Poets & Writers Theater
Every day we share a new clip of interest to creative writers—author readings, book trailers, publishing panels, craft talks, and more. So grab some popcorn, filter the theater tags by keyword or genre, and explore our sizable archive of literary videos.
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“It is an ancient Mariner, / And he stoppeth one of three. / ‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, / Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?’” Jeremy Irons reads the opening lines of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” accompanied by Glenn Brown’s oil painting The Shallow End, for the “Ancient Mariner” Big Read, an online audio and visual art project curated and produced by the University of Plymouth with forty readers—including Simon Armitage, Alan Cumming, Willem Dafoe, Olivia Laing, Hilary Mantel, Iggy Pop, Ali Smith, Tilda Swinton, Neil Tennant, and Jeanette Winterson.
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In November 2013 the Brooklyn Academy of Music put out an open call for readings of an excerpt from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation's Record-a-Poem project. This clip features a sampling of the many voices that participated. You can listen to the full audio submissions on SoundCloud.
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In this 1977 experimental film by Larry Jordan, Orson Welles reads Coleridge's classic poem.
