An early ballad by Helen Adam: “The Shoe Song”
Richard Owens has provided us with the transcribed text of Helen Adam’s “The Shoe Song,” which was collected in the book titled The Elfin Pedlar. He also shared with us a photograph of the...
Category: beats
Further discussion of Amiri Baraka’s “Incident” (recorded in Scotland, October 2023)
During the ModPo team’s visit to Scotland in October 2023, we hosted a live webcast at the Scottish Poetry Library. During that discussion we had occasion to look once again at Baraka’s “Incident,” a...
Patti Smith improvises a poem-legend, 1975
Patti Smith performed an improvised poem live at Gerde’s Folk City, in Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue, October 23, 1975. Patti wrote about the performance on her substack, May 13, 2021: “I was living...
On Ferlinghetti’s “Baseball Canto”
Our discussion of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Baseball Canto” is now available on YouTube. This was originally posted to the ModPo syllabus as an audio-only item. But thanks to Paul Burke we are now presenting it...
On connotations of “got” in Jayne Cortez’s “She Got He Got”
We have now added a new video to ModPoPLUS for week 6. This is a discussion of the connotations of the word “got” in Jayne Cortez’s poem-performance piece “She Got He Got.” This is...
1-minute video on “Poem” by ruth weiss filmed on location
ModPo short—a 1-minute excerpt from a longer conversation filmed in a San Francisco park a few years ago in which Jake Marmer & Lily Applebaum talk about a poem titled “Poem” by ruth weiss. The clip...
ModPo Short: 1-minute video on Anne Waldman’s “Rogue State”
A 1-minute clip from an October 19, 2016, live webcast:
ModPo Short: 1-minute video on the social specificity of the Beats
From an October 17, 2018, live webcast, featuring poet-critic Angela Carr.
new abridged version of our discussion of Helen Adam’s poem
Thanks to the talented editing of Makena Deveraux, we are now making available an abridged, 20-minute version of our discussion of Helen Adam’s “Cheerless Junkie’s Song.” See below for the revised list and links...
Doug Kearney in ModPo
ModPo people might recall that Doug Kearney visited us back in November 2019 and joined us for the Beat week webcast. We edited several clips from the full recording of the webcast, and have...