Saturday Linkenings: Whale Sound

If you like the Feed, you’ll really appreciate what Nic Sebastian is doing over at Whale Sound. Nearly every day she reads a poem by a poet published elsewhere on the web, in a voice like sundogs around the words she’s reading.

Whale Sound also includes a couple of regular features I wish I’d thought of:

Group Readings are three recordings of the same poem, read separately by three different readers.  Besides that any poem worth listening to is worth listening to three times, it’s fascinating to hear how the music in the same words changes from reader to reader.  And Audio Chapbooks are longer recordings, 8-15 poems by one poet, which scratches that itch for more that I can’t be the only one to feel after a mere 75 or 90 second recording.

For me, as a reader and teacher, all of this is enhanced by Nic’s reflectiveness, openness, and thoroughgoing interest when it comes to what it’s like to read aloud.  She blogs her Whale Sound “process notes” along with numerous poet interviews at Very Like a Whale, and she blogs with several other contributors at Voice Alpha, “a repository for thoughts, theories, suggestions, likes and dislikes and anything else related to…reading poetry aloud for an audience.”

All right, so Nic’s suite of sites and thoughts is a lot of good stuff to take in.  If you need to, forget everything after the first paragraph of this post, and go listen to a few of the Whale Sound poems.