It’s one thing to read an E.E. Cummings poem and another altogether to listen to the man himself read it. Take “pity this busy monster, manunkind,” written in 1944, which begins: “pity this busy monster, manunkind, // not. Progress is a comfortable disease: / your victim (death and life safely beyond) // plays with the bigness of his littleness.”
A 1986 reading by Alice Walker (left) and a 1963 lecture by James Baldwin can be heard at the archive at 92ny.org. (Credit: Walker: Arthur Sirdofsky, Courtesy 92NY Archives)
On the page, the poem—somehow even more apropos in its social critique today than it was eighty years ago—features the unruly structure and otherworldly beauty Cummings is famous for. But to know where Cummings himself would take a breath or elide a line break, how he would pronounce his new-word creation, manunkind, is to encounter the poem anew.
We can experience it as such because Cummings read the poem, along with several others, at New York City’s 92nd Street Y (also known as 92NY) in October 1949. The recording of that event is available online as part of the organization’s Literary Audio Archive, a collection of poetic moments in time that makes it possible to experience the alchemy of a world-class literary reading whenever the mood strikes.
Specifically the archive is home to recordings of readings hosted at 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center between 1949 and 2021. The collection sat, unorganized and underappreciated, until 1980, when staff began sorting and then digitizing it to protect the recordings from obsolescence and degradation. Then, a few years ago, 92NY received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to more fully realize its collection. The funding paid for staff to index and transcribe one thousand out of the two thousand five hundred audio recordings the organization has in storage using a digital tool called TheirStory, then to meticulously authenticate each transcript. “These are poets reading their work; we want to make sure we’re not putting words in their mouths,” says archivist Caitlin Biggers. She hopes more funding will eventually arrive to cover the rest of the collection.
In December 2025, 92NY announced the finished-for-now result, featuring an impressive list of literary luminaries, a remarkably diverse group that includes Isabel Allende, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Kazuo Ishiguro, Anaïs Nin, and Eudora Welty. Arthur Miller performs a dramatic reading of scenes from Death of a Salesman in 1955 and then, in another recording from almost five decades later, reflects on his long, august career. Alice Walker reads from The Color Purple, Vladimir Nabokov reads from Lolita and Pale Fire, and James Earl Jones performs a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. Some eight hundred fifty recordings are available on the 92NY website and searchable through a portal, with more trickling out as Biggers and her colleagues resolve permissions issues or tinker with audio quality. In the meantime, anyone can request direct access to the rest through a contact form on the 92NY website.
Jennfier Egan, whose 2017 event is featured in the archive, believes there’s something revealing and immediate about hearing an author’s voice, especially one reading their own work. “I can control the way the text is heard, and that’s really meaningful,” she says about her own readings. “Anyone who listens is going to hear it the way I imagined it when I wrote it.”
For Egan, literary readings represent a modern manifestation of the ancient human impulse to tell stories and derive their particular power from that enduring oral tradition. “The energy and excitement of the room, of live people together, that’s what these recordings capture,” she says. And readings at 92NY are particularly remarkable: “It’s Carnegie Hall, you know? It’s the place where, when I first came to New York, I went to hear all the stars.” She remembers with pleasure events there featuring Joyce Carol Oates, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, and Robert Stone.
Unfortunately “readings are really in eclipse,” Egan adds, replaced with onstage conversations occasionally appended with a chance to read a page or two. She attributes the change to the deadened Zoom events of COVID lockdown, which largely failed to re-create the energy that makes the experience of live readings special.
This trend makes the archive all the more valuable, since the recordings “allow us to be transported to a moment in time, a one-night-only event,” says Biggers—mundane-yet-magical snapshots that add elements of depth and dimension to beloved authors. Margaret Atwood leads the theater in a physical warm-up exercise. Gregory Corso and James Dickey kibitz about the money to be made from poetry. Lucille Clifton chuckles wryly about the physical toll of bearing six children. Isaac Asimov sighs over publishing a story about Martians living on Mount Everest just as it was climbed for the first time.
Starting in the nineties, the Unterberg Poetry Center began capturing its events using video as well as audio. Those recordings are preserved as part of a separate collection, in part out of respect for the distinct, and for some more vivid, experience that audio provides. Egan, for one, sees audio-only formats as more conducive to imagination. “Leaving it as audio makes it richer for me; the video is distracting,” she says. “I like to be in charge of the visual, i.e., to use my imagination.”
It is in precisely this way that the 1949 recording of Cummings allows listeners to imagine themselves in the audience, hearing each breath and elucidated syllable as he finishes his still-relevant poem to applause: “pity poor flesh // and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this / fine specimen of hypermagical // ultraomnipotence. We doctors know // a hopeless case if --- listen: there’s a hell / of a good universe next door; let’s go.”
Alissa Greenberg is an independent journalist based in Boston and Berkeley, California, who reports at the intersection of culture, history, and science. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New Yorker, and elsewhere.
Correction: The print version of this article misstated the time during which the Unterberg Poetry Center started capturing its events using video.