The Audio Revolution: How to Amplify Your Poems

We are in the midst of a revolution in the way poetry finds its readers. Never before has it been so easy to create and distribute vocal recordings to a truly global audience, and yet most contemporary poets continue to invest themselves in only their art form's print aspects, reserving their presentation skills for little more than public readings. It's a pre-Internet model that serves poets to a limited extent, leaves readers half satisfied, and denies access to a potentially much wider "listening" audience.

The audio revolution may operate on assumptions less radical than logical. If we agree that poetry is partly music, then we must also concede that to read a poem is partly to sing it. And when you consider that most Americans know by heart the words of at least one popular song—the one that has been played over and over again on the radio and been downloaded countless times from iTunes—it's easy to see their love of language as a tremendous opportunity.

My own writing career, which has enjoyed a lot of traction over the past two years (culminating in a debut collection from Norton that spent several months on the poetry best-seller list), has benefited greatly from my investment in audio production. And I am just beginning to realize the possibilities.

My journey into audio poetry was propelled, in truth, not by a performance—or by slam-poet impulses—but by familial envy. My cousin John Hermanson is a folk-pop musician in my hometown of Minneapolis. For years, I've envied not only his gorgeous, risk-laden songwriting, but also his teeming throngs of gyrating coed fans. In contrast to his shows, poetry readings are downright funereal. Like it or not, rap and pop music are the popular poetry of our day, and poets have much to learn from their distribution models, which are also being quite fantastically revised at present. But in this ferment lies opportunity.

When I launched my own Web site two years ago, I wanted visitors not only to learn about me and my work but also to hear my poetry—in my own voice. I wanted the music of my poems, intimate and aspirant, to reach my would-be readers in that sacred place where the eardrum's rhythms pound with the heart's heat. I went knocking on Johnny's studio door.

Three sound sessions later, dozens of my poems were masterfully recorded and edited. A handful of these recordings were converted to MP3 files for my Web site, and suddenly online visitors could both read and hear poems I'd published. As it happened, the audio files went online in the nick of time. About a month earlier I had submitted my manuscript to Norton, and within a week of its launch the Web site caught the attention of someone at the venerable publishing house. It's easy to imagine that the site's audio content helped Norton take a risk on me, and to be honest I have no idea if it did, but it's hard to think that the recordings hurt. Later, when the publisher introduced Yellowrocket to its sales team, my audio was piped into the room. "It blew us away," a sales rep told me. I know from my days as a bookstore manager that it's that kind of anecdotal experience that finds its way into sales pitches, and can make all the difference on an order form.

“When I launched my own Web site two years ago, I wanted visitors not only to learn about me and my work but also to hear my poetry—in my own voice. I wanted the music of my poems, intimate and aspirant, to reach my would-be readers in that sacred place where the eardrum's rhythms pound with the heart's heat.”