PennSound Daily

Running just shy of an hour, Katz's set is comprised of twenty-two titles in total, which show the breadth of his talents. There are generous selections from his most recent collection, Broadway for Paul ("Propensities," "Autumn Days and Hours," "Six Figures Fire," "Winter Window") as well as his current manuscript-in-progress ("Keys and Ripples," "Pulling Out," "The Sign on the Closed Theater Marquee," "Time Marches On," "Walk Beside You") and Previous Glances, a recent retrospective collection published in Italy ("Poem," "The Sky," "Wellsprings"). Katz also reads a pair of translations from the works of germinal Roman elegist Sextus Propertius.

Listen to this sprawling set on our Vincent Katz author page, where you'll also find a broad array of readings, talks, and films spanning the past forty five years. Click here to start exploring.

While Whitman left behind no recordings of his poetry — that much heralded wax cylinder with four lines of the late poem "America" is unlikely to be the poet himself — but that doesn't mean that we don't have recordings of Whitman's work for your enjoyment. Today we'll highlight performances and interpretations by three poets.

We start with UPenn professor emeritus John Richetti, who has recorded a wide variety of Whitman's work over the years, including "O Captain! My Captain!," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "The Sleepers," "Goodbye My Fancy," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "I Hear America Singing," and sections 1 and 2 of "Calumus." You'll find these tracks on a special page containing all of Richetti's renditions of Whitman's work, which also includes "Song of Myself" in its entirety,  among other titles. Sticking with "Song of Myself," we're also lucky to have a 1974 recording of Aaron Kramer reading sections I-XXXII of that poem, and Basil Bunting winds things up with a 1977 reading at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he read "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" as part of a performance that also included work by Louis Zukofsky, Ezra Pound, Thomas Wyatt, and Edmund Spenser. You can click on any of the poets' names above to be taken right to the mentioned recordings.