American Poets...

Here is a selection of recordings by American poets of the 20th century (Walt Whitman being the exception; the collection kicks off with a wax-cylinder recording of Whitman reading in about 1890!) The poems are not arranged by date of composition or recording, but in order of the poet's birth.  And it's not supposed to be any all inclusive best of sort of deal, and it doesn't reflect my 'taste'. It's just a few files I lifted. 

Walt Whitman (1819 –1892)

America.

William Carlos Williams (1883 –1963)

The Red Wheelbarrow

To Elsie 

e.e. cummings (1894 –1962)

Next of Course God America

Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town

Ogden Nash (1902 –1971)

Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man

Langston Hughes (1902 –1967)

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Theodore Roethke (1908 –1963)

Elegy for Jane

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b.1919)

See It Was Like This When..

Underwear 

Charles Bukowski (1920- 1994) 

The Secret of My Endurance

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

American Haikus [Excerpt]

 Allen Ginsberg (1926 –1997)

America

Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

The Truth the Dead Know

All My Pretty Ones

Maya Angelou (b.1928)

Phenomenal Woman

Gary Snyder (b.1930)

The Song of the Taste

How Poetry Comes to Me

Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh Computer

The Defective Record

The Defective Record (1938)

Cut the bank for the fill.
Dump sand
pumped out of the river
into the old swale

killing whatever was
there before—including
even the muskrats. Who did it?
There's the guy.

Him in the blue shirt and
turquoise skullcap.
Level it down
for him to build a house

on to build a
house on to build a house on
to build a house
on to build a house on to . . .


William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963)




















Visit to W.C.W. circa 1957, poets Kerouac Corso Orlovsky on sofa in living room inquired wise words, stricken Williams pointed thru window curtained on Main Street: "There's a lot of bastards out there!" Allen Ginsberg- Death News (1963)