The University of Pennsylvania hosts an extensive and pretty remarkable audio collection of modern and contemporary poetry, with a generous helping of prose writers thrown in. Directed by Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein (whose U. Penn experimental poetry courses are themselves works of art), the collection includes hundreds of names you’ll recognize immediately, and others who are not household names, but ought to be.
You can start with the stars, including John Ashbery, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Amiri Baraka, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Vladimir Mayakovsky… But don’t be afraid to dig around for a while too. We were delighted to find “The Outcry,” a favorite poem by the wonderful William Bronk, and several fascinating podcast interviews with Cid Corman.
For more poetry, don’t miss the readings in our collection of Free Audio Books.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Variety, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
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