Product Review, Poetry on Record
Product Review
Poetry on Record
98 poets read their work
1888-2006
Compiled and Produced by Rebekah Presson Mosby
For
Shoutfactory.com
List Price $49.98
Available for purchase
Click here to go to shoutfactory.
Click here to go to audiobooksonline.
Click here to go to amazon.com.
Hear samples at
Click here to go to Robert Frost.
Click here to go to Dorothy Parker.
Click here to go to Langston Hughes.
Click here to go to Charles Bukowski.
Click here to go to Gary Snyder.
Click here to go to Elizabeth Alexander.
LetGÇÖs start out by saying this is a wonderful historical collection. I believe that is what it set out to be and that is what it is. ItGÇÖs delightful. It contains 4 completely full CDs of complete poems and fragments recorded by the poets themselves dating back to wax cylinder recordings in the 19th century right up to poets in the studio today using the best contemporary recording equipment. On the scale of historical panorama, it is very successful. During 20 years in the high school English classroom, I would have loved to have had a collection like this to use. But letGÇÖs be sure we donGÇÖt over ascribe the value of these recordings. As with any anthology, I think the editorGÇÖs choices do a lot to shape the casual listenerGÇÖs perception of what poetry is and how it should be rendered. On that mark, this collection is missing somethingGÇôthe passion of real performance.
Even before that, I want to talk about packaging a little. ItGÇÖs a nice packageGÇôa book-like portfolio for the four CDs packaged with a thin perfect bound book (which might be a little juvenile for my tastes) all inside a nice pasteboard slipcover. It will look cool on the bookshelf or the CD shelf. But the good looking presentation of these four discs in the book structure has three flaws: 1) You have to take out disc one to get to disc two and you have to take out disc three to get to disc four. I can live with that. ItGÇÖs not hugely inconvenient, but you do increase the chances of scratching a disc by handling it too much, especially when you only have one hand left to get the second disc out. As I said, not a huge issue. Just be careful. But 2) The inside of the book is built up with pressed cardboard. That material leaves fuzzy fibers on the discs which should be removed before you slip them into your player. ItGÇÖs not just a little dust, it's a good bunch of paper fuzz. And 3) The rubber holders that insert into the spindle hole is tough to get to grip on the disc when you put them into the holder and even harder to get to let go when removing the discs from the holder. I actually thought I might crack disc four getting it out of the package.
This is a truly amazing collection of some of the finest poems composed in the English language in the last century and a half. But letGÇÖs be sure we understand that many poets are not very good at performing their own poems. Poets, sadly, quite often, labor under the delusion that the words alone will carry the emotional load for the composition. And when they are on the page, and the reader can go back over the words as often as s/he chooses, they do. But when a poem becomes a living thing, hanging as vibrations in the air between the lips of the poet and the ears of the audience, it is a quite different matter. If these poets were contemporary Slammers, most of them would be lucky to walk out of the Green Mill on a Sunday night with a pocket full of 8sGǪand some would be sadly disappointed in their 6s and 7s. Sad to say, but Alfred Lord Tennyson might not score that high. That is not to say they the poems are bad. It is to say that the verbal presentation of these excellent poems is weak at best, sometimes boring at worst. And they are accompanied by common mistakes of presentation that still bother poets on the stage. Anecdotally, Yeats at one point spends over two minutes introducing The Lake Isle of Innisfree which is only one minute and ten seconds long.
Let me tell you about my favorite pieces on these discs. There are some glorious moments.
On Disc One, the first hint that some poet has connection to a sense of drama is James Weldon JohnsonGÇÖs The Creation. There are clear performance qualities, including changes in voice and diction when he is characterizing the voice of God. (Of course, a squeaking tape reel mars the recording, but it does lend some common truthfulness to the track.) I also get a kick out of Carl Sandburg. He sounds a lot like Utah Philips. I shouldnGÇÖt be too surprised about that. There are low points: ee cummings sounds like the driest, dustiest academic you can imagine and Sterling Brown somehow sucks all the emotion out of a poem about the wretched conditions in which newly captured slaves found themselves. I donGÇÖt know how it is possible to do that. Dorothy Parker provides a little humor and some vocal variety and life. Elizabeth Bishop wrote and reads what I regard as one of the ten best poems of the Century in The Fish, but she reads it like a housewife who is trying to get this out of the way so she can get back to her laundry. The best performance work on Disc One is Theodore Roethke. Both I Knew a Woman, and Elegy for Jane were very lively and I think Roethke still believed in the messages and the poems. Then again, I might simply be biased in favor of my fellow Michigander.
At the beginning of Disc Two, the listener gets a sense that things might be getting better. But, if they are, it is only marginally. In John BerrymanGÇÖs, The Lay of Ike, I at least get a sense of his indignation. Dylan Thomas brings us his perfect diction (even though history teaches us it is highly practiced to disguise the effect of the Scotch). But finally, Gwendolyn Brooks (of course, she, like Sandburg, is from Chicago and Chicago is hugely known these days as the birthplace Poetry Slam and an ethic of really performing poems) does a delightful rendition of The Mother. One of the most disappointing moments is when Lawrence Ferlinghetti sounds like an old guy doing a cold reading of a script where he is supposed to (but fails to) sound like a beatnik. Bukowski does a little better but he is still young enough to have not developed his trademark whiskey voice and subsequent dourness of attitude yet. The absolute BEST POEM OF THE COLLECTION turns up in Hayden CarruthGÇÖs, Ray. Essentially it is a story of an old man crying late at night over pie and the death of Raymond Carver. Powerful poetry and a wonderfully sensitive performance. Later, Jack Kerouac knows the appeal of beat poetry in front of a single jazz sax. Having heard Ginsberg read several times, IGÇÖm disappointed in this performance of America where he almost sounds embarrassed to say GÇ£go fuck yourself with your atom bombGÇ¥ in public. Galway KinnellGÇÖs work is wonderful if for no other reason than to listen to his deep bass voice. And the disc ends with Anne SextonGÇÖs genuinely expressed and appreciated sadness.
