Summer Shorts ’14 Blog Hop Featuring Coleen Marlo

Summer ShortsAs part of our continuing celebration of June Is Audiobook Month, we are participating today in Summer Shorts ’14 Blog Hop. It’s Poetry Week and Coleen Marlo is our guest!

Brenda: Welcome to AudioGals Coleen! Will you share with AudioGals’ readers why you chose How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning for your performance in this year’s Summer Shorts?

Coleen: I suppose I chose this piece because it deeply touches me with it’s beauty and vulnerability. It is a sonnet lifted directly from the soul in such resonating perfection.

Both the poem itself, How do I love thee? and its subject, love, are essential parts of all of our lives, a subject we all know about. To me, there are two foundational emotions in life from which all others spring from: love and fear. In romance both are ever present.

This poem delves into the myriad forms of love which reside within all of us. I like that it speaks to the depth and breadth of love. People fall in and out of love, they live for love and die for love. “How do I love Thee,” explores the col crop wkinds of love there are, in such a beautiful and thought provoking way. The mystery and wonder of love, whether that be for a higher power, a lover, a child, a friend, family or country, are part of our eternal human questions of life and they’re some of the questions Barrett Browning asks and tries to answer with this sonnet. She wrote this sonnet for her beloved Robert Browning.

Here is a bit of history on How do I love thee?

“Sonnets from the Portuguese, was written during1845–1846 and first published in 1850, and is a collection of 44 love sonnets written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The poems largely chronicle the period leading up to her 1846 marriage to Robert Browning. The collection was acclaimed and popular in the poet’s lifetime and it remains so today.  Initially Barrett Browning hesitated to publish the poems, feeling that they were too personal, but her husband insisted that they were the best sequence of English-language sonnets since Shakespeare’s time and urged her to publish them. To offer the couple some privacy, she decided that she might publish them as translations of foreign sonnets. Robert suggested that she change their imaginary original language to Portuguese, probably after her admiration for Camões and his nickname for her: “my little Portuguese.”

 

 

Brenda: Can you tell our listeners more about Summer Shorts ’14 and who it benefits?

Coleen: Summer Shorts ’14, is a way for the audiobook community to give back. Spoken Freely, is a group of more than 40 professional narrators who have teamed up with Going Public and Tantor Media to celebrate June is Audiobook Month (JIAM) by offering Summer Shorts ’14, an audio collection of poetry, short stories and essays. All proceeds from sales of the collection will go to ProLiteracy, a national literacy outreach and advocacy organization. So it is a great way for all of us, listeners and narrators who know the power of reading to give back!

Throughout June 2014, 1-2 stories, poems and essays will be released online each day via Going Public, as well as on various author and book blogs, thank you AudioGals! As a “Thank you!” to listeners, pieces will be available for free online listening on their day of release. As a bonus for those who purchase the full collection from Tantor Media in support of ProLiteracy, there are over 20 additional tracks only available via the compilation download.

Brenda: Thanks for joining us in Summer Shorts today!

As one of our official AudioGals Narrator Friends you’ll find Coleen’s page with an up-to-date list of her romance narrations here.

 

More Summer Shorts

Also available on the Summer Shorts ’14 Hop today you’ll find:

Amy Rubinate, Cassandra Campbell & Kathe Mazur, Sonnets 2, 4, 6 from Renascence & Other Poems, by Edna St. Vincent Millay at Lakeside Musing

 

For more Summer Shorts ’14, check our yesterday’s posts:

John Lee, The Stolen Child, by W.B. Yeats at Literate Housewife

Kathe Mazur , An Ancient Gesture, by Edna St. Vincent Millay at Lakeside Musing

 

And there’s more audio offerings for you to enjoy tomorrow on Summer Shorts ’14:

Katherine Kellgren, Father William, by Lewis Carroll at Overreader

Carrington MacDuffie, Al’s Boy, by Carrington MacDuffie at Beth Fish Reads

 

Do you feel like you need an extra from the Summer Short’s ’14? Check out  “bonus listen day” over at The Insatiable Critic!

 

If you’d like to see the full schedule of Summer Shorts “14 along with companion posts please visit narrator Xe Sand’s Going Public blog here.

Brenda

3 thoughts on “Summer Shorts ’14 Blog Hop Featuring Coleen Marlo

  1. I love the way Summer Shorts ties together so many great sites and sounds of the audiobook community, including AudioGals, of course! Love Coleen’s reading of this sonnet. Now back to my listening!

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