FONO27WS02 // Audre Lorde at Fassett Studio, 1970 (LP; Liner Notes Booklet)
Description
In May of 1970, Audre Lorde visited Fassett Studio to record a reading for Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room.
The 12″ LP of this reading includes a 12-page liner notes booklet with original essays by Tongo Eisen-Martin, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Carl Phillips; and poems by Fred Moten and Pamela Sneed.
This record is the second in a series of archival LPs released in collaboration with Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room. The first is John Ashbery Live at Sanders Theatre, 1976.
SOLD OUT.
Praise
From the liner notes:
She did not invent the blues. Just a similar interpretation of signs. I am listening to her read poems in genuine pursuit of her few flashes of laughter; the confidence of her church. She invented what comes after the blues. Opposite side from the roses in a poetry room. In pursuit of a phonographic description, I want to start the handwriting with music. With the object of a miracle’s affection. Like taking the “A train” into itself. Like body heat of one person warming an entire subway car; a poem about New York begins.
The way Lorde locates greater political realities and a diversity of cosmogonies in the small moments or the innocuous interactions between people, the innocuous rhythms of socialization; she can make all things. And we listeners are found peeking over a fence watching a herd of gods relaxing under the watchful wisdom of her uncatchable kinetic mind. Her poems, a choral creation of sociologist’s critique, a painter’s reimagining, a parent’s revolutionary desperation, a womanist’s dissidence to be made zeitgeist, a lover’s epistemology, even a guru’s transcendence of hegemonic conventions. There is no direction of logic she cannot go. There’s no direction of retelling that she cannot go. There’s no direction of deification she cannot go. Her mind running through our hearts alongside the streetcar and the light beam, teaching clandestine relativity. Proving that us furious horn players are in fact patient witnesses.
—Tongo Eisen-Martin
Track List
Side A
- New York City 1970
- Rooming Houses Are Old Women
- The Woman Thing
- Rites of Passage, to MLK Jr.
- Revolution Is One Form of Social Change
- Summer Oracle
- Poem for a Poet
- Naturally
- Dreams and Revolution: Part I
- Dreams and Revolution: Part II
Side B
- Blood Birth
- Coal
- A Family Resemblance
- Oaxaca
- Spring People
- Now that I am Forever with Child
- The American Cancer Society Or There is More Than One Way to Skin a Coon
- A Sewerplant Grows in Harlem Or I’m a Stranger Here Myself When Does the Next Swan Leave
- A Ballad of Black Childhood
- Bridge Through My Window
- Father, the Year is Fallen
- Gemini
- Conversations in Crisis
- The Dozens
- Song
- The Healer
- And What About The Children
- Pirouette