While all good poetry should be read aloud, I am a firm believer in the supremacy of the written word over the spoken one. It is possible to enjoy and glean the quality of a good poem on a first listen, yes, but it is always going to be words riding on the wind. These do not lend themselves for deliberation and, most necessarily with good poetry, re-reading. While spoken-word and its horrid offspring, poetry slam, have tried liberating themselves from print, I am yet to witness a single good poem come from these formats.
It is important for me to underline that this website and its affiliated channels will be grounded in the written medium. At the same time, I am not going to be blind to the fact that we live in a day and age in which people have less and less of the time and patience which such reading requires and I am afraid that the number of people who can genuinely read, not just poetry, but even literary prose, is diminishing.
I am not going to be so foolishly self-righteous to see this project of mine as a sort of reconquista of the written word in the face of the hordes of unbelieving audiovisualists. The primary goal of this project is simply to contribute to the diffusion of good literature (predominantly poetry) on a popular level and if that means that I can reach a larger audience by branching out into other media, then I would be foolish not to do so. That is why I have created a supplementary channel to this website on Youtube. It can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcXu0TzhqSe6crhKaqqrb1A
If there is any regular reader here, do not worry that you might be missing out on something by not also following the Youtube channel, for it consists exclusively of recordings of texts earlier published on the blog, nothing else. My main hope with the channel is rather to advertise the website and bring potential readers over here.