

Kamau Brathwaite (1930-2020)

Selections from Kamau Brathwaite’s PennSound page:

1. Negus (4:35): MP3

2. talking about poverty (1:35): MP3

3. A Game of Cricket (9:29): MP3

4. The Day the First Snow Fell (3:22): MP3

5. Calypso (10:11): MP3

6. Nathaniel Mackey introduces Brathwaite (10:33): MP3

7. talking about Ghana (9:52): MP3

8. The Making of the Drum (4:43): MP3

9. Naming (1:31): MP3

10. Brathwaite's ntroduction to a Segue reading (3:18): MP3

11. on "Cross-Cultural Poetics" in 2005 (59:43): MP3

12. Three Things the Artists Say (19:40): MP3

13. Beast (4:00): MP3

14. The Two Curved Sticks of the Drummer, part three of The Making of the Drum (0:45): MP3

15. talking about Shakespeare (1:47): MP3

The editor of PennSound's Brathwaite page is Jacob Edmond of the University of Otago (New Zealand).

From PennSound Daily: PennSound's Brathwaite page is home to a modest collection of recordings spanning four decades, starting with readings from Islands recorded in 1973 and an undated recording of Masks. Jumping forward to the 80s, there's a segmented reading at Philadelphia's Robin's Books on November 9, 1982, and a pair of recordings from the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh in February 1987. From the 90s, we have a recording of the poem "Angel/Engine" taken from the 1997 XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics Conference at the University of Minnesota (via Ken Sherwood), along with Chris Funkhouser's recording of a December 2000 reading at New York University that's been segmented into individual tracks. Brathwaite made two noteworthy appearances on Leonard Schwartz's Cross Cultural Poetics radio program in 2004 and 2005, and our final recording is a forty-five minute Segue Series Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club that's also been broken up into individual MP3s.