I thought that Terry Teachout made an unfortunate omission in his recent column, “Hearing is Believing: The Vanished Glories of Spoken-Word Recordings.” After glimpsing into BBC’s giant vault of sound recordings, Teachout bemoans the inaccessibility of most spoken-word albums:
Why are so many of these priceless documents out of print? Because the market for spoken-word recordings is too small for them to be worth reissuing on CD. So why don’t the BBC, HarperCollins and Sony BMG (which now owns the Columbia Masterworks and RCA catalogs) make their spoken-word archives available for digital downloading via iTunes? Imagine being able to click a few keys on your laptop and listen to, say, Truman Capote reading excerpts from “In Cold Blood” or Montgomery Clift, Julie Harris, Jessica Tandy and David Wayne performing Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie.” Wouldn’t you pay 10 bucks for that privilege? I sure would.
But what about poets.org and Penn Sound? Both websites host catalogs of sound clips and boast thousands of mp3s, for free nonetheless. In fact, archived audio exists across the internet, in fabulous–even if sometimes hidden–pockets. Over at Slate, all weekly poems are accompanied by author readings. On Kenneth Goldsmith’s UbuWeb, you can listen to Ezra Pound reading at the Harvard Vocarium, experience Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, and even enjoy a rare 1929 recording of James Joyce.
Earlier in the summer, I raided Penn Sound’s archives for Robert Creeley audio files. I adore Creeley’s readings – ?how he ascended each stanza, how he stumbled through an enjambed line. In his voice, you can hear when his poetry is downright mean, irresistibly tender, and forever hesitant. Having listened repeatedly to Creeley’s “I Know a Man,” I was disappointed in Teachout’s treatment of what author readings tell the audience. Tsk, Teachout writes to all literary critics that picked up that popular “unfortunate habit” of using “voice” when they mean “style.” Teachout’s lead forgets that poetry began as an oral/aural tradition, a tradition which PennSound is looking to revive. Director Al Filreis hopes that the project “has already had an impact on the way poets, critics, teachers, and students talk about the sound of poetry, which is, after all, its most fundamental quality.”
Is there scholarship on how poets read their work? The space between how a reader interprets the text and how an audience hears the words is often vast – ?a canyon of blank page and intentional pauses. Shouldn’t we consider the poet’s performance? When I listen to Creeley read, the way he forfeited line breaks and rushed toward conclusions frequently changes my sense of the poem. On poets.org, John Berryman starts The Dream Songs, introducing his Huffy Henry, grumbling and gruff. Berryman takes a sharp breath, and his voice goes staccato, “It was the thought that they thought/they could do it.” Then, there is a pause and he proceeds, “made Henry wicked & away.” In Berryman’s vocal staggering, you can almost hear the departure from when the world was once like a woolen lover…
How can we use our listening experiences with our readings of texts? Or, maybe the more practical question: what should these hybrids look like? In the end, I do agree with Teachout; I want more. After hearing “Dream Songs 1,” I am greedy to hear Berryman tackle “Dream Songs 4.”
A quick illustration of this in Sophie: here is a version of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land that I threw together in Sophie, including Eliot’s reading of the poem. Right-click to download (13 Mb) and open in either Sophie or Sophie Reader; you’ll need to unzip the file, and if you’re looking at it on a PC, you’ll need to have Quicktime installed for the audio to work. The audio, for what it’s worth, is borrowed from Caedmon’s recording of him, which was floating around the Internet in the way that these things do. I don’t know the date of the recording, though I suspect that it’s from much later in his career; were one to closely study the interaction between the written and the spoken form of the poem, that’s obviously something to look at closely.
What’s most immediately striking to me about listening to Eliot read this poem instead of silently reading it is his tone, which strikes me as stilted. (This is perhaps a personal, perhaps provincial, response: Eliot was born in St. Louis, after all. Like most displaced Midwesterners, I find myself noticing and quietly irritated by my fellows who are attempting to pass as being from somewhere less prosaic.) Eliot’s tone is particularly interesting towards “A Game of Chess,” where the poem imitates the speech of working-class people in a bar. Reading the poem, Eliot affects their accent, whatever that might be; I find it impossible not to notice the scorn in his voice. It’s a scorn that’s certainly there in the poem once you notice it. I don’t remember seeing it in the poem before listening to Eliot read, but perhaps I was a bad reader.
