AL FILREIS: I'm Al Filreis and this is Poem Talk at the Writer’s House, where I have the pleasure of convening friends in the world of contemporary poetry poetics to collaborate on a close but not too close reading of a poem or several poems. We'll talk, maybe even disagree a bit, and perhaps open up the verse to a few new possibilities, and we hope gain for poems that interest us, some new readers and listeners. And I say listeners because Poem Talk poems are available in recordings made by the poets themselves as part of our PennSound archive writing.upenn.edu/pennsound. Today, Poem Talk has once again gone on the road, this time to Brooklyn, New York, where I, with Poem Talk’s director and editor, Zach Carduner, have been welcomed warmly into the home of Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee and are joined by Pierre Joris, poet, translator, playwright, critic, winner of the 2021 PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for Translation. Translator and editor most recently of 'Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry' of Paul Celan, and author of many books of his own writing, including recently 'Fox-trails, -tales & -trots'. And by Rachel Levitsky, author of 'The Story of My Accident Is Ours' and 'Under the Sun,' both out, from future poem 'Neighbor,' Ugly Duckling Presse, 'Against Travel / Anti-Voyage,' or maybe it's anti voyage. I don't know which one is it? Either one, voyage, Pamenar 2020, and other books, who in 1999 founded the feminist avant-garde network Belladonna series and who is now a member of the Restructured Belladonna Collaborative, a non-hierarchical literary community. And by Lee Ann Brown, poet, editor, teacher, stirer-up of poetry community happenings, and maker of multimedia poetry events, founder, back in 1989, of the great Tender Buttons Press, whose books include 'In the Laurels, Caught', 'Other Archer', 'Polyverse', and others. And who for the past year has been working on not one, not two, not three, not four, but five long and short-term poetry manuscripts and collaborations with the likes of Bernadette Mayer, Will Patton, David Kirshenbaum, Julie Patton on a big Tender Button's publication. And by our aforementioned host, Charles Bernstein, whose newest book is 'Topsy-Turvy' full of cognitive dissonance, what's new, "covidity," and unruliness. What's new there, either? Published by Chicago poet, editor, essayist, theorist, scholar, librettist, editor way back with Bruce Andrews of 'L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E' magazine, co-founder with me of PennSound, and in recent years, happily settled Brooklynite. So, Charles, thank you for having us here. And Pierre, congratulations on the prize. 

PIERRE JORIS: Thank you. 

AL FILREIS: It's very exciting. And everywhere I turn now, I was saying before we went on the air that maybe my media sphere is too narrow and it seems like everybody's talking about it. But I think the work that you've done with these translations has gotten out. I think everybody is realizing what a big thing it is. So thanks on behalf of all of us. And Lee Ann Brown, you came all the way from North Carolina to talk about Tuli. We haven't mentioned that we're talking about Tuli, but we are. 

LEE ANN BROWN: Yes. Thank you. I love Tuli. 

AL FILREIS: We're going to find that out. And, Rachel, thank you for studying up on Tuli. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Thank you. It's a much-needed immersion into someone who I clearly am aligned with in every way. 

AL FILREIS: Well, today we five have gathered to talk about two poem songs by Tuli Kupferberg. The first is perhaps his most well-known song, written for and performed by The Fugs, 'Morning Morning'. It first appeared as a track on the album entitled 'The Fugs' in March of 1966. The second piece we'll discuss is 'No Deposit No Return', the title cut on an album subtitled 'An Evening of Pop Poetry with Tuli Kupferberg,' also of 1966. This song and the entire album, along with liner notes, are available on our Tuli page at PennSound, reproduced with the kind permission of Samara Kupferberg. Before we talk, let's listen now to 'Morning Morning' and 'No Deposit No Return'. 

('MORNING MORNING' BY THE FUGS PLAYS) # Morning morning # Feel so lonesome in the morning # Morning morning # Morning brings me grief # Sunshine and the sunshine # Sunshine laughs upon my face # And the glory of the growing # Puts me in my rotting place # Evening evening # Feel so lonesome in the evening # Evening evening # Evening brings me grief # Moonshine moonshine # Moonshine drugs the hills with grace # And the secret of the shining # Seeks to break my simple face # Nighttime nighttime # Kills the blood upon my cheek # Nighttime nighttime # Does not bring me to relief # Starshine and the starshine # Feel so loving in the starshine # Starshine starshine # Darling kiss me as I weep. # 

('NO DEPOSIT NO RETURN' BY TULI KUPFERBERG PLAYS) (CHANTING) # No deposit no return # No deposit no return # We try harder, we try harder # We try harder, we try harder # It's the taste that really tells # It's the taste that really tells # When it rains it always pours # When it rains it always pours # The army makes a man of you # The army makes a man of you # Only her hairdresser knows for sure # Only her hairdresser knows for sure # No deposit no return # No deposit no return # No deposit no return # No deposit no return # No deposit no return # No deposit no return. # 

AL FILREIS: Lee Ann Brown, we've just heard two pieces. They're very different Tuli pieces. But I guess I want to start with a counterintuitive question, which is they are different. They're coming from two musical places, but in a way, they're both so Tuli. How so? What do they have in common? 

LEE ANN BROWN: Well, I have to say, first of all, that they do show the range of the sort of crass and sublime part of Tuli, and also that, this deepest melancholy and also this deepest delight. And they're both inherent in both of the pieces. But I think one thing that unites them formally is that there's this simplicity to them. I mean, there's no chorus in this gorgeous 'Morning Morning'. It's the same tune, the same verse. And then the other is like this wild chant that's like a demon out kind of thing, you know? But there's like a DIY embrace that's happening. 

AL FILREIS: Ah, that's great. A great way to start. Charles, the sensibility, the Tuli sensibility is also in both. What is that? How would you put your finger on that sensibility? 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: I loved Lee Ann's answer. It's just absolutely so crystalline, it's perfect. Well, one thing I'd say in common is the year, which is fascinating, 1966. 

