On Sun, 11 Feb 2007 13:23:15 -0000, Joanna Boulter
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>I must admit that when I heard Ted Hughes had died my immediate reaction
>was - "Now I shall never hear him read."
>
>There is an unarguable extra dimension given by the voice and personality of
>the poet.
I've several times had the experience of finally hearing a poet read (either
in person or more often recorded) after already becoming very familiar with
their poems. It's similar to finally meeting someone whom you've gotten to
know only on line: in ways they are just like you expected, in ways totally
different.
>
>Do you think a really bad reader would cause anything to seep into the work
>from the earliest stages of writing? It seems quite likely that a good
>reader would get his/her own voice into the language on the page, almost in
>spite of him/herself.
Robert Graves wrote somewhere that though he didn't like any modernistic
poets, when he heard Dylan Thomas read he was "almost seduced."
>
>As Allen Ginsberg put it - " To read Shelley's poem ['Ode to the West Wind']
>aloud is to breathe his breath."
>
Try reading the following lines of Keats aloud and notice what happens to
your lips and especially tongue:
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn ...
You can't speak those lines without singing them, and "forlorn" with
effortless brilliance ushers in tolling bell of the next stanza.
or:
And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.
You can hear the sighing breath of the sleeping girl in "azure lidded
sleep," hear and feel the stiff rustle of fresh cloth in "blanched linen,
smooth and lavender'd," taste the unctious sweetmeats with the motions your
lips and tongue makes to recount them, hear the call of the muezzin in
"silken Samarkand" and the scented puff of the Levantine breeze in "cedar'd
Lebanon" ...
--
===================================
Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/jgcorelis/
===================================
|