15 Albums to Help You Fall in Love With Poetry

Whether you’ve been a poetry lover for decades or never read a stanza in your life, you’re likely to find something to make you fall in love with poetry among the batch.

Language shapes and sculpts our reality. It delineates what’s possible, what’s probable, and what’s merely a flight of fancy. It helps us clarify what’s possible, stand up for our rights, and call out injustices. Words are our roadmap and the keys to our prison. The powers that control language control our reality, and we might not even have the language to realize it.

That’s one of the troubling aspects of our pragmatic, increasingly business-oriented world we’re currently inhabiting. Everything is meant to serve the bottom line, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. Where does freedom factor in such a ledger world? What about imagination? Love? Justice?

Outside of certain highly select circles, poetry is primarily perceived as irrelevant today, an inconsequential frittering away of time that could be better spent on something more productive. Yet poetry is language at its most ineffable, its most transcendent and liberatory. In the words of Audre Lorde, “poetry is not a luxury”.

Poetry may not be a luxury, but it can be a bit of an acquired taste. For those with little exposure, they might default to “roses are red, violets are blue” clichés. On the other side, old and new poetry alike can sometimes come across as dense and inscrutable. Sometimes it’s helpful to have a guide to let you know where to start.

While poetry is often geared towards the written word and the page, there is a long tradition of poetry being spoken or read aloud. Listening to poetry brings a whole new dimension, animating the language into howling, fizzing, burning, raging life. 

Towards that end, we’ve compiled 15 albums, collections, and box sets to introduce you to the world of spoken poetry. We’ve covered a wide range of eras and styles, from the classicism of Marianne Faithfull reading the romantics to the revolutionary beauty of the Harlem Renaissance and the Beat Poets. There’s even some new wave poetry, courtesy of Anne Clark, and some post-digital satire from arch experimentalist Jan Jelinek. Whether you’ve been a poetry lover for decades or never read a stanza in your life, you’re likely to find something to make you fall in love with poetry among the batch.

Amiri Baraka – It’s Nation Time

Amiri Baraka released numerous incredible recordings of his poetry throughout his life, but It’s Nation Time is still a cut above the rest. Released in 1972, backed by the ferocious Free Jazz trio of Idris Muhammad on drums, Gary Bartz of the Jazz Messengers on alto sax, and Lonnie Liston Smith on piano, It’s Nation Time finds Baraka in cosmic mode.

It’s still got the razor-sharp, blazing hot political consciousness of the rest of his poetry. However, the scope is broadened to include a kind of Black mysticism, along with its scathing political condemnations. It’s also one of the most accomplished jazz and poetry hybrids ever realized, deep and immersive, with Baraka’s frenetic rhythms and incantatory phrasing recreating the Free Jazz expressionism of John Coltrane or Anthony Braxton. 

Anne Clark – Hopeless Cases

Romantic poetry in a sprechstimme style over jittery electro and coldwave beats? Yes, please! If you’ve ever wished the Waitresses would record an album of Romantic verse with Yellow Magic Orchestra on synth and Wire making the beats, you’re likely to get a lot of mileage out of Hopeless Cases. 

Marianne Faithfull and Warren Ellis – She Walks in Beauty

It seems like the classics have fallen out of favor, no longer taught in school, edged out in favor of skills that will serve the technocracy. Marianne Faithfull may belong to the last generation raised with an appreciation of classic poetry, or any poetry at all, for that matter. In She Walks in Beauty, Faithfull reads the Romantic poetry of Lord Byron, W. B. Yeats, John Keats, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and more, over ambient arrangements by Nick Cave collaborator Warren Ellis with a special guest appearance from Brian Eno for good measure.

Hearing Faithfull’s commanding recitation of the Romantics throws an important light on the poets, which appear almost painfully old-fashioned and traditional on the page, disguising the dark, revolutionary magic concealed beneath their familiar rhymes. 

Irreversible Entanglements – Irreversible Entanglements

The Civil Rights struggle has been responsible for some of the most incredible poetry ever etched to wax or vinyl. From the groundbreaking poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first African American to work at the Library of Congress, to the fire and revolutionary tumult of the Harlem Renaissance, to the steely, militant rhythms of hip-hop, the struggle for Black liberation inspires each generation to give voice to their hopes and fury.

Irreversible Entanglements, the collaboration between Moor Mother and a Free Jazz quartet, was initially formed to perform at a Musicians Against Police Brutality rally in 2015. Their self-titled debut captures the lightning of the blossoming Black Lives Matter movement in a bottle of warm, airy Free Jazz saxophone and knotty, twining rhythms.

It’s a challenging listen, laying out the harrowing struggles of Black life in the United States with Moor Mother’s unflinching verse, but a rewarding one. Irreversible Entanglements is one of the most satisfying jazz/poetry hybrids of the century so far.

Jan Jelinek – Social Engineering

Poetry helps us contextualize the times we’re living through. It transforms the words and written language around us into litanies, requiems, odes, elegies, paeans, and satire. Although there’s always been a fair amount of absurdity and straight-up rubbish cluttering the psychosphere, our current moment is more surreal and nonsensical than most. Now, not only are we surrounded by trash, but it’s often served up to us by artificial intelligence wearing false faces.

