Excitement Sisters

Lee Ann Brown - Crush (5'44"). • For Valentine's Day, a 2002 studio recording of a poem first published in 1993. Bonus track: To Bed (0'27"). • Listen to lots more Brown here. And read a sampler here. • As Elaine Equi writes: "Pleasure is the subject of Lee Ann Brown's poetry. Pleasure in the craft and anti-craft of poem making. Pleasure in the vocalizing and harmonizing of voice and text—speech and writing. Giddy recombinings. Flirtatious collaborations. Irreverent anagrams.... As a woman writer myself, I am grateful to Lee Ann for the way she unabashedly connects gender to knowledge. In her poems, knowing is knowing as a woman. Knowledge is pleasure. The life of the mind is refreshingly erotic."

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

You Might As Well Know It

John Wieners - Elizabeth Taylor Is My Sister (3'15"). Recorded 6 January 1971 and later included on The World Record: Readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, 1969-1980. • I just saw the Grey Gardens films for the first time this past weekend and was struck by how much Little Edie sounds like John Wieners, especially when she pronounces, in a conspiratorial hush, phrases like "The Marble Fawn, you know, by Nathaniel Hawthorne." • The dedication to the 1973 first edition of No More Masks (omitted in the second edition of 1993) reads: "to our sisters / in jail / underground / at war / whose lives are their poems." Where John and Elizabeth (or the Beales) might fit into that utopic interpellation, it's hard even now to say. • Wieners previously on Lipstick, The Garbos and Dietrichs.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

Doubled, Split

Robert Creeley - Anger (4'06"). My colleague Ben Friedlander directed my attention to this alternate take on the poem featured yesterday, recorded a decade earlier on 22 July 1965 at the Berkeley Poetry Conference. • The whole set, not yet segmented into "singles," can be heard here (scroll past the 1956 materials). • Friedlander's new edition of Creeley's Selected Poems is here.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

Convulsively Darkening

Robert Creeley - Anger (4'45"). This track, from another great resource for exploring Seventies phonotextuality, The World Record, is dated 22 October 1975. • I'm interested in hearing the poem "with" (if only metaphorically, since I know of no available soundfile) Adrienne Rich's "Phenomenology of Anger," the notable sequence from Diving into the Wreck that is conspicuously absent from the new edition of The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems, 1950-2001 (Norton, 2002). • Last May Hair hearts Flip recommended this rather different form of mash-up.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

That They Are Unfit to Live

Ted Berrigan - From a List of Delusions of the Insane (What They are Afraid Of) (1:10). Recorded 11 August 1978 for broadcast on In the American Tree, hosted by Lyn Hejinian and Kit Robinson. • More Berrigan, including a June 1981 reading from The Sonnets, here. • Previously on Lipstick of Noise, Red Shift.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

The Obviousity

Kevin Killian - Is It All Over My Face? (6'30"). Recorded at the Queering Language reading in Philadelphia on 24 March 2007 and archived at PennSound here, this track evokes spring 1978, Allen Ginsberg, Gay Sunshine magazine, and the avant-garde cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell. • Much more Killian, here.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

Drive, He Said

Allen Ginsberg - Please Master (4'40"). Still sampling from Totally Corrupt, here's Ginsberg's April 1975 performance of a poem dated May 1968 in The Fall of America. • Tom Beckett, in a brief note posted a month ago to his Slim Windows blog, writes: "Allen Ginsberg's 'Please Master' is a litany of desire which I wholly admire. Poetry needs, I think, to find itself more often at the intersection of possession and intellection." • The text. • Interesting to compare this ecstatic form of gay male masochism to the numbly depressive "feminine" form diagnosed by Adrienne Rich in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

You Will See

Ericka Huggins - For a Woman (1'02"). The note accompanying this track on Totally Corrupt indicates that it was "recorded outside The Republican National Convention, Miami Beach, August 21, 1972," which is interesting enough, but a quick perusal of the few available web resources on Huggins—most notably this long and thoughtful post on a blog called Bay Radical—reveals a still more complicated context for what might initially strike one as a slight and somewhat conventional poem. If I read the sequence of events correctly, the poet, active in the civil rights struggle since '63 and the Black Panthers since '68, had seen her husband and fellow activist John Huggins slain in January '69, when their daughter Mai was still an infant, and had not long after been sent to a New Haven prison, charged with Bobby Seale of ordering the torture and murder of fellow Panther Alex Rackley, a trial that ended in a hung jury in May of 1971. • For more on the "Free Bobby, Free Ericka" campaign, scroll down to page 6 of this document.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

A Seizure of Talk

Robert Duncan - Despair in Being Tedious (4'20"). Recorded at San Francisco State University on 12 December 1972. • As his introductory remarks detail, Duncan composed this strangely self-lacerating, beautifully-sounded poem in 1972 as a sort of coda to and commentary upon the poems from 1949 that had made up Caesar's Gate. In this, it makes an interesting companion to Muriel Rukeyser's own revisitation of her own work of 1949 in "The Poem as Mask," featured here two days ago. • This track is just one of the many made newly available on PennSound's expanded Duncan page.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

The Lipstick of Noise is a product of the Third Factory • Inspired by the music blogs • And by Paul Blackburn's reel-to-reel deck. Intending to make good use of PENNSound and other sources of digital audio files of poetry • Comments welcome • XML.