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.

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.)

thumbs up, Joanie Mackowski

One Afternoon by Joanie Mackowski (1 min 15 sec)
poem text

The House Gift by Joanie Mackowski (1 min)
poem text

Lovely warm voice and relaxed, natural reading style. I had never heard of her before, I have to say, but am happy to have found her voice.

Naomi Shihab Nye – yes!

Yep, Naomi Shihab Nye has what it takes – watch her read here and here. Great stuff.

I love Grace Paley

This is great. Please skip directly to minute 34 for Paley reading her poems. Before that, she reads a couple of short stories, and before that, there’s a lot of intro stuff (Pinsky) and another reader. After that, you get about 30 minutes of Grace Paley reading Grace Paley poems (with some sweet/funny pauses while she gets absorbed in looking for the exact poem she wants among her sheaves of paper). This reading took place in April 2007, when she was 84. She died in August 2007.

I’m a big fan of Grace Paley’s poetry, as various Very Like A Whale posts have shown. Sadly, though, liking a poet’s poems is never any guarantee that one will like that poet’s reading of his or her poems. In this case, however, we are definitely lucky.

So what do we have in this You Tube video? A short, elderly lady with big glasses, a red hat, a gravelly old-lady voice and a pronounced New York accent. She doesn’t look up at the audience much while she reads. She uses no hand gestures or body movements. And she looks tiny and unprepossessing behind the big lectern at which she stands.

She clearly has a wicked sense of humor and is just plain wise, but it’s not just that that makes her completely engaging. The first big thing she has in her favor from my perspective is that she reads the poems as if she’s talking to you – conversationally. No rising inflections or declamation, no plaintive lingering on the last word/syllable of a line, no self-conscious ahem, I am reading a poem voice. She is obviously a natural story-teller, which helps – lots of convincing variation in tone, pitch, pace. Clear delivery. Appropriation of the material. She is in the poem as she reads. To repeat what I said of a couple of different poets in a recent post: what you feel when Grace Paley reads is not: Here I am, reading my poem. What you feel is just: Here is my poem.

‘An inchling bristles in these pines’

Lol, I love the energy and the humor in this Wallace Stevens reading.

Bantams in Pine-Woods
by Wallace Stevens (52 secs)
poem text

‘To enter in these bonds, is to be free’

Very nice reading of Donne’s On His Mistress Going To Bed by the British actor, Jasper Britton. Of course, their training gives actors a huge advantage over the rest of us when it comes to reading poetry aloud for an audience.

awesome delivery – Maya Angelou

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:

‘Letter to a City Under Siege’ – Carolyn Forché readings

A Carolyn Forché reading up at the Poetry Foundation today. She reads well:

3 min 24 secs

I also LOVE this 1992 reading, which is part reading and part recitation from memory. What a performance!