Chekhov's Mistress
The Poetry Archive
Its launch has been widely noted, but I can’t help but to throw out an appreciation for the Poetry Archive.
It’s a great site (a design I could only hope for) and they have even built in a “tag cloud,” which I am conceptually fond of, to find poems by loose-knit subjects instead of having to know the author you’re looking for. Only one little problem – I haven’t figured out how to listen to anything yet. Maybe it’s because I’m on a Mac, I don’t know.
Anyway, this is from the about page:
Poetry was an oral art form before it became textual. Homer’s work lived through the spoken word long before any markings were made on a page. Hearing a poet reading his or her work remains uniquely illuminating. It helps us to understand the work as well as helping us to enjoy it. When a poet dies without making a recording, a precious resource is lost for ever and as time goes by that loss is felt more and more keenly. What would we not give to be able to hear Keats and Byron reading their work? And, if recording had been possible in the early nineteenth century, how inexplicable it would seem now if no-one had recorded their voices. Yet in the twentieth century, when recording technology became universal, there was no systematic attempt to record all significant poets for posterity and even some major poets – Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman (as far as we know. Please tell us if you have a recording of Hardy or Housman reading his poetry!), for example – died without having been recorded at all. The Poetry Archive has, therefore, been created to make sure that such omissions never happen again and that everyone has a chance to hear major poets reading their work.
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