I once had a conversation with John Walsh in which we had opposing opinions
on poets reading poetry. John loved the EP recordings, and felt that poets
were the best readers of poetry. I held that they were not, and that
actors--or people who had worked hard and refined their mechanism and
techniques of vocal presentation--were the best readers of poetry. I was in
college at the time, and had spent some time obssessed with classical piano
and performance, and felt that the same standards should be applied to
poetry. So I memorized Canto I, developed my interpretation, and when I went
home I "performed" [there's that wonderful irony about Liszt and the word
"recital"] Canto I for Ted and Marcella [Spann] Booth. Marcella had been
present at the original Caedemon recording session, and told me that I had
given a better reading. Well; I was young and believed her--and still do.
This is a topic about which I felt strongly, and now, almost twenty years
later, I think that my youthful ardor was not wrong-headed.
 
Pound's voice in Canto I is wonderfully correct; so rare a tone and sonance,
and so right for the evocation of the broken manuscript that itself is an
echo of an older manuscript: a voice through a voice of a voice that in the
dark halls of Homeric Greece filled the shadowed space with a chanted
rhythm, a voice that is the voice of the sea-surge.... But then, when EP
gets to
 
     Lie quiet, Divus.
 
a totally different voice is required, and EP doesn't give it. [I just can't
imagine Canto I in an uninflected conversational tone and significantly
faster than EP reads it as Tim Bray suggests, though. He lingers on the
vowels, making it songlike, and the passions depicted throughout the canto
are ill served in a conversational tone: the horror of the shades about
them, "girls tender,/Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads"--this last
charged with vowels that are the sound of the wailing of the dead, and that
force us as readers to open our mouths for those wide vowels into the
position of the mouths of the unhappy ghosts: "mauled with bronze". Canto I
is so rich in its play of assonance and alliteration, and that can only be
brought out by giving every spoken sound its own weight, and that cannot be
done presto or vivace. The change of vowel patterns as you move through the
Canto is miraculous; the way they reflect, scene by scene, the situation
remembered by Odysseus, rendered by Homer, adapted by Divus, revived by
Pound; these things must be given by the reader to be heard by the auditor,
who might not have the poem before him or her, or might not know it well, or
might never have encountered it before. How could one rush "Dark blood
flowed in the fosse"? And the two esses at the end of the line are the sound
of the liquid moving in the ditch, the initial surge (f) and then flow (ss);
the sound of blood under pressure issuing from a living jugular onto the
sand (osse).] Overall, I think that Pound's readings are mannered, and a
disservice to his poetry, but there are passages where it is quite right,
such as when he harkens back to a kind of bardic chanting as in Canto I, and
there are passages where his reading is hauntingly effective, as in the
"pull down thy vanity" passage of LXXXI. {However, far better EP's excesses
than that horrible whiny--equally mannered, mind you--flat devitalized
reading style affected by so many current American poets who impose an
arbitrary retard at the ends of lines, stanzas, and poems, and end those
retards with a kind of rising inflection sort of like a question but having
no meaning or connection with the text and never used in any kind of vocal
communication that I have ever heard other than reading poetry. It always
makes me think of a student senior recital I went to in college in which a
really remarkably bad piano player (I won't call him a pianist) had one of
his buddies stand in the wings at the light console continually changing the
dimness and color of the lights cast onto the stage while he played Chopin.
Bad taste, but a cheap and easy way to get an effect. Much easier than doing
it *right*.}
 
Pound was born in a day when poetry--and anything read, orated, or
acted--was declaimed; the pre-Stanislawsky days of intoning with tremolo
(vibrato in popular and operatic and lieder singing in those days was also
much more pronounced than in our day) and projected from the diaphragm and
exaggerated in expression and pronunciation, often with sawing of the arms
and to our eyes overdone gestures and body language. It is natural that this
would affect his approach to setting the air to thrilling to his verse.
 
