From Katie Haegele and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

This morning, in my kitchen, Richard Hell was talking about the world. He said:

"Humans are a small part.

But a speaking one!"

I was listening to the punk legend's "Winter Poem," which I downloaded from the online poetry project PENNsound, here. And—since I never have actually seen the text of his poem, only heard it online - I don't know how he'd feel about my putting that exclamation point there, but that's what it sounded like to me.

Home to more than 7,000 audio files of poets reading their work, PENNsound has had nearly 11 million visitors since its launch in January 2005. It's the brainchild of the poet Charles Bernstein, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Al Filreis, Kelly Professor of English and director of Penn's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW), where the archive is housed.

Their goal is simple, but lofty: to make as many of these one-poem audio files available to as many people as possible, for free.

Their belief in a culture of accessibility has a tradition not just online (i.e., in zine culture) but also in print, Bernstein said. He pointed to the rich pamphlet and broadside culture in early American publishing as an example.

"But within a local American culture, the real flourishing of small-press magazines was poetry stuff," he adds. "And poetry remains significant on the Internet. It's a tiny form within all the entertainment there, but still it's important because it has the potential to offer more stuff with fewer hooks. It's one of the largest providers of noncommercial content on the Web."

Read the rest of Katie Haegele's article, here.

Source: The Philadephia Inquirer

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