AL FILREIS: Ah, yes. Same thing. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: And that's sort of hard to completely take in that he was doing that, as well as '1001 Ways to Beat the Draft,' also '66 / '67, which is yet another sensibility, and that, that we're focusing just on this one year. So '66 adequately stands for what I like to call nowadays 1968. And I think that you can understand what Lee Ann is saying in terms of the best of the spirit of '68. I turned 18 in 1968 and heard these things when I was a teenager. And it to me, it's very much a part of the anti-war movement and the movement against racism, the civil rights movement, which we now think of, to some degree, as the counterculture. But I think that Kupferberg is going way beyond the more superficial understandings of the counterculture so that it's political on the one hand, of course, 'No Deposit No Return'. But there's something very visionary about the 'Morning Morning' song. So it combines both the Blakeian and the political, which I think for my generation, it was what we thought was going on. 

AL FILREIS: Interesting, the '66, '68 thing. I mean one way, Pierre, we can talk about this in terms of political eras is, as Charles implied, this is a kind of premonition a couple of years earlier of, I mean, the draft is starting to get to be a big issue in '66. It becomes a much bigger issue in '68, '69, just affecting more people. So does it seem, Pierre, to you, to be kind of anticipatory in some ways of a certain aspect of counterculture? What's the political-- 'Morning Morning' is a little hard to read politically, but we have to, I think. 

PIERRE JORIS: No, I think both are totally in that moment because that moment had that hard political edge, and at the same time, an incredible romanticism that is an opening up of every level of the body and the mind. So the sexual was there as much as the political. The sexual is the political and the daily life was totally part of that. And so while breaking down the '50s, the hardness of the '50s in this country, but in Europe, too. In '67, I was on Route 66... 

(LAUGHTER) 

..and I stopped with an old friend of mine. The first time I drove across the country, and we stopped somewhere in a bar in Arizona, and I saw a sign on the door. And that sign totally blew me away because I was learning American, a certain language thing, that said, "no shoes, no shirt, no entry". And immediately when I heard the Tuli poem again, that 'No Deposit No Return,' there is an American syntax there that you don't have in any of the other languages. There is an incredible, interesting play going on, wait, that means nothing or that means a positive. And that whole play between those two had me... I mean, amused and I loved it, you know, the discovery of it. 

AL FILREIS: (CHUCKLING) That is such a brilliant comment. Oh, my god, Rachel... 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Yes, beautiful. 

AL FILREIS: ..what do we do with that? That's amazing. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: It occurred to me that my experience of both of them has a lulling-ness and a breakage, both, as well, which actually goes with that, with what you're saying, Pierre, and what everybody is saying. But this lulling-ness is maybe the part that I haven't really thought through much until this moment, but makes sense with the ongoing-ness. There was always music being made from the most mundane thing. But also when my eye went to... the moonshine stanza. Right? 

AL FILREIS: Can you read that moonshine stanza? 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Sure. Moonshine moonshine-- I almost started singing. (SINGS) # Moonshine, moonshine # Moonshine drugs the hills with grace # And the secret of the shining # Seeks to break my simple face. # Sorry. 

AL FILREIS:That's quite an ending. That's quite a last line. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Yeah, right? So the desire to sort of fade out, to drop out, is there, is honored, but also the danger of that desire. So breaking you back into waking up. There's the military sound. (CHANTS) # No deposit no return # No deposit-- # Right? So there's also this wake up and break your simple face. You don't get to just lull out. 

AL FILREIS: So we're back to Lee Ann because I think Lee Ann introduced the concept that both poems have both of those, both pieces have both of those things in them. Lee Ann, I'm going to quote from the liner notes from 'No Deposit No Return'. You're not seeing them, and you didn't anticipate this question. So forgive me, but there's something, you know, the chanting quality which makes you maybe temporarily forget about the politics here in the liner notes, returns to the politics. It goes like this. “Om tellink you.” “Om tellink you. Will the gentleman who borrowed the country by mistake, please return game! How Heart Johnson? Give me yr tired yr hangry. Your poor soldiers frothing to kill. No No No No. No Deposit. No Return.” That is brilliant politics. Can you do anything with that? Holy cow. 

LEE ANN BROWN: Immediately it just starts a flood of all kinds of other songs that, like the first one I learned was (SINGS) "Kill, kill, kill for peace". And I was like, what? This kind of just harsh parody that's so harsh you think, how can he even say that? 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: And 'Kill for Peace' is on the same Fugs second album, 1966. And it's the only other thing written by Tuli Kupferberg on that album. So he had those two, "Kill, kill, kill for peace," perhaps one of the most famous for the irony, but also the savage anti-war quality of it, along with this song. So he had them together on that album. 

AL FILREIS: But here you have immigration. I keep thinking of Pierre in '67 on Route 66, looking at the American English. No, no, no. Here you have 'No Deposit No Return' thinking about the soldier trained to kill, to go to Vietnam and not return. And it's about your tired, your poor. It's a very complicated notion of going and coming to and from the United States. 

LEE ANN BROWN: And that song about, you know, just like a jail in the US Army, you know, he wrote that. Instead of the way down the mine. He's like talking about the jail, the Army. But "How Heart Johnson," I love that. How do you love him? 

AL FILREIS: And the Yiddishism at the beginning of that little passage. 

LEE ANN BROWN: "Om tellink you," yeah. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: And grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household, so that would have been a mother tongue. 

AL FILREIS: Yeah. So we're back to this funny thing, we tried to represent Tuli's work, but it's Poem Talk. We only do one piece or two. So we did two and they're very different. So what do we want, Lee Ann, people who don't know Tuli's work to come away with from these two pieces? And then we'll get to doing some more close readings of them. What do we want to convey this way? 

LEE ANN BROWN: Well, this 'Morning Morning' song is, I mean it's just so, this gorgeous lyric we've already sort of explored it a little bit, but I can't help but pre-associate. I mean like there's another song about the 'Carpe Diem' song and he says, I see the young girl dancing, come celebrate that gladness. Like there's this deep, you know, delight of life and love that is like... it's erotic. A lot of times people think of The Fugs as like, "I like boobs a lot" and 'Nothing,' which are great. But it's also, you know, it's this deep, deep, passionate love for people. And he wasn't a smarmy hippie like some of them were that I met. 

