Thursday, February 1, 2007

Actually listening to poetry

How often do we really listen to poetry anymore? Perhaps it is true that contemporary poetry is meant to be read more than to be heard, but I find that once I hear a poet reading his or her own work I can never read it the same way again. That's right, I'm looking at you, Paul.

The PENNsound poetry site collects audio files from all sorts of interesting people. We're using it this week in a class to listen to William Carlos Williams reading a few excerpts from Paterson.

2 comments:

Ed said...
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anna said...

I used to try to read poetry out loud, back in my undergraduate salad days, in an attempt to make some of it more interesting. It only worked occasionally. There's no hope for some of those long stretches of Wordsworth.