Brian Ang trawls the PennSound archives so you don't have to...

Intrigued by the PennSound archive, but a little overwhelmed by its abundance? Like your old, dusty poetry recordings with a healthy dose of leftist commentary? Then get thee over to Brian Ang's inaugural post at Jacket2! Each Sunday, the Oakland-based poet will present a PennSound gem along with some musings, and he kicks it all off with a couple of recordings of William Carlos Williams' lectures at Hanover College in 1952.

Ang chose this particular "fiery document of late Williams" for the tensions it reveals in the poet's politics: his hard-to-shake sense of American exceptionalism (“You are Americans! You are inheritors of that ideal!") as it bumps up against his creeping suspicions that all is not well with the country, two years deep into the Korean War. Of course, in the end, the lecture is mostly about poems -- the ways that measure shapes meaning, and the need for new and less restrictive forms. Ang quotes from Williams' lecture:

There are elements in various places which force us to go into wrong thinking.  Now if the poem, if the fixity of the poem, subscribes to that wrong thinking, then the whole thinking about poetry is wrong!  If the poem is so changed, is so altered, so remeasured, that it allows the mind to realize this is the right way, this is a broader way, this is not a constricted way of thinking, we have a chance then of thinking correctly about the world, and that’s the importance of the poem.

As always with the PennSound recordings, the best part is hearing a familiar poet's voice -- in this case, Williams' slightly New Jersey-fied drawl, punctuated by the occasional bump, as he beats his podium for emphasis.

Next up for Ang? LeRoi Jones, speaking at the Revolutionary Theater in 1965, along with contemporaneous recordings of Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan at the Berkeley Poetry Conference. Check the post for links to the recordings, if you want to hear them before catching up with next Sunday's commentary.