Put together by the American Book Review, this list (which comes in PDF format) serves up some of the great last lines from modern literature. Ranking number six on the list is a passage that I happened to read just yesterday: “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” –Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926).
Listening to Famous Poets Reading Their Own Work
Today, we have a guest feature by Don from Classic Poetry Aloud (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), a place where you can find a great lineup of poetry podcasts. We welcome other guest contributors. So, if you’re interested, just email us. Take it away (and thanks) Don…
The internet has given poetry new scope and a new freshness. It’s almost like the ‘70s, when punk fanzine readers were famously told ‘Here are three chords, now form a band’. Today, the injunction could be: ‘Here are three web sites, now perform some poetry’.
And the emphasis would very much be on performance, with readings taking place on blogs (individually) and at poetry slams (collectively).
But an interest in poetry readings is not confined to new work. My own daily poetry podcast, Classic Poetry Aloud, is dedicated to anything in the English language that is out of copyright, and attracts listeners on every continent.
While podcasts such as Classic Poetry Aloud (see a November Open Culture posting for a listing of poetry podcasts) feature a range of poets, the internet also offers a wealth of recordings of celebrated authors reading from their own work.
The BBC has a wonderful series of such recordings at Poetry Out Loud. My favourites include: Men and their Boring Arguments by contemporary British poet Wendy Cope, and an excerpt from Tennyson’s celebrated Charge of the Light Brigade, originally recorded in 1890 on a wax cylinder by Edison. In addition, the BBC has a series of interviews with poets discussing their work.
The Academy of American Poets’ listening booth offers more than 150 original readings. As well as the rolling tones of Dylan Thomas reading Do not go Gentle into that Good Night, there is Robert Frost’s The Road not Taken, and Gwendolyn Brooks’ We Real Cool – complete with an illuminating, humorous, wry introduction. This is an unashamed show stopper reading of a poem that runs to just 24 words.
Indeed, one of the joys of listening to poets reading from their own work is often the comments and insights that they offer. T.S. Eliot does this in introducing The Journey of the Magi, one of three of his poems to feature on the Poetry Archive. On this site, there are over 200 poems that feature some form of introduction by the poet.
The Poetry Archive is an ambitious project set up by British poet laureate Andrew Motion to capture poetry readings. The range here is so vast that it is impossible to say how many poems are featured on the site, but it makes for an invaluable resource, with poems accessible by theme as well as by form.
Among British poets is former laureate John Betjeman, apparently unable to remember the title of the poem he is best remembered for – A Subaltern’s Love Song – and he jokes with his audience before launching into a characteristically brisk and warm rendition. Not all of the Poetry Archive comes from the UK, though, and Allen Ginsberg reads three poems, including A Supermarket in California.
Author Andrew Keen has claimed that the internet is ‘killing culture’. That’s a good, alliterative tag line to sell books, but the growing popularity of poetry on the net shows that it’s also far from the truth.
A New Media Scholar’s Dilemma
For a graduate student in an English Ph.D. program, one of the big milestones on the road to the dissertation is the Oral Exam. In my case this involves five professors, a list of 60–80 books, and two hours in a (rhetorically) smoke-filled room. Since I’m working on contemporary literature and new media, one of the challenges I have to deal with is how to address novels, films, television shows, video games and more as part of the same “list.” How does one put these things together? How can a video game be read as a text alongside Gravity’s Rainbow or Brave New World?
One way to approach this question is to include the work of literary and cultural critics who are already looking at new and traditional media side by side. Following that line, I try to keep up with the academic blog Grand Text Auto, which covers “computer narrative, games, poetry and art.” One of its contributors, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, is working on a book about digital fictions and computer games that looks perfect for my Orals list—and he’s publishing it, chapter by chapter, on Grand Text Auto for blog-based peer review. It will come out next year with MIT Press, but for now, it’s a work in progress.
All fine so far—I could list it as “forthcoming” and direct my professors to the link. But what happens when I start commenting on this book as I read it? What are we to do with the knowledge that this “text” will most likely change between now and next year? Does this item on my Orals list signify a draft of the book, the blog and its comments, or the experience of reading and writing into the MS myself (including, perhaps, responses from the author)?
