Poetic License

April is National Poetry Month, and I just stumbled across a great way to celebrate. Poetic License is an ambitious project that pairs 100 poems with 100 actors, many of them Broadway stars. The result is a captivating, sometimes surprising synthesis of voice and verse. Here are some of my favorites…

Pablo Neruda’s enchanting ‘Sonnet XVII,’ read by Joanna Gleason, expresses a tender, absolute love:

Christine Ebersole (a guest on Studio360 in 2006) lends her voice to the beginning of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ‘Renascence’:

Meryn Cadell’s ‘Job Application,’ read by Donna Lynne Champlin, squeezes a bit of humor from a difficult situation:

The weariness and nobility in Florence Henderson’s voice are an apt fit for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s ‘The Day is Done’…and might force us to change what we thought we knew about Mrs. Brady:

– Michael Guerriero