresses tell us where caller and recipient are actually located, nor does an email address provide vital statistics about its possessor; when an AOL or Yahoo address, for example, reveals neither nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, age -- and often not even gender. We are moving away, she claimed, from a geographical, from identity politics to shifting identities and communities, all this being reflected in the new poetry.

She gave numerous examples of Language Poetry, which she termed the "period style of the 1980s": a poetry of programmatic non-referentiality, words and phrases refusing to "add up" to any sort of coherent, much less transparent statement. The defeat of reader expectation -- a kind of cognitive dissonance-- is central to these poems.

Conceptual Poetry and Its Others
University of Arizona Poetry Center
Tucson, AZ
5/29-31/08

Thursday, May 29

4 p.m. Reading with Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris

5 p.m. Break

7 p.m. Keynote Address with Marjorie Perloff

Friday, May 30

9 a.m. The Politics of Conceptual Writing, Craig Dworkin
This seminar will investigate the politics of conceptual writing. Understanding politics broadly as “relations of power,� we will seek to better understand the way in which those relations are reconfigured by the various contexts in which conceptual writing practices might be read: plagiarism and copyright; new media and government surveillance; psychosis and medical diagnosis; publishing fads; the Situationists’ principle of detournement. Several case studies will be presented, followed by open participation.

10:15 a.m. Forms of Social Engagement, Caroline Bergvall
In this workshop, I will be looking at conceptual methods as they frame and favour socially engaged forms of writing. I will be using examples from my own work as well as from a few other writers/poets who work conceptually to set up a discussion around questions of personal history and poetic process; bilingualisms and writing engagement; language awareness and writing systems.

11:30 a.m. Uncreative Writing Workshop, Kenneth Goldsmith
It’s clear that long-cherished notions of creativity are under attack, eroded by file-sharing, media culture, widespread sampling, and digital replication. How does writing respond to this new environment? This workshop will rise to that challenge by employing strategies of appropriation, replication, plagiarism, piracy, sampling, plundering, as compositional methods. Along the way, we’ll look at the rich history of forgery, frauds, hoaxes, avatars, and impersonations spanning the arts, with a particular emphasis on how they employ language. Participants will be penalized for showing any trace of originality, sincerity or honesty.

UbuWeb

Tellus Audio Cassettes (1983-1993)
http://www.ubu.com/sound/tellus.html

UbuWeb is pleased to present the entire run of the legendary New York-based Tellus audio cassette magazine. Originally a subscription-based bimonthly publication, the series took full advantage of the popular cassette medium to promote cutting edge music, documenting the New York scene and advanced US composers of the time. Highlight issues include: All Guitars! (1985), The Sound of Radio (1985), Just Intonation (1986), Audio By Visual Artists (1988), The Voice of Paul Bowles (1989) and Flux Tellus (1990). Featuring hundreds of artists including Marcel Duchamp, Alison Knowles, Sonic Youth, Joan Jonas, George Brecht, Pauline Oliveros, John Zorn, Richard Prince, Glenn Branca, Harry Partch and Mike Kelley. Tellus cassettes were edited by Joseph Nechvatal, Claudia Gould and Carole Parkinson. This UbuWeb feature is presented in conjuction with Continuo's Weblog. Produced for UbuWeb by Steve McLaughlin.


Dada Magazine, Issues 1, 2, 3 (1917-1918)
http://www.ubu.com/historical/dada/index.html

Attempting to promulgate Dada ideas throughout Europe, Tristan Tzara launched the art and literature review Dada. Appearing in July 1917, the first issue of Dada, subtitled Miscellany of Art and Literature, featured contributions from members of avant-garde groups throughout Europe, including Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Delaunay, and Wassily Kandinsky. Marking the magazine's debut, Tzara wrote in the Zurich Chronicle, "Mysterious creation! Magic Revolver! The Dada Movement is Launched." Issue 2 appeared in December of 1918. Issue number 3 violated all the rules and conventions in typography and layout and undermined established notions of order and logic. Printed in newspaper format in both French and German editions, it embodies Dada's celebration of nonsense and chaos with an explosive mixture of manifestos, poetry, and advertisements - all typeset in randomly ordered lettering. Included is Tzara's "Dada Manifesto of 1918," which was read at Meise Hall in Zurich on July 23, 1918, and is perhaps the most important of the Dadaist manifestos. See also Helmut Herbst's film Deutschland Dada (1969), Hans Richter's films and Tristan Tzara's sound poems in UbuWeb Sound which is strewn with historical and rare recordings from dozens of Dadaists.