The best poet-readers I have heard are Basil Bunting and Ralph Gustafson,
both at Orono, Ralph at the Williams centennial conference. I heard Bunting
read _Briggflatts_ at Orono in 1980(?). I still remember the resonant and
musical Northumbrian burred 'r's in "ears err":
 
     Tongue stumbles, ears err
     for fear of spring.
 
Even now, it "bids my hair stand up"! [And a note in response to Richard
Caddel's comment about Bunting's pronunciation getting a little more
rrrolled for the American audience: Bunting sure did seem to have a
mischevious glint in his eye throughout, although I had assumed then that it
was from the wine he was drinking and his impishly charming the little girl,
Kenner's daughter, who had been given the task of sitting next to Bunting
and pouring the wine while he read, and who seemed a little overawed and shy
at being so much the center of such close attention....]
 
Bunting wrote wonderfully about how poetry should be read [by "read" I mean
aloud, of course, not what we're taught to do to poems at University]. When
I read it in college, how excited I was! He was saying exactly what I wanted
authority to back me up on. I had much difficulty getting other English
majors and "poets" I knew to think that my opinions were better than
crankish. Some came around to believe that I could read OK, but they
modified their own readings not a whit. But Bunting was saying basically the
same things I was telling my compeers: poetry should be alive in the air,
the squiggles on paper are the same in poetry as they are in music, etc.
 
I have not heard Gielgud's recording of Shakespeare's sonnets yet, but I
expect to love it when I do. Let's not forget that Shakespeare wrote verse
too, but the sound of Shakespeare's music has been in the actor's hands all
along, and I don't think that a disservice has been done it thereby. Has
anyone here heard Derek Jacobi's recording of Fagle's translation of the
_Iliad_? It lives.
 
It is also true that few composers are good performers of their own work,
although there have been notable exceptions who lived when they could be
recorded. Beside Mahler there were also Strauss and Rachmaninoff--although
Rachmaninoff acknowledged that Benno Moiseiwitsch was a better performer of
Rachmaninoff's work than Rachmaninoff was.
 
I never did convince John Walsh that poets were not the best readers of
poetry, nor did he convince me that they were. But personally, until some
hypothetical day when public readings of poetry and prose return as a
widespread practice in the English-speaking world, I feel that this thread
is a valuable one, and of great importance. (And to me of much greater
interest than the discussion of EP's politics, which some people leap to
with the joy that some people leap to the discussion of Whitman's
homosexuality. EP was a poet, after all; if it were not for the verse, his
politics, economics, etc. would have been as forgotten as those of some guy
who lived down the street. The exquisite delicate rarified beauty of the
Drafts and Fragments, the haunting music of the Pisan Cantos, the perfection
of _In the Station of the Metro_, the rocky jagged berglike textures of _The
Seafarer_; what happens when they are brought to life in the air, in EP's
voice, or others'? It seems to me that this is a much more fundamental
question than the subjects of most theses on EP or other poets ever
approach.) Poetry has lost its voice in a way, and the audience has lost its
ear; calling attention to EP's readings will awaken more thought and open
more ears than any other poet reading that I can think of offhand. (Bunting,
perhaps, but how many people out there really have heard of Baz? That's
going to take a while yet.)
 
Apologies for having gone on a bit long-windedly. (I found this a refreshing
thread.)
 
Chris Booth
 
> ----------
> From:         Tim Romano
> Reply To:     Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
> Sent:         Tuesday, November 23, 1999 1:13 PM
> To:   [log in to unmask]
> Subject:      Re: recordings of Ezra
>
> This is indeed an old bardic chanting tradition. Uncommon among modern and
> contemporary American poets, many of whom have striven for a
> conversational nonchalance, and so it may seem excessively mannered to a
> modern or contemporary American ear. Wyndham Lewis though Pound's poetry
> to be somewhat histrionic. Joseph Brodsky chanted his poems. Two very
> different poetic traditions: one tending towards the rhythms and
> tonalities of everyday speech, the other hierophantic.
> Tim Romano
>