Online archive has poets reading their own work

Last Updated Wed, 30 Nov 2005 13:54:07 EST
CBC Arts

A major online archive allows poetry lovers to hear poets, including greats such as Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, reading their own work.

The Poetry Archive, which went online Wednesday, is a project of Britain's poet laureate Andrew Motion and Richard Carrington, a recording engineer specializing in the spoken word.

Margaret Atwood is the only Canadian poet included on the site so far; but new recordings are being added as they are discovered. Atwood can be heard reading four of her poems.

The bulk of the poets are Britons, with only 28 so far, including Atwood and U.S. poet John Ashbery, from the rest of the world.

Among the treasures included on the site is a 1932 recording of W.B. Yeats reading "The Lake Isle of Innisfree".

Browning and Tennyson were recorded on early phonographs reading their own poems. Browning is heard in a rather rough recording at a dinner party, reading an excerpt of "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix". Tennyson is recorded in 1890, reciting his "The Charge of the Light Brigade".

Harold Pinter, Seamus Heaney, Anne Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling are among hundreds of prominent poets recorded.

Motion says he wanted to store these recordings for history, but also create a site that generates interest in poetry. There is a children's section and each poet's recording is accompanied by a brief biography and a list of his or her works and where to buy them.

Visitors to the site can also buy a CD of the recordings, a project that helps pay the cost of maintaining the site.

Motion says he met Carrington in 1999, shortly after becoming poet laureate. The two began talking about the pleasure of hearing poetry read aloud and hit on the website project.

"Actors may (or may not) read poems well, but poets have unique rights to their work, and unique insights and interests to offer as we hear their idiom, pacing, tone and emphases," said Motion in an interview with Reuters. "The readings are at once instant in their appeal, and lingering in their impact."

The website has been funded by grants from the government, a lottery fund, private foundations and charities.