from Podcasts
We are delighted to announce a collaboration with The Poetry Foundation that presents recordings from the Key West Literary Seminar audio archives to a much larger audience. The Chicago-based foundation is one of the largest literary foundations in the world, the publisher of the historic Poetry magazine, and the creator of poetryfoundation.org- arguably the most comprehensive resource for readers of poetry on the web.
Among the Foundation's online initiatives are nine podcast series, including iTunes's top-ranked poetry podcast Poetry Off the Shelf, an offbeat exploration of contemporary American poetry hosted by Curtis Fox. A recent episode, "Worshipful Company of Snowbirds," features a recording of poet James Tate at the 2003 Seminar, with commentary by Fox and KWLS media director Arlo Haskell. Other Foundation podcasts include the monthly Poetry Lecture Series, which features talks given by notable scholars and critics on poets, poetry, and their intersections with other art forms. The current episode is Mark Doty's keynote address from the 2008 Seminar, "Tide of Voices." We're told these two KWLS recordings have already been listened to by more than 20,000 people on the Foundation's website.
We're grateful to Cathy Halley, Jim Sitar, and all the good people at The Poetry Foundation for making this possible. We hope it is the beginning of a long and happy collaboration that will help bring KWLS audio to even more educators, students, and readers worldwide.
Browse all podcasts from The Poetry Foundation
Subscribe to KWLS Audio Archives in iTunes
Photo by Rollie McKenna Joy Williams is the influential author of dozens of short stories and essays, which are collected in Taking Care (1982), Escapes (1990), Honored Guest (2004), and Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals (2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She has also written four novels, including The Quick and the Dead (2000), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and State of Grace (1973), nominated for a National Book Award.
In this recording from the 1989 Key West Literary Seminar, Williams reads "The Last Generation," which would be published in Esquire later that year. It tells the story of 9 year old Tommy, whose mother has recently been killed in a car crash, and his relationship with Audrey, the darkly philosophical ex-girlfriend of Tommy's teenaged older brother
"The last generation has got certain responsibilities," Audrey said, "though you might think we wouldn't. We should know nothing and want nothing and be nothing. But at the same time we should want everything and know everything and be everything."
Upstairs in his room, Walter Junior was lifiting weights. They could hear him, breathing, gasping. Audrey's strange, smooth face looked blank. It looked empty.
"Did you love my brother?" Tommy asked. "Do you still love him?"
"Certainly not," Audrey said. "We were just passing friends."
From KWLS 1989: The American Short Story: A Renaissance
(31:42) / 14.7 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 1989, 2010 Joy Williams. Used with generous permission from Joy Williams.
Photo by Curt Richter Richard Wilbur is among the singular poets of our time, the only living poet to have twice won the Pulitzer Prize, and a former Poet Laureate of the United States. As a young veteran of World War II, Wilbur became friends with Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens and began writing the refined and rigorously optimistic poetry that characterize his sixty-year oeuvre. In the 1960s, Wilbur and his wife Charlee began spending winters in Key West, where he became friends with a circle of poets including James Merrill, John Ciardi, and John Malcolm Brinnin. In January 2010 we welcomed Wilbur back to Key West with Clearing the Sill of the World, our 28th annual Seminar, held in his honor.
In this recording from January 9, 2010, Wilbur reads more than two dozen poems and translations, many of which will be published by Harcourt this fall in his 10th collection, Anterooms. These new poems include "The House," "A Measuring Worm," "Flying," "Trismegistus," "The Censor," "Out Here," and several new translations of riddles from Symphosias ("Nine lives I have...," "I have no tresses...," "Through middle air...," "All things I powerfully crush...," and "A god's sweet mistress..."). He reads "Security Lights, Key West" from the 2004 New Poems as well as "Nuns at Eve" by John Malcolm Brinnin, for whom the Seminar's Saturday evening address is named. From Mayflies (2000), Wilbur reads "For C.," "Crow's Nests," a translation of Valeri Petrov's "A Cry From Childhood," and "This Pleasing Anxious Being." From 1987's New & Collected Poems, we get "The Ride," Vinicius de Moraes's "Song," and "Hamlen Brook," while from 1976's The Mind-Reader we get "The Writer," and the comic poems "Piccola Commedia," "To His Skeleton," and "The Prisoner of Zenda." Wilbur continues this survey with "Complaint," from Waking to Sleep (1969), and "Advice to a Prophet," from the eponymous 1961 collection, before concluding with several pieces from one of Wilbur's books of light-hearted verse for children, The Disappearing Alphabet.
