Update: Apparently the Simpsons’ video was in violation of copyright, so YouTube has removed it.  Here’s another video instead, of John Astin (from the Addams family) reciting the poem:

Another great resource for studying Edgar Allen Poe is the progressive rock album Tales of Mystery and Imagination by the Alan Parsons Project, with narration by Orson Welles:

And finally, speaking of Orson Welles, you can download an mp3 of his infamous War of the Worlds broadcast from Mercury Theatre on the Air. They’ve got other great shows as well, including Dracula, Treasure Island, A Tale of Two Cities, The Man Who Was Thursday, and The Count of Monte Cristo.

There are other sites that offer free mp3s of public domain books (such as Librivox and Ejunto), but what sets Lit2Go apart are the educational materials that go with each title.

Take, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey for instance. The main page offers a brief summary of the book and links to each chapter. Clicking on a chapter link takes you to a new page where you have the opportunity to download the chapter’s mp3, read the text online, or download the chapter as a pdf file. In addition, each chapter page gives the reading level, genre, country of origin, themes and reading strategies. It also includes support material, which is usually an open-ended question that could be used to start a discussion or lead to a writing assignment.

All of the recordings I sampled seemed professionally done, if sometimes a bit stiff, and many of the titles are available through iTunes. Authors include the usual suspects: Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Brothers Grimm, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allen Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

There were a few surprises, however–authors and titles I didn’t expect to see: James Baldwin’s The Story of Siegfried, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, George MacDonald’s The Light Princess, and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.

All in all, Lit 2 Go is a superb literature resource for teachers and students. I’ll be visiting it often and telling my students about it in class this week.

Quick Review

If something is in the public domain–literature, art, music–then, as the Stanford Copyright & Fair Use Guide states, “it is not protected by intellectual property laws…which means it’s free for you to use without permission.”

The Stanford guide explains that most books enter the public domain because their copyrights have expired.  These books include “any work published in the United States before 1923.” Other works may be released into the public domain by the author or creator. The volunteers at Librivox.org, for instance, record audio books of public domain texts and release the recordings into the public domain.

Public Domain Literature in Schools

Thanks to sites like Project Gutenberg and Librivox, there is an ever-growing repository of public domain materials that we can use in our classrooms at little to no cost. Last year I used short stories by Chekhov, Hugo, Poe and Tolstoy, to name a few.

I photocopied the stories and poems and asked students to put them in their three-ring binders, creating a dynamic textbook that grew as the year progressed. We do have a literature anthology at my school, which we used occasionally, but students can’t mark up a page with their notes as they can with the photocopied public domain texts.

Using public domain texts also allows me the freedom to change stories from year to year. I’m not dependent on the stories in the literature anthology. There are, however two big disadvantages to using public domain texts.

Disadvantages

First, relying solely on public domain texts means you are limited to teaching older, mostly Euro-centric material. Books like Bless Me, Ultima, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Fahrenheit 451, To Kill a Mockingbird or Ender’s Game are not yet in the public domain, and teaching these books requires that they be purchased. Still, there are enough high-interest titles in the public domain to teach students how to read well.

Second, there are no teaching materials when you use public domain texts. Anthologies come with study questions, vocabulary words and other teaching ideas. With public domain texts you must either buy ancillary materials, find resources on the Internet or create your own materials. I actually believe this is an advantage, since it frees the teacher from dependence on someone else’s interpretation of the text. I think we give students too many study questions and vocabulary words. Hand them the text, show them how good readers read, and let them get to work on it, discussing it with them as they go.

Conclusion

I have a lot more to say about how to use public domain literature in the classroom, but for now I’ll close by linking to a recommended reading list of public domain titles that could be used in a junior high or high school classroom. There are almost seventy titles on the list, but I could have listed seven hundred. This is just a beginning. There is no poetry or drama on the list, so you won’t see authors like Walt Whitman or William Shakespeare, though their works, too, are in the public domain.

If you decide to use public domain texts, be sure to read Prepare a Gutenberg Text for eReading from Lifehacker. It will show you how to make the Gutenberg texts readable and printable.

I call the list “Open Source Literature” because, similar to programs like Firefox and Linux, users can take these texts and adapt them, change them and use them in any way they want.

Here, then is the link to Open Source Literature.

The Poetry Archive is a collection of streaming audio recordings of poets reading their own poems, and in some cases commenting on them.

“The Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded.”

The president of the archive is Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney, who reads some of his own poems, such as “St. Kevin and the Blackbird.” The archive even features newly-named U.S. poet-laureate Charles Simic reading “In the Library” and others.

There’s something magical about poets reading their own words. Listening to a poet read his or her own words helps to make poetry more accessible and more personable.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout Finch finally overcame her fear of Boo Radley by meeting him face to face. Students can overcome their fear of poetry by meeting poets in The Poetry Archive. The archive puts a personality to the words, and helps students to break free of the myth that poetry is boring, “fluffy” and remote.

There are some real gems in the archive:

• Billy Collins reading “Sonnet.” This is a very funny poem to use when teaching your students the sonnet form.
• Langston Hughes reading “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” As Monica Ali says of the recording, Hughes’ voice “conveys both strength and emotion and makes the poem all the more moving. When you hear him say, ‘my soul has grown deep like the rivers’ you find a little catch in your throat.”
• Tennyson reading “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Who knew a recording of Tennyson even existed?
• T.S. Eliot reading “Journey of the Magi.” I never thought I would hear T.S. Eliot reading one of his own poems. He also reads “The Waste Land” in its entirety.
• Margaret Atwood reading “Siren Song.” A great companion piece to The Odyssey.

The Poetry Archive also includes resources for teachers, including tips for listening, and The Children’s Poetry Archive featuring poems like “The News” by Michael Rosen.

The Poetry Archive is a must-see web site for every literature teacher.

ThoughtAudio.com has some great titles including the following:

• The Apology by Plato
• Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
• The Call of the Wild by Jack London
• Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
• The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain
• The Declaration of Independence