The Poetry Archive

Go to the website of the Poetry Archive.

The Poetry Archive provides audio streaming of poets reading their work. It already has over seventy-five recorded readings. Its organizers plan to commission new, high-quality recordings from both established and emerging contemporary poets. The website also contains some hard-to-find, older recordings, some up to a century old, and there is a hope of obtaining others.

Seamus Heany, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is the President. Andrew Motion, U.K. Poet Laureate, and Richard Carrington, audio producer, are its Directors.

The Poetry Archive seems to be limited to poets writing in English, but the idea is worthy of extension to poetry in other languages. As UNESCO seeks to protect cultural diversity, it might well consider supporting and expanding this initiative!