I find the dilemma particularly interesting because it touches on a central conflict in humanities scholarship. Are we passive observers of the literary scene or active participants in it? It’s a rare academic critic who thinks of calling up a poet to ask her what she meant in a particular line, but that’s exactly the kind of connection that our hyper-conscious, digitally mediated world offers up.
P.S. After all of this hand-wringing, it’s obvious I’m not going to have time to read Noah’s book before I take my exam, so it’s off the list. But I can’t wait to dig in next month!
Harold Bloom on the Ghastly Decline of the Humanities (and on Obama’s Poetry)
Open Source (iTunes Feed Web Site) is back. The radio show hosted by Christopher Lydon hit some financial snags last summer and went off-air. Now, thanks to the Watson Institute at Brown University, the program has found new life, and it’s already regaining some of its old momentum.
Right before the New Year, the show aired a three-part interview with Harold Bloom, America’s most well known literary critic. As always, Bloom doesn’t hesitate to share his views here. But he saves his sharpest remarks for when he addresses the state of the humanities in the American academy (MP3 — iTunes — Feed — Web Site). For Bloom, a longtime professor at Yale, it’s not a pretty picture. The humanities, particularly the study of literature, has “committed suicide” by “going in for political correctness to a simply sickening degree” and “getting away from canonical standards [and] cognitive and aesthetic standards.” The humanities, Bloom summarily says, “are not worth celebrating until they establish themselves as a discipline again,” and, until some resurrection takes place, they won’t have the institutional standing of the social sciences. These are strong words, but frankly they’re among his milder comments. Have a listen, and find the comments mentioned above about 13 minutes in.
Fortunately, the conversation does end on a positive note (at least sort of). Bloom gives a kind nod to the poetry written by the young Barack Obama (read it here), likening his poems to the work of Carl Sandburg and Langston Hughes. It’s fairly high praise, especially when you consider that he’s willing to call Jimmy Carter the “worst poet in North America.”
Below find the two other segments of the recorded interview with Harold Bloom.
1) On Walt Whitman (MP3 — iTunes — Feed — Web Site)
2) The Jazz Bridge (MP3 — iTunes — Feed — Web Site)
And also see our earlier piece: The Art of Reading a Poem (According to Harold Bloom). Here you get to listen to a class where Bloom gives a critical reading of a Wallace Stevens poem. This one is long on straightforward scholarship and short on polemics.
James Joyce’s Dubliners: Four Stories
Back in June, we highlighted the release of James Joyce’s Ulysses in free audiobook format. Ulysses stands as Joyce’s most important work, and for some, it’s most the important work published in the English language during the entire 20th century. Despite Ulysses’ enormous stature, many readers still turn to Dubliners, a collection of 15 short stories that Joyce published in 1914, partly because it’s considered his most accessible writing. Over at Librivox, you can find several key stories from this collection — namely, The Sisters (mp3), Araby (mp3), Eveline (mp3), and The Dead (mp3 in zip file). The Dead is the longest and last story in the collection, and it’s a Christmas story, some say the “greatest of all Christmas stories,” which makes it particularly timely to mention here.
It’s worth noting that you can download the complete etext of Dubliners at Project Gutenberg or on Google Book Search. (The latter version is cleaner.) And, if you can suffer through it, Gutenberg also offers a free audio version of Joyce’s text, which is read by a computer, not a real person.
Lastly, be sure to spend some time perusing Librivox’s entire collection of free audiobooks. It’s the best on the web.
The Future of Print
WNYC’s latest On The Media (iTunes — Feed — Site) covers the crisis of traditional book publishing in a new media age. While Amazon rolls out the Kindle and more and more content comes out in pure digital form, we’re still publishing more books than ever before. One interesting note from the program is that publishers have discovered that offering more free content online (i.e. not just excerpts but whole chapters of new books) serves to increase sales even more. The show was great–worth a listen.