(LAUGHTER) 

I met them. And he was the most radical feminist of the men and everybody that I had met. He was so gentle and kind and like, concerned for everybody. It was just like, it just comes across in the songs. It's like this deep, deep feeling. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: His voice is not very overtly masculinist either. There's a kind of gentleness to his voice that I really picked up on listening to him as well. Like, I don't want to say gentleness, but he's just not hyper-masculine. 

PIERRE JORIS: That makes me think of the sentence that Ed Sanders quotes when he finally asks, "Tuli, why did you jump off the bridge?" And Tuli said, "Because I wasn't loving enough." Just one of those—

(CROSSTALK) 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: (INAUDIBLE) but he tried to commit suicide when he was young. 

PIERRE JORIS: Right. When he was 21 and in bad shape and so on. In Ginsberg's poem, it's the Brooklyn Bridge, but it was, in fact, at the Manhattan Bridge. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: It does sort of seem like a defining moment-- 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: So he's a character in 'Howl' by Allen Ginsberg. 

PIERRE JORIS: He's a character in 'Howl'. Right. 

AL FILREIS: Which is amazing. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: But he makes the incorrect part, I think, in 'Howl' for Tuli's biography. But correct me if I'm wrong, is this sort of, like, lightness of walking away, both the lightness, but also like there's a kind of hyper tragicness to the character in 'Howl,' and it seems like it feels very much that this was a defining moment for Tuli in terms of the life force that Lee Ann was talking about. But, you know... 

PIERRE JORIS: He was lighter. He was not that, you know, Allen makes this into the, you know, the ah! The absolute, and Tuli, yeah, it was something Tuli did and probably said, oh my god, that was a stupid thing to do. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Yeah. It's defining. 

PIERRE JORIS: And he was in a body cast for a while. But, you know, he was OK. And he went on, and he got up the way he always did. I mean, there's that odd, wonderful quality. And that quality is in the work. I mean... 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Yeah, I mean, for me, that goes to this song 'Morning Morning' because, I mean, I also, back to the Yiddishisms, I was thinking about very, like, kind of ecclesiastical, but also this song that we sing at Passover called 'Dayenu,' which is, it would have been enough. Like, if you gave us the sun, it would have been enough. We suffer even though it's beautiful. But each of the stanzas has that kind of balance. And then there is this last stanza, again, back to what Lee Ann is saying, which says looks for the palliative of love. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: Although I... I hear what you're saying and it sounds like, one thing I want to note, born Naphtali, he's born in 1923. So he's older than not only Allen Ginsberg, but most of the new American poets. Because one of the things I'm interested to do, partly because of my own not considering him adequately is to think about him as one of the great figures of the new American poetry, though, and never acknowledged within the poetry context. This poem, unlike 'Ecclesiastes' and a lot of other poems that it seems to sound like, is actually a poem that comes from a clinical depression, and the things that normally would cheer you up don't cheer up the speaker of the poem. And I think that this is really what caught me when I was young, too, about it. I never really thought about it, actually, until he died. And then I went back and I said, that's the song I know the best because almost every other pop song and all these other things, something good happens. Whereas this is no matter what happens, he remains depressed. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: The last line is weep, I weep. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: And even in the case of the love, it means that the love coexists while you're still being sad. It doesn't cheer you up. And I think this is another very powerful thing within this moment of 1968 that somebody is willing to write a song without the upscale hook, that it's dark. I don't want to allegorize it about the war, about America, because I think it's coming out of an experience where the dark stays dark. And that's very astounding, really, for a pop song. And you almost don't hear it. It almost sounds like he's saying, oh, and then I'm feeling better, but he never does. 

PIERRE JORIS: But it has-- oddly enough, I was thinking of Celan's 'Death Fugue' the way I heard that first. You have a text that talks of something very grievous. This is not as grievous. This is personal depression. But then you have the music or the sound of the poem of that one or this one that is morning, you know, that is totally up, so that you have this incredible nearly dichotomy between the sound, the song, and, you know, and the text, which puts you in a strange place. It kind of opens something that you can slip in between this. 

AL FILREIS: Pierre, you've done it again. You brought up Celan 'Death Fugue' and you meant it to be... 

PIERRE JORIS: Sorry. 

AL FILREIS: No. I didn't mean you've done it again in bringing Celan in. You've done it again in saying something brilliant. Because when you said 'Death Fugue,' I thought, well, that's a nice, brief and, you know, kind of askance reference, but actually it works well to make me think that morning, even when it's not M-O-U-R-N, when it's just plain M-O-R-N is still about mourning, it's about survival, because that doubleness that you get in Celan, whenever he turns a poetic tradition around, this is the tradition of the morning. The sun is coming up. The day is new. We're going to be fine. Right? He's turning that around to say morning reminds me of another fucking day. (CHUCKLES) Right? And survival is not greeting the morning and dancing down the avenue, but realizing that morning is survival. And we are going to have to do this day thing. And poetically, that's the way it works. So I really think it means Tuli and Paul Celan, you know, not that-- you don't think of them in the same way. But I do think that he is trying to take depression and make it social and communal and political, which, of course, Celan does in a very complicated way. I think that's there. This is '66 becoming '68. This is a generational depression that he's talking about. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: Paul Celan was born in 1920. He's almost the same age. It's worthwhile to think of them together. 

(CROSSTALK) 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Yeah, I do think it's really important what Charles is saying about the time, because, you know, going back to the suicide, it's 1944. What does it mean to be a Yiddishkeit Jew in 1944? Like, how do you not be depressed? How do you not want to commit suicide? 

AL FILREIS: There is no mourning. There is no mourning. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: Yeah. There is no mourning. Mourning rhymes with grief. It was in a poem here. 

