Rescue Efforts Lift Poets' Voices From Fraying Tapes

[Dave Monroe]

>From Stephen Kinzer, "Rescue Efforts Lift Poets'
Voices From Fraying Tapes," NY Times, Thursday, May
16th, 2002 ...

SAN FRANCISCO — The melodic voice of Marianne Moore
echoed from a reel-to-reel tape recorder at the
American Poetry Archives here on a recent morning. She
was reading her poems to an enthusiastic audience in
1957, and the tape offered delights quite different
from those that come from reading a printed page....

[...]

As the tape wound on, the archives manager, Jiri
Veskrna, hovered nearby, watching a computer screen.
He was turning the Moore reading into a digital
recording, since the tape on which it was originally
recorded was starting to disintegrate.

This process is being repeated at poetry centers
around the United States. Three of the largest — in
San Francisco, New York and Boulder, Colo. — have
recordings of many of the greatest 20th-century poets.
Often these tapes were made in casual settings where
the poets felt free to muse, explain and joke as well
as read. But the recordings, many of them decades old,
are in poor condition.

[...]

Transferring these audio tapes to digital format will
make the recordings more widely available to the
public. The archive in San Francisco has already begun
offering audio cassettes, and the one in Boulder says
it will issue a greatest-hits CD later this year to
use as a fund-raiser. Demand for these recordings is
remarkably strong. The San Francisco archive, for
example, is printing 10,000 copies of a catalog,
listing what it has available for purchase, but will
send out only about 500 at a time, to avoid being
swamped by orders.

"The 1950's and 60's began a real democratization of
poetry, and that led us to everything from poetry
slams to rap music," said Steven Taylor, director of
the audio preservation and access project at the
Naropa archive. "There's a massive audience for the
spoken word, including in the MTV generation. We don't
have any doubt that there's a big market for what we
have. All we need to do is put it into a format that
can reach people."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/16/books/16ARTS.html

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