From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World
(1:06:52) / 31 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2010 Richard Wilbur. Used with generous permission from Richard Wilbur.
More Richard Wilbur resources from KWLS:
A reading in tribute to Elizabeth Bishop, from KWLS 1993
A reading from KWLS 2003
The World is Fundamentally a Great Wonder: Wilbur in conversation with Arlo Haskell, 2009
Photo by Curt Richter Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City and graduated from Princeton University in 1973. She studied Zen for nearly eight years at the San Francisco Zen Center, and has taught at UC Berkeley, Duke University, and Bennington College. She is the author of six books of poetry, as well as the influential prose collection Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She has also translated and edited the works of early women poets in The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu and other books. Hirshfield has said "I am interested in poems that find a clarity without simplicity; in a way of thinking and speaking that does not exclude complexity but also does not obscure; in poems that know the world in many ways at once– heart, mind, voice, and body."
In this recording from the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar, January 10, Hirshfield begins with "The Poet," from her 1997 collection Lives of the Heart. The remaining poems are all new and uncollected, including "First Light Edging Cirrus," "French Horn," "The Supple Deer," "Alzheimer's," "Left-handed Sugar," "Vinegar and Oil," "Sonoma Fire," "A Day is Vast," "One Loss Folds Itself Inside Another," and "A Hand is Shaped for What it Holds or Makes."
From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World
(16:09) / 8 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2010 Jane Hirshfield. Used with generous permission from Jane Hirshfield.
The Florida State Department's Division of Cultural Affairs has awarded the Key West Literary Seminar a grant for more than $20,000. The award, part of the DCA's Culture Builds Florida Grant Program, is designated for the expansion and enhancement of the KWLS Audio Archives Project. Begun in late 2007, the Audio Archives Project aims to preserve and promote the recorded history of the Key West Literary Seminar, which contain more than 20 years of unique presentations by some of the world's most influential writers. More than 50 such recordings have already been digitized and released through the project, which is freely available to anyone with an internet connection.
Together with matching funds from KWLS, the Florida Builds Culture grant marks a significant investment in the project and will ensure its viability for years to come. Funds will be used to digitize fragile analog recordings and develop a mobile-optimized platform that will allow iPhone and other mobile device users greater access to the archives. The award will support KWLS investment in audio production equipment, as well as the development of initiatives and partnerships aimed at increasing use of the archives among educators, students, and readers worldwide.
The Audio Archives Project is one of more than 100 project-specific grants awarded statewide by the Division in 2009. Granted projects demonstrate cultural excellence and innovation, sustainability, and effective program management in support of the Florida Council on Arts and Culture’s strategic plan for the continuing development of arts and culture in the State of Florida.
photo by Curt Richter Barry Unsworth's body of work is marked by scrupulous historical research and compelling narratives. In this recording from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Unsworth discusses the impulses, instincts, and concerns that drive his fascination with history. The often intimate discussion suggests that Unsworth's chief aim as a novelist is to explore the ethical complexities of humankind as presented in the customs and sensibilities of distinct historical periods.
"The past is another country, we know. It's not recoverable. Even our own past, our own childhood is not recoverable. We know that we can't get back to it, but we know at the same time that we've never lost it. We know it belongs to us because it has made us what we are."
From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(28:19) / 13.1 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Barry Unsworth. Used with generous permission from Barry Unsworth.
photo by Isak Tiner Patricia Engel was the winner of the Key West Literary Seminar's Marianne Russo Scholarship for 2009. She subsequently signed a two-book contract with Grove/Atlantic, which will publish Vida, a collection of short stories, in 2010. Engel's short story "Madre Patria," workshopped at KWLS 27 with Hilma Wolitzer, is forthcoming in Quarterly West, while "The Bridge," which debuted at the Seminar, will appear in print in The Atlantic Monthly's 2010 Fiction Issue.
On this recording from 2009, Engel reads from "The Bridge," about a father who throws his young son off Miami's Rickenbacker causeway.
"When he found out his wife was unfaithful, Hector Castillo told his son to get in the car because they were going fishing. It was after midnight, but this was nothing unusual. The Rickenbacker bridge hanging over Biscayne Bay was full of night fisherman leaning over the railings, catching up on the gossip over beer and fishing lines, avoiding going home to their wives. Except Hector didn't bring any fishing gear with him."
