On Mon, 26 Oct 1998 [log in to unmask] wrote:
> The rest of his meditations upon Pound and Bunting very interesting, not least
> re Pound and line-endings. As someone who has thought much about consonant
> timing, I still think the duration of the "r" is used by Pound to help him
> time the line in relation to his voice, as well as to add a harsh, aggressive
> tonality.
- But, I wonder how consistent Pound wd be in his reading. In BB's case,
we can compare the countless (usually bootleg) recordings of readings made
in his last years, and prove either that he had an innovative approach to
reading which allowed him to vary from performance to performance (which
is certainly ok by me), or that he'd lost the plot and couldn't deliver a
simple phrase the same way twice (the possible variations of tone in the
fairly evenly stressed "Brag, sweet tenor bull" are all exploited at some
time or other. "Yet delay!" is another capable of a variety of stresses.
Try saying "A pint of beer, please" the same way twice... if you're a
performer, you should be able to do it...). In general - not surprisingly
- he got slower. But he never got as slow as EP at Spoleto.
I've heard some tapes (not in the - uh - public domain) of BB reading
Pound, Zukofsky etc. And I guess he tended to Buntingise them all to some
extent in that he brought the full range of pitch into play in a way in
which Pound in particular didn't. Also, he maintained a fairly cavalier
attitude to line-ends, as he did in some of his own readings, and read at
a fair pace. And then, also in the bootleg basement, I've heard Pound
reading Bunting's "I am agog for foam": evidently, as a very old man,
slowly, doggedly, thumping out the beats with his voice and varying the
intonation not a jot so it sounds like the Seafarer's Last Stand...
The main thing here is that there seems to be some kind of line, even in
its resistences, coming with variations from Yeats down, discernable in
some way in Bunting and on to O'Sullivan etc today, and infact strong in
Hollo in the Morden Tower on Friday nite (he was good: the rich Seafarer
voice lulled you so the Satie bits caught you off guard). I wonder what
the Irish members of this list feel about that, having heard the abuses
which mainstream irishry makes of the stage-Yeatsian voice, and what
differences are perceptible from that listening point.
RC
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