Tell us about the poem (or the whole poetry CD) you most like to listen to.
In 2001, Poetry Guides Bob Holman and Margery Snyder scoured the Net to select the best online audio poems, by poets both old and new, for your listening pleasure. Those picks are archived here, in alphabetical order by poet’s name.
Here’s what we do: put a CD on and never take it out... Your Poetry Guides have selected poetry CDs to add to your collection.
Casting our eyes back across 2004 in the poetry world, Poetry Guides Bob Holman & Margy Snyder chose the best poetry & spoken word recordings.
Listening back through the poetry recordings released in 2007, Poetry Guide Bob Holman offered his selections of the best CDs to add to your audio poetry shelf, or your laptop, or your iPod.
Selected poetry/spoken word anthologies (in CD form) to add to your collection, recommended by your Poetry Guides.
The Academy's Web site offers a long list of poems read by their authors (in RealAudio) -- everyone from W.H. Auden to Gwendolyn Brooks, T.S. Eliot to Allen Ginsberg, Joy Harjo to Sylvia Plath to William Stafford, William Carlos Williams & W.B. Yeats. A bountiful archive, worth coming back to again and again.
A collection of audio recordings of poets performing their own work, from Seamus Heaney (“Bogland”) to Derek Walcott (“Homecoming: Anse la Raye”) & W.H. Auden (“After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics”) to Sylvia Plath (“Lady Lazarus”).
“An archive of sound art, spoken word poetry, audio hypermedia, and arts radio broadcasts,” this enormous site has lots to explore: wander through
LINEbreak public radio programs (“Interviews & Performances from the Literary Edge”) or check the
EPC Soundfiles archive, organized alphabetically by author, producer or composer.
Robert Pinsky’s ambitious project asked Americans to record their favorite poems, creating a portrait of the country at the turn of the millennium. The site is full of videos & texts, like Pablo Neruda’s “Puedo escribir” (“Tonight I Can Write” in Merwin’s English translation), Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur” read by Stanley Kunitz & Sylvia Plath’s “Polly’s Tree” read by the Miller family.
From the Fishouse is a free online audio archive that “promotes the oral tradition of poetry” by showcasing emerging poets reading their work & talking about poetry.
This is the poetry channel on Indiefeed’s music service, offering poetry podcasts—everything from the hottest new performance poets to archive recordings of Plath & Ginsberg—three times a week. You can subscribe on iTunes and browse the archived podcasts (they’ve done more than 500 shows!) on the Web site.
Jim Finnegan is the founder of Litstation.com -- a new Web radio broadcast source for poetry, fiction, interviews, book reviews and essays of literary interest.
Launched in January 2005, PennSound has grown into the richest cataloged archive of poetry audio anywhere. Directed by Charles Bernstein & Al Filreis, it’s a free, non-commercial source of high-quality poetry sound files -- singles for your mp3 player, reading series from Kelly Writers’ House, the Bowery Poetry Club &
MiPoRadio, cuts from CDs donated by the artists & preserved classic readings.
Takayuki Nakano's amazing config.sys of Japanese performance po based on
Finnegan's Wake: “
if you police” with drum accompaniment. This will wake the living -- superb audio stream to keep you comfy on the long surf home.
Jim Rosenberg's multivoice recordings (inspired by David Bromige) date back 25 years, but they are newly ensconced at
the Electronic Poetry Center.
“SlamMania,” Lisa Martinovic's article for the
San Francisco Chronicle, is accompanied online by a series of mpeg & Quicktime audio files of slam poets.
Great use of the blog form to create an anonymous archive of readings: “The Poet Speaks With A Thousand Voices” opens the blog to call-in readers, asking them to share their voices by reading a poem over the phone, and posting the contributions as audio blog entries. Bravo!
Put together by UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion & recording producer Richard Carrington, the Poetry Archive is collecting classics & making new recordings of English-speaking poets reading their own work, and putting them all online for free, with guided tours by people like Motion & Stephen Frye, and lots of ways to search. Ambitious & admirable!
The Poetry Foundation has amassed a vast library of audio files and puts out a series of podcasts well worth subscribing to: a poem of the day, notes from the editors of
Poetry magazine, lectures, round-table discussions, archival recordings of great American poets, and an avant-garde collection.
Eric Blomquist, Annie Callan, Aniina Jokinnen & Russ Van Westervelt read some of the great English sonnets in RealAudio for
Sonnet Central.
From Berkeley performance artist & provocateur Frank Moore,
Sounds from the Underground is “cookin’ with sound... music, poetry readings, sound collages, interviews, jams, and whatever else we or YOU(!) come up with!” selections updated monthly or thereabouts. Get your RealAudio up & listen!
This is WAR!
SpokenWar, that is. Greg Stant of Denver has one of the most beautiful spoken word sites on the Net, full of audio (“Voice”) and video (“Vision”).
Tilt-A-Whirl Press is gone, but
all the cuts from Ron Whitehead’s CD
Tapping My Own Phone are preserved from their site in RealAudio, unexpected online bounty! Sample treasures like “[http://mark.stosberg.com/tilt-a-whirl/audio/asheville.ram]Asheville[/link].”
ubuweb presents an extraordinary & ever-growing RealAudio collection of “sound poetry” (now expanded to “sound art”) both historical & brand-new. Some of the recordings are old or scratchy or faint, but you can listen to Guillaume Apollinaire, William Burroughs, Jean Cocteau, e.e. cummings, Brion Gysin, Jackson MacLow, Kurt Schwitters, Edwin Torres & more here.
“Dedicated to life, poetry, and the ABC’s of a new art,”
Jim Andrews’
Vispo site is mostly devoted to visual poem-art pieces, but also includes a large audio section with works by Andrews & others -- like Paul McKinnon’s stand-up travelogue, “Wake Up & Smell the Bus Depot.”
Minnesota Public Radio hosts Garrison Keillor’s daily reading of a poem & notes on literary history, and the
audio archives at
The Writer’s Almanac Web site go all the way back to 1998.