AL FILREIS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: A lot of great lyrics don't really hold up as poems on their own. This does and actually, this works perfectly well as a poem. It's a nice setting, but the tune is not what's significant about it. The text itself creates a very powerful work as a poem. Also, this darkness without remission is a kind of splendor. It allows for what a kind of splendor is. And for me and for, I think a lot of my contemporaries, we heard it on the Richie Havens album early on where everybody I knew had that Richie Havens album where he sang it. So it had a crossover into popular culture, which was way before I had read any of the poets that I'm involved with now. 

AL FILREIS: What does it mean that Havens covered it? What does it mean? 

LEE ANN BROWN: It went into the stratosphere of the culture. I mean, it was really everywhere, I mean, known on the radio and more than that. But I mean, like, you know. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: Richie Havens was a very powerful figure with Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, only one of those people who is African-American with that deep, resonant voice. He's the only one of those people, really, that could do a song like this. And it brought this song into the world of folk music. And the singer-songwriter such as The Fugs wouldn't have been. And actually, so it brought it to an audience that was interested, and that was at the heart of the counterculture. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: I mean, what really strikes me, what you're saying about Tuli, which is that he didn't do things for fame and that that is so much a frame of the oeuvre and the milieu, which is, for example, like all of the songs that are from found music, from found material, which 'No Deposit No Return' is. 

AL FILREIS: That's what that is. Yes. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Of course, I was thinking they're conceptual in a sense, but they never follow conceptual rules. So like 'No Deposit No Return' is not an ad line, but the other ones are ad lines. So that's he's sort of free to break, to start something, and then to break it in the middle of it where we who study like avant-garde purism, like things like, you know, or when those things get studied, one likes them to be, you know, more like a Caroline Bergvall and like a very consistent program. And there's all these ways which the work, in general, has so much just ongoing survival performance, play, attention to life as it's happening. And within the sort of almost mundane, ongoing chant of performance of the daily life, these like moments, these sublime moments come up all the time. 

AL FILREIS: Let's listen to 'No Deposit No Return'. It's only 50 seconds, and then talk about it because I think we should begin with a lightning round where the five of us just toss out the origins of some of these advertisements and then go further to talk about it as chant and sound poem and whatnot. So here it is.

('NO DEPOSIT NO RETURN' BY TULI KUPFERBERG PLAYS) (CHANTING) # No deposit no return # No deposit no return # We try harder, we try harder # We try harder, we try harder # It's the taste that really tells # It's the taste that really tells # When it rains it always pours # When it rains it always pours # The army makes a man of you # The army makes a man of you # Only her hairdresser knows for sure # Only her hairdresser knows for sure # No deposit no return # No deposit no return # No deposit no return # No deposit no return # No deposit no return # No deposit no return. # 

AL FILREIS: OK. Lightning round. I'll start. We try harder is the rental car. Maybe Avis that's not as good as Hertz. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: Definitely Avis. 

AL FILREIS: And they're number two. They're number two. We try harder. OK, who's next? 

LEE ANN BROWN: The army makes a man of you. 

AL FILREIS: Right. I think it became a song too, wasn't it? It was a recruitment. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: But it should be noted that all of these for a teenager in 1960, in the late '60s, were completely legible because they were repeated constantly over the airwaves. 

PIERRE JORIS: The one I don't know or no longer know, it's the taste that really tells. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: That's a cigarette ad. 

PIERRE JORIS: That's a cigarette ad. 

AL FILREIS: Yeah, that's a cigarette. They were turning from nonfilter to filter. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: That's right. That's right. Yes. 

AL FILREIS: Menthol. So that was a mentholating something or other. What about the hairdresser? 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: It's Clairol. 

AL FILREIS: That's Clairol. That's about coloring your hair. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Yeah. And actually, there's a video. 

AL FILREIS: Only your hairdresser knows you need to color your hair. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Yeah. It's a kind of gray ad. I watched it, right before I came out here. And yeah. So it's only your hairdresser knows for sure and it's against gray hair. 

LEE ANN BROWN: Well, only your hairdresser knows you have gray hair. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Yeah, exactly. 

AL FILREIS: It's a youth culture thing. It's about our parents' generation, at the time, who started to buy into the youth culture a little bit. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: What I recall about that ad has to do with my mother, who is another Brooklyn-born person. Almost exactly coming from a place like Tuli, but who dyed her hair blonde in probably 1947. 

AL FILREIS: Blonde is an understatement. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: Well, she was a blonde, but she was a brunette originally and only her hairdresser-- is she blonde? You know, blondes have more fun. Is she blonde or is she brunette? Only her hairdresser knows for sure also has to do with that which is a mark of assimilation. Nobody will know what your original hair color is. So Clairol was advertising both things. 

AL FILREIS: So in that sense, blonde is a de-Jewification? 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Right. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: Well, I don't know if my mother would put it that way. Maybe it's a hyper. The real Jews would be blonde and be like my mother. So... (LAUGHS) But yes. The answer to your question is yes. 

LEE ANN BROWN: Blondes have more fun. 

AL FILREIS: Can that be the pull-out quote for this, the program note for this poem? 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: I think my mother wasn't trying not to be Jewish in her case. It was just that... 

LEE ANN BROWN: Glamour. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: It was glamour. 

AL FILREIS: I think of her as platinum. But I think the platinum came later, I think is what you're saying. What about when it rains it pours? 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: That's the other one that's not there. 

LEE ANN BROWN: Salt. Morton salt. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Yeah, it's Morton salt. It's great, yeah. It took me a minute to remember that one. 

AL FILREIS: So what's Tuli doing picking these? Is it random choices? Are they earworms? What is he trying to do? 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: You know you have is, what he says on the album, which isn't true is this. An album of popular poetry, pop poetry, real advertisements as they appeared in newspapers, magazines, in direct mail. No word has been added. These are genuine texts. Parts of the ads have been repeated. Parts of, some of the ads have been omitted. But these are the very texts. They are for real. Many of these were first published in 'YEAH' magazine. Now, that's not true, of course. It's very funny that he says, he's saying that there's appropriation without change, but some of them are not ads. Some of them are other kinds of slogans. 

