by Dave Bonta
For me, poetry is first and foremost an oral art. Many of my all-time favorite poems came straight out of the oral tradition – Beowulf, Son-Jara, the Chinese Book of Songs – and I’m continually annoyed by the fact that contemporary MFA programs place so little emphasis on dramatic reading and performance. Why should the poetry slammers have all the fun? Who decided that “serious” American poets should limit their reading style to a monotonous, sing-song chant?
So I was cheered to read, in Deb’s post Li-Young Lee and the dying breath, that at least one major contemporary poet strongly believes in reading poems out loud. “A poem is like a musical score for the human voice,” Lee declares.
Deb’s new-found enthusiasm for sharing audio recordings online reminded me of my own enthusiasm a year ago, when I bought a $30 dictation microphone and began making digital recordings as part of an archive of my poetry that I was building on a WordPress.com site. Key to the enterprise, I thought, was the ability to embed an audio player on a blog page so that people aren’t taken elsewhere while they listen, which is what happens if you simply supply an audio link. (On the other hand, I discovered that failing to include an extra link for downloading meant that the audio didn’t show up in the RSS feed, so nowadays I do both.)
At first, I used Odeo, because that was the audio-blogging format supported at WordPress.com (which, unlike Blogger, doesn’t let users embed javascript directly). I made the recordings using the free Audacity software, which I’m told is roughly equivalent in quality to Mac’s Garageband. Storing the files was a bit of a problem: there are a lot of free file storage sites out there, but they tend to bombard you with ads, place severe restrictions on how much you can upload, and/or eliminate your files if nobody clicks on them at least once a month. Soon, however, WordPress.com introduced its own Flash-based audio player, so I no longer had to route my files through an Odeo shell. And at that point, they also began supporting MP3s and other formats for a fairly nominal annual fee. (For my main, self-hosted blog, which also uses a WordPress platform, I uploaded the 1 Pixel Out audio plugin, which is very similar to what WordPress.com uses. It works great. More sophisticated WordPress.org users might want to give the PodPress plugin a try.)
With embeddable players accompanied by text, people can read along while they listen, or vice versa. To my mind, this is one of the few real advantages that the online medium has over print, and it more than compensates for the difficulty of reading and absorbing text on a screen. At qarrtsiluni, the literary magazine I help curate, we only began encouraging all contributors to make audio recordings a few months ago, because we’d always assumed it would be too difficult for most people to manage. But I hadn’t realized how many laptops have built-in microphones, and how generally resourceful online writers tend to be. (One enterprising poet even went to her local public-access cable TV station and got the engineers there to make a recording for her.) I know some of our visitors never listen to the audio, and that’s fine. But I felt vindicated by a recent review at the popular social bookmarking site, StumbleUpon, praising qarrtsiluni for the inclusion of audio, and adding: “For ADD types such as myself, absorbing literary material both visually and audibly seems to increase the likelihood that some of it will actually stick.”
I don’t want to suggest that we’re trail-blazers here. The Cortland Review has been including audio with virtually all its poems for a number of years, and recently made the transition to Flash-based players. I suspect they’ve invested in a good telephone recording system, like what radio stations use. Over in Great Britain, Poetcasting records many of its featured poets in person, and describes its mission as bridging the divide between performance poets and those who write for the page. Another audio poetry site that syndicates its content is From the Fishouse, which focuses on “emerging poets.” For better-known poets, living and dead, check out PennSound, The Poetry Archive, and the Academy of American Poets.
I’ve compiled a page of basic suggestions for how to make an audio recording with the needs of qarrtsiluni contributors in mind. But if you’re interested in posting audio on your own site, I’m afraid I’m not very well qualified to make recommendations, because I haven’t experimented with very many options, and I don’t know which ones are compatible with which blogging platforms. Audio publishing systems apparently worth considering include: Gcast, ClickCaster, podOmatic, Poderator and Hipcast. (You can see an example of a Hipcast player on this post at Watermark, which is a TypePad blog.)
Keep in mind that these systems were designed for regular podcasting, which takes radio as its model – not the kind of oral-literary hybrid I’m talking about.
If you have experience with these or other systems, or if you have any other suggestions of audio-blogging tools, please leave a comment. I hope to be able to revisit this subject for Read Write Poem a few months from now and present a lot more solid information.
