Poetry
Speaks-Anyone Listening?
Matthew Boudway
Poetry Speaks
Edited by Elise Paschen and Rebekah Presson Mosby, Sourcebooks,
336 pages with three CDs, $49.95
When a young student at Vassar named
Elizabeth Bishop heard a poetry reading by one of the college's
most famous alums, Edna St. Vincent Millay, she and her friends
doubled up with laughter. Listening to recordings of those two
poets in the new multimedia poetry anthology Poetry Speaks, one
can easily guess what Bishop found so funny. It would be hard
to find two poets whose approach to reading-and writing-poetry
was so different. Millay's voice, like her poems, is coy and theatrical,
full of trills and vatic pomp. It is a voice that aims to seduce
and conquer. Bishop's readings, by contrast, are plain and relatively
uninflected, like the sound of someone reading to herself. Their
effect is somehow to make the poems themselves seem less self-consciously
poetic, so that we see through them to the world they try to capture
or invent. The listener is first surprised, then a little disappointed
to discover that the two poets sound pretty much the way a reader
of their poems would expect them to sound.
Not all of the 42 poets gathered
in Poetry Speaks are such good readers of their own work as Millay
and Bishop. The implicit claim of the collection is that hearing
great poets read or recite their poetry will help us to appreciate
it. This seems like a reasonable claim. The real surprise-and
maybe the only surprise-of this new collection is that quite a
few good poets were bad performers. Unhappily, these tend to be
the poets whose recordings were either unavailable or hard to
find until the release of Poetry Speaks. Ezra Pound, Robert Frost,
and Dylan Thomas sound as good as ever. But rare recordings of
John Crowe Ranson and Robert Browning (the latter produced with
such primitive equipment that I could hardly catch the words even
with the text sitting in front of me) add nothing, or at least
very little, to the words on the page. Still, even when the recordings
are surprisingly bad, they are not bad in a surprising way. If
one is amazed to hear Ransom's sing-songy delivery flatten his
carefully modulated verse, one has no trouble believing that it
is Ransom's voice and not, say, the voice of Ogden Nash.
The texts of all the poems presented
on the three CDs of Poetry Speaks appear in a companion volume,
which also includes other work by the same poets, brief biographical
sketches, and appreciative essays by well-known contemporary poets.
The essays are as uneven as the recordings, ranging from academic
criticism to personal reminiscence. Several of the essays seem
to tell us more about the poets who wrote them than about the
poets they are supposed to be about. The amiable Charles Osgood
does a good job of introducing the recordings, though there are
a few false steps in the commentary he was given to read, as when
he suggests that Millay's outrageous persona puts one in mind
of the woman described in Robert Frost's "Silken Tent."
It does not.
Frost's own voice is as weathered
and irregular as one of his stubbled apples or stone walls. Philip
Larkin's reading, one of the highlights of the collection, is
pitched somewhere between the clipped, admonitory tones of the
university librarian and the melancholic drone of a man who always
finds himself "crouching below Extinction's alp." And
come to think of it, why should we be surprised that the voices
of the great poets match their words-as if we were noticing the
resemblance between a pet and its owner? If it is true, as George
Orwell said, that by the age of 40 everyone deserves the face
he has, surely it is also true-and perhaps truer-that the mature
poet has the voice he deserves, a voice something like the one
we had imagined.
Matthew Boudway is assistant editor
for Crisis.
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