Poetry As Performance
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
POETRY AS PERFORMANCE BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Many poetry lovers heard verse aloud long before they began reading it. My own passionate interest owes much to my father's dramatic bedtime renditions...
...Hughes says little about his own work...
...If a new publishing experiment succeeds, poetry as performance is about to take another giant step forward...
...He connects this to the Northern Irish condition of life caught between the terror of the police and the terror of the IRA, where he, and other ordinary citizens feel "guilty for no reason, or cause, I could think of...
...Of course, poetry recordings as such are nothing new...
...I knew chunks of them by heart before I learned to read...
...But his best work is fresh and intriguing...
...The verses themselves deserve repeated hearings, both for their merit and for the superb delivery...
...Paulin also considers the plight of Russian dissident writers of all periods, working in a state of fear...
...his voice tends to rise at the end of each sentence, whether or not aquestion is intended...
...His songlike poems catch some of their melodies from the Celtic Twilight: We'll have taken him unawares, and stand behind him, slightly to one side...
...Hughes is a Yorkshireman, while the other three grew up in Northern Ireland...
...In this tape, he speaks of "a dream of the possibility of forgiveness in this dark, vengeful world...
...There is a special reason why the four poets Faber has chosen need to be heard-particularly by American audiences...
...He weaves his intelligent ideas as thickly as his words...
...His grandparents were Scotch Presbyterian immigrants to Northern Ireland...
...A printed booklet containing the poems is part of the package...
...Another problem of poetry as performance is that a good actor, or even a ham, can compensate for the hol-lowness of the lines...
...Paul Muldoon and Tom Paulin are less familiar to American audiences, so these readings may introduce them to a new public...
...what he does say is pithy and to the point-only what might whiz past the listener, which a reader could figure out from the page...
...Ted Hughes is a formidable "presence," too...
...His sing-song inflection makes them sound dull, and they aren't...
...Not only the language they use but their pronunciations and inflections reveal the way they hear their own creations...
...Still, the proportion of explanation to text means that Heaney is controlling how we hear and understand these works...
...His picture of his homeland is the most chilling I have encountered...
...This is one more pitfall of performing poetry...
...Like the Brontes, he comes from the moors, and is addicted to the gothic...
...The last word conveys a Protestant solidity-not the explosion of rage described by Heaney and Muldoon (who were born on the Catholic side), but the self-righteous anger Calvinists associate with Justice and Jehovah...
...His best poems are very, very good...
...Some of the best poets don't project themselves effectively enough to be entertainers...
...Alas, when Hughes is bad, when his ghoul-haunted imagination begins to sound like Edgar Allan Poe, or one of those novels with spooky castles on the cover and a heroine stalked by a dark fate-then his masterful reading conceals a multitude of sins...
...It combines a factual description of commercial mushroom farming with a hallucinogenic dream of ancient rites and modern Irish mayhem...
...Heaney reads the fewest poems of the four, and talks the most...
...His voice vibrates with the same dark energy conveyed by his poems...
...But an American will miss some of the musicality until he hears Heaney's soft pronunciation of "mud" or "cut" with the oo of "look" instead of our flat, short u. Heaney is an engaging speaker with a modest manner...
...Faber and Faber has just released the first two of a new series of tapes: SeamusHeaney& TomPaulin, and TedHughes & PaulMul-doon (Faber Poetry Cassettes, $10.95...
...My own passionate interest owes much to my father's dramatic bedtime renditions of James Whit-comb Riley's "Little Orphant Annie," Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride," Oliver Wendell Holmes' "The Deacon's Masterpiece" (better known as "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay"), Robert Service's "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," and other gems of light rhetorical poetry...
...He is one of those ancient warriors before the rising tide...
...A scratchy antique exists on which Yeats left the sound of his voice to posterity, and today at least several organizations market tapes of readings...
...His delivery accentuates the Shakespearean cadences in such poems as "An October Salmon": All this, too is stitched into the torn richness, The epic poise That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom, so patient In the machinery of heaven...
...As it happens, Heaney (an excellent critic) has chosen the strongest selection of his own poetry...
...The above lines come from a long poem, "Gathering Mushrooms...
