J.T. Welsch

Music

Poem Songs Project

These recordings are part of an ongoing project for putting some favourite poems to music. It’s mostly a different way of reading, or getting to know the shape of these lines more intimately. Suggestions for singable poems very welcome.

So far, I’ve collected recordings in 4 EPs on Soundcloud:

Poem Songs 1 (2014)

  1. Wandering Aengus (W.B. Yeats)
  2. Lullaby (W.H. Auden)
  3. To Speak of the Woe that is in Marriage (Robert Lowell)
  4. Visits to St. Elizabeths (Elizabeth Bishop)
  5. The World is Full of Loss (Muriel Rukeyser)

Poem Songs 2 (2019)

  1. The Emperor of Ice-Cream (Wallace Stevens)
  2. I Knew a Woman (Theodore Roethke)
  3. Women (Louise Bogan)
  4. Jack’s Blues (Robert Creeley)
  5. A Dream Within a Dream (Edgar Allan Poe)
  6. Let It Be Forgotten (Sara Teasdale)

Poem Songs 3 (2022)

  1. Spring & Fall (Gerard Manley Hopkins)
  2. Sadie & Maud (Gwendolyn Brooks)
  3. Blessing the Boats (Lucille Clifton)
  4. Scotch Rhapsody (Edith Sitwell)
  5. Lubin (Anne Hunter)

Poem Songs 4 (2022)

  1. What Kind of Times Are These (Adrienne Rich)
  2. Admonition (Sylvia Plath)
  3. Flower of the Mountain (James Joyce)
  4. Meeting Point (Louis MacNeice)
  5. Tender Only to One (Stevie Smith)
  6. No. 1292 (Emily Dickinson)