Listening to Poetry Online
Today, we have a guest feature from Don from Classic Poetry Aloud (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), which offers a great lineup of poetry podcasts. They have just kicked off a week dedicated to war poetry, which includes pieces by Shakespeare, Coleridge and Melville, among others. Below, Don offers a very helpful survey of the poetry podcast landscape and helps us see why podcasting might be the perfect medium for sparking a renaissance in poetry. Take it away Don…
Short, intense and often emotional pieces of writing penned for the human ear: poems could have been invented for podcasts. It’s no surprise, then, that poetry reading podcasts have sprung up like daisies this year.
Most are the aural equivalent of blogs, telling the intimate stories of the poet, and often about as interesting. Some, though, are dedicated to reading others’ poetry, and they are worth visiting for a regular, short piece of writing that will almost always stimulate thought and feeling – and if it doesn’t, well, you’ve probably only wasted the few minutes it takes to read a poem.
Classic Poetry Aloud (Tunes Feed Web Site)), my own podcast, is dedicated to anything in the English language which is over 70 years old. Experimentally, this week (Nov 4 – 11) is War Poetry Week, featuring poems from Samuel Coleridge and Herman Melville as well as Wilfred Owen and Shakespeare. It’s an attempt to take listeners on a week-long journey from the first rumours of war (on Monday 5th) through to remembering the dead (on Sunday 11th, Remembrance day in the UK).
Most poetry podcasts don’t deal exclusively with the past, however. On the excellent Poetry Off the Shelf (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), from the Poetry Foundation, you’ll find the smooth-toned Curtis Fox interviewing contemporary poets about their works, and having them read and interpret a poem or two. It’s wonderfully produced and Fox’s intelligent, self-deprecating style puts both this guests and his listeners at ease. Other podcasts, such as MiPOradio (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), follow the same interview/reading format.
Cloudy Day Art (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) similarly involves interviews, most recently with former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, but with a different focus. A home-produced show by Washington DC resident Will Brown, the aim is to draw out of those he interviews thoughts, tips and advice for those who, like the ever-enthusiastic Will himself, are writing poetry, for publication or just for themselves.
One podcast focuses purely on Shakespeare’s sonnets, and is read by a man describing himself as “some guy from New York” (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). The shtick on this podcast is that the reader was ordered to read the sonnets as some form of community service or face the prospect of prison. I’m not sure I quite believe this – the interpretations are too good, and the attitude too laid-on. None of this detracts from what is, though, an entertaining and intelligent listening experience.
For pure simplicity, and no attitude, I subscribe to Clarica’s Poetry Moment (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), which gives me what I want: a clear female voice reading a wide range of poetry, with no fuss, just a sense of pleasure in the meaning and the sound of the words.
In this reaction, I am a regular poetry podcast listener: all comments I’ve read on my own, and other sites show reaction to all this spoken poetry to be overwhelmingly positive, and sometimes deeply emotional. People love to hear the poem come off the page, whether they are a receptionist in Holland, studying for their English Literature exams at high school in Scotland, or learning English in the Far East. It’s wonderful to sense the world being brought together through the medium of the poetry podcast. Sometimes it almost seems that technology has enabled the oral tradition to be reborn.
For more poems and novels, please visit our Audiobook Podcast Collection and if you want to guest blog, get in touch.
Bestselling Novelist Sells Story Ideas for $1
Bestselling writer Jonathan Lethem — author of one of my favorite novels Motherless Brooklyn — has put together an offer that’s hard to beat. He’ll sell you a story for a book, play, or screenplay for a mere $1. Then you can take the story idea, make it your own, and move it in new and unexpected directions.
This is obviously not a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s actually more about bringing Larry Lessig’s notion of free culture to the literary domain. You can get more on Lethem’s ideas here, but the upshot is that Lethem, being a fan of “adaptations, appropriations, collage, and sampling,” wants artists to “make material free and available for [creative] reuse.” (Some of this thinking informs a recent piece in Harper’s called “The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism.”) The initiative, which he calls The Promiscuous Materials Project, offers a step in the right direction.
Related Content: Give a listen to this engaging interview with Lethem where he talks about this project and more. Also check out Lethem and other authors speaking at Google.
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