LEE ANN BROWN: It reminds me of his practice of what he called para songs, meaning like parody, but also beside. So he uses tunes that everybody knows, like (SINGS) “what a friend we have in Sigmund, all our griefs to bear”. You know, like, instead of Jesus, you know, or like, you know, (SINGS) “I see the White House and I want to paint it black” and all that stuff, you know, he's like using the earworm of the tune and getting to your body and your mind in all these different ways. And you he's saying, look what I can do with this. And this is the real thing that you need to hear, like, I don't know. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Which is really a classic detournement, right? 

PIERRE JORIS: Yeah. Well, I was going to say he is the original Situationist in America. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Well, no. Oh, in America. Right. Yeah. 

PIERRE JORIS: You know, in America, and this is, you know, a de-turning of the classical thing, the same way that he disambulated through New York. I mean, he didn't need to do that French thing of going officially. He was just living that every day. And this detournement is-- 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: I was thinking, Pierre, people say that he's, like, he precedes punk, but he proceeds the Situationists, and he probably knew about them. He's very, he is Eurocentric in some of his aesthetic like he thinks of himself as a bohemian and not a hippie. And he probably just knew about the Situationists. 

PIERRE JORIS: He's doing this stuff in the early '60s, you know, and the Situationists really come out at the same time. And I don't know… and I think this is independent. I think Tuli does this here because that is the way that the culture is lying and changing and moving. And he, coming from that complexity of the Yiddish lower New York culture... 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: When was 'The Society of the Spectacle' published? 

PIERRE JORIS: I can't remember the date, but it certainly was in the early '60s. But when he got over here, when he could even had look at it, I'm certain that he had not read it at the time he did this. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: I was wondering about that. 

PIERRE JORIS: But, you know, I mean... 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Because it's so 'Society of the Spectacle'. 

(CROSSTALK) 

PIERRE JORIS: If somebody shows me that he did, I'll stand corrected. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: He’s so responding to those ideas in his work.

AL FILREIS: Its newest iteration and revival in Paris is dated '66, '67, of course, it culminates in '68. That's a new version. But if Pierre is right, people, that Tuli is the first Situationist in America, then why the hell is he so little known? Why are people going to listen to this Poem Talk thinking, who is this guy? Why have I not heard about this? 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: It's worth noting again to go back to what generation he is. So he's in his early 40s when he's writing this. We associate a lot even the folk singers that I mentioned are all quite a bit younger than him. So in middle age when he's doing this and he's coming from a different place. And I think this is a very powerful kind of aspect about what he's doing. It also, you could say it's one of the early spoken word albums, it's a conceptual spoken word album. I listened to this incessantly when I was a sophomore in college, 1969, and over and over and over again. 

AL FILREIS: And you were influenced by this. Isn't '1-100' influenced by this? 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: I recorded '1 to 100,' which is where I do a crazy reading…

AL FILREIS: ’69, right?

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: ..just of those, exactly the year that I was listening to this. And I think it certainly gave me the idea, though, until I'm thinking about it, I wasn't aware of it, but that's the only thing I was listening to that was like this. I was also listening to Allen Ginsberg, which isn't like it. 

AL FILREIS: Listening to Ginsberg sing Blake, right? 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: Yes. I went to see him perform. 

AL FILREIS: You were obsessed with that as well, right? 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: But yeah, but yeah, absolutely. And they were associated in my mind. But just thinking of kind of spoken word concept, poetry, performance, it's a remarkable record of spoken word conception. Also fit in, though, to the Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: And radio plays. 

LEE ANN BROWN: And Harry Smith recorded it. I mean... (CHUCKLES) 

AL FILREIS: To a number of kinds of recordings that he obviously he was hearing and processing. 

PIERRE JORIS: That age thing also relates to the fact that he really grew up at the moment of the Great Depression. And he talks of his school where in the, I guess, the lunchroom, the tables were clubs. There was, the Stalinists were over there, the Trotskys were there, and he was often with the Trotskys, he said, you know, and then there was some other grouping. So there was, in a way, a very Marxist education. There was an actually political theory of thinking and reading going on that he overcomes, exactly in a way like the European Marxist also had to sidestep finally the classical Marxism and he did that on his own without (UNKNOWN). Again, I think that links to what I said earlier. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: So it's really I mean, a more obvious point which we didn't make anti-capitalist is that it’s anti-consumer society and that would have been, again, as a teenager listening, that would have been the most apparent thing. That he's attacking the career man and the consumer society, 'No Deposit No Return' as the chant was, of course, what would happen is it, for your bottles that you're recycling. But he's still talking about that in a way that suggests an economy, that the economy of the ad for the army, for the Avis used car ad, for being blonde or darkening your hair if you're going gray, all of that fit into a consumer orientation, which was, like 'Kill for Peace,' a series of cliches that were driving not only individual people crazy, but also driving America to its disastrous war in Vietnam 

AL FILREIS: You're all brilliant and you're all lovely, but you didn't answer my question. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Yeah, I have something to say. 

AL FILREIS: Yeah. So let me repeat what the question is. If he's-- 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Because I think he wasn't going for fame. I think Charles is, in some ways, answering your question by saying that he was countercultural. And what we're not talking about-- 

AL FILREIS: But countercultural should lead to that wide recognition in our poetry-- 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Wait. Wait. Wait for it, it's coming. 

AL FILREIS: OK. 

(LAUGHTER) 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: That part of the counterculture was, and this goes back to this like ongoing production, this massive production of lots of what is very mundane, which is that he was doing it also for a kind of daily pleasure, daily what people would call now like healing or like living with PTSD and facing trauma and not being in a mode of career and of getting the ring, but rather a sort of ongoing performance of pleasure. And what we really have not yet talked about is the body and is the sex and is maybe the Reichian part of this work as well. 

LEE ANN BROWN: But are you sure he's not, I mean he's not like anthologized up there in these, you know, ‘The Norton Anthology of Poetry’ as much, but people know The Fugs. I mean. 

AL FILREIS: They know The Fugs for sure, yeah. 

LEE ANN BROWN: They know The Fugs. That’s Tuli.

RACHEL LEVITSKY: But the kind of like critical attention that Jackson Mac Low gets is not being gone. 

