Naropa Archives - and Much More

I've added several links to the page, and want to mention two of them in particular: one is to Jacket magazine, a great resource for poetry, including the New American Poetry, which, as I mentioned in the previous post, is published from Australia, and the other is to the Naropa Archive at Archive.org.

The Naropa archive contains audio of decades of readings and lectures from Naropa's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and the material is truly rich and diverse. From Allen Ginsberg to Michael Palmer, Eleni Sikelianos to Carl Rakosi, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche to William Burroughs - even reading together - it's all there. While I've heard many of the poets included in person over the years (and even recorded them; more about that another day), I've enjoyed being able to check out some of my favorite poets, given the time-depth of the site, at very different stages in their work. There are some twenty recordings of Robert Creeley, for instance, from 1984 to 1999, and in them he addresssd issues as various as language poetry and eco-poetics, Aristotle on poetics and Robert Frost, among a host of other concerns, as his own thinking about the world evolved over the course of that fifteen years.

The parent site, Archive.org, is truly, literally, a-mazing. It's home to the Wayback machine, for instance, which allows you to visit a given web site as it existed in, say, 1997; I've used it to recover material that clients couldn't remember they'd ever had. It's home, too, of the Live Music Archive, an online source of free concert downloads from several hundred musical groups (27,399 concerts as of today). I first started frequenting the site to download recordings of Steve Kimock, a favorite guitarist (I'm listening to a great stage recording of a show from August 10, 2002, in fact, as I write), and have been back hundreds of times since. If you haven't explored it yet, do check it out; it's really the Internet at its best.