Wednesday, May 24, 2006

New Collection of Recorded Poetry

A new collection of recorded poetry looks awesome. It's called Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work (1888-2006). It's 4 CDs and 128 poems.
It has wide range of poets, too: Tennyson, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, Dylan Thomas, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Bukowski, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, and more more more.
It's not too pricey either. Amazon is advertising it for about 40 bucks.
Fresh Air featured the collection this week. Listen to host Terry Gross and U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins discuss it here.
Of course I would be remiss if I did not point out that it features two poems from my favorite work, Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. Master's reads the poems Lucinda Matlock and Emily Sparks -- both among the best poems of the anthology. You can hear snippets on Amazon, not the whole poems though.
The written word is the child of the spoken word. Recorded poetry always reminds me of that, happily.

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