Good morning,

I’ve found several links this week that concern female poets reading their own work aloud. One famous, one not, so you get to enjoy both hearing words you know and (maybe) finding out about someone you did not know before.

Let’s give top billing to the less famous woman, Sarah Webster Fabio, who had a short but incredibly prolific career. You can listen to her poems on Spotify!

Fabio used this vote of confidence to set fiercely into writing, regularly producing and publishing work: “take away the fire-lust, / take away the fire, / send down the cooling waters, / send down the cooling rain,” she wrote in “Rainbow Signs.” “Give us, again, the rainbow sign, / give us, again, the rain.” Though Fabio’s books fell out of print, her four spoken-word albums, recorded in the 1970s for Folkways Records, are readily available on iTunes and Spotify. These four albums—Boss Soul (1972), Soul Ain’t, Soul Is (1973), Jujus/Alchemy of the Blues (1976), and Together to the Tune of Coltrane’s “Equinox” (1977)—feature Fabio reading her poems over a rollicking ’70s funk band reminiscent of Isaac Hayes or Curtis Mayfield

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/252112

My favourite Sylvia Plath poem is Two Campers In Cloud Country, which I’ve had a deep affection for since it showed up in my final practical criticism exam in English and (1) I knew I could make out okay writing about a Plath poem and (2) I read the beautiful line I lean to you, numb as a fossil.  Tell me I'm here. There are no recordings that I know of of her reading that poem so here instead is Sylvia Plath, reading A Birthday Present aloud:

In October of 1962, mere months before her death, Plath recorded herself reading “A Birthday Present,” written the previous month and later included in her beloved poetry collection Ariel. The recording was one of several broadcasts Plath participated in for BBC’s celebrated series “The Poet’s Voice” and survives on The Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/10/29/sylvia-plath-reads-a-birthday-present-1962/

Finally in poetry by women, two of the best things I have read this week have been Ortberg’s renderings of Byron and Yeats. If you ever see something that makes fun of Byron, do not hesitate to send it to me. It is one of the greatest literary genres. You'll notice that there are no recordings, currently, of anyone reading these aloud. If you choose to record either of these, please send me a link to the video or sound file and I will feature it next week. I'm very serious about this.

Have a lovely weekend!

Alex.