Have Words Will Travel

To continue yesterday’s discussion of podcasts, this morning I found that a good podcast makes running on the treadmill ever so much more enjoyable. This morning was especially good, with a podcast from alt.NPR: Poetry Off the Shelf. They featured the site From the Fishouse: An Audio Archive of Emerging Poets.

For one thing, what a fantastic idea. They record emerging poets reading their own work, and then post the recordings on their site. They have dozens. Maybe hundreds? It’s remarkable and one could lose hours and hours listening to the poems.

What made the podcast so super-fantastic, though, was that they played a recording of a poet named Tyehimba Jess reading his poem, “leadbelly vs. lomax at the modern language association conference, 1934.” I was interested immediately because, coincidentally, I had just read a whole article in last week’s New Yorker about how people went around recording folk music back in the 20’s and 30’s and some of those artists, such as Leadbelly, went on to become famous. In the article, it mentioned Leadbelly being asked to wear prison stripes for public appearances to exploit the fact that he was an ex-con, thereby making him more interesting to the music consumer. It was a fascinating article, and then there I was on the treadmill listening to this random podcast with a poem by someone I’ve never heard of about that very subject. Not only that, but the poem is amazing. Amaaaaazing. It’s pretty cool to read, with interesting formatting of parallel dialogue–one side representing Leadbelly’s words and the other, Lomax’s. But when the poet reads it, first the one side, then the other, then both together (with the help of another person), it is incredible. You can hear it here. Go listen. I’ll bet anything that at the end, you can’t help but say, “Wow!” out loud.

And if you like it as much as I think you will, you might want to make a little donation to Fishouse. They strike me as a resource well worth supporting.

Just today, April 29, 2008, I discovered podcasts. Don’t get me wrong — I knew podcasts existed long before today, but I didn’t really get them. I didn’t understand why I would want one. My life is busy enough, so why would I go to all the trouble of downloading some program on my iPod to listen to? I don’t even make time to watch TV, let alone listen to things.

But then I heard on NPR on the way to pick up my daughter from school that they were going to have a show about a new Elizabeth Bishop collection that was being put together (or had been put together–I missed some of the details.) I was interested and knew I wouldn’t be in the car when the show was on, and in the car is the only time I actually listen to things. So I went on the NPR site to see if I could figure out this newfangled podcast dealio and download the program. Heh. An hour and a half later, my iPod was overflowing its waistband with poetry podcasts. Everything from Poetry Magazine to NPR/PoetryFoundation to Houghton Mifflin and more. There was WAY more than I could even download. I literally don’t have enough space on my iPhone (which I’m using as an iPod these days because I’m an admitted Apple/Mac whore.)

So the first podcast I listened to was on the subject of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Fever 103.” Not only was there a great discussion of the poem, virtually line-by-line, but they had an audio recording of Plath herself reading it the year she died. Oh. My. God. I hate to be a cliche, but I got literal chills. (In case you were curious, Sylvia Plath sounds exactly like Gwyneth Paltrow, partial English accent and all.) All I can say is WOW. And that little nugget of gold will be living on my iPhone forever and ever. You know, for when I’m feeling all dark and angsty.

If I wasn’t really the last person on earth to have discovered the joys of podcasts and someone reading this hasn’t seen the light, I urge you to go to iTunes as quickly as your nimble fingers will take you and search under Podcasts for some of the poetry programming. If nothing else, get the Sylvia Plath podcast and listen to her hair-raising reading. It’s on iTunes under: Arts->Literature->NPR->alt.NPR Poetry Off the Shelf.