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In 2005, The University of Pennsylvania's School of Arts and Sciences created a free online data base of over 1500 live digital recordings of poets reading their own work:

Rock, pop, jazz...poetry? Thanks to PennSound, Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich and William Carlos Williams can now fill their own play list on your iPod. A project of Penn's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW), PennSound has been giving the world free access to the largest collection of poetry sound files on the Internet since January 2005.

The project is about preservation as well as distribution, as poetry sound recordings are often at risk of deteriorating if they are not converted or copied. One of the founders, Charles Bernstein explains, "The beauty of PennSound is that in the course of preserving these recordings, we are also making available a treasure trove of wonderful poetry performances that we believe will attract a whole new generation to poetry as a performance art."

Check it out, download a few, and start listening!

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