Thank you, Dave — for the link, and the reminder. I keep intending to go in and add audio to more of my posts — especially since I send $5 of my scarce funds to Hipcast each month for this service.
Must — must — must speak…
Useful post, though I won’t be adding audio to my blog …. I love going to poetry performances orreadings (specially if the poet knows how to project his or her voice!) and one of the best things about the books ‘Spoken Word Redux’ and “Poetry Speaks Expanded” were the CDs that came with the books. I love to hear poetry, it does really add to the overall experience of the poem.
My publishing partner and I regularly used audio on our online community and our e-zine and this was 2004. Our online community was a message board community that supported audio files and our e-zine was web based. We also used flash animation. There are couple of online e-zines that meld mediums when presenting poetry.
Like Dave, I see poetry as an oral art, and I have had the good fortunate to hear many page poets deliver wonderful readings that are as powerful spoken as they are read.
One of the shortcomings I find with novice poets is their inability to consider or the absence of attention to sound. When we write, when I write, I am very conscious of the sounds and well as the sense of a read. I highly recommend checking out Mary Oliver’s Poetry Handbook and Robert Pinsky for their take on the sound of poetry.
Here is a brief collection of my poetry, which I recorded — featuring also music beds and sound effects. Visceral Voice
I create them on a MAC G5 Quad Processor computer, using a program called “Garage Band” to create my recorded mixes. I then save these into “iTunes” so that I can convert them to MP3 format, for which I create a ‘file name’ — then I upload this MP3 file to my blog using a software program called “Transmit”.
My blog is a WordPress format that I host on an independent BlueHost server, so I uploaded a ‘plug-in’ called Audio Player, version 1.2.3 created by Martin Laine for WordPress: http://www.1pixelout.net/code/audio-player-wordpress-plugin/
The hardware I use is: • M-AUDIO FastTrack mini-mixer, • M-AUDIO iControl, • Shure Bros. SM58 Vocal Microphone, and a • Radio Shack 33-370 Desktop Microphone Stand.
You inspire me, Dave; I might try to record the next poem I post.
Rob, it sounds like you and Dave have similar solutions and platforms. He also linked those, and more in the article.
Blogger only supports embedded audio at present (embedded audio is not my favorite – read my Li-Young Lee post if you want the “full” opinion.)
I have yet to make the step into WordPress, but think Whirling Dervish and I might have to!
Dave / Deb — there is some good stuff in this post.
I went through the Odeo/Audacity phase a while ago. I find “Garage Band” more flexible, with greater creative possibilities — especially when considering mixing sound beds of music and effects under your readings of your poetry. “GB” facilitates the creation of very dynamic presentations.
The only frustration I have with regard to the recordings I create of my poetry, is the realization that not everyone, who clicks on to listen to one of my mixes, will be doing so in high resolution, full range stereo (with subwoofer) — which is how they were mixed originally. Therefore, they don’t fully experience the impact of the piece.
But more and more people are understanding the value of quality sound for their computers — so it is those folks I keep in mind as I create.
I highly recommend that every blogging poet fully explore the remarkable possibility that is — spoken word recording. There is no better way to truly communicate the vision and intent of what you wrote. It eliminates all inflection, pronunciation, and meter problems that can creep in when someone else is interpreting what you’ve written — allowing you to precisely communicate the power and focus of your written creation.
Truthfully, I started adding audio recordings of poetry to my blog just last week–and it was Deb who gave me the idea with her wonderful post about Li-Young Lee.
I’m currently at Blogspot, so I had to contend with embedding audio files and storage, and came up with a weird solution that (so far) has worked well.
First, I record my poem as an MP3 file using Audacity and a headset mic (helps me to focus and hear how I sound). Then I use Corel Paint Shop Pro to create a JPG file of the title of my poem on a blank white background. Next, I use Windows Movie Maker to create a WMV file with the poetry recording as the audio and the plain JPG title page as the “video” (because aesthetically I’m a less-is-more type of gal and I thought video of me reading would distract from the impact of the poem itself). Finally, I upload my WMV file to (don’t laugh too hard) YouTube, which I can link to by embedding the HTML code in my post.
It’s a round-about, low-tech approach but it works to overcome Blogspot’s limiting factors, and right now I’m just too lazy to migrate elsewhere!