Dear, Alison,
Before expanding my email message window I noticed these line breaks in the
message "Reading &c" you sent. I thought the breaks interesting. If not,
I'll go back to watering the garden.
- Frank
***********************
Why is it that almost all poets sound as if they were
trained in the same
read-a-poem school?
I can't help feeling that there is something about poetry
which draws all
readers of poetry, all reciters of poetry, all performers of
poetry, all
Big-Poetry-Issue street sellers of poetry, towards roughly
the same sort of
voice. The poetry voice.
The poetry voice? It's sing-songy without being musical.
It's incantatory
without being hypnotic. It's slow, it's monotone, it's
somewhat
self-important and it's always slightly reverential. It's not
unlike the
voice of a clergyman who is doing the daily service on
Radio 4 and wants to
sound a bit like God without actually giving himself airs.
I probably would not be expressing these thoughts on the
churchy nature of
the poetry voice if I had not found myself the other day
listening to Andrew
Motion. The Poet Laureate is presenting a series on
Radio 4 in which he is
grandly surveying British poetry, past and present.
Every time I hear him reading poetry, the thing that hits me
is not whether
the poetry is good or bad but how ecclesiastical his voice
tends to be. Not
in a grand cathedral manner, more in a plain, parish
church, small-but-brave
congregation sense.
&c
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