A month ago, I attended a KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading on Zoom whose featured readers were from Michigan and California. Diane Seuss, the poet from Michigan, I had never heard before and was surprised and taken by her poems; I could hear and […]
Category Archives: Odds and Ends
Sonnets 1 through 19 written by William Shakespeare and read by Sir John Gielgud
Shakespeare’s first nineteen sonnets are addressed to a handsome young man. Procreation is its own kind of heaven, Shakespeare tells him, urging him to breed, not waste his seed, but live on through his offspring. Beginning in sonnet fifteen, there is another kind of […]
HOWL read by Allen Ginsberg
The Vimeo below contains the 1959 Big Table Chicago Reading of Allen Ginsberg reciting HOWL, and the text is scanned from a third edition copy. If you listen as you read along, you will see that the poem is often expurgated. When Ginsberg reads […]
T. S. Eliot reads Four Quartets
Four Quartets was a favorite poem of Barack Obama when he was in his twenties; in one of his university letters he even attempted to impress a girlfriend by writing to her about it. T. S. Eliot, unlike Ezra Pound, was a fatalist not […]
Ash Wednesday read by T. S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot converted to Christianity and joined the Anglican Church in 1927, a man with no faith now having to find some. Perhaps his faith was already there, the faith, at least, that if he put a pencil to paper, he would create a […]
Charles Bernstein reads from Near/Miss
I am a slow reader and come to a lot of books slowly too, but if you live long enough, as I seem to be doing—so far, so good—good books, or books that I enjoy do come. Such a one has been Near/Miss by […]
Laura Cronk reads from Ghost Hour @KGB Monday Night Poetry
I was very moved listening to Laura Cronk read from her most recent book, Ghost Hour. Her childhood and my childhood have similarities. Although she grew up in Indiana and I grew up in Pennsylvania, I could relate. Her poems were like seeing an […]
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock read by T. S. Eliot
The first poem that anybody reads who must read something by T. S. Eliot—I think of high school teenagers—is “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Perhaps, like those who first read it, the poem is young. Many people love it. Its Michelangelo couplet, […]
Inauguration Poems, 1/21/21, curated by Dorothy Friedman
For this past January’s inauguration, after so much stress beforehand including armed insurrection, Dorothy Friedman gathered some poet friends together the day after the official celebration for a Zoom poetry reading. This reading is captured below on the Vimeo and some of the poets […]
Etheridge Knight reads Feeling Fucked Up
Etheridge Knight wrote some great poems, up there with the best of them. Like a contemporary of his, Gregory Corso, he was also a heroin addict for a lot of his life, burning his bridges as he went along, thievish like François Villon, a […]
A Kiss and a Sonnet
Last year I sent out a few Valentines, my poem “In the Circle,” and one came back with a kiss. Those lips are Shelley Kraut’s. Here’s to love, everybody. Mmmmwwahhhh! 219 I want to write something about you butI’m […]
Charles Bernstein reads from The Lives of the Toll Takers
In the Vimeo below, Charles Bernstein reads part of a poem from his book, Dark City that he made for his friend Li Zhimin, a poet and professor at Guangzhou University in China. The excerpt was selected by Li for his anthology Reading Poetry […]
