Poetry MP3 Picks

Coleman Barks, “Spring Morning”

From The Cortland Review, Issue 15.
Famed as the English translator of Rumi, Coleman Barks was featured in Bill Moyers’ PBS documentary Fooling With Words and reads a series of his own poems in the Cortland Review, his soft-edged Georgia voice playing a conversational rubato over the indented three-line stanzas on the screen.

Ernie Cline, “Tech Support”

From his CD Ultraman Is Airwolf, Slammunition by Ernie Cline.
This is a high-energy live recording, full of Tron-style reverb-echoes, that puts you in the hands of Ernie-as-madman-geek whose job is “the imposition of order on chaos.”

Billy Collins, “Japan”

From the Key West Literary Seminar Audio Archives, 2003.
During his second term as U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins gave a reading at the Key West Literary Seminar that includes this poem about poetry, one of his more classically poetic pieces. It begins... Today I pass the time reading / a favorite haiku, / saying the few words over and over. ...and winds down the page in three-line stanzas wrapped around images and echoes that culminate in a metaphor which both describes and is the effect of a poem. Also in this recording is his poem “Forgetfulness,” a lovely exemplar of the genial, accessible, humorous nature of Collins and his work.

Emily Dickinson, “I cannot live with You”

From the “Soundings” series on Atlantic Unbound’s poetry pages.
Steven Cramer, Lucie Brock-Broido and Mary Jo Salter have taken on the mystery of Emily Dickinson’s poems as “scripts for performance”—“But how should her poems be said?... did she intend it to be read out loud?”—and you can hear the results in their readings of “I cannot live with You.”

Rita Dove, “Parsley”

From NPR’s “Poet’s Corner.” In a clear and musical voice, Rita Dove reads a poem which invokes the lyric impulse in order to tell the horrors of a particular bit of history: Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s selection of 20,000 Haitians for execution by their French Creole pronunciation of the Spanish word for parsley, “perejil.” As Helen Vendler says, “No matter how painful her stories, no matter how sharp-edged her lines, her poems fall on the ear with solace.” Dove read “Parsley” at the White House, “to talk about the uses to which power has been put” and to “show what poetry could do,” and it does both these things, powerfully.

Paul Flores, Darren de Leon, Norman Zelaya, Jimmy Biala (Los Delicados)

“¡Presente! Heroes/Sheroes y Otras Cosas” from their CD Word Descarga on Calaca Press.
Calaca Press is a bonfire burning in California, an energy revolution of Chicano/Chicana spoken word, creating big light and roaring sound in books and CDs from such luminescent poets as Sandra C. Muñoz, Elba Rosario Sánchez, robertkarimi, raúlrsalinas and the Taco Shop Poets. Described by Latin Beat magazine as “urban griots paving a way for a spoken-word revolution,” Los Delicados combine theater, music and poetry in a rhythmic, intoxicating, truly live performance. (And once you’ve been to the Calaca Press online Poesía library to hear them, you’ll find lots of other audio samples worth listening to.)

Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Trumpet Player”

From Salon.com Poetry Audio.
When we chose this mp3 pick, Langston Hughes’ name was on top of the poll at the Academy of American Poets to select the poet whose face would appear on a new US postage stamp—and the Langston Hughes stamp was issued in 2002, the year of his centenary.

June Melby, “Island”

From Livepoets.com.
Bob Redmond (our former Seattle/Pacific Northwest Museletter correspondent) had this to say about June Melby, and we think he says it all: “Weird, delicate and disturbingly hilarious, June Melby says out loud what all those little voices in your head have been saying for years. She’s the dance band on the Titanic, and her poems: prayers for all lost causes, broken hearts, and ends-of-millennia.”

Tracie Morris, “Chain Gang”

From the 1999 collection of People’s Poetry Gathering audio and video clips.
Tracie Morris is the high priestess of rap-inflected sound poetry, former Nuyorican Slam Champ and veteran of The United States of Poetry, whose voice polishes the words to a shine in this recording from the first People’s Poetry Gathering.

Sylvia Plath, “On the Decline of Oracles”

From Salon.com Poetry Audio.
Called our “Queen of Sorrows” by Joyce Carol Oates, Sylvia Plath is an icon of suicide and poetics. Her siren songs have lured young women to poetry for more than half a century, and in these recordings her voice perfectly matches the beauty and the diamond hardness of her poems.