the end-of-line note

Petersen: Kleichen and a Man by George Szirtes
50 secs, poem text

Most days, I listen to someone reading poetry, even if it’s just clicking on the Poetry Foundation Poem of the Day in my news reader. I also stop listening very quickly if it doesn’t go right, and by that, I mean, does the reader establish an end-of-line note and keep returning to it throughout the reading? If not, I’ll keep listening. George Szirtes (about whom I know pretty much nothing else) avoids this phenomenon, and I like that.

Test your own reading. Pretend the reading is a musical performance for a solo instrument and listen to the note that sounds at the end of most of the lines. If you hear the same end-of-line note repeated throughout the reading, go back and deliberately vary it each time. It’s a trap easily fallen into (speaking from experience here) but, once identified and acknowledged, also easily escaped from.

Carol Ann Duffy – not so much

Ouch. Really a case where a poet would be so much better off getting someone else to read their poems for them.

She reads her poem You here. More of her readings here.

using voice to investigate and internalize

Love this post from Anthony Madrid.

When I was in the middle phase of dissertation writing, I developed a technique of reading I found so helpful and enriching that I want to urge it upon the whole world. This technique is a simple thing—“obvious”—yet I was forty before it ever occurred to me to do it. Now I can’t imagine my life as a serious reader of poetry without it. I’ll tell you the back story.

So… Readings. What’s the point?

A series of articles at Ploughshares on poetry readings this week:

- So… Readings. What’s the point?

- Why Are Readings So Awkward?

I am fearfully and wonderfully made – and so are you

watch this beautiful child

(cross-posted at Very Like A Whale)

OK, Mark Doty

A recitation, not a reading – very nicely done in my view.

A reading. I find it a tiny bit overdone, and would have wanted to have less emphasis on the outbreath in many places, but still, he definitely has what it takes.

music when you read?

We talked a while back about people who, while they read, appear to hear a music which both guides and manifests itself in their reading. Cin Salach and Carl Sandburg are my favorite examples of this phenomenon. (NB: They do it well, and engagingly, but I have also heard it done excruciatingly badly.)

Here we have it again, in the voices of two Norwegian poets who do the readings for these two delightful videopoems by Kristian Pedersen (via Moving Poems):

(And just in case you think all Norwegian poets read like this, you can check out more Kristian Pedersen filmpoems at Moving Poems – Norway definitely has its fair share of non-singing poets.)