Most of the time, when I read poetry – by anyone, even Billy Collins – I read it aloud. The prosody of the text is for me always an essential aspect and I’m often dismayed at younger poets who seem to take to the genre solely for its conceptual potentials (substantial as they may be). Not too surprisingly, one of the greatest pleasures for me is hearing the authors read their own works aloud.

Three superb resources for modern poetry sound files:

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Joel Kuszai’s growing collection of sound files in Real Audio. The only problem with the Factory School site is that it doesn’t permit you to download the file, only to stream it over the net, so there are inevitable (and regrettable) pauses for rebuffering throughout unless you have a broadband connection. The site has some excellent African-American recordings (Countee Cullen!) and genuine rarities, including Robert Browning and a reading by Larry Eigner.
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Laurable has put together the best index of poetry sound files on the web that I’ve encountered, including all the Factory School materials. In addition, this site also has the best poetry weblog out there – by far. When I started this project, I wrote “Blogs have been around for awhile now, but to date I haven't seen a genuinely good one devoted to contemporary poetry….” Laurable proves me wrong.

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Ilya Kutik and Andrew Wachtel’s site for Russian poetry is called From the Ends to the Beginning. The text is in both Russian and English (although I have not been able to get the Cyrillic to work on my XP system, which is slightly maddening). If you want to hear Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak or Esenin read their own poetry aloud, this is the place. There are also some poems of Mayakovsky’s read by his lover, Lilly Brik.