(CROSSTALK) 

AL FILREIS: I think bringing up Jackson is a great thing. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: Same age, once again. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: I did it on purpose. 

AL FILREIS: Exactly. What a great parallel. Is it possible that-- 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Because they were also sharing in this idea of pleasure and breaking the rules. 

AL FILREIS: Oh yeah. They share a lot. And politically, I think they're both anachists. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: The anarchism which also has to do with setting out a conceptual idea but then breaking it in the middle of it. 

AL FILREIS: Oh, absolutely. And there was a table in that lunchroom for the anarchists as well, for sure. 

PIERRE JORIS: Yeah, he doesn't mention it, but it was probably the one that... 

AL FILREIS: You got to figure that, right? 

PIERRE JORIS: Anarchist tables. 

AL FILREIS: Yeah, you don't want to sit—

(LAUGHTER) 

So Lee Ann, you... 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Bad manners, is that what you're saying here? 

AL FILREIS: Is it possible that the pop poetry, which is a genre that he kept talking about, an evening of pop poetry, it's possible that the avant-garde or the literary history of the avant-garde can't find a place for him as readily as they can Jackson? Somewhat belatedly, it took a while to have him completely get in there because pop poetry doesn't work for that idea. And you were actually the perfect person to fall in love with the Tuli thing because you've been straddling all those categories. Do you want to say something about this? 

LEE ANN BROWN: Oh man. It just reminds me of the Lynn Melnick workshop I just took called 'Love Is Like a Butterfly', looking at the lyrics of Dolly Parton and saying, don't be afraid to be corny and cheesy and like, you know, say something from the heart and make it political underneath. I mean, I never would think of Dolly Parton and Tuli Kupferberg in the same breath, but it's true. Like they both have this little twist. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: He put her picture in one of those books, her childhood pictures. 

LEE ANN BROWN: What?

AL FILREIS: He was a Dolly fan? 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Yeah.

LEE ANN BROWN: Really?

RACHEL LEVITSKY: There's a Dolly photo in one of those books where he has, you know, like the photos of fascists and pop stars as children and those books. 

LEE ANN BROWN: Oh, cool. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Yeah. 

LEE ANN BROWN: But just like the song, you know, the song is, it's just song form itself. Working in song form is somehow not always taken as seriously as poetry. It's like as soon as you start singing something, people just hear that. You can get the message in, but it's like they just get hypnotized by the voice kind of. And it's like, you know, every time I do a reading that, I sing a little bit, part of it, everybody just comes up and says, I love it when you sing, you know, and that would annoy me for because I was like, what about the other, all the complicated avant-garde work that I just told you. But Tuli, you know, I love that he doesn't need that. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: He uses the term popular poetry and pop poetry. So I think that… it would have been hard to assimilate exactly what Tuli was doing in with his contemporaries. And yet once we do it, then it kind of makes sense. But it's also the case that he didn't publish all that. The works we're talking about are ‘66 and the other, it seems to me, fundamental work of his, '1001 Ways to Beat the Draft' is 1966/67 with Robert Bashlow. It's a collaboration. But he never published a book of poems. And without publishing, it doesn't really put his work into the context in which people are reading him as a poet. At the same time, as I'm saying, I knew him and my friends knew him as a teenager, he crossed over into popular culture, and Lee Ann is quite right about that. But for whatever reason, that also was at that moment. He lived a long time after and he lived a long time before. So… and I don't know what to say. I wonder what you think about that, Lee Ann. I never met Tuli Kupferberg, either. 

LEE ANN BROWN: I keep thinking about the term of, you know, The Fugs were “total assault on the Culture”. And I'm not sure if that sort of sounds more like something Ed would say, but that's... 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: But Ed Sanders published many books. He's a very literary person in a way that it doesn't seem to be true of Tuli Kupferberg. 

LEE ANN BROWN: That’s true, yeah. 

PIERRE JORIS: That's the funny thing. When I got the invite to take part in this I said, oh, great! I go to the shelf, I take down, I can reread Tuli and do it. There was no Tuli on the shelf!

RACHEL LEVITSKY: This tiny little book. OK, so there’s ‘Listen to the Mockingbird.’

PIERRE JORIS: There was this much Sanders on the shelf. And I took the history of The Fugs I brought with me. I looked in that. But then I looked at the bottom of the letter and that the two poems you're going to talk about, I knew them! I knew them nearly by heart. 

LEE ANN BROWN: It's oral. Oral, too. 

PIERRE JORIS: That's, you know, the other aspect of oral. You know, oral, singing.

RACHEL LEVITSKY: But my friend Bill Mazza has a huge collection of these, like, collages. Like, there's one on the body that's just beautiful, like, quotes on the anatomy that he's found and he's collaged them, and we would call that a poem now. In a way, it's classic before the moment, like, that this kind of total found material in 1966 was not resonating perhaps the way it resonates now.

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: But '1001 Ways to Beat the Draft' is 66 pages. And it’s not been reprinted.

RACHEL LEVITSKY: But that's also written. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: It's written. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: That’s not just found poetry.

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: It's a great literary work. I would say that that work as a work, you know, stands up there with great…

RACHEL LEVITSKY: As a poem, yeah.

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: ..great, conceptual antiwar poems up there with, with Ginsberg and so on, even though it's not recognized. 

AL FILREIS: What I'd like to do is go around twice. The first time is going to be a lightning round. I'm going to ask you to say one really brief thing, and then the second time will be a chance for final thoughts. Something that you wanted to say today but you haven't had a chance to yet. So the first is a true lightning round. It's your chance to say in brief to people listening, probably mesmerized by the five of us being so interested in this artist, what is the one thing you would want to say to people who don't know Tuli? What will they find? What should they find? What might they find in here that would delight them or change them? So, Lee Ann?

LEE ANN BROWN: I'm just going to read the last paragraph of this letter that I found in my packet of Tuli paraphernalia. To remember all the yeah, we're gonna go to hell in a handbasket. Just, well, hmm. Every day better than the next? Gather ye rose, please, while ye may. And cheers! Tuli. 

