Voca is a free digital archive of poetry recordings. For the past 15 years, Poetry Center staff have taken care to catalogue, transcribe, and tag thousands of poetry recordings with the goal of making poetry accessible to everyone. What's incredibly unique about Voca is that you can hear thousands of poems in the voice of poets, traveling across more than 60 years of recordings.

Discover poems on Voca

"You get to hear the poet's voice directly!" says Poetry Center librarian Julie Swarstad Johnson. "You hear them in the moment, breathing and present with a live audience, often providing commentary on their work that you won't find anywhere else. The recordings are alive in a way that a studio recording wouldn't be."

Voca features over 12,000 recordings of poets reading their own works, spanning various eras, from the 2020's to the 1960s. The archive is fully transcribed and captioned, enhancing accessibility. New readings are regularly added, allowing users to discover and revisit favorite poems, while also inspiring their own creativity.

Voca showcases the voices of poets since the 1960s. It features live recordings edited into individual tracks, compared to published works to highlight unpublished poems. Each recording is captioned, resulting in over 6 million words transcribed for accessibility. Voca allows users to search and engage with the content, promoting exploration of its extensive archives.

The Poetry Centered podcast showcases contemporary poets as hosts, discussing themes like chiasmus and balance. Each episode offers insights into the Voca Archive, allowing listeners to engage with poetry while learning about its significance. Personal reflections illustrate poetry's impact, inviting exploration of current and past episodes on various podcast platforms.