Friday, May 28, 1999

A University's Web Site Offers Not Just Poetry and Prose, but Also Voices By JASON HUGHES The bohemian writers of the Beat generation believed in the power of the spoken word. In the coffee shops and apartment lofts of San Francisco and New York, writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac pieced together and performed their bebop, beat-laced works. "It seems so much more powerful to hear her voice than to read it in print." The staff of Ohio University's Telecommunications Center also has a soft spot for the spoken word, but rather than jockey for seats in the local java joint, the staff members are muscling out their own niche on the Internet. Their Web site, Wired for Books, contains the published works of local and canonical authors, as well as scholarly essays and public discussions. And instead of just providing texts, the site is wired with the voices of authors and actors, lending some wind to the words. Users can listen as Terry Anderson, a journalist held hostage in Beirut, reads poetry he wrote during his seven-year captivity. Other authors -- many of them Ohio University faculty members -- also read their own works. To listen to the sound clips, users need to have RealAudio software, which can be downloaded free of charge using a link on the site. The recordings are part of what makes the site interesting, says David B. Kurz, the telecommunications center's coordinator of on-line services. You hear more than just the lines of the poems -- you listen to the authors themselves clipping the words as they intended, enunciating, and slowing or speeding through their lines in a syntactic ebb that no one else could mimic. When Bonnie Proudfoot, an Ohio poet, reads her work, Mr. Kurz says, "it seems so much more powerful to hear her voice than to read it in print." Users can also watch a video clip of the actor Martin Sheen reading the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore's famous poem "My Country Awake." Also easily accessible is the site's most frequently visited feature -- its animated slide show of Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Mr. Kurz created the site in 1997 with a recording of local scholars discussing the works of Raymond Carver, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Leo Tolstoy. "We were trying to tie in a scholarly discussion and bring some of the radio technologies to the Internet, so it would be available on demand -- unlike the radio, where it's easy to miss," Mr. Kurz says. Mr. Kurz says he hopes to add more contemporary poetry and prose, as well as larger productions of the classics. In the site's most ambitious program to date, he and a few students who help maintain the site are organizing an upstart production of Shakespeare's Macbeth using local actors. "It's a really small operation," he says. "But slowly and steadily over two years' time, we have accumulated some really nice things."