AL FILREIS: And that's a letter to you? 

LEE ANN BROWN: Yeah. Lee Ann, dear. 

AL FILREIS: That's cool. 

LEE ANN BROWN: Yes. 

AL FILREIS: That's cool. Rachel, what's one thing that people will find? 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: I want to be a Supergirl. 

AL FILREIS: I love that. Pierre? 

PIERRE JORIS: Don't be fooled by Tuli's simplicity. He's one of the most complex people imaginable. 

AL FILREIS: There we go. Charles?

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: We need to have a collected works of Tuli Kupferberg. And I think while I understand some of it is performance, some of it is music, I still think a written, collected poems or collected works. Because we're not talking about it even in the '1001 Ways to Beat the Draft' is the collage element, which is extraordinary. There’s a lot of collage and cut-up, just actually the list of the 1001 is astounding. But the book is not just that, it's a collage. 

AL FILREIS: Well, maybe Tender Buttons Press would put out a collected Tuli edited by Charles Bernstein. OK, now we're going to go around for final thoughts. This is something that you want to say about Tuli that you haven't had a chance to in this conversation, but really want to put into the record. Who wants to go first? Final thoughts? 

LEE ANN BROWN: Well, the thing I said about that he was, you know, a great feminist is that it reminds me of when he would, you know, he wanted-- and he'd love to sing. He loved to do his performances. He loved to do the material. And The Fugs would only play twice a year or something at the point when I knew him, and he would do this group called The Fuxxons, F-U-X-X-O-N-S. He said, you know, like Exxon. So The Fugs songs, the ones that he did, like the songs of Tuli, and he invited me to be on the stage, and I played in The Fugs. I was in The Fugs. 

AL FILREIS: Wait, what?

LEE ANN BROWN: Yeah, I sang with him. 

AL FILREIS: What was that like?

LEE ANN BROWN: Well, I remember singing (SINGS) # Whatta ya gonna do? # After the orgy? # I wanna read Blake with you # After the orgy # I wanna eat something too # After the orgy # I wanna be your friend # I wanna be your friend # I wanna be your friend # I wanna be your friend # After the orgy ends # I just wanna be your friend # Give me a call # After we pet and ball # Why don't you give me a call? # 

You know, just like, ah! You know. And we did it all the time, all these kinds of songs. And it included people like Jasmine, the accordion player, Steven, and whoever was around, and he would divide the door between us. And I remember getting $5.33 because he exactly divided all the money that we’d get from the gig, like the back, the back, what's it called? The gate. 

AL FILREIS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So was it recorded? 

LEE ANN BROWN: Probably not. 

AL FILREIS: Ohh. Well, that's a… wow. Who's going to top that? That's a great final word.

LEE ANN BROWN: I was in it, yeah.

RACHEL LEVITSKY: I keep thinking about Julie Patton in this conversation about Tuli Kupferberg because, like, Julie Patton also is making art all the time, being political, finding ways to be both alive and political and serious and also engaged and mournful and having pleasure…

LEE ANN BROWN: Everything she does is her poetry, yeah. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: ..and bringing everybody in. And it's also really often so not recorded, difficult to make books of, but necessary. 

AL FILREIS: Charles, final thought?

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: I'm interested in the distinction between chant and song and poem. So, for example, in the famous one that we're talking about, the subject of this meeting, (CHANTS) # No deposit no return. # And you could do it even with my lack of voice and accent. (CHANTS) # No deposit no return # We try harder # We try harder # No deposit no return # It's the taste that really tells # No deposit no return # Only her hairdresser knows for sure. # 

It has an ethnic twang to it that's not country and western, but Yiddishkeit. But that nonetheless connects up to a lot of aspects within American popular culture. And so moving really to have Lee Ann, the child of Appalachia…

(LAUGHTER) 

…and a very different kind of song feel such a deep connection. And I think this is the kind of utopia that Tuli Kupferberg was interested in and enacted. 

PIERRE JORIS: When Tuli died, he lay in state at St Mark's Poetry Center in an absolutely gorgeous and amazing suit and decked out incredibly. And last night I talked, Nicole and I called Miles to talk to him…

AL FILREIS: Your son.

PIERRE JORIS: My son, Miles Joris-Peyrafitte. And we said, "Do you remember because you were with us?" And he said, "Oh, he was the first dead person I saw. And he was the least scary thing that ever happened." (LAUGHS) Which I think Tuli would have loved to hear. There was that absolute beauty. I remember also Tuli there in his coffin looking absolutely delighted with the world in a strange way. 

AL FILREIS: I love that. I love all the reminiscences here. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: And I just want to say, like, one more thing, which is because, you know, thank you, Lee Ann, for that song. That there's a kind of also lack of distinction between gay and straight in Tuli. And this moment, like, you're just talking about Charles with the sort of moving from Appalachia to Yiddishkite. But there's also, like, the body transgresses and the transgressions of the body and how that important those transgressions are to being against the war machine. Against the state.

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: “Hyperemiator vacuum tube penis erection device” is another song on this album. I mean, who else is talking about…

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Teach yourself fucking, yeah.

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: ..a vacuum tube to get an erection? 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Which is probably (INAUDIBLE).

CHARLES: BERNSTEIN That's another part of the scatological ‘68. 

(CROSSTALK)

RACHEL LEVITSKY: But it's also why he's underground, right? Is because of sex.

PIERRE JORIS: Where we should listen to his septuagenarian in love. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: And why queers are underground. It’s because of sex.

LEE ANN BROWN: Yeah. (SINGS) Why must I be an octogenarian to be in love? 

AL FILREIS: It goes back to what you were saying about the importance of the body and movement and really dance in a way in this work. And that's my final thought. I wanted to talk about dance. Again, from the liner notes, very unusual part of them. And by the way, you're going to hear two phrases that sound like Kupferberg, that sound like his name. One is “copotheworld,” and the other is “on top o the world”. Here it is. And it has to do with what Rachel was just saying about body movement and why we can't assimilate this art so easily.” Keep movin says the copotheworld but I’m (we always away sail) on top o the world & Keep movin! It also means: the blood, the green, the sun, the us. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! So… keep movin. Movement is life. Movement is dance. Movement is joy. So throw these cymbols” C-Y-M-B-O-L-S. “Throw these cymbols down now, otherfucker & dance!” 

