[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Maryann Corbett

The problem of finding test audiences for those untested poems remains--especially if, like me, you can't easily get to and from late-night open mics, and you don't have an in-person poetry group, and your spouse is more interested in mics and recordings than poems.

Hmmm... there may be some lemonade to make from that particular lemon. I find reading a poem into a mic, and hearing it back, does double duty. First, I find the flaws I can't bring myself to speak. Then I hear another set of flaws when I listen. It's actually very helpful.

I don't like the fiddling with microphones part. But if you have someone who does, perhaps you should exploit him! And it's not exploitation if he enjoys it!

Oh, and please don't mention I called him a lemon!

Thanks,

Bill

[A. E. Stallings]

I don't think you need to read a roster of only your "best stuff" or greatest hits--that too can get a little dull. Throwing a new poem or two in the mix makes it more exciting for poet and thus for audience.

I do think poems can be OVERperformed as well as underperformed.

I totally agree about over-anecdotalizing and excessively long/detailed introductions (that in fact preclude the need of the poem itself). Billy Collins' "The Introduction" is a great send-up of, well, an introduction.

And observe your time limit. Arrrrgh. That's the worst. To go way over is rude to your audience and to your fellow readers if you have any.

[Holly Martins]

Overdone anecdotalizing should also be punishable by death.

I absolutely agree with Quincy. I think some readers waffle on through nervousness and feel self-deprication will win the audience over. It won't because they're just being extremely irritating. With others it's pure ego and they need to be told they're no one special. Poets aren't really special people, are they? I had a similar expreience to John's when I heard someone very badly and very loudly imitating Dylan Thomas. Unfortunately I was sitting in the front row and went purple trying not to laugh.

[Maryann Corbett]

Originally Posted by W.F. Lantry

Oh, and please don't mention I called him a lemon!

Too late, Bill. He's read it by now.

So far, neither the CPR observations nor any of ours talk about what the test readings are testing. And there are a lot of possibilities, so maybe we should lay them out.

Of course reading aloud can help you discover flaws of all kinds, including the ones that workshopping can also help you find, like an unconscious repetition of a word.

Reading aloud can also show you what lines are just too !@#$ hard to speak for tongue-tanglement reasons. Reading aloud in front of some kind of audience is better for the realization that some poems are challenging for psychological reasons.

Do recordings really help with this? I'm less sure than Bill is. Making a recording forces repeated readings and so helps one get the timing right, but practicing solo would do that too. And a lot of things about making a recording, I find, are so different from the experience of live reading that I'm not sure they help.

For example, for the recording, it doesn't matter if the mic hangs on a boom and obscures my face with a big pop screen; we do that if we need to in order to get the plosives and lip-smacks out. I can't have that at a live reading.

And recording doesn't make me practice eye contact and gesture.

And recording, which is so dependent on a specific mic, teaches nothing about making the amount of sound one needs for an unamplified room. Getting no chance to pretest the actual space is the toughest problem, IMO, and the biggest contributor to the problem lots of people have named: being loud enough.

(There is such a thing as being too loud, just as there is such a thing as overperforming, as Alicia says. One overamplified, ranting slam performer in a very, very live auditorium sent me running for the exits in two poems. But it's rare.)

So an actual practice audience would still be the best thing. I'm still searching for an open mic series that doesn't ask me to frequent bars in the small hours of Saturday nights when I need to be in a choir loft at 9 am on Sunday.

[Lance Levens]

Interesting that at the rap and slam events I've attended the performers rarely read their stuff. I saw Galway Kinell recite his work without a text and folks in the audience, who brought his books, would chime in if he slipped up. I would love to be able to do that, but I'm too lazy.

On a related note I recently heard the CD that accompanies the 8th ed. of the Norton Anthology. I don't know how many of you have ever heard the recording of Yeats reading "Innisfree". If you haven't, you owe it to yourself. It's scratchy, but it is astounding. The man extends each open vowel as if the poem were little more than a vowel song.

[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Lance Levens

. I don't know how many of you have ever heard the recording of Yeats reading "Innisfree". If you haven't, you owe it to yourself. It's scratchy, but it is astounding. The man extends each open vowel as if the poem were little more than a vowel song.

It's available here, and in a few other versions. It's almost as if it comes from another world. But be forewarned: "Did not the poet sing it with such airs / That one believed he had a sword upstairs..."

Thanks,

Bill

[Lance Levens]

Thanks, Bill. I was just on Poetry Archive listening to James Fenton.
And you're right: Yeats sounds as if he's speaking from another world.
He's trying, it seems, to sing, but he doesn't want to bother with a melody.

[Maryann Corbett]

Here's another editor who listens to a lot of recorded poems: Didi Menendez interviewed at Voice Alpha. She agrees with the CPR folks, it seems to me.

[Lance Levens]

Maryann

I think I agree with Didi Mendez: many poets do a lackluster job with their own work aloud. As I said above I've just finished listening to Norton's CD
anthology and quite a few of the readings are flat. When actors are called in (Ian McKellen, Ossie Davis, Julie Harris) the texts come alive.
But Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur et al. are rather tame. Sylvia Plath, on the other hand, is downright scary.

Mendez argues that poets need to spend more time with their poems. Where to pause, comma? colon? What about between stanzas? Actors labor long and hard to learn how a line should be delivered.

[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Lance Levens

But Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur et al. are rather tame.

Agreed on the last two. And yet, Ginsberg gets them rolling in the aisles as he moves through America: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetrya...do?poetId=1547

Thanks,

Bill