From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(7:11) / 3.4 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Patricia Engel. Used with generous permission from Patricia Engel.
photo by Curt Richter Barry Unsworth is the English-born author of 16 novels, most recently Land of Marvels, a historical novel set in Mesopotamia on the eve of World War I. Three of his books have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, including Sacred Hunger, which is concerned with the 19th-century Atlantic slave trade and won the prestigious award in 1992.
In this recording of the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar John Hersey Memorial address, Unsworth outlines his thoughts on the nature of truth in works of fiction. On the one hand, argues Unsworth, the novelist must strive for accuracy in relating the historical facts of a period. On the other hand, "the writer of fiction should be seeking a larger truth, a purer truth." In pursuit of this aesthetic aim, the author strives to appeal to the reader's experience and intuition, and so may take liberties with "the categories of factual falsehood or truth." In making his case for an "economy of truth," Unsworth cites authors Mark Twain, Umberto Eco, and D.H. Lawrence, as well as British spy-turned-author Peter Wright.
From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(39:49) / 18.3 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Barry Unsworth. Used with generous permission from Barry Unsworth.
photo by Curt Richter Gore Vidal has been one of America's most distinct voices for more than half a century. The author of more than 20 novels, hundreds of essays, and several plays for screen and stage, Vidal is perhaps best known for the eloquent and witheringly sarcastic political commentary that has made him a darling of the American left. With dependably erudite attacks on right-wing figures, this quixotic scion of a privileged political family, friend of the Kennedys and playwright Tennessee Williams, has staked out a unique position in American political and intellectual life.
This recording from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar consists of an hourlong conversation between Vidal and Jay Parini, his literary executor, a poet, biographer, and critic. Vidal discusses the influences on his work as a historical novelist, his views on the American educational system, and his admiration for figures including Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. George W. Bush, then serving his final week in office, is the target of particular scorn, as Vidal levels a litany of complaints accusing his administration of "shredding" the Bill of Rights and striving "to make lying the national pastime." In a question-and-answer session,Vidal discusses efforts to bring Tennessee Williams's final play to the public, as well as his feelings on disgraced financier Bernard Madoff and former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(59:09) / 27.1 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Gore Vidal and Jay Parini. Used with generous permission from Gore Vidal and Jay Parini.
Photo by Nick Vagnoni Andrea Barrett's acclaimed novels and short-stories are marked by their investigation of scientific and historical themes. In this recording from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Barrett explains how she began to write about science and history in the short story form after the disappointment of writing four unsuccessful novels. "With nothing to lose," Barrett recounts, "I began to write about the thing that I actually loved the most, but had never dared to write fiction about before." She follows this account with an excerpt from "Ship Fever," the title novella of her National Book Award-winning first collection of short stories. In it, Lockland Grant, a bright young doctor who has come to the island of Gros Île in 1847 to treat the population of newly landed Irish immigrants, has fallen victim to the typhus epidemic raging through the community.
From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(11:13) / 5.2 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Andrea Barrett. Used with generous permission from Andrea Barrett.
photo by Curt Richter William Kennedy is best known for the novels of his Albany Cycle. A singular epic of that capital city and its Irish-American clans in the 19th and 20th centuries, the work has earned Kennedy comparisons to James Joyce and Saul Bellow. Among its novels are Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1979), The Flaming Corsage (1996), and Ironweed (1983), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a PEN/Faulkner Award, and was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
In this audio recording from the 27th Key West Literary Seminar, Kennedy reads two unpublished pieces. The presentation begins with a brief (5:30) essay recounting Kennedy's first short story, "Eggs," and the lukewarm reaction it garnered from his friends and family. This is followed by a reading from the opening chapter of Kennedy's unnamed novel-in-progress. A continuation of the Albany Cycle, this forthcoming novel focuses on Daniel Quinn, a reporter for the Albany Times Union and the grandson of the Daniel Quinn from Kennedy's Quinn's Book.
From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(29:27) / 13.5 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 William Kennedy. Used with generous permission from William Kennedy.
Photo by Nick Vagnoni Valerie Martin is the author of three collections of short fiction, including The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories; several novels, including Tresspass and Mary Reilly, which was made into a movie with Julia Roberts and John Malkovich; and a nonfiction work about St. Francis of Assisi.
