Podcasts: April 2008 Archives

Current U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic reads and comments upon his poems "White Room," "Mirrors at 4 a.m.," and "The Friends of Heraclitus." From the 2003 Key West Literary Seminar.

(7:32) / 3.5 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. © 2008 Charles Simic. Used with generous permission from Charles Simic.

James Tate, half stand-up comic, half great American poet, reads a selection from his work, including "Of Whom Am I Afraid," "A Sound Like Distant Thunder," "The Animists," "The Rally," "Silver Queen," "The Rules," and "The Special Guest." His offbeat humor and superb comedic timing keep the crowd in stitches. From KWLS 2003: The Beautiful Changes. (21:04)

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. © 2008 James Tate.

Sharon Olds reads a selection of poems from her body of work, including 1987's "On the Subway," "Animal Crackers," "When I Left Her" (work in progress), "Stag's Leap," "Wooden Ode," "When She Slept In," and "A Week Later."
From KWLS 2003: The Beautiful Changes. (19:12) / 8.8 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. © 2008 Sharon Olds. Used with generous permission from Sharon Olds.

John Ashbery reads from Chinese Whispers (2002), his twenty-fourth book of poems. Along the way, he discusses the poems' references to Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp, Arthur Rimbaud, and other titans of French music, art, and literature. The reading, from the 2003 Key West Literary Seminar: The Beautiful Changes, includes the poems "Nice Presentation," "Disagreeable Glimpses," "Theme Park Days," "Why Not Sneeze," "View of Delft," "The Lightning Conductor," "I Asked Mr. Dithers Whether It Was Time Yet He Said No to Wait," "Local Legend," "Runway," and "The Business of Falling Asleep, 2." (25:03)

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. © 2008 John Ashbery.

The New York Times reported last week on the discovery of a sound recording made in 1860, nearly twenty years before Thomas Edison first captured the sound of the words "Mary had a little lamb" on a piece of tinfoil. Oddly, this recording, made by Parisian typesetter Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, was never intended to be heard. The idea of audio playback had not been conceived, let alone by Martinville, and his intent, to create a paper record of human speech, related more to stenography than to phonography. We have come, of course, a very long way; the in-your-ear-in-an-instant .mp3 which accompanies the Times article is proof of that.

When the Key West Literary Seminar began in 1983 as a program of the Friends of the Monroe County Library, audio recordings were ubiquitous in the average American home. Vinyl records had been around for a generation, and cassette technology had made it possible to listen to your favorite recordings in the car or anywhere you and your Walkman, invented by Sony in 1979, might travel. Furthermore, cassettes were easily recorded upon, easily recorded over. One could now, with a minimum of equipment, affordably create audio recordings of any event. The Key West Literary Seminar did not immediately pick up on the possibilities afforded by this technology. The early years' events were assembled on a nothing budget as a labor of love. Many of the organizers were remarkably young. Key West was a surface and a beneath-the-surface; an anonymity which implied assent toward myriad behaviors thrived and was prized. Posterity was on no one's mind.