Dinner With Henry Miller (1979)
http://www.ubu.com/film/miller_dinner.html

Dinner With Henry is a rare, 30-minute documentary about Henry Miller. It is exactly what the title implies: footage of Henry having dinner. With him at the table is the film crew, and actress/model Brenda Venus, to whom Henry was enamoured in the final years of life. Henry - at age 87 - spends the majority of his time speaking on a number of subjects, the most persistent of which is Blaise Cendrars. Occasionally, he complains about the food. That is all: a curious "slice of life" for any Miller fan who likes to imagine being at the table with him.


David Cronenberg on Andy Warhol (2006)
http://www.ubu.com/sound/warhol.html

A guided tour of the "Andy Warhol / Supernova: Stars Death and Disasters, 1962-1964" exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario, conceived and narrated by renowned filmmaker David Cronenberg. Cronenberg says, "Andy was making underground films when I was making underground films. And I was more inspired by him than by Hollywood. He created himself: He was an outsider, a Slovakian, Catholic, gay, an artist, poor; an outsider in his own family, a triple outsider like Kafka, with his nose pressed against the New York window. And, he became the ultimate insider, the center of his own world, and drew people to him. He became a huge example of the invention of an identity." Commentary by David Cronenberg, Mary-Lou Green, Dennis Hopper, David Moos, James Rosenquist and Amy Taubin.

Derek Melander "Nomad", 2007 (video)

In the grand tradition of Nick Beef's DieKu" series or Claude Closky's Mon Catalogue, Derek Melander creates a poem out of the labels on the clothing in his closet.

The resultant poem is:

Dreams Divided The Natural Uniti
One Free Voice Above The Crowd
R Nomad Identity InStride

Spellbound Acrobat S Bridge The Gap
A Tightrope Outline Barely There

I’m Absolutely Pale
Solitude S Rare Essence
U Breakaway Speechless 2xist

Selected by Alex Ross

1. Robert Ashley "She Was a Visitor"

2. Kurt Schwitters "Sonata in Urlauten"

3. John Cale "Loop"

4. The Films of Mauricio Kagel

5. Charles Amirkhanian "Dog of Stravinsky"

6. Bernd Alois Zimmermann "Musique pour le soupers de Roi Ubu"

7. Pauline Oliveros "Sound Patterns"

8. Ezra Pound "Sestina: Altaforte"

9. John Cage "4'33""

10. Robert Ashley "The Wolfman"

Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His work has also appeared in The New Republic, The London Review of Books, Lingua Franca, and The Guardian. From 1992 to 1996 he was a critic at The New York Times. He has received two ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for music criticism, fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin and the Banff Centre, and a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center for contributions to the field of contemporary music. He played keyboards in the noise band Miss Teen Schnauzer, which gave only one public performance, in 1991. His first book, "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century," a cultural history of music since 1900, was published in October 2007 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Henri Chopin died yesterday (03/01/08), at home in England with his family, peacefully.

Henri Chopin's sound poetry
Films of Henri Chopin
Henri Chopin Why I Am The Author of Sound Poetry and Free Poetry" (1967)

Henri Chopin, explorer of the body's voices (1922-2008). For the last forty years, with his sound poetry revue OU (1964-1974), then through his participation in various international sound poetry festivals, through his personal experience in the experimental studios of radio stations in Köln, Paris, Australia, Canada or Sweden and in his concert/performances throughout Europe, Henri Chopin has consistently and unceasingly opened the ways to unexplored spaces beyond all known languages. Thanks to the systematic use of microphones, amplifiers, tape recorders, editing and mixing consoles, he has given a voice to realms beyond modern or experimental music, beyond any note system and headed for spaces without norms, categories, definitions or limits: spaces of permanent metamorphosis. Read more...

UbuWeb

All Avant-Garde All The Time - UbuWeb Podcast #2:
Produced by The Poetry Foundation, UbuWeb is pleased to announce the second in its podcast series, focusing on Ubu's hidden treasures. As the site has grown so large, these occasional audio guides might shed some light on things you may have overlooked, forgotten about or simply never knew about. This podcast explores the mass of recordings by Giorno Poetry Systems (aka The Dial-A-Poem Poets), a series of double LPs put out back in the 70s featuring artists such as Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, John Cage, Richard Hell, Frank O'Hara and hundreds of others. UbuWeb's first podcast, a general introduction to the site and to sound poetry, can be found here. You can subscribe to our podcast here. The next one, focusing on the audio archives of Aspen Magazine, will be ready in mid-January.