“The voice of the age is the Voices….”
–Brenda Hillman
The Woodberry Poetry Room is honored to announce that it is the recipient of a 2024-2026 Mellon Foundation Public Knowledge Grant to support its on-going mission to create, preserve, and provide access to a library of voices at Harvard University and beyond.
The $250,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation will provide the archive with the unparalleled opportunity to help secure the 20th century recordings made by the Poetry Room (and the archives it stewards), preserving for current and future users almost 100 years of cultural heritage, and to contribute toward bringing down the barriers of access to literary recordings in the 21st century by creating The Library of Voices (LOV)— a website and custom player– that will seek to reimagine the encounter with literary AV media in the online environment in ways that help foster broad and inclusive use (by patrons) and sustainability (for literary orgs and staff, who are often themselves artists, creators, and poets).
PHASE ONE: Preserving 100 Years of Cultural Heritage
The preliminary phase of the two-year project will focus on the preservation of 2,000 reel-to-reel recordings created between 1947-1990. According to curators Christina Davis and Mary Walker Graham, this large-scale digitization effort is driven by the crucial need to preserve at-risk media against irrevocable content loss and to ensure the survival of these vital voices.
“Throughout the Poetry Room’s 90-year history,” Davis states, “we have been guided by the belief that recordings of poets and authors can serve a vital democratic role and that encounters with them can give rise to more complex, compassionate, and nuanced conversations and to new generations of inspiring and visionary writers, thinkers, activists, and advocates. ‘Poetry,’ to cite Amanda Gorman (a frequent Poetry Room visitor during her time at Harvard), ‘is often at the heartbeat of movements of change.’ We are committed to contributing to that change.”
Graham adds: “At the heart of our history lies not only the creation of one of the nation’s first ‘library of voices’ and one of the earliest poetry-recording labels in the world (Harvard Vocarium records) but also a commitment to revolutionizing the structural experience of encountering literary recordings, as evidenced by the creation of the first communal library listening-stations in the country (designed by Alvar Aalto in 1949).”
Among the recordings that will be digitized are literary readings, interviews, lectures, workshops, oral histories, radio broadcasts, and performances featuring:
Ai, Agha Shahid Ali, Yehuda Amichai, Margaret Atwood, W. H. Auden, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Kamau Brathwaite, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ernesto Cardenal, Lucille Clifton, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hayden, Susan Howe, Ted Hughes, June Jordan, Etheridge Knight, Robert Lax, Li-Young Lee, Audre Lorde, Robert Lowell, Czeslaw Milosz, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary Oliver, George Oppen, Sylvia Plath, Ntozake Shange, John Wieners, Derek Walcott, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Louis Zukofsky.
Recordings included in the preservation initiative reflect not only the wide array of artists that the Poetry Room has sought to document but also the wide range of languages the library has sought to represent, including readings and performances in Arabic, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Lithuanian, Mandarin, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Welsh.
PHASE TWO: Piloting “The Library of Voices” Website
The second phase of the project will focus on reimagining access to digital recordings, through the creation of “a creative, compelling, sustainable, accessible, and user-friendly Library of Voices website and IIIF-enabled streaming player that is focused on honoring the sonic, visual, and spatial dimensions of the art form and on providing a user experience that responds to the needs of a large and ever-increasing international audience that includes poets, artists, digital humanitarians, college faculty, high school teachers, first-time poetry students, and members of the general public.”
At the time of its launch in 2026, the LOV website will provide visitors with a dynamic encounter with over 150 highlights from the Poetry Room’s recording collection—a number that will (we hope) continue to grow to more than 500 recordings in the years to come. The breathtaking array of voices will include archival and contemporary recordings by such authors as:
Etel Adnan, John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Creeley, Ralph Ellison, Forugh Farrokhzad, Robert Frost, Louise Glück, Galway Kinnell, Seamus Heaney, Lyn Hejinian, Fanny Howe, Kim Hyesoon, Jack Kerouac, Denise Levertov, Layli Long Soldier, Audre Lorde, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Charles Olson, Octavio Paz, Claudia Rankine, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Anne Sexton, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Cecilia Vicuña, Ocean Vuong, Anne Waldman, William Carlos Williams, and Raúl Zurita.
The site will also include design features and functionalities previously unavailable on any Poetry Room access portal: including text searchability; extensive browsing (filtered by such fields as author, year, format, and sponsoring organization); readily shareable permalinks (at the track and recording level); synchronous transcripts; and a dynamic, enlargeable waveform.
The curators are particularly interested in giving equal UX design attention to both Audio and Video playback: In our Mellon grant we argued that “in our visually dominated culture, sound recordings are often treated like the absence of a video, not as a distinct artform and a valuable mode of attention. We look forward to investigating ways to foreground poetry’s sonic dimensions, which are integral to the artform’s history, interpretation, and attraction.”
In addition to enhancing the experience for current and future users, the Poetry Room staff looks forward to using the site as an experiment and as a springboard to catalyze a wide range of conversations with literary AV archives and poetry non-profits nationwide—to share current access solutions and to collectively imagine new ones. Davis adds: “We are not alone in this endeavor. We have learned immensely and continue to seek to learn from our peer orgs and fellow innovators in this field, such as PennSound, SpokenWeb, and UbuWeb, and such amazing online AV archives as Furious Flower, University of Arizona Poetry Center, Naropa, Lyrikline, the SF State Poetry Center, Archive of the Now, and the list goes on.”
In response to the Mellon Foundation grant, former U.S. poet laureate and Harvard faculty member Tracy K. Smith stated:
“I was one of those undergraduates drawn to a sense of vocational calling by the nearness and aliveness of this archive, which became a kind of sanctuary for me as I was first immersing myself in the craft and history of poetry. A haven like the Poetry Room, in Harvard’s main undergraduate library, is an extraordinary lifeline, and I am grateful that the Mellon Foundation will help secure this collection and access to it for generations to come.”
Please note: During the Mellon Grant period, the Poetry Room staff (of two) will need to cut back temporarily on public programs, especially during the intensive design phase in Spring/Fall 2025. In addition to the “design sprints,” the staff and its wonderful team of students will be focused on the crucial AV and photographic permissions-work required for the LOV site, as well as in-depth transcript-editing (for over 150 audio and video recordings). We will also be researching hundreds of related materials from the Harvard Library collections (e.g. broadsides, vinyl LPs, typescripts, paintings, and event posters) that will help foster additional vectors of learning and immersion on the LOV platform. We look forward to brainstorming with the WPR community about ways to continue to activate and actualize the Poetry Room venue during this period. Stay tuned!