New Website Aims To Be An iTunes For Poetry

The new website PoetrySpeaks is aiming to serve as a social networking hub and online marketplace for poets. Visitors are greeted with a sleek, jukebox-style display of poet portraiture and an unpretentious atmosphere. And it's immediately clear that PoetrySpeaks casts a wide net: among the home page's collage of clickable poet heads, spoken word poet Kevin Coval appears next to William Butler Yeats.

Click on your poet of choice, be it a hipster or an Irishman, and you'll be taken to a web page that includes a list of audio (and maybe even video) recordings. And here's where things get interesting. As with iTunes, you can preview each recorded poem then decide if you want to spend 99 cents to download it ($1.99 for a video version). The site is, quite literally, banking on your interest in poetry.

Here are a couple of the poems for sale: "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe and "Wild Nights, Wild Nights" by Emily Dickinson.

Will the iTunes model work for poetry? Site creator Dominique Raccah certainly thinks so. She told the Wall Street Journal that "Poetry has a marketing problem. This is a solution." Her publishing company, Sourcebooks (which is also backing the site) has a history of applying out-of-the-box techniques to market the art. It produced two popular poetry anthologies, Poetry Speaks and Poetry Speaks to Children, by bringing the texts to life--pairing the books with CDs of the anthologized poets reading their work.

Another interesting aspect of PoetrySpeaks is a section called YourMic, whereby anyone can upload an audio or video recording of a poem and share it with the site's online community. Take a look at "Price of Retribution" by 15-year-old Emanuel Vinson of Chicago. YourMic poets can't yet market their work, but Raccah hopes that the site will evolve to include a self-publishing capability.

To help build a community, all PoetrySpeaks visitors are encouraged to create free profiles whereby they can share their favorite poets and poems and show off their own work. Members can also rate and review each other's work. And the site is wired into social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and that other stuff that gets confusing for those of us over thirty.

The poems available on PoetrySpeaks are currently limited to those that Sourcebooks owns the rights to, along with a few publishers that the site has signed agreements with (Tupelo Press, Marick Press and Naxos Audiobooks), but the site is planning to grow. It's a new business model for an old art form, and any lover of poetry should be interested in seeing how the combination works.

 

Comments

[pegu]

I have a steadfast belief in the cultural and literally value of poetry. Unfortunately, the public has never endeavored to "steal" poetry in mass volumes ... this will fail ... for all the right reasons.

[DaveyT]

Most good movies and music and paintings aren't free. Why should good poetry be free? But I think the better question is, why aren't more people willing to pay for poetry? Poets who are savvy, like Dickens was with books, will figure out how to make a dime (without winning bureaucratic grants) when they write poems that make the average days of averages better. Something like a pop-folk poetry.

[Kmitch]

I love the idea that poetry be free or really really cheap, but what about the poets? Shouldn't they get compensation for their work? Either way, the site looks really cool and it will be interesting to see how it works.

[shutterbabe]

Everything in this world has a monetary value. Poetry is an etheric entity. It should be free, like feeling a breeze kissing the air.

[DaveyT]

This sounds excellent! Another great online poetry service is www.PoemaDay.org, the editor picks a theme every week and sends short weekdaily poetry emails. It's a very intersting survey of poetry from The Metaphysicals to The New York Poets. Sign up for the free emails with a blank email to [e-mail].

[ghostdance]

The prices sound imitative of itunes and therefore arbitrary.

I think they would do much better by having very low prices. 5c 10c or something. The poetry lovers are going to spend their whole budgetary allotment, but who wants to explore with those inhibitatory prices?

[Nommo]

You can hear all of that for nada, @ http://www.live365.com/stations/noboarderspoetry

[estherpoyer]

This does sound good, but I am skeptical. Will believe it when I see it, though I hope it becomes a reality.