In this recording from the 27th Key West Literary Seminar, Martin reads from her Orange Prize-winning historical novel, Property. Set on a plantation outside New Orleans in 1828, Property is narrated by Manon Gaudet, a slaveowner whose husband has fathered two children with one of Manon's slaves. In the passage presented here, Manon meets with her brother-in-law following an insurrection in which Manon has been shot in the shoulder, the slave has run away, and her husband has been killed.
From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(13:54) / 6.4 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Valerie Martin. Used with generous permission from Valerie Martin.
photo by Ellen Warner Richard Wilbur is a former United States Poet Laureate and the only writer since Robert Frost to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice. In this recording from the 2003 Key West Literary Seminar, Wilbur reads and comments upon numerous poems, translations, lyrics, and light verse spanning his career.
Wilbur begins the reading with two poems, "The Reader" and "Man Running," from the then-unpublished Collected Poems, 1943-2004, and continues with "A Barred Owl," "For Charlee," Valeri Petrov's "A Cry from Childhood," and "This Pleasing Anxious Being," all from Mayflies. From 1989's New and Collected Poems, Wilbur chooses "The Ride," "Lying," "On Having Mis-identified a Wild Flower," Vinicius de Moraes's "Song," and "Hamlen Brook"; from The Mind-Reader, he reads "The Writer" and "A Wedding Toast." Wilbur's early collections Ceremony, Things of This World, and Advice to a Prophet are represented by "Museum Piece," "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," "Two Voices in a Meadow," and "Pangloss's Song: A Comic-Opera Lyric," written for the 1956 musical version of Voltaire's Candide, which Wilbur collaborated on with Lillian Hellman and Leonard Bernstein. Wilbur's reading concludes with several humorous poems, including "A Late Aubade," the two-part "Flippancies" (including "The Star System" and "What's Good for the Soul Is Good for Sales"), "To His Skeleton," "The Prisoner of Zenda," and several verses from his book for children, The Disappearing Alphabet.
Wilbur's hourlong reading was given in memory of John Malcolm Brinnin, an influential early KWLS organizer. In a brief (1:26) introduction, program chair Irving Weinman discusses Brinnin and the regular game of Anagrams he played with Brinnin and Wilbur.
Wilbur joins us again in January 2010 as our guest of honor for Clearing the Sill of the World.
From KWLS 2003: The Beautiful Changes
(1:03:12) / 29.1 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2003, 2009 Richard Wilbur. Used with generous permission from Richard Wilbur.
photo by Michael Blades
Tesla's drawing for the AC dynamo;
U.S. patent 390,721 Samantha Hunt is the author of The Invention of Everything Else, which has been shortlisted for the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction. In this recording from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Hunt discusses the subject of her historical novel, Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla, whose revolutionary inventions included alternating current and wireless technology. Briefly employed by Thomas Edison, Tesla routinely found himself on the wrong side of American capitalism and died impoverished and marginalized. In Hunt's passage, Tesla recounts his initial meeting with the financially-driven American inventor who sought to keep Tesla's inventions from reaching the public.
"'Capitalism! Ever heard of it?'
'Yes, I have,' I said. 'I've heard of it. I'm not certain I agree.'
"There's nothing wrong with capitalism,' he told me."
'Except that in order to sell something, a person must first own it, and how can a person own these things that we are inventing? How could I own alternating current? That's like owning thunder or lightning.'
'Men own thunder all the time. That's how America works. And please, I've heard enough about your alternating current. ... AC is dangerous, and more importantly'– Edison drove his finger once directly into the center of my chest– 'my light bulbs don't work on it.'"
From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(14:05) / 6.6 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Samantha Hunt. Used with generous permission from Samantha Hunt.
photo by Nick Vagnoni David Levering Lewis's two-volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, each of which won the Pulitzer Prize, is the definitive work on the life and thought of a complex American intellectual. In this lecture from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Lewis examines Du Bois's largely-forgotten work as a writer of historical fiction, whose journey "beyond the borders of social science certitude" was the result of a "poetic temperament combined with an intellectual's dissatisfaction about the limits of the historically knowable." Lewis discusses Du Bois's early historical novels, The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Dark Princess; as well as the later Black Flame Trilogy (The Ordeal of Mansart, Mansart Builds a School, and Worlds of Color). In a brief question and answer session, Lewis comments on Du Bois's persecution at the hands of the U.S. government during the 1950s, his reputation as a "ladies' man," and his early life and education in Great Barrington, MA.
