I never liked Pound's stylized (a more polite word than "affected")
readings.  I knew (or at least later figured out) that he was trying to
bring out the quantitative nature of his rhythms, but I still didn't like
it.  Only recently, when I read Hugh Kenner, did I understand more about
what Pound was trying to accomplish by his chanting.
 
So now I can say....   Well, it's higly stylized.  Stylized in the way
that Japanese Kabuki or Noh theatre is.  An acquired taste.  I can listen
to it now and appreciate what Pound is doing, but for me it's still one
of those things that one appreciates without really liking it.
 
Chris Booth wrote:
 
>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
 
In buying commercially produced cassettes and CDs, I've found that many
actors do a terrible job of reading poetry.  For one thing, in many cases
it's clear to me that they don't understand the meaning of some of the
things they're reading, and so I have to constantly mentally redit their
reading, changing the pauses and the stresses so that what they're saying
will actually make sense.
 
On the other hand, many poets are dreadful at reading their own
poetry.  I've had classes from poets who admitted that they hated
giving readings and who became very uncomfortable when I tried to
raisen class the issue of performance of poetry.
 
So my opinion is that in order to read poetry well, two things are
required.  One has to really care about (or at least be interested in)
the particular poetry being read.  And one has to really care about
performance.  And it helps if one knows a few simple tricks.
 
Come to think of it, maybe I should post an article from my web site on
performance of poetry and other literature.  There are many different
ways of doing it, and one can't say that any one of them is the only
correct way.
 
              >SNIP<
 
>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.
 
In my own concept of performance of poetry, at least, this is one of the
crucial elements:  the ability to change one's voice and have one's voice
take on different personalities.
 
[ I'm deleting a bunch of very wonderful material from Chris's message
here, and including only the comments I want to respond to. ]
 
>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
 
Yevtushenko is a marvelous declaimer of his own poetry.  Wonderfully
passionate, enthusiastic.
 
Unfortunately, although one doesn't need to know a foreign language well
enough to be able to follow the meaning in order to appreciate a
reading in that language, one does need to know it well enough to be
able to understand the *sound* of that language --- the tonal
patterns.  It's the same thing as in watching a movie with subtitles.
Even though I can't quite follow a movie in French or Italian or
Russian or Swedish without the subtitles, with the aid of the subtitles
I come pretty close to completely understanding the movie, because the
tonal patterns of the language make sense to me.  But with a movie in
Arabic or Chinese or Turkish, the subtitles only enable me to pick up
half of the meaning.
 
Caeman once had an absolutely marvelous recording of someone reading "The
Trans-Siberian Express" by Blaise Cendrars (in French, of course) to a
jazz background.   I couldn't follow the meaning, but I loved it.
 
Like many people, I find T.S. Eliot's readings marvelous, although
apparently most English professors hate them.
 
Jack Kerouac is a marvelous reader.  (I could never appreciate Kerouac
until I heard recordings of him reading aloud and heard the wonderful
rhythm of his prose.)  So is John Ciardi.  Allen Ginsburg is very
good.
 
The things that make poetry work well when read aloud are not necessarily
the same things that make it work well on the page.
 
A recent native American poet named Joy Harjo writes poetry, including
many prose poems, that work marvelously well when read aloud.
 
A lot of Tom Waits works very well when read as poetry, although it does
demand a very good performer.  (One needs to read it, in my opinion, in a
completely different way than Tom Waits sings it.)  Most of Bob Dylan, on
the other hand, in my experience, is very thin when one takes away the
music.
 
-- Lee Lady    <Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady>