In 1991, the generous support of the Axe-Houghton Foundation enabled Poets House to acquire its first taped recordings of poetry readings given at premier literary centers throughout Manhattan. These recordings became the cornerstone of what was then called The Axe-Houghton Poetry Tape Archive, an inclusive collection of sound recordings dealing with “all things poetry.” Since 1991, this collection has grown to nearly 2,000 distinct items and its holdings have been so broadly expanded through new media, such as hypertext, that it has been renamed The Axe-Houghton Multimedia Archive.
Recording technology has made it possible to preserve the voices of artists reading and speaking about their work. Such recordings especially extend the work of artists who employ the written word, for just as meaning exists in words on a page, so it exists in the transmission of those words through the human voice, and, perhaps even more so, through the voice of the artist. The Axe-Houghton Multimedia Archive contains unique records of artists’ encounters with their work, and preserves these encounters for audiences generations into the future. This special collection, like the Poets House library itself, invites the public to step into the expansive living traditions of poetry and has become one of our country’s cultural treasures, providing unique insight into poetry’s evolving forms and readers’ varied tastes in twentieth and twenty-first century America. Within this collection, one finds homemade reel-to-reel recordings of publicly broadcast radio programs on which Robert Lowell, e. e. cummings, and William Carlos Williams read their own, newly-published work. One also finds video biographies of well-known poets such as Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, and Stanley Kunitz; anthologies released by commercial publishers such as Caedmon/Harper Audio and Rhino Records, Inc., that contain the voices of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath; and over 1,000 unique, unpublished, and untranscribed audio recordings of reading series sponsored by literary organizations in and around New York City, including the Academy of American Poets, the Mad Alex Foundation, Great Neck Library, and Poets House.
