Presentation on “Spoken Poetry for the Public”

On November 12th, 2019, guests Omar Miranda (University of San Francisco) and Danny Snelson (University of California, Los Angeles), presented their project, Spoken Poetry for the Public.

Can a digital humanities platform -- which focuses primarily on the sounding of poetry and the poetics of sound -- be as appealing to scholars as the general public? This talk will discuss an emerging online social community dedicated to creating and sharing original audio recordings of poetry as well as audio essays. Produced collaboratively by literary scholars, computer scientists, and graphic design artists, the platform of spoken verse is user-generated and brings together original audio recordings of poems. Aiming to transform and diversify access to the world of poetry for artists, scholars, instructors, students, and poetry enthusiasts, the project promotes new "readings" of poems through an unconventional "close listening" mode and an innovative method for "anthologizing" texts across cultures, languages, traditions, and time.