Life: Poem XXI A Book

Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 and died in 1886. She lived most of her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, in great privacy, and wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems, only a handful of which were published while she was alive; the first selections reached readers in 1890. Her short, compressed lines and unusual punctuation have made her one of the most distinctive voices in American poetry. The poem recorded here, A Book, stands as number XXI in the Life section of her posthumously published poems.

What makes this recording unusual is the circumstance of its creation. It was recorded by the podcasters attending the Podcasters Across Borders 2006 conference, held in Kingston, Ontario, on June 23 and 24 of that year. Each participant took a turn at the microphone, and forty of them are gathered here, among them Hugh McGuire, the founder of LibriVox. Together the readings last about twenty-five minutes.

The pleasure lies in the diversity. Each reader brings a distinct accent, pace and temperament. The conference belonged to the early days of podcasting, the amateur-audio world in which LibriVox itself began in 2005. Dickinson’s poem about the joys of a book becomes a kind of shared celebration of the spoken word.

This is a good recording to sample rather than to rush through. Choose a few voices at random, or listen from beginning to end if you enjoy the sense of an event captured in sound. It also serves as a gentle introduction to a poet whose work rewards patient, repeated reading. The poem itself is only eight lines long, which is why forty readings fit so comfortably into a single sitting.