Poetry Speaks features the work of the most influential writers in modern poetry-written and performed-from 1892 to 1997. This book combines their most significant poems in print with the authors themselves reading their poetry on audio CD. Poets range from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot and Dorothy Parker to Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and Gwendolyn Brooks.
The power of spoken poetry is at the heart of Poetry Speaks. Poetry is a vocal art, an art meant to be read aloud. Listening to a poem read aloud can be a transforming experience. Poetry Speaks not only introduces the finest work from some of the greatest poets who ever lived, it reintroduces the oral tradition of poetry.
Poetry Speaks features over 40 poets in chapters each containing:
· The poems that are read by the poet on the audio CD
· Additional poems in print form to allow the reader to further explore the poet
· A short biography and photo of each poet
· Original manuscripts and letters for most of the featured poets
· An original essay for each poet written by today’s most influential poets, a veritable Who’s Who of poetry, including: Seamus Heaney on W.B. Yeats; Richard Wilbur on Robert Frost; Mark Strand on Wallace Stevens; Jorie Graham on Elizabeth Bishop; Glyn Maxwell on Dylan Thomas; and Rita Dove on Melvin B. Tolson.
Poetry Speaks-combining the talents of great poets past and living, their words written and spoken-is the most ambitious, comprehensive and innovative poetry project to be published in years, and is sure to be the model for collections to come.
Elise Paschen is the author of Infidelities (Story Line, 1996), winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, and Houses: Coasts (Oxford: Sycamore Press, 1985). Her work has been published in magazines such as Poetry Magazine, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Nation and in numerous anthologies including Reinventing the Enemy's Lannguage and A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women. Former Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America (from 1988-2000) and co-editor of Poetry in Motion (Norton, 1996), she teaches in the Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently she is a Frances Allen Fellow at The Newberry Library. She lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter.
Rebekah Presson Mosby interviewed more than 350 contemporary poets and writers as the host and producer of the syndicated radio literature series New Letters on the Air from 1983-1995. Since 1987, she has filed 140 art news features and six one-half hour documentaries as a freelance reporter for National Public Radio. She also free-ances as a producer/editor for Rhino Records. Her Rhino titles include the multi-disc audio anthologies In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry (1996) and Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like the Rivers: Black Poets Read Their Work (2000).
