“Nothing, certainly not the canon-heavy classes I took at Rutgers-Camden, prepared me for what I heard when I popped the Meditations cassette into a player. Over the course of two 19-minute sides, Kern chanted, moaned, and bleated. At some points he sounded like he was stuttering, at others speaking in tongues. It took me at least 10 listens just to wrap my head around the idea that this was, in fact, poetry, and not some maniac testing out a microphone.”

Read “Behind the Sound” by Daniel Nester, a look into legendary sound poet W. Bliem Kern and Nester’s own history with Kern’s 1973 collection of concrete and visual poetry.