And it seems to me that, you know, movement is literal movement. But it's also this person who is not going to sit still. 'Morning Morning' is about, like, barely getting to the next day by standing up on your feet, but, you know, starting it over again. And that's a kind of movement, a kind of dance. He's dancing on the genres. 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Breaking your face. 

AL FILREIS: Exactly. Exactly. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: And it makes me realize that really it's not 1968 that he's (UNKNOWN) to, but in Al Filreis sense, 1960. Because if we think of this as an extension of what you write about in 1960, it even is more powerful than to think of it as a premonition or an augury of ‘68.

AL FILREIS: Well, that's very sweet of you to say in advance of a book about 1960 that will come out after this is being recorded. So there you go.

PIERRE JORIS: (LAUGHS)

AL FILREIS: Well, we like to end Poem Talk with a minute or two of Gathering Paradise, which is a chance for us to spread wide our narrow Dickensian hands. Speak for yourself, Al. To gather a little something really poetically good to hail or commend something or someone going on in the poetry world or the music world or the art world or the film world. Who's got a recommendation? Who's ready? Lee Ann. 

LEE ANN BROWN: I have been amazed at this amazing explosion of sort of poetry workshops but refigured that have happened since the pandemic. Like Filip Marinovich already did his, but now they're continuing, like Ariana Reines, Invisible College, and Dorothea Lasky. Yeah, and doing the witch poetry with (UNKNOWN) and like, you know, all these amazing workshops that are happening in communities. It's sort of like outside of the academy, you know, sort of remaking the need for that in a way like, you know, how to make poetry together, you know, online. There's been this major explosion, which of course, ModPo is part of as well. But it's like this sort of extracurricular thing that's really happening underground. 

AL FILREIS: It's a great day to be saying this after a long discussion about Tuli, I think. Rachel, do you have a Gathering Paradise? 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Yeah. So when I was thinking about Tuli, I was like, what's my paradise? And there's two books, actually, both by people involved in Belladonna but that I'm going to be writing on. They're both reprints, republication, you know, full-on new editions. Gail Scott’s ‘Heroine’ and Akilah Oliver's 'The she said dialogues: flesh memory’. Akilah's has an introduction from Tracie Morris and Gail Scott has an introduction, new foreword by Eileen Myles. And these are both books that also catalog daily political existence, very much through lesbian, feminist sexuality and sex and pussy and, you know, and all kinds of things. So I was thinking about Tuli when I was thinking about these two books. 

AL FILREIS: Marvellous. That's great. And the Akilah book, who published that? 

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Oh, that's Nightboat. And Gail Scott’s ‘Heroine’ is Coach House. 

AL FILREIS: Excellent. Great. Charles?

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: If you like Poem Talk, go to PennSound and listen to Close Listening, interviews with lots of poets. 

AL FILREIS: And who most recently? 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: Well, the most recent one I'm going to incorporate into it is an interview I did for ‘The Brooklyn Rail’ of Etel Adnan, but I've included it on the Close Listening page with audio because it's a similar kind of format and could talk a lot about Etal connecting up to this as well. Also at the same age. 

Etel. I always say Etal, but it's Etel. Etel. 

AL FILREIS: How many Close Listenings are there? 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: I don't know. There's over a hundred of them. 

AL FILREIS: Pierre. 

PIERRE JORIS: I am deeply into what I call the triple-decker, Nathaniel Mackey's ‘Double Trio’… 

AL FILREIS: Yeah. Just out.

PIERRE JORIS: ..which is an absolutely amazing book. And so waiting right behind that is another now 92-year-old, Nathaniel Tarn’s ‘Holderliniae,’ which also-- so two major works by poets, you know, late in their work. And it's an interesting thing to think of (SPEAKS ALTERNATE LANGUAGE), of a late work. But that's it. I mean, I think Mackey's book blows me away by the sheer musicality of it. I mean, he's a jazz person. It's pure music. 

AL FILREIS: Great recommendations. I've been seeing some reviews of the Tarn, and I was happy to see that. Well, my Gathering Paradise is 'Topsy-Turvy'. I am 'Topsy-Turvy'. And I wonder if what's going to happen here, listeners aren't going to notice this because Zach's going to cut out the silence. But I'm going to ask Charles to go somewhere into this house to get a copy of 'Topsy-Turvy' and to read the shortest poem in the book to us. 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: This is very much a tribute to Tuli Kupferberg. Couldn't really exist without him. As you'll hear.

AL FILREIS: This piece. OK.

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: This is the shortest poem in the book. "Turn off your poetry blocker. This is an initial alert. Aesthetic action will be taken if there is no response." 

PIERRE JORIS: (LAUGHS)

RACHEL LEVITSKY: Bravo!

AL FILREIS: 'Topsy-Turvy' by Charles Bernstein, published by Chicago. A new book. Well, that's all the feeling lonesome in the morning we have time for on Poem Talk today. Actually, I’m gonna try that again. Well, that's all the army making a man out of you we have time for on Poem Talk today. I'm going to try another one. Well, that's all the sunshine putting us in our rotting place we have time for. And Zach, put all of those in we have time for on Poem Talk today. Poem Talk at the Writer's House is a collaboration of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and the Kelly Writer’s House at the University of Pennsylvania and the Poetry Foundation. poetryfoundation.org. Thanks so, so, so much to my guests Lee Ann Brown, Rachel Levitsky, Pierre Joris, and Charles Bernstein. And once again, Susan and Charles for hosting us, and to Poem Talk’s director and engineer today, Zach Carduner, who came all the way from Philadelphia to hang out with us. And to Poem Talk’s editor, the same amazing Zach Carduner. A shout-out to Nathan and Elizabeth Leight for their very generous support of Poem Talk. This is Al Filreis, and I hope you'll join us next month for another episode of Poem Talk.