From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(25:35) / 11.8 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 David Levering Lewis. Used with generous permission from David Levering Lewis.
photo by Nick Vagnoni Eric Foner is one of America's preeminent historians, especially known for his work on the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction. In this fascinating lecture from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Foner explores the social and political implications of historical inquiry, and the role of the imagination in the historian's work. Drawing on sources as diverse as Jane Austen, Friedrich Nietszche, Newt Gingrich, and Diane Feinstein, Foner says society's understanding of history is both reflected in and shaped by contemporary thought. Rebutting a popular claim regarding "facts" in the historical record, Foner argues that "the constant search for new perspectives [is] the lifeblood of historical understanding."
“The line between historical scholarship and historical fiction is not as hard and fast as we sometimes might think. ... Every novel is an expression of the sensibility of the novelist; and, as E.H. Carr wrote, 'to study history, study the historian.' The reason historical interpretations change is that historians change, as does the world around them.”
From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(38:44) / 17.8 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Eric Foner. Used with generous permission from Eric Foner.
Bishop photo by Rollie McKenna
Wilbur photo by Stathis Orphanos The 1993 Key West Literary Seminar was devoted entirely to Elizabeth Bishop. A series of readings-in-tribute offered her fellow poets the opportunity to discuss Bishop and her influence.
In this recording from the event, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Wilbur reads Bishop's "Little Exercise." Originally published in her debut 1946 collection North and South, the poem ostensibly describes a thunderstorm "roaming the sky" over the mangrove islands, palm-lined boulevard, herons, and sleeping indigents characteristic of Key West, a place each poet called home. Wilbur also reads his translation of "Song," by Vinícius de Moraes, the Brazilian poet and Bossa Nova pioneer who co-wrote many of João Gilberto's hits. Bishop herself translated de Moraes, and included his work in her landmark Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry, along with poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira and others in translations by North American poets including Wilbur, Paul Blackburn and Mark Strand. Wilbur discusses he and Bishop's shared affinity for Edgar Allan Poe and their fascination with "stages and half-stages of the mind," and concludes by reading a selection of his own poems which he says were inspired, influenced, or enjoyed by Bishop, including "A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra" and "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" from his 1956 collection Things of This World; and "In Limbo," from his 1976 The Mind-Reader.
Wilbur returns to KWLS in 2010 as our guest of honor for Clearing the Sill of the World.
From KWLS 1993: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop
(18:22) / 8.4 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 1993, 2009 Richard Wilbur. Used with generous permission from Richard Wilbur.
photo by Curt Richter Billy Collins served two terms as United States Poet Laureate and founded Poetry 180, a teaching aid for high school students based on the belief that "poems can inspire and make us think about what it means to be a member of the human race." Collins has joined us for the Seminar nearly every year since he left the Library of Congress office, and is an annual favorite of the students who join us from Key West High School.
This recording was made in January of 2003, during Collins's second term as Laureate. He reads a selection of poems, including "Shoveling Snow With Buddha," "Monday," "Flock," "Creatures," "The Lanyard," "The Country," "Surprise," "No Time," "Love," "Sonnet," "Japan," "Forgetfulness," "Consolation," "On Turning Ten," and "Nightclub."
Collins will join us again in 2010 for Clearing the Sill of the World.
(30:31) / 14 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2003, 2009 Billy Collins. Used with generous permission from Billy Collins.
Here's a recording of Allan Gurganus delivering a laugh-out-loud lecture titled "A Still Small Voice Under the Cannonade: Field Notes towards Fiction's Pact with History," during the first session of the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar. We'll amend this post with complete liner notes after the Seminar.From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth.
(42:31) / 38.9 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Allan Gurganus. Used with generous permission from Allan Gurganus.
Here's a recording of Geraldine Brooks reading from March, during the first session of the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar. We'll amend this post with complete liner notes after the Seminar.From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth.
(20:14) / 18.5 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Geraldine Brooks. Used with generous permission from Geraldine Brooks.
