Wallace Stevens Audio Downloads

Just a brief post about some poems by Wallace Stevens which can be downloaded as podcasts (iTunes).

You can hear many of the most popular of his poems (Anecdote of the Jar, The Emperor of Ice Cream, Peter Quince at the Clavier, Sunday Morning, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird).

They were recorded for LibriVox by Alan Drake and all the poems are in the public domain.

And you may want to listen to another related podcast featuring the literary critic Harold Bloom from his Yale seminar on "The Art of Reading a Poem" (listen in iTunes or get the mp3). Bloom is walking students through his reading of Stevens' "Parts of a World."

Free Billy Collins!

No, Billy is not trapped or jailed.

It's his CD, The Best Cigarette. It's a great CD of him reading. There are 33 tracks that are now available for free. No more CDs available.

We gave Billy some grief here about his expensive little haiku book, but then he goes and gives us this freebie.

This work is now licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. That means you can download, share these, burn these, give these away for non-commercial purposes - you just can't make money from your efforts. Hurray for open culture! (Geek Talk: All mp3 files on these sites are at least 192 kbps)

Go to Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/details/BillyCollinsTheBestCigarette and download the whole album or get the tracks selectively one by one.

It's also available track by track at http://music.download.com/billycollins

Both sites will also lead you to some other great free downloads.

You can download, share these, burn these, give these for non-commerical puposes (you can't make money off it).