Audiobook · read by volunteers
Purple Cow
Frank Gelett Burgess (1866–1951)
Read by Amanda, Annie Coleman Rothenberg, Aaron Hochwimmer, Catharine Eastman, Juan Carlos Bagnell, Joe Clune, Fox in the Stars, Robert Garrison · 9 chapters · 8 min
About the book
I never saw a purple cow, and I never hope to see one. Those few lines, written by Gelett Burgess, became one of the most quoted nonsense rhymes in American literature, and here you can hear them nine times over, each in a different voice. Readers from the LibriVox community took the same short poem and made it their own, some solemn, some sly, some openly delighted by the absurdity. Listening in sequence turns the exercise into a small experiment in interpretation: the words never change, yet the poem keeps shifting, a pause here, a stress there, a grin you can almost hear. The collection was recorded for the weekly poetry project in the spring of 2006, in the mood of April Fool's Day, so expect a little mischief. Altogether it lasts only a few minutes, which makes it an easy and cheerful way to sample the community's work.
Introduction
The Purple Cow is a four-line verse by the American humorist Gelett Burgess, who died in 1951. It dates from the 1890s, and it remains the poem for which he is best known. Its charm lies in its refusal to be anything more than a joke: a cheerful declaration about an animal nobody has ever met, followed by a cheerfully rhymed shrug. Generations of readers have been able to recite it from memory, and it has been parodied, quoted and turned into a catchphrase more times than anyone can count.
This is a multi-version recording, one of the weekly poetry projects organised by the LibriVox community. In such a project the volunteers all read the same text, and the results are gathered into a single collection. Here there are nine short readings, one per chapter, from eight different readers, and each chapter is labelled with the initials of the person who recorded it. The whole set takes about six minutes.
Why listen to the same poem nine times? Because a very short text gives a reader almost nothing to hide behind. Every choice is audible: the speed, the weight given to the last word, the amount of seriousness poured into the nonsense. You will probably find a favourite by the third version and a surprise by the seventh. It is a light, warm introduction to what LibriVox volunteers do best, and an easy thing to put on while the kettle boils. Anyone who has ever wondered how a very short poem can fill a whole afternoon of discussion will find a charming answer here, and a few unexpectedly funny moments as well.
Public domain
Frank Gelett Burgess died in 1951: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text