A project that our arts editor Phoebe Mitchell and living editor Deb Scherban had been incubating with local author Lesléa Newman came to fruition last week with the introduction of "Hear a Poet, There a Poet." We'll be featuring a new, original poem in the Gazette and on GazetteNET every other Wednesday; Lesléa, who is Northampton's poet laureate, kicked it off with one of her own works, and we'll have the next one a week from today as I write.

While she was working out the concept, Phoebe asked me about the possibility of doing audio recordings of the poets reading their works whenever possible. The first word of the column's title is "Hear," after all. (I love it when my colleagues kick great ideas into the GazetteNET bucket, which they frequently do; the more that happens, the less you have to rely on whatever weirdness I dream up. I think their ideas are usually better anyway.) I'm especially pleased to be doing this, since poetry is IMO so much more interesting when it's heard than when it's just read. And what could be more authentic than a writer reading his or her own work? That won't always be the case, maybe, but we'll strive to do that whenever we can.

The recordings are pretty simple, just using GarageBand on a MacBook laptop to capture the reading with the MacBook's internal mic in a (hopefully) quiet place, usually our conference room here at the paper. The poems aren't overly long, so the recording goes quickly, and the payoff for you is, we hope, well worth the small amount of time it takes.

For the moment, the recorded poems are mp3 files embedded right into the page; clicking on them should either fire up your browser's associated mp3 player (often Windows Media Player) or play right in the page if you have a plug-in such as QuickTime installed. Shortly, we should be placing them in a little Flash player that will do the job right on the page as well. Give them a listen as they appear; the pace of our lives is often too hectic and the assault of digital information can be unrelenting, but there's still always room for moments of spoken beauty and soulfulness, right from a writer's heart to your ears.

Here's how the first one sounded: