spoken poetry

Poem readings liked by J Bryden

(From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Spender)

Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995) was an English poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work. He was appointed the seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the United States Library of Congress in 1965.[1]

Spender was born in Kensington, London, to journalist Edward Harold Spender and Violet Hilda Schuster, a painter and poet.[2][3] He went first to Hall School in Hampstead and then at thirteen to Gresham's School in Holt and later Charlecote School in Worthing, but was unhappy there. On the death of his mother he was transferred to University College School (Hampstead), which he later described as "that gentlest of Schools."[4] Spender subsequently went up to University College, Oxford where, in 1973, he was made an honorary fellow. He left Oxford without taking a degree and subsequently lived for periods of time in Germany. He said at various times throughout his life that he never passed an exam, ever. Perhaps his closest friend and the man who had the biggest influence on him was W. H. Auden. Around this time he was also friends with Christopher Isherwood (who had also lived in Weimar Germany), and fellow Macspaunday members Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis. He was friendly with David Jones and later come to know W. B. Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, Roy Campbell, Raymond Chandler, Dylan Thomas, Jean-Paul Sartre and T. S. Eliot, as well as members of the Bloomsbury Group, in particular Virginia Woolf.

His early poetry, notably Poems (1933) was often inspired by social protest. His convictions found further expression in Vienna (1934), a long poem in praise of the 1934 uprising of Viennese socialists, and in Trial of a Judge (1938), an anti-Fascist drama in verse. His autobiography, World within World (1951), is a re-creation of much of the political and social atmosphere of the 1930s.

Stephen Spender reads To My Daughter

The Applicant by Sylvia Plath, read by Autumn Royal

From the anthology A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford, edited by Becca J.R. Lachman. Topeka, KS: Woodley Press, 2013.  

Weight of Water by Christina Lux

The Darker Sooner By Catherine Wing Read By Joel Dias-Porter

Miscegenation by Natasha Trethewey read by Christina Lux

Invitation written and read by Druzelle Cederquist

Echo by Christina Rossetti read by Christina Lux

This poem is for participation in The Poetry Foundation's 2013 National Poetry Month initiative "Record-a-Poem." Gwendolyn Brooks is one of my favorite poets. This is my favorite poem. Read with hopefully the same vigor and love as she recited it. May she rest in peace!

"We Real Cool" By Gwendolyn Brooks - Recited By Christopher D. Sims

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower by Dylan Thomas read by Mark Johnson

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower by Dylan Thomas read by Mark Johnson

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