98 poets, 118 years

The new four-disc box set Poetry on Record is subtitled 98 Poets Read Their Work: 1888–2006, and inevitably that nineteenth-century date catches the eye. Can it be? A real recording of Robert Browning reading “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”? Of Tennyson reading “The Charge of the Light Brigade”?

Well, yes—and, for good measure, both recordings were captured on wax cylinder by Thomas Edison. Browning sounds as if he’s reading from inside a moving train, and Tennyson sounds as though he’s caught in a storm. But Edison’s scratchy recordings bring the poets to life, conjuring up Browning’s knack for drama and Tennyson’s regal inflections.

This intimacy, this connection to the human beings behind the poems, was enough for the box set’s producer, Rebekah Presson Mosby, to justify including the readings despite their poor fidelity.

“To have that tangible connection of the poet’s voice is, to me, a moment of frisson,” Mosby says via phone from Paris. “It’s exciting and thrilling. I get chills even now when I listen to these things. They’re so good.”

Mosby, the former host of NPR’s poetry program New Letters on the Air, compiled Poetry on Record as a kind of second edition to 1996’s In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry, a similar box set on the Rhino label that has gone out of print (despite, Mosby says, selling 50,000 copies). Released on the Los Angeles–based Shout Factory label, the new set comes with a 63-page booklet including liner notes and credits for the poems within. The whole set fits into a handsome hard slipcase that seems designed to fit comfortably alongside works of literature—scanning my bookcase, I found the case to be the exact width of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.

“That’s what we had in mind when we designed it,” says Shout Factory’s director of A&R, Derek Dressler, “that it would fit nicely in a bookshelf and maybe not fit so nicely on a CD shelf, to discourage people from looking there.” Dressler would prefer that Poetry on Record, which has a list price of $49.98, be stocked in the poetry section of major book retailers—not the music section. Then again, he says, “There’s only so many things we can do to make it look like a book without actually making it a book.”

The set is ordered chronologically based on the date of each poet’s birth. While In Their Own Voices focused on the twentieth century, Poetry on Record expands in both directions to also include the nineteenth and twenty-first. The first disc contains readings by Edgar Lee Masters (born 1868), Carl Sandburg (b. 1878), James Weldon Johnson (b. 1871), H.D. (b. 1886), and Elizabeth Bishop (b. 1911). The final disc works all the way up through Kevin Prufer (b. 1969), Kevin Young (b. 1970), and Jonathan Lamfers (b. 1981). In between are Dylan Thomas (b. 1914), Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919), Ted Hughes (b. 1930), John Updike (b. 1932), Erica Jong (b. 1942), and many others. Gender and race distribution gets far more diverse as the set progresses—for example, the first disc features five female poets; the last features eleven.

“The guiding principle,” Mosby says, “is that I want to take you on a trip through recorded poetry.”

For the most part, the trip sounds great. The modern recordings are pristine, but they have enough idiosyncrasy to keep them interesting. Carolyn Forch