There are a lot of interesting conversations that could be had about this: a British ear would hear in Eliot’s accent something entirely different from what I hear.
Hearing a poet read her / his own work is enormously helpful to me in understanding the subtleties of a poem. My favorite example is E.E. Cummings reading “Memorabilia.” He makes the American girls’ baedeker-led whirlwind through Italy so vivid! Plus, he sings in the middle of it, which is priceless.
In response to your question, Is there scholarship on how poets read their work?, Pennsound is a good place to look. The Pound scholar Richard Sieburth (who edited Pound’s complete works for the Library of America, and is editing a new edition of New Direction’s iconic “Selected Poems of Ezra Pound) contributed a long, accompanying essay to Pennsound’s recent release of the (more or less) complete Pound recordings, from his first in Paris in 1913 to those he did shortly before his death in Venice. It’s called The Work of Voice in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
The most important parts of the essay are where Sieburth demonstrates how Pound’s manner of recitation suggests meanings or interpretations to which we’d otherwise be blind (or deaf, I guess). The best example is when he discusses Pound’s Canto LVI, part of the section of Chinese Cantos. Pound was most interested in the ideogrammatic quality of Chinese, that is, its visual, imagistic quality; he was also interested in Chinese history. Here, however, as he mispronounces the Chinese, the Canto’s references to ideograms and history dissolve into “a strange kind of post-symboliste scat-singing.” “As his reading of Canto LVI shows,” writes Sieburth, “even in its most historically referential sequences (the margins of this Canto read “a.d. 1225/65,” “a.d. 1278,” “a.d. 1295,” etc. to ground its narrative of the rise and fall of Chinese dynasties in concrete chronological data), Pound’s epic is always verging on lyric, that is, on the sheer music of (non-referential, de-semanticized) poésie pure that actually undoes the very “history” it seeks to “include.””
This, I think, is an excellent example of how recordings can be essential to scholarship.
who wants to listen to poets
giving oral interpretations of
work that was written for print?
talk about bait-and-switch…
go listen to (and watch) the poets
who create our work for performance.
livepoets dot com is one place to start.
or go over to youtube and search for
“slam poetry” or “performance poetry”.
if you want to shortcut to one of the best,
google for “rives” — he will amaze you…
-bowerbird
p.s. i’m just freshly back in l.a. from the
national poetry slam team championships,
held in madison this year. charlotte won…
As both an avid if:book reader & an editor at PennSound I was glad to see this post this evening. Interesting questions & yes-agreed, the mainstream mappings of the resources online always a sorry cartographic farce. But glad to see attentions here: also can’t forget the immense archive.org hosting of things from the Naropa Institute & all over – plus there are dozens of smaller sites & hundreds more cottage music blogs devoted solely to spoken voice &/or the digitization of spoken word albums.
But the scholarship question is easy to answer – lots of work going toward / thot of there: see Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening for one, & the remarkable Lipstick of Noise project by Steve Evans for another. Also people like Kyle Schlessinger & Eric Baus are interested in this same question of recorded poems. Michael’s Pound note is dead on: that Sieburth piece is really great – you can hear him talking about it w/Al Filreis on PennSound too. There’s lots more, if you poke around, I kno, & with the ever rising currency of media discourse analysis I’m sure there’s more to come!
But then, personally, I’ve a vested interest in these questions too! (*~_^*)
For now, click-hear Williams do “The Defective Record.”
xdoxo
Don’t forget The Poetry Archive, set up by poet laureate Andrew Motion in the UK, http://www.poetryarchive.org, which covers a wide range of poetry, is academically useful and approachable by the ‘general reader/listener’ too. At a different point on the page/stage continuum there’s the poetry jukebox created by 57 productions some time ago: http://www.57productions.com/assets/juke.html