Cross-posting a portion of a post I wrote at Very Like A Whale on Maya Angelou. I wrote in part:
As for Angelou’s poems, they did not work at all well on the page for me. The tradecraft was less noteworthy and I found her work lacked subtlety – was indeed often fairly raw, heavy-handed and sometimes even clunky. It’s easy to see where her considerable reputation comes from, though, if you do an internet search for her reciting her own work… She has a great, super-sensitive relationship with her words, a terrific voice and amazing delivery, which make her poems-as-voice much more formidable than her poems-as-text.
There aren’t that many recordings of her reading her own work online, but here are two videos that really do showcase her amazing delivery:
February 18, 2013 at 12:14 pm
She is amazing, and I understand what you said about her style at times, but there are many poems of her that I just adore. These two readings were phenomenal. I am thinking of doing a reading of her poem about a diner, and meat eating.
This also makes me think about poems that I have read which sound incredible in my head, but when I hear the poet read them they fall flat. I am thinking of William Carlos Williams’ reading of the Red Wheel Barrow. It goes way to fast and has nothing of the spacing from the paper version about it. Even Robert Frost was guilty at times of galloping along too quickly.
I really appreciate what you are doing here, focusing on reading out loud for an audience. This is a vital part of poetry that often seems to have been lost.
February 18, 2013 at 12:41 pm
David – Unfortunately, readings by authors that don’t do justice to their own poems are not as uncommon as one would hope. I’m a huge Yvor Winters fan, for example, and was disappointed here: http://bit.ly/WHrQiG. Thanks for stopping by and glad you found some of the Voice Alpha content worthwhile. Best, Nic