...None of these lyrics looks like deathless art on the page, yet each is a pleasure to recite...
...Heard melodies are sweet," Keats observed, "but those unheard/Are sweeter...
...Tom Paulin often adopts what he calls "a Loyalist voice...
...Muldoon's introductions to his poems are anecdotal, sometimes blarney, yet always delightful...
...Unpublished poets who produce gimmicky John Cage-like recordings of their efforts with sound effects, or lines read antiphonally or simultaneously have been scorned by the academic poetry establishment...
...But the success of poetry performance has nothing to do with merit...
...We are reminded that the pleasure Coleridge said poetry was supposed to give doesn't have to be the kind that plays to a passive audience...
...Descriptions of the poet's experiences shepherding, or trying to grow apples in an inhospitable climate, powerful and moving of themselves, are further enhanced through Hughes' reading...
...However enjoyable, listening to poetry remains an appetizer to the main course...
...Muldoon is a radio producer for the BBC in Belfast...
...Isn't it a fiction that pretends to be fact like A Journal of the Plague Year...
...And when all is said and done, much of the best poetry was meant to be heard aloud: Look at the Psalms...
...Although he is by nature bucolic, the violence in Belfast that he lived through for a time, then fled, has engaged his poetry...
...1 appreciate Faber's tapes, and hope they create a greater interest in these excellent poets, and others as well...
...Although Paulin understands the Loyalist temperament, he does not share it...
...His benignity makes his performance the most captivating as well...
...only a killjoy could fail to appreciate the alliterative language, or the gallop of the meter...
...Many others, however, are still troubadours in spirit and need no urging...
...Of Belfast, Paulin says, "The city is built on mud and wrath...
...Following a rambunctious tradition from Vachel Lindsay's one-man poetry vaudevilles, through Carl Sandburg's guitar-thrumming recitations, to the medicine shows of Allen Ginsburg and Robert Bly in the present, poets have chanted their works in college common rooms, before women's literary clubs, or the echoing spaces of high school auditoriums from sea to shining sea...
...To my knowledge, though, this is the first time a prominent verse publisher has proposed a series of recordings, including some work that hasn't yet appeared in book form...
...It is an attractive miniature, but requires excellent eyesight or a magnifying glass to read...
...and Shakespeare...
...Poets themselves have not outgrown the bardic impulse...
...No matter how familiar you may be wit h Heaney's work-both he and Hughes are as well known in this country as in Great Britain-you will get a better sense of the repetitive stress by listening to him read: "A man wading in lost fields/breaks the pane of flood://a flower of mud-/water blooms up to his reflections/ /like a cut swaying/its red spoors through a basin" (from "Gifts of Rain...
...The entertainment value of these readings is frequently high...
...Readers must be more involved and discriminating than listeners in a lecture hall...
...One imagines cases where the next development will be tapes as a substitute for the printed page altogether...
...When Muldoon hits a false note, he falls into Yeats-fakery...
...Not unexpectedly, his performance displays professional polish...
...Don't misunderstand me...
...Since public readings can be more lucrative than poetry book royalties, even writers who dislike these appearances are often prevailed upon to become performers...
...Introduced by Craig Raine with a few biographical facts, each poet reads a halfhour selection of verses (an average of 11 poems) with commentary...
...It rests on the personality of the poet, and on the rhetorical qualities of the poem...
...Paulin's reading does not do full justice to his thoughtful poems...
...His image for himself is: a wood-kerne Escaped from the massacre, Taking protective coloring From bole and bark, feeling Every wind that blows...
...Nevertheless, poetry as an auditory art is gaining respectability...
...Nevertheless, when the poet becomes his own apologist often a sleight-of-hand is accomplished: We are tricked into hearing about a poem differenl and better than theone that was actually written...
...Heaney has always wanted to "weave a mat of sound that was as thick and sturdy as the kind of music in Anglo-Saxon poetry and Gerard Manley Hopkins...
...Their poems are rooted in their locales and the speech reflects this regionalism...
...His poems scrutinize Ireland's victimization by history, and find no comforting answers: Can you describe history I'd like to know...
Vol. 66 • October 1983 • No. 20
