A few days ago I was googling up some background on the late Rosa Parks and stumbled onto this site.
MP3 recordings of some of the biggest names in Poetry.
An incredibly emotional reading by Dylan Thomas,Robert Frost (who sounds like a young Tom Waits.) A world weary Auden and the icing on the cake, Willie Yeats himself with an accent that covers three distinct regions of Ireland - sometimes all in the one sentence.
Eliot is there alongside many others, a lot of whom are new to me.
One great discovery was Lucile Clifton whose short reading had me laughing out loud.
A very dear friend of mine tells me that Cliftons poem,though very funny,is only the tip of the iceberg - cliches in a poetry thread..doh! - and that further reading will be very rewarding.
That is my mission for the weekend.
I am thrilled to have found this site and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I have.
I listened to A Lesson for This Sunday by Derek Walcott and The Hermit Thrush by Amy Clampitt. I guess I have read a bit about each of them at some time or another. I don’t read poetry on my own and have rarely heard it read aloud, let alone by the poet, so this was an unusual experience. I felt I could understand a bit of what they were talking about. Very nice website.
I have I think most of Dylan Thomas’s recorded poetry in one format or another.
Actually, I think I have multiple copies of his two Caedmon LPs. Do not go gentle is from one of them.
My favorite is his recording of “Among those killed in the Dawn Raid Was a Man Aged One Hundred”. the sound quality is awful, and he’d forgotton to put on his phony ‘reading voice’ (which was an octave lower than his speaking voice, according to his lifelong friend Dan (err, Jones, I think).
But he nails the crescendo at “tell the street on its back he stopped the sun” and “the keys shot from their locks, and rang”.
I think I also at one point taped Yeats reading three poems–the lake Isle of Innisfree and I don’t recall which else. I wonder where that tape is now.
