Review: Classic Poetry Aloud Podcast

Contributing writer Travis King is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist from Oregon. He has a long-standing love/hate relationship with technology but is excited about exploring the opportunities the Internet presents in the field of poetry.

In my last post, I wrote about SpokenVerse, a poetry channel on YouTube, and I mentioned at the end the convenience afforded by such a medium for those who enjoy listening to poetry on-the-go. In this post, I’d like to introduce you to something similar: the poetry podcast. There are a number of these available on the web and through directories such as Apple’s iTunes Store. One of my favorites, which I discovered soon after purchasing my first iPod, is Classic Poetry Aloud.

The anonymous podcaster of Classic Poetry Aloud describes it as a podcast “giving voice to the poetry of the past.” Since May 2007, he has uploaded nearly 500 readings—an average of one every 1.5 days. Although the gentleman who reads the poems is English, all are old enough to be in the public domain in the United States, which means that none were composed more recently than World War I or shortly thereafter, making them true classics. The poems include many English classics, including pieces by Romantic poets such as Keats, Byron, and Shelley, as well as later poets such as Tennyson and Kipling. Older poets, including Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Donne, are also showcased. There are also well known American poets, including Poe, Dickinson, and Whitman, as well as lesser known poets from both Britain and the United States.

Recent episodes, as well as all the past ones from the Classic Poetry Aloud podcast can be found at http://classicpoetryaloud.podomatic.com, while iTunes carries the 100 most recent episodes. The anonymous podcaster can also be followed on Twitter.

I’m a fan of classic poetry, so I’ve chosen this one to exemplify poetry podcasts, but there is, of course, a wide variety of others. An iTunes search results in hundreds of entries. Many, like Classic Poetry Aloud collect older poems, because they are copyright-free and thus require no royalty fees to be paid, but others showcase modern poets and poetry through interviews and performances. From erotic poetry to political poetry to poetry slams and more, there are podcasts available on the web for nearly every taste.


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The [Very Loud] Voice from Nowhere: Anonymity and Poetry

Lewis Carroll. Moliere. Pablo Neruda. Toni Morrison. Mark Twain. Pseudonyms and literary pen names have been a part of the writing of poetry, fiction, and drama since the very beginning of writing itself. Most authors of Japanese haiku, for example, write under a haiga, or pen name. And the most famous name in Greek literature, Homer, is really a pseudonym that stands in for a collection of oral tradition, rather than a particular individual.

The literary world has always embraced authors who use pseudonyms, as demonstrated by the household names mentioned above. Poetry readers are very comfortable with anonymity, and it's no different on the Internet, where anonymity is a way of life for many.

There seems to be two schools of thought with Internet handles, screen names, and avatars. Either you use your real name, as many Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook users do, or you choose a nom-de-plume, like most AIM users and those who post on online forums. Some, like me, do a combination of the two. I use the handle "paradisetossed" on most sites, but my real name is readily available to those who view my profile. Others include part of their name, usually their first name, but don't give the entire thing. Despite the variation there are clearly two camps: the named users and the anonymous ones.

Online communities have become places where the anonymous have just as much say as those who use their real names. For the most part, this option for anonymity isn't abused, and people are becoming pretty comfortable with the idea of interacting with someone who hasn't disclosed their full identity. For poets, this idea is anything but new. Poetry can be a close interaction with an author who has been dead for hundreds of years, and whose name, real or imagined, is immaterial. What's the difference between reading Homer and the poetry on an anonymous blog?

In a tightly controlled publishing industry, poets and authors are allowed to write under pen names, but their real names are kept on record. A quick Google search will yield the real names of any of the authors listed above. The big difference with internet anonymity is that someday soon the most famous contemporary poet may have an undiscoverable real name. Someone who publishes a book anonymously, as Stephen King found out when he published under the name Richard Bachman, doesn't stay anonymous forever. But someone who posts anonymous poetry online today could very well stay anonymous forever.


A quick follow-up to last week's post on Iranian poetry. Yesterday NPR featured Iranian poet Parham Baghestani on its website for his poems and tweets about Iran's disputed election. What I especially like about the article is the side-by-side Persian and English translations.