Ambient artist Jan Jelinek has transformed our current reality into a poetry that is both hilarious, deeply confusing, and perhaps a little bit chilling. In Social Engineering, Jelinek takes text from spam emails, which are then read by synthetic voices, and weaves them into loopy electroacoustic tapestries of surveillance and paranoia. 

The Last Poets – This Is Madness

Widely considered an essential forerunner to hip-hop, the Last Poets’ third record is a blazing mix of Black Power poetry, live jazz, and various folk musics from the African diaspora. It’s as radiant with political outrage and blazing insights as a Last Poets record, but there’s an accessibility here, too, that draws you in to hear what they have to say. 

Ken Nordine – Colors

Colors is one of a kind. When Ken Nordine wasn’t busy being a beatnik hep cat, he was earning his bread as a voiceover actor and narrator from the 1940s through the 1960s. If you ever wanted expressionistic mid-century free verse over abstract jazz read by the Brillo commercial guy, you’ll get a lot of mileage out of Colors.

Sylvia Plath – Sylvia Plath Reads Her Poems

Sylvia Plath is well-known for her misery, mainly due to her tragic end due to taking her own life. People less familiar with her work might not realize she can also be hilarious, not to mention terrifying, exhilarating, or defiant. Sylvia Plath Reads Her Poems puts a silver bullet into the notion that women can only write poetry about love, flowers, and family. 

Kae Tempest – The Book of Tempest and Traps

Getting modern spoken word and poetry right requires a tricky equilibrium. With hip-hop being the dominant music of this millennium, combined with the disorienting abundance of recorded media, we should be living in a Golden Age of recorded poetry. Unfortunately, lesser artists tend to imitate rather than innovate. We’re left with hundreds of thousands of mediocre slam poetry nights, with battalions of would-be poets imitating the cadence of Andrea Gibson or Saul Bellow. You’ve got to dig to find the gems when so much of the phrasing sounds the same.

British poet Kae Tempest’s diction resembles the poetry you’ll hear on TikTok and whatever coffee shops can still afford rent, but delivered with a rough Northern English accent. Lean in and pay attention, and your hair will quickly stand on end. Its pauses are pregnant with intimations, ready to boil over into pure kinetic motion. If you’ve ever wished for a queer Sleaford Mods over some sick beats and art music, you’re going to freak out for this one.

T.S. Eliot – T.S. Eliot Reading Poems and Choruses (The 1955 London Caedmon Readings)

It has been argued that the opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” mark the beginning of modern poetry, with the mythological romanticism of the old world giving way to “a patient etherized on a table”. Listening to T.S. Eliot read his timeless poetry helps you understand the sheer, unfathomable horror of the years between World War I and World War II, in all its chilling, existential angst.

Various Artists – Closed on Account of Rabies

Edgar Allan Poe may be better known for his Gothic tales of guilt, murder, and premature burial, but he was also a notable poet. The classical enchantments of poems like “Annabel Lee” or “The Bells” add a spellbinding shadow to Poe’s neurotic tales of grief and loss. In Closed on Account of Rabies, you can hear an incredible range of readers deliver their take on the master’s verse. Christopher Walken’s “The Raven” will make your blood run cold while Ken Nordine’s “The Conqueror Worm” sounds like a radio announcer on a nod. It’s chilling stuff, but it’s also miraculous, as life-affirming as it is soul-crushing.

Various Artists – In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry

No matter how well-versed and expert in poetry you are, you’re sure to learn something by listening to all four CDs of Rhino Records’ game-changing compilation. Over the span of over 100 tracks, you’ll hear everyone from Walt Whitman to Robert Frost to Anne Sexton and Maya Angelou read some of their most beloved poetry. No matter how many times you’ve read these timeless stanzas, it’s an entirely new experience to hear the poets read their own verse.

Luxuriating in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s post-pronunciation or flinching at the acid bubbling barely beneath the surface of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”, hearing these voices materialize like so many specters will give you a whole new appreciation for these works, no matter how long you’ve known them.

Various Artists – Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness

A peculiarly 1990s document, Kicks Joy Darkness brings together late 20th-century poets and underground musicians of the day to celebrate the twisty legacy of Jack Kerouac in all its contradictions. You can hear Lydia Lunch read “Bowery Blues” in a voice of bile and battery acid or R.E.M.‘s Michael Stipe intone “My Gang” over the bare recording of a harmonium. You can hear Hunter S. Thompson sing his praises or Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler talk about coffee cake. It’s worth hearing for the haunting Midwestern post-industrial clangor of Maggie Estep’s “Skid Row Wine” alone.  

Various Artists – The Beat Generation

The first of Rhino Records’ major box sets, The Beat Generation remains an indispensable document, part historical curiosity, part epiphany. It’s not strictly poetry, as there’s plenty of music, especially blues and jazz, which heavily influenced the Beats, and historical ephemera from the time. However, there are plenty of inspired verses among its sprawling tracklist. Heavy hitters like Jack Kerouac, Langston Hughes, and Carl Sandburg are the main attractions. Still, guest appearances by Tom Waits and Ken Nordine make The Beat Generation indispensable listening for anyone interested in 20th-century poetry. 

Ruth White – Flowers of Evil

As if Charles Baudelaire’s Le Fleur du Mal weren’t eerie enough, hearing its stories of rot, ruin, and alienation over a prickly backdrop of early electronics and maltreated orchestral arrangements draws out its malingering madness even further.