Charles Olson reads

Still frequently discussed by the internet literati, Charles Olson tidbits turn up on blogs and websites often. Since I have yet to do more than casually dip into his massive body of work, here are a few YouTube clips of Olson and others reading his work that have turned up recently.





As a teenager, I went to many an open mic night at the coffee shop downtown and loved the Nuyorican poets, but most of the time the slam poetry cadence sounds like a silly affectation to me now—easy to parody, hard to make it feel like it is The Right Way to perform a piece. It's nice to hear a poet read his work without feeling shouted at, or jerked along from comma to comma waiting for the punchline to drop.