Saturday, March 24, 2007

Dedalus Audio Room (happily) too popular


The Dedalus Press website inexplicably vanished for a couple of days at the end of this week, and sent us in circles trying to figure out what had gone wrong. In turned out that our server had 'frozen' us, as we'd exceeded our bandwidth.

Given that most of the content of the site is text, and some small graphics, the explanation of course lay in the free audio content recently added, offering visitors a chance to sample some recent publications or 'attend' missed events.

Since then, we've happily increased our bandwidth allocation significantly (just in case), but it's reassuring to discover that the 'outage' wasn't the result of the usual computer gremlins, but an indication that one of our new departures is already proving itself for poetry readers.

Perhaps it is that for many of us our first encounter with poetry is as sound rather than words on a page. And even though the 'technology' of a book of poems is unikely to be improved upon, the additional experience of hearing a poem in the poet's own speaking voice has a potency and intimacy all of its own. In a sense, too, it's an opportunity to pull away for a few moments from the almost bewildering shuffle of possibilities that even a search for POETRY on the internet can produce -- and to just listen to a single speaking voice. Litte wonder that so many of the qualities we associate with written poetry -- voice, tone, rhythm and rhyme, of course -- are in fact descriptive of qualities of audio delivery.

If the internet sometimes seems abuzz with new ideas, fads and gimmicks, at the same time it is also particularly good at creating quiet space where words can actually be heard.

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If you haven't already visited (files are mostly mp3 and easily downloadable), do drop into the Audio Room from time to time, as we will continually add new material as forthcoming titles are published.

1 comment:

Hermagoras said...

It might have been me who crashed your site, just by listening a lot. Your audio room is great -- every small poetry press should have one.