Barry Unsworth is the author of 16 published novels, including the Booker Prize-winning Sacred Hunger, and his newest, Land of Marvels, which The Washington Post has called "immensely intelligent and entertaining." In this recording from the first session of the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Unsworth reads a passage from Land of Marvels, concerning Somerville, the British archelogist whose work on an ancient Assyrian site is threatened by a railroad being constructed by a German company, and Jehar, the financially-motivated Arab he pays to report on the railway's progress.
From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth.
(20:01) / 18.3 MB
To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Barry Unsworth. Used with generous permission from Barry Unsworth.
We will soon begin to release audio recordings from our 1993 Seminar devoted to poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979). The event was organized by John Malcolm Brinnin, a friend of Bishop's since the 1940s, and brought together many of Bishop's intimates for a weekend of informal tribute. In many ways, it anticipated the field of Bishop scholarship as we know it today. At the time, Bishop's extra-literary life was largely unknown to the public; her private letters and unpublished works were still private and unpublished, and the experiences revealed by biographies and oral histories were mainly known to those she shared them with. Brinnin recognized a beginning flood of interest in Bishop, writing in an invitation to Octavio Paz of "the slow but sure rise of Elizabeth's reputation, from the devoted attention of an elite to the acclaim of an ever-broadening audience." He ended up orchestrating an event that offered a richer, deeper, more fully-known Bishop than ever before.
Among those Brinnin gathered in Key West was Robert Giroux, Bishop's longtime editor and publisher, whose reading from her letters (a selection of which he published the following year as One Art) was likely the first public presentation of this important material. Bishop's close friend and fellow poet James Merrill also took part. He read a selection of her poems along with the poems they inspired him to write, linking the pairs with private anecdotes that reveal and offer insight into each poet's creative process. Paz, the Mexican poet and Nobel Prize winner whom Bishop translated into English, joined Richard Wilbur and Ashley Brown, who had translated portions of Bishop's anthology of 20th-century Brazilian poets. Alice Quinn, editor of the 2006 Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box (the "uncollected" Bishop poems) was here with Alice Helen Methfessel, Bishop's companion in her last years and the executor who has made possible so much of what we now know of Bishop. In addition to the readings and discussions, Bishop's watercolors (loaned by Methfessel) were exhibited to the public for the first time. The collection, curated by William Benton and later documented in his book Exchanging Hats, presents a folk-art version of the Key West Bishop knew and loved in the 1930s and 1940s. Finally, in a ceremony coordinated by the Friends of the Library USA, her former home at 624 White Street was added to the national register of Literary Landmarks.
Our audio engineers at Private Ear Recording Studios have remastered the original recordings from nine cassettes and converted them into digital .wav files for our use. We're now in the editing process– listening to the recordings, selecting the material that will be of most use to readers, fans, and scholars, and securing permissions from various copyright holders. The production of these recordings for the web has been a particular goal of our audio archives project. We look forward to sharing them with you here soon.
We're delighted to note that our partners at PennSound have added three more recordings from the KWLS archives. Our 2003 recordings by C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander, and a 2008 recording by Maggie Nelson, all recently posted here at home, are now also part of PennSound's estimable collection.For years, PennSound has been the best place to go for free, downloadable poetry readings by many of the 20th century's most original poets. We're grateful for the opportunity to work with the good people at PennSound and for the chance to reach their listener-readers. Check out their author index here, where you'll find rare readings by William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Koch, Michael Palmer, and others.
Mark Doty is the author of eight books of poems and four volumes of nonfiction prose. He has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and his Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems is nominated for the 2008 National Book Award in poetry. In this recording from our 2008 Seminar, Doty reads a selection of work inspired by a visit to Key West in 1997, including a section from his 2007 memoir Dog Years, and the poems "Sea Grape Valentine," "Watermelon Soda," and "Catalina Macaw." 
from "Watermelon Soda"Strange island,
to yield a walking
hot-pink soda can
inhabited by a lucky
Modernist crab,
carrying on his back
a tropic shelter
by Barragan
or Corbusier,
perennially modish
if not quite practical...
From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (11:19) / 5.2 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Mark Doty. Used with generous permission from Mark Doty.
