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Other People’s Poetry (OPP) was inspired by the idea that poetry is best read out loud and the desire to explore the spoken word. With the emphasis placed on the reading of work by authors other than the reader, OPP has the nifty effect of allowing the work itself to take center stage.

Want to get down with OPP? Here’s how: You can read anything you like—poems, prose, plays, letters, speeches—anything at all, really, as long as it was not written by you. You are free to read them as you wish, including accompaniment with an instrument, but the primary portion of the pieces must be spoken (i.e. not sung). The limit is five minutes or five individual pieces, whichever comes first.

Sign-ups begin an hour prior to the start time and will continue as time permits. You can sign-up to read again after completing your first reading.

What Was Read
April 2008
Destiny (D. H. Lawrence)
It’s Either You Fight or You Die (D. H. Lawrence)
Dead Flag Blues (Godspeed You! Black Emperor)
Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues (Blind Willie McTell)
Ballad of Mithrandir (J.R.R. Tolkien)
Duster Bennett in London (Robert Kiyoshi Nishizaki)
Friday’s Child (W H Anden)
More About People (Ogden Nash)
The Purist (Ogden Nash)
Excerpt from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (James Agee)
America (Grasberg)
Excerpt from Hip-Hop (Mos Def)
The Black Art
When Man Enters Woman
We Are The Witnesses (H. W. Longfellow)
The Warning (H. W. Longfellow)
The Charm of 5:30 (David Berman)
After the Argument (Stephen Dunn)
Alta Traicion (Jose Emilio Pacheco)
Speaking a Foreign Language (Alastair Reid)
Mother To Son (Langston Hughes)
The Life of Game (Loren Goodman)
The Lost Pilot (James Tate)
A Man Said To The Universe (Stephen Crane)
Many Red Devils Ran From My Heart (Stephen Crane)
In The Desert… (Stephen Crane)
A Song From Sylvan (Louise Imogen Guiney)
FOAM: The Day Antonioni Came To The Asylum (Anne Carson)
Excerpt from Naked Lunch (William Burroughs)
Numbers 13, 14, 25, 53, 28 from 100 Selected Poems (E. E. Cummings)