Like so many denizens of the New York that produced Warhol and The Velvet Underground, then gritty punk rock, hip-hop, and no wave, poet Jim Carroll didn’t fare so well into Bloomberg-era NYC, a developer’s paradise and destination for urban professionals and tourists, but not so much a haven for struggling artists.

Samuel Beckett was notoriously shy around recording devices. He would spend hours in a studio working with actors, but when it came to recording a piece in his own voice he was elusive. Only a handful of recordings are known to exist. So the audio above of Beckett reading a pair of his poems is extremely rare.

For almost a century, writers and other creative people have found inspiration and a profound sense of validation in the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s posthumously published Letters to a Young Poet.

Here’s a great reading by E.E. Cummings of his famous and widely anthologized poem, “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” The poem has a bittersweet quality, dealing with the loneliness of the individual amid the crushing conformity of society, but in a playful way, like a nursery rhyme with delightfully shuffled syntax.

Here’s a quick video that serves as an addendum to last week’s post, “Don’t Try”: Charles Bukowski’s Concise Philosophy of Art and Life.

From 18bis, a Brazilian design & motion graphics studio, comes this: a free interpretation of “The Me Bird,” a poem by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda. Writes 18bis, “The inspiration in the strata stencil technique helps conceptualize the repetition of layers as the past of our movements and actions.

It should surprise few to learn that Abraham Lincoln wrote poetry. But this fact about his life is dwarfed by those events that defined his political legacy, and this is also no surprise. Nevertheless, in the midst of the current Lincoln revival, the man and the statesman, I think it’s fitting to attend to Abraham Lincoln the poet.

eBay prices for the album Gertrude Stein Reads Her Own Work range from $20 to $200. Vinyl purists, and Stein purists, may long for one of the still-sealed copies at the upper end of that range. The rest of us can enjoy hearing its recordings as mp3s, free on the internet courtesy of PennSound.

Want to know what’s going on the poetry world? Ask University of Pennsylvania professor Al Filreis.

Of all American poets, almost no one looms larger than Walt Whitman. As I once heard an old poet acquaintance say, American poets don’t need Shakespeare and the Bible; we’ve got Dickinson and Whitman.