To celebrate 35 years of poetry publishing, Brick Books has set out to create the largest publisher-focused poetry performance archive in Canada and abroad. The podcast channel currently boasts over 160 recordings, with many more to come. Brick Books’ general manager Kitty Lewis has contracted Julie Wilson of Book Madam & Associates to produce and publicize the project.
To date participants include:
A. F. Moritz, Jennifer Still, Randall Maggs, Pain Not Bread, Kim Maltman, Brian Henderson, Maureen Hynes, Nico Rogers, Barry Dempster, John Reibetanz, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Karen Enns, Antony Di Nardo, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Maureen Harris, Heather Cadsby, John Barton, Steve McOrmond, Chris Hutchinson, Jan Conn, Meira Cook, Carla Hartsfield, Karen Connelly, Diana Fitzgerald Bryden and Dennis Lee (reading all of Riffs), with recordings to come from Karen Solie, David Seymour, Helen Humphreys, Margaret Avison and many more.
“Brick’s poetry podcast archive gives a home, paradoxically, on the non-local, even anti-local surface of the Web, to a community of poetry,” says A. F. Moritz (Griffin Poetry Prize winner). “It makes a constellation out of the star-in-the-night quality of the brief eternal passion of the poem. A new and another form of breathing your poem into the vastness and discovering its almost nothingness is almost everything.”
“Podcasting naturally lends itself to the performed voice,” Wilson continues, “so why wouldn’t a publisher take advantage of 35 years’ worth of poetic voices? This channel has the potential to be an extremely powerful archive of some of the country’s greatest poets. That’s worthy or celebration.”
Wilson chose to host the channel at Audioboo.fm, known best in its early days for having Stephen Fry as its spokesperson. Most recently, Audioboo landed in the news again when The Guardian opened its feed to allow the public to report podcast updates from Bahrain. Ultimately the greatest advantage of using Audioboo as Brick Books’ podcasting platform is the mobile-friendly nature of the site, its built-in community of podcasters, as well as its sharing and mapping capabilities. Wilson continues, “Perhaps most important for Brick Books, however, is the ability for users to embed a player for any recording right on their own blog or website. The poetry is truly transportable, which has big implications for educators, event coordinators, booksellers, media and reviewers looking to provide enhanced content for their own visitors.”
To read the entire press release, and to hear samples from the archive, visit: http://pressdoc.com/p/000bvj
For all media queries related to this project, reply directly to this email to contact Julie Wilson.
For all other requests, contact Kitty Lewis at brick.books@sympatico.ca.