Forrest Gander is the author of several collections of poetry, essays, and the novel As a Friend, published by New Directions in 2008. He has translated the works of several Latin American poets including Coral Bracho and Pura Lopez-Colome, and is the editor and co-translator with Kent Johnson of two books by Bolivian poet Jaime Sáenz. In this recording from 2003, Gander reads a selection from his body of work, including an early version of "Present Tense" (its first public reading); a translation of Sáenz's "Someone Must Be Called Twilight"; and, from the collections Science & Steepleflower and Torn Awake, "To Live Without Solace" and "To The Reader."From KWLS 2003: The Beautiful Changes. (19:59) / 9.2 MB
To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2003, 2008 Forrest Gander. Used with generous permission from Forrest Gander.
"Hustleman," Transylvania, Lousiana, 1999. Photo by Deborah Luster from One Big Self.
In the old days they would have sent you to America
The one called Grasshopper raises wild things
sparrows hares you name it
They've got a muleskinner here that can make one sit down and talk
Then there's the wren nesting in the razor wire
From KWLS 2003: The Beautiful Changes. (15:54) / 7.3 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2003, 2008 C.D. Wright. Used with generous permission from C.D. Wright.
Ann Beattie is the Edgar Allan Poe Chair of the University of Virginia's Department of English and Creative Writing. A short story writer and a novelist, she has received critical acclaim for her body of work and has been called "one of our era's most vital masters of the short form" by The Washington Post. In this recording from 2008, Beattie reads from a virtuosic essay-in-progress on the subject of ambient sound in works of literature. Beginning with accounts of poet John Ashbery's "managed chance" method of composing, the noises of drunken Parrotheads in Key West, and a discussion of clichés "whose repetition deadens language," Beattie arrives at a luxuriant analysis of technique in the fiction of James Joyce ("The Dead"), Raymond Carver ("Are These Actual Miles?"), and Richard Yates ("The Best of Everything").
From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (31:42) / 14.5 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Ann Beattie. Used with generous permission from Ann Beattie.
Maggie Nelson reads two long poems, "The Mute Story of November" and "The Halo Over the Hospital," from her book Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007). In a brief introduction, Nelson gives credit for the title of her book to Annie Dillard, whose essay "Seeing" refers to Marius van Senden's 1932 Space and Sight, about previously blind persons returned to sight.
From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (15:10) / 6.9 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Maggie Nelson. Used with generous permission from Maggie Nelson.
This 2008 reading features poet Kevin Young reading a selection of then-recent work, including "Aunties," "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," "Black Cat Blues," "Hang Dog Blues," "Flash Flood Blues," "Ode To The Hotel Near The Children's Hospital," "Farm Team," "I Walk The Line (for Johhny Cash)," "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere," and four odes to food, including "To Chicken," "To Homemade Wine," "To Catfish," and "To Boudin."
From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (21:51) / 10 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Kevin Young. Used with generous permission from Kevin Young.
We are proud to announce a collaboration with PennSound, the digital poetry archive project at the University of Pennsylvania. PennSound, founded by Charles Bernstein and Al Filreis as part of UPenn's center for contemporary writing, maintains perhaps the finest collection of audio recordings by 20th century poets on the web. Among the more than 1,500 recordings on their site are such rarities as Jack Spicer's 1956 Vancouver lectures; a 1967 recording of George Oppen reading his masterpiece "Of Being Numerous" in its entirety; James Schuyler reading "Hymn to Life" from the Chelsea Hotel in 1986; several recordings of Gertrude Stein in the 1930s; and major collections of readings by Robert Creeley and John Ashbery. We've been working with managing editor Michael S. Hennessey for the past month developing PennSound's KWLS page, which debuts with KWLS readings by John Ashbery, Meghan O'Rourke, James Tate, and Charles Simic. You can read Hennessey's blog post announcing the page here. You'll find the complete list of PennSound recordings, indexed by author, here. And you can read the PennSound manifesto here. Many thanks to Hennessey and all the good people at PennSound for their work in making KWLS recordings part of this important online collection.
The journal of the Key West Literary Seminar features recordings from our
audio archives, exclusive interviews, essays, news about the Seminar, and
dispatches from Key West's literary past and present. It is created by Arlo
Haskell. Send email to arlo [at] kwls [dot] org
C O N N E C T
S U B S C R I B E
Audio recordings on this page and elsewhere on www.kwls.org are being made
available for educational and noncommmercial use only. All rights to the recorded
material belong to the author or authors speaking. © 2008, 2009.
The Key West Literary Seminar Audio Archives Project is sponsored in part by the
State of Florida, Department of State, Division of
Cultural Affairs, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, and the National
Endowment for the Arts.
