Poems Out Loud

I enjoy hearing poems read aloud, but not everyone can get to readings in their area, especially ones by well-known poets. And, of course, we only have authors recorded reading their poetry going back about 100 years.

Although the site launched in April 2009, I only recently discovered Poems Out Loud.  It features recorded readings by well-known and award-winning poets, columns and general poetry news.

The name of the site was inspired by the anthology edited by Robert Pinsky called Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud and the site is sponsored by that book's publisher, W. W. Norton & Company

Portrait of a Woman by Bartolomeo Veneto,
traditionally assumed to be Lucrezia Borgia.

It seems that the site stopped adding new content back in 2011, but in the archive and on others like are plenty of opportunities to discover poets and poems.

Recently, someone asked a question on Facebook about the poet Walter Savage Landor. I confess that I had never heard of him.

A quick search turned up lots of links, including one to his poem "On Lucretia Borgia's Hair" read by Robert Pinsky on the Poems Out Loud site.

I have heard of Lucretia (AKA Lucrezia) Borgia and the 2011 TV series, The Borgias, brought that family back into discussions.

The family came to epitomize Machiavellian politics and sexual corruption in the time of the Renaissance Papacy. Lucrezia is seen as a femme fatale in many artworks, novels, and films.

So, I clicked over to the poem.

I like the short text attached to the audio:



"The story is that the poet Leigh Hunt showed Landor a long, blonde strand of hair�said to be stolen from an Italian museum by Byron�of the glamorous, powerful, nefarious Lucretia Borgia. (It is tempting to think that the Italians who ran the museum were accustomed to English gentlemen stealing the purported hair several times a month, and that the museum replaced it each time from an ample supply.)

Landor, a great master of the epigram form, composed many dazzling poems of as few as two lines. In this one, the reach of the grammer across the rhyme-word �august� is expressive, a kind of flourish or fanfare preparing the way for the curt �Now thou�rt dust.� Different published versions have the final word as �unfold� and �enfold��an interesting small ambiguity in itself, the hair as keeping the history it represents either unfolded to us, or enfolded away from us."

The poem is only four lines, and honestly, not one I would probably read if I stumbled upon it, brief as it is. But hearing it read, it worked for me.

Borgia, thou once wert almost too august
And high for adoration; now thou�rt dust.
All that remains of thee these plaits unfold,
Calm hair, meandering with pellucid gold.

Such is the power of poetry read aloud.


For more poetry read aloud, check out these sites:

• The Favorite Poem Project
• Poetry Out Loud
• Poetry Foundation
• Academy of American Poets
• From the Fishhouse: An Audio Archive of Emerging Poets

Rilke and a Wild Love for the World

From On Being (onbeing.org) - conversations about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas - is a Peabody and Webby-award-winning public radio program and podcast and an evolving media space. Initially launched as Speaking of Faith in 2003, the program takes up the great animating questions of human life: What does it mean to be human? And how do we want to live?

This week A Wild Love For the World is with Joanna Macy, a Buddhist philosopher of ecology and a translator of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.

Now in her 80s, Macy has always been ahead of her time. She worked with the CIA in Cold War Europe and the Peace Corps in post-colonial India. She even took up environmental activism long before it became mainstream. Krista first interviewed Joanna Macy in 2010 after a man-made ecological disaster: the Gulf Oil Spill. Macy says we're now in a moment she calls "The Great Turning" � a transition from an industrial society to a society that's life-sustaining. Macy finds inspiration for this vision in Rilke's poetry; and she uses that poetry to find meaning in the great dramas of our time � ecological, political, and personal.

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For this week's show, Krista recommends reading: A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke as translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows.

(Browse pages from the book at harpercollins.com/browseinside/)

One of the most beloved poets of the twentieth century, Rilke is widely celebrated for his depth of insight and timeless relevance. He has influenced generations of writers with his classic Letters to a Young Poet, and his reflections on the divine and our place in the world are disarmingly profound.many readers find Rilke a trusted guide amid the bustle of our daily experience, reflecting on such themes as impermanence, the beauty of creation, the voice of God, and the importance of solitude.