Romantic Circles Blog

This week, after a short holiday, Romantic Circles’ Poets on Poets series publishes Ira Sadoff reading Blake’s “London.” (Also available via free subscription as a podcast.)

“A librarian at University College London has discovered a previously unknown manuscript version of a poem by Lord Byron during a routine cataloguing session. The 12-line poem was inscribed in the front of a copy of an 1810 edition of The Pleasures of Memory by Samuel Rogers, which had been given to the poet by the author.”

(see the rest of this article in the Guardian).

This week’s Poets on Poets MP3 archive features Johanna Drucker reading Byron’s “Stanzas to [Augusta].” A reminder: weekly updates are now available as a podcast, via Apple’s iTunes, iPodder, or any other “podcatcher” program. (See the instructions on the page.)

This week’s Poets on Poets MP3 archive features Fanny Howe reading Bronte’s “No Coward Soul is Mine.”

Now you can subscribe to Poets on Poets as a podcast. Just look for the “RSS Podcast” button on the home page and copy the link into your podcast aggregator or player (such as iTunes) in order to receive automated updates with new postings every week.

This week’s Poets on Poets MP3 archive features Mary Crockett Hill, author of the award-winning If You Return Home with Food, reading “The Little Black Boy” by William Blake (and includes audio commentary).

This week Romantic Circles’ Poets on Poets MP3 Archive features Jonah Raskin, author most recently of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation, reading both Blake’s “Ah! Sun-Flower” and Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra.”

This week the Poets on Poets MP3 archive features Ken Edwards, poet, fiction writer, and editor (he has been editor/publisher of Reality Street Editions since 1993), reading William Blake’s “London.”

This week, Poets on Poets MP3 archive presents more Beddoes: Alan Halsey reading “Song in the Air.” Halsey’s edition of the later text of Beddoes’s Death’s Jest-Book was published by West House Books in 2003, and his several essays on Beddoes’s life and work have appeared in various journals and pamphlets.

Here’s the poem:

The moon doth mock and make me crazy,
And midnight tolls her horrid claim
On ghostly homage. Fie, for shame!
Deaths, to stand painted there so lazy.
There’s nothing but the stars about us,
And they’re no tell-tales, but shine quiet:
Come out, and hold a midnight riot,
Where no mortal fool dare flout us:
And, as we rattle in the moonlight pale;
Wanderers shall think ’tis the nightingale.

This week, Romantic Circles’ Poets on Poets MP3 Archive features Geraldine Monk–whose work has appeared in numerous major anthologies including the Oxford Anthology of 20th Century British & Irish Poetry–reading two selections from Thomas Lovell Beddoes: “If thou wilt ease thine heart” and “We do lie beneath the grass.”

This week’s addition to Romantic Circles’ Poets on Poets MP3 archive: Michael Collier, Professor of English at the University of Maryland and director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Middlebury College, reads two poems by John Clare.

Curtis Bauer, winner of the 2003 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and co-director of the Writing Studio at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, reads Keats’s “To Autumn”–the MP3 is now available at Romantic Circle’s Poets on Poets site.