“Having a Coke with you,” written and read by Frank O’Hara
“Frank O´Hara reading his poem “Having a Coke with you” in his flat in New York in 1966, shortly before his accidental death. Taken from – “USA: Poetry: Frank O’Hara” produced and directed by Richard Moore, for KQED and WNET. Originally aired on September 1, 1966. This video was found where more videos can be seen: on http://www.frankohara.org”
Podcast of “Flarf vs. Conceptual,” a reading organized by Kenneth Goldsmith at the Whitney Museum of American Art in conjunction with the recent Jenny Holzer exhibition “PROTECT PROTECT”
Especially memorable is the reading by Christian Bök
“It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature… . If he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way… . This is not easy. Nature works from reverence, even in her destructions (species go down with a crash). But breath is man’s special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts… . I keep thinking, it comes to this: culture displacing the state.” —Charles Olson
Click here for a terrific review by Richard Hell of Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems, which I am reading right now. One especially wonderful short poem goes like this:
In this seven-minute sound poetry tutorial, Christian Bök takes the most difficult things and makes them pleasurable and completely understandable. Produced by Curtis Fox for the Poetry Foundation, Curtis tries — and botches — a snippet of sound poetry. He then hands the mic over to Christian who makes it soar. Bök then goes on to precisely explain the piece and its historic context. I can’t imagine anything better to use as a teaching aid to explain and demonstrate this art form.
“Armantrout ably frames a highly mediated world using its own language, even as she deftly employs quotation marks and overly familiar diction to delineate those voices we “receive” in contemporary culture, leaving open and in perpetual play in her compositions the question of where the real begins and the (pre)fabricated ends, or where the poet emerges and where she disappears.”
