Getting your poetry fix aurally.

The best way to read poetry is to not to. That is, get someone else to do it for you. Especially if you're just starting out reading poetry, it can help to get a sense of how it sounds when read by the author or an actor. Too many people read poetry and think they have to pause at the end of each line break. (Not true, you follow the punctuation as in any other writing.)

So, shall we all host tea-parties and invite poets? Well you could try that - but they might resent having to perform in exchange for their cream cake and Darjeeling. You could go to some readings at a cafe or pub, but I confess I don't do that after some horrible reading-related incidents at university. Far too scary and confronting. Especially if the poet comes up to you afterwards to ask you what you thought. (Is "Eep?" a suitable response? Probably not.)

The solution, of course, lies in recorded media. CDs, audio files, podcasts, tapes, records, 8-track. Whatever you're comfortable with.

A quick Google led me to these useful sites:

Cloudy Day Art - a roughly monthly, roughly half-hour podcast that includes several different poets reading their own work each episode.

Griffin Poetry Prize - a page of author readings in various video and audio formats. The poets are chosen from this Canadian prize's shortlists and winners.

Houghton Mifflin's Poetic Voice - a different poet from the Houghton Mifflin stable is featured in each episode which includes discussions as well as readings.

Poets.org has a long list of audio files that are stupidly embedded and can not be extracted from the webpage. But it's still a good collection and includes Dylan Thomas reading Do not go gentle into that good night — he never sounded like that in my head.


There are several tapes my daughter and I listen to while eating dinner — Sir John Mills and Hayley Mills reading A. A. Milne's When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six* and Spike Milligan reading from A Children's Treasury of Milligan. (It's the new edition that comes with the CD.) When they wear out (which won't take long at this rate) I think we'll move onto some Roald Dahl and Neil Gaiman. Dinner-time listening shouldn't be too heavy. It might affect the digestion.

*No longer available, but I did find a used copy for 35 GBP!