Our Format: PennSound and the Articulation of an Interface for Literary Audio Recordings

  Le goût de l’archive est visiblement une errance àtravers les mots d’autroi, la recherce d’un langage qui    en sauve les pertinences.

[The allure of the archives entails a roaming voyage  through the words of others, and a search for a  language that can rescue their pertinence.]

Arlette Farge

At the university of pennsylvania’s kislak center for Special Collections, with the material contents of PennSound spread out in seven boxes before me, I am uncertain where or even how to begin. Although I have been listening to the audio recordings on the digital repository’s website (writing.upenn.edu/pennsound) for years, each recording I pull out from the archival boxes seems cast in a new light by its sheer materiality, more complex with the traces of the many hands involved in its recording and circulation. Inside the main collection boxes, there are more boxes, cardboard ones with cassette tapes lined within, plastic ones containing stacks of compact discs. There are envelopes of all sizes, with more tapes and discs, with the occasional dat cassette or floppy disk, and, sometimes, a reel in the mix. Hand-scrawled stick-it notes adorn the coverings of individual recordings and detail their contents. Occasionally, I find personal messages written on a recording’s sleeve that signal toward an ongoing exchange between poets. There are elastics so old and ossified that sometimes, when I pick up whatever objects they bundle together, the rubber crumbles to pieces. The boxes are “unprocessed,” as Lynn Farrington and John Pollack of the Kislak Center explain. By this, they mean that they have not organized the materials in any particular way and have kept them in relatively the same groupings as they arrived at the Kislak Center seven years earlier. In fact, they admit, they aren’t exactly certain what “processing” this collection should mean.

Over these last years, I have learned that I am one of many for whom PennSound has served as a main introduction to the expanded practices of contemporary Anglophone poetry and, more generally, to listening to poetry audio recordings. In ongoing dialogues with peers throughout my own transition from occasional listener to graduate student to teacher, I have also learned that I am one of many who uses PennSound as a core resource for teaching contemporary poetry and poetics. Launched by Charles Bernstein and Al Filreis in 2005, PennSound’s online repository of mp3 audio recordings has made a significant contribution to the recent critical turn toward sound as “a material and materializing dimension of poetry” (Bernstein, “Introduction” 4). Assembled from numerous personal and institutional collections of poetry audio recordings—ones that were, generally, not publicly accessible prior to PennSound—the digital repository has established a new set of standards for archiving, accessing, and engaging with literary audio recordings. A large part of its impact is the emphasis Bernstein and Filreis have put on access and distribution as core elements to the project’s design and protocols. One of the site’s core credos is, after all, “Make it free,” adapting Ezra Pound’s modernist dictum to “Make it new” so as to apply to poetry and poetics in an era of digital networks. Another important aspect of the digital repository’s impact is its commitment to exploring and expanding the many spaces of production and use that inform the site’s interface. Here, interface defines both a technical object and shared boundary between electronic media and human users (Kirschenbaum), as well as a zone of activity, of processes that transform the material states of media (Galloway). In Bernstein and Filreis’s attention to these components of PennSound’s interface—as a technical object and its effects—they have developed a unique mode of pedagogical exchange concerning poetry and poetics, one that Filreis describes as “our format” (Nardone 422).

Part of what I am attempting to do amid the archival materials at the Kislak Center is to better understand their articulation via PennSound’s interface and, thus, to more thoroughly assess the modes of use and...