a talent *not* owned by every poet? reading their poems well aloud

Oregon is organized! They are archiving voicings of poems by Oregon poets here. (Hat tip Maureen Doallas).

I love the idea of archiving poems-as-voice, and absolutely think more states and entities and people should do it. So yay, Oregon!

What I do argue with, however, is the seemingly universal notion that the best way to aurally present a poem is to have its author read it aloud.

So not true. Just take a listen.

What Oregon (and other collectives looking to create aural poetic archives – are you listening, people?) should do is actively look for and select those among them who read well and have them volunteer to read for everyone else.

Screen writers and playwrights don’t act their own films and plays. Fashion designers don’t model their own clothes. They look for people with the specific talents and attributes acting or modeling requires. My argument is that to do their own work justice, poets should do the same.

It’s not as if good readers are desperately scarce – like good actors or good models, they most definitely are not. All that is required is the baseline intellectual/emotional acknowledgment that most poets just don’t read aloud well – just as most playwrights or fashion designers aren’t good actors or good models.

And a decision to proceed accordingly.

‘wallops of wholesale death’ – Carl Sandburg

I’ve gushed about Carl Sandburg’s reading style before and here I am again. It’s not so much that I completely get how/why he sees and reads and hears a poem the way he does, just that I’m fascinated with how very definite his vocal take is – odd and strong and whimsical and sinister, all at once, and quite certain about it all every step of his serious-clownish way. I don’t think anyone could do this but Carl Sandburg.

Mr. Attila by Carl Sandburg
poem text

1 min 12 secs

(PS Recall that Hiroshima was bombed on 6 August 1945.)

Filming Poems and Readings: “Howl”

Dave Bonta has a great post about seeing the recent movie Howl.  His review is well worth reading; he changed my mind about seeing the movie, which I hadn’t planned to do, and now I can hardly wait.

He talks about realizing that Ginsberg really is the father (grandfather? great grandfather?) of the modern poetry reading:  “From the opening seconds of the film, I was like, Holy shit, that’s the reading, man! The one that started this whole craze for live poetry readings (and later, poetry slams) that’s still with us 55 years later. “

And he finishes with a tantalizing idea–what other poems are out there, waiting to be filmed?

Recapturing Read-Aloud Magic

A quick post here to link to an article on poetry readings from Jess Lacher at the Kenyon Review blog:

“Whatever happened to the sort of reading out loud we got when we were kids– when your mom talked in a monster’s voice, when the scary parts became whispers and there was relief in her voice when the day was saved? Here’s an idea: treat your audience like the exhausted child-brains they are…”

Although some of her tips have been discussed here before, her goal and attitude about readings being for the AUDIENCE, not the poet, are worth a read.

Find her post here.

From bookstore to telephone: the incredible shrinking poetry reading

No one cares about public readings — unless, apparently, they’re delivered via telephone. Or so one might conclude by reading, first, a new screed at the New York Observer by Michael H. Miller, “No One Cares About Your Reading“:

Is it a coincidence that this is how parents get their children to go to sleep? It is a dark fate, indeed, the reading that drags on and on, where the only person who has lost interest more than the audience is the author, the room lost in a purgatory of pauses for laughter, met by awkward silences. [...] While these turgid, awkward, too-often sexless events are an evil necessity, not enough people enjoy them to justify their existence.

“Turgid, awkward, too-often sexless events” — I love it! This guy really knows how to pen a screed.

Miller does concede that poetry is something of an exception, although he quotes Paul Muldoon to slam the frequent practice of poets “trying out new work” at readings. On the whole, the article comes down firmly on the side of those who prefer performances to readings.

It turns out, many of the best readings have very little to do with reading. In Boston, Rick Moody and Wesley Stace performed together, singing songs and sharing stories. According to Mr. Stace, the event was a rousing success. Both “readers” had forgotten their books in the hotel room.

Bookstore readings — like brick-and-mortar bookstores themselves — are probably on the way out. But that’s not the only way to use a live reading to interest the public in your work, as Heather Christle’s recent experience suggests. To promote her second book of poetry, The Trees The Trees (published by Portland, Oregon-based Octopus Books), she set up a tumblelog with a schedule for the first two weeks of July, offering to read poems over the phone to anyone who calls up during the posted hours (which are very generous). The response has been surprisingly enthusiastic, including coverage in Salon, on the BBC World Service’s Newshour, and in the Guardian:

“The book itself is full of references to phones and phone calls, and the speaker often seems to mistake the technology of the page for that of the telephone, imagining that the reader is right there in the moment,” said Christle. “My father is a merchant mariner, and when my sister and I were small we would record messages to him on cassette tapes. I’d often ask questions and then pause for his response. There’s something so lovely and sad about the hope that another actual person is on the other end of any technology. So I thought it would be interesting to bring that dynamic forward, to read these poems (which frequently address a ‘you’) directly to another person, across the intimate distance a telephone creates.”

So far she has received around 60 calls, from a multitude of different readers, from a couple from Toronto looking for a love poem to a class in western Massachusetts. “I’ve been amazed at how variously people respond. Some callers state quickly that they’re calling for a poem, listen, say thank you, and then promptly hang up. Others want to chat a little bit about the project. I love it when people tell me where they’re calling from. One man called on his break from work, which made me glow. If people seem chatty I’ll often tell them where I am as well, because I think it’s exciting to know that the poem they just heard was read in the middle of the shampoo aisle at the supermarket,” Christle said.

This is a great idea, and I’m glad Christle is getting such good mileage out of it. Obviously there’s a strong novelty factor at play in the publicity, but I still think we can learn from her experience. What other live-reading approaches might we be neglecting? Door-to-door readings around the neighborhood, perhaps? And this new group video chat thing I’m hearing about on Google+ and Facebook sounds like an ideal format for small readings. Maybe we need to stop planning events aimed at large crowds which generally fail to materialize, and instead embrace the intimacy of a microaudience.