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On Sat, 24 Oct 1998 13:53:34 +0100, Alan wrote: > [log in to unmask] writes >>Was playing Pound reading Usura to a class of the French yesterday, and >>listening to him roll his "rr"s [snip] So I imitated "Braag sweet tenorrr bull" for >>them. >> >Earlier recordings of Pound sound very Yeatsian to me - painfully so - >or was it more a case of a widely accepted & expected 'recitation' style >fashionable earlier this century & now thankfully not so? Bunting opined (tho where I can't quite recall now) that his own reading style was a direct rejection of the "incantatory" style which Pound used, which was, as Alan sez, taken directly from Yeats. B. felt that his own style related much more directly to "normal" speech. Hmm... depends what you call normal, I guess. If you listen to the early UK recordings of Briggflatts you certainly find the pace is fairly sprightly and close to the natural speech of West Newcastle, and the accent - though evident - is not unnatural. Later in life he read more slowly, which gives the effect of attempting to squeeze extra sonority out of it, and as I've said, I think, he rrrolled those borrrder RRRs loads more for the benefit of US audiences: together these factors seem to me to have brrrought him much closer to the style he prrrofessed to have rejected. I feel it's in the variations of pitch and timing in reading (which are consistent throughout the recordings I've heard) that BB most clearly breaks away from Pound n Yeats - and that I'd say is the achievement in reading technique which he passed on - one way or another - as a possibility for further development by younger poets such as Maggie O'Sullivan and Bill Griffiths (for instance). RC %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%