Poetic License: 100 Poems - 100 Performers

Product Description<br/><br/><br/>Why a Poetry Album? Easy answer: I love poetry. I love reading it. I love memorizing it. I love hearing great actors recite it. As the poet Mark Strand wrote, "Ink runs from the corners of my mouth / There is no happiness like mine / I have been eating poetry."<br/>In the past, when I was full from the eating, I have had the audacity to set poetry to music. But, on this CD, you will hear the music of the poems. Poetry unadorned. Words. Because in truth, great poetry needs nothing but a great actor, a voice as eloquent and expressive as the poem itself, to lift the poem off the page and into the heart.<br/>I have never done a project which has elicited so much enthusiasm. From the actors arriving at the studio who thanked me for inviting them to participate, "Are you kidding?" I'd say, "Thank you!" to the engineers who would say, "I never got this stuff, but these guys make it so beautiful."<br/>This production has been a joy from beginning to end, a true labor of love. And whenever I heard my stomach rumbling during the production process, I always knew I could find something delicious to eat in the studio. Mmmm. Yeats? That hits the spot. - GLEN ROVEN, Producer<br/><br/><br/>Review<br/><br/><br/>A Poem a Day.... When I was an undergraduate, an English professor said, in passing, a poem a day keeps the doctor away. He meant, I assume, that being regularly exposed to the best that has been thought and written is a universal medicine. This collection helps bring poetry off the page and back into the ear, where it belongs, and hearing it read with such skill is a constant revelation. I have not found myself ever, for instance, since I was forced to in college, deciding to sit down and read Tennyson or Milton, but hearing them read has made me realize what I've been missing. This is the best of the best, read by the best of the best. I plan on listening to this CD every day on my commute and saving a bundle on my mental health bills. --TOM LUTZ, Writer<br/><br/>Words that Bind How does it happen that great poetry cuts through all the noise and noisy disagreements that separate us and set us at each other's throats? How does it target and hit the note that quiets us, that unifies us, and that, in turn, defines us as human?<br/>The performers on this CD illuminate the mystery. Beneath the trembling, faux enthusiasm of Donna Lynne Champlin's reading of<br/>Job Application, or the steely reserve of Charles Busch's<br/>My Last Duchess, there lies the truth of the situation, like a beautiful rock that's been polished smooth by all of the people who have heard before and who have understood.<br/>Here we are...living without the benefit of a unifying popular culture, but with a culture frayed into a million semi-connected strands. How sobering, how comforting it is to be reminded of the notes that bindus.<br/>When you hear Emily Skinner say: Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. <br/>Then you know that is true. And that is enough. --LAURIE WINER, Critic