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Wilbur begins the reading with two poems, "The Reader" and "Man Running," from the then-unpublished Collected Poems, 1943-2004, and continues with "A Barred Owl," "For Charlee," Valeri Petrov's "A Cry from Childhood," and "This Pleasing Anxious Being," all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 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.

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


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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 Forrest Gander. Used with generous permission from Forrest Gander.

C.D. Wright is the author of numerous collections of poetry and prose, including Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (2005). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (twice), the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Bunting Institute, as well as Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In this audio recording from 2003, Wright reads from One Big Self (2003), her collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster, which portrayed inmates at three Louisiana prisons.

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


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 C.D. Wright. Used with generous permission from C.D. Wright.

In response to a panel discussion titled Poets and Their Work: Poetry as Its Own Biography (personal I vs. poetic eye), John Ashbery delivers a "mini-lecture" on so-called confessional poetry and the work of Elizabeth Bishop. At the conclusion of the lecture, Ashbery reads his "Soonest Mended" (1966), from The Double Dream of Spring, inspired, he tells us, by Bishop's "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance."

This is the (unpublished) lecture cited in Eugene Richie's introduction to Ashbery's Selected Prose. An excerpt:

It's only when I feel compelled to write poetry that is all of a piece, that I feel uncomfortable. Poetry bloweth where it listeth. It should never be thought of as a practical solution to life's mess. Its value is in its total uselessness. It's the roses we are always being urged to stop and smell.

Elizabeth Bishop is a poet in whom the two kinds of I/eye are fully, and beautifully, fused. We do not read her to discover the details of her biography, yet I feel that we end up knowing her— and I feel it all the more intensely in Key West, every time I walk past that little house, tucked behind the pandanus bush— better than many poets who set out to inform us about the particulars of their lives.
From KWLS 2003: The Beautiful Changes (12:04) / 5.4 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. © 2008 John Ashbery.

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)
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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
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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 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 "A 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."
From KWLS 2003: The Beautiful Changes. (25:02) / 11.4 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. © 2008 John Ashbery.