Disc Three continues the beat. It is full of some of the best poems ever written. I consider Adrienne RichGÇÖs Diving Into the Wreck one of the finest of the modern era. But her reading of it deserves no more than a B- in any college oral interp class. Etheridge Knight, however, in The Idea of Ancestry does a credible job. Sylvia Plath doesnGÇÖt seem to hate Daddy but she has some authentic disdain. And then Amiri Baraka gives us that AHA! Moment when he performs all three of his poems in a way that makes us feel like his poems are full color and three dimensional and everyone elseGÇÖs are black and white photographs. We donGÇÖt feel anything like that again for five more poems until Lucille Clifton delivers her poems with more inflection, like animated conversation. Charles Simic should be read by every student of poetry. I love his words. I love his accent. His ironic handling of language and dramatic situation is always understated. Unfortunately, so is his handling of performance. Seamus Heany, with that glorious command of language and a wonderful Irish accent is listenable. But he could learn to dance more. Al Young knows he is performing a script, even pronouncing GÇ£theGÇ¥ as GÇ£theeGÇ¥ and GÇ£aGÇ¥ as GÇ£ay.GÇ¥ The last poem on the disc is Erica JongGÇÖs Ode to My Shoes. She says the same thing at least three times in introducing the piece. There is so much these poets could learn about performance if they wanted to.
Disc Four is, probably because it contains the newest poems, the oddest collection of work. But it is especially obvious how flat and somnambulant these poets sound because of the contrast of a few pieces. The disc begins with Sharon Olds and James Tate reading the same way poets have read for a hundred years. Lines inexplicably rise at the end and all the rest is delivered as flat and dead as possible. In a writing class they would receive perfect A+s but in a performance class, if they didnGÇÖt skip and if they did all their homework, IGÇÖd award them with Cs and wish them well. Pedro Pietri, whom I have heard before, is brilliant, but even he, although he is capable of much more, would earn no better than a B- on this performance. Then comes the first of four anomalous poems. Anne Waldman delivers Uh Oh Plutonium in front of her band. It makes her sound like Devo meets the Beatniks. Great fun, great energy, but it doesnGÇÖt seem to fit this collection. (It is, however, one of about ten poems that makes this collection worth the purchase price.) It is followed by Adrian LouisGÇÖ rage against alcoholism but all the rage is smothered beneath dusty pillows and feather ticks. Along comes Juan Felipe Herrara who is accompanied by a guitar and the confluence of the word and music sparks interest again. Joy Haro, a few cuts later is performing something like pseudo-folk music too. And that is followed later by Carl Hancock Rux in front of something like a blues band. Each of these pieces has heart because the musicality forces real vocal interpretation of the words, exactly what is missing in most of the other performances.
So, all totaled, itGÇÖs a collection of great poems dating back to the time of Jack the Ripper, but mostly delivered with all the passion of the rest of the Elizabethan age.
Poetry has learned something in the latter part of the 20th Century. It has learned to stand on the stage and command an audience to pay attention to it, to run with it in the groove of its living blood, to breathe heavily with it at the end of the performance. This collection mostly doesnGÇÖt do that. Disc Four would have benefited immensely from inclusion of a liberal sprinkling of contemporary performance poets. It would have benefited from some war poems, or anti-war poems. It would have benefited from some political poems and some sex poems. And where-oh-where are the hip-hop poems? See what I mean about how the editorGÇÖs values are reflected in the anthology?
So, bottom line: who should buy this collection? Everyone who is even mildly interested in the history of poetry. It is that important historically. But buy with this caveatGǪit wasnGÇÖt called spoken word back then for a reason.
Steve Marsh
Poetry on Record
98 poets read their work
1888-2006
Compiled and Produced by Rebekah Presson Mosby
For
Shoutfactory.com
List Price $49.98
Available for purchase
Click here to go to shoutfactory.
Click here to go to audiobooksonline.
Click here to go to amazon.com.
Hear samples at
Click here to go to Robert Frost.
Click here to go to Dorothy Parker.
Click here to go to Langston Hughes.
Click here to go to Charles Bukowski.
Click here to go to Gary Snyder.
Click here to go to Elizabeth Alexander.
LetGÇÖs start out by saying this is a wonderful historical collection. I believe that is what it set out to be and that is what it is. ItGÇÖs delightful. It contains 4 completely full CDs of complete poems and fragments recorded by the poets themselves dating back to wax cylinder recordings in the 19th century right up to poets in the studio today using the best contemporary recording equipment. On the scale of historical panorama, it is very successful. During 20 years in the high school English classroom, I would have loved to have had a collection like this to use. But letGÇÖs be sure we donGÇÖt over ascribe the value of these recordings. As with any anthology, I think the editorGÇÖs choices do a lot to shape the casual listenerGÇÖs perception of what poetry is and how it should be rendered. On that mark, this collection is missing somethingGÇôthe passion of real performance.
Even before that, I want to talk about packaging a little. ItGÇÖs a nice packageGÇôa book-like portfolio for the four CDs packaged with a thin perfect bound book (which might be a little juvenile for my tastes) all inside a nice pasteboard slipcover. It will look cool on the bookshelf or the CD shelf. But the good looking presentation of these four discs in the book structure has three flaws: 1) You have to take out disc one to get to disc two and you have to take out disc three to get to disc four. I can live with that. ItGÇÖs not hugely inconvenient, but you do increase the chances of scratching a disc by handling it too much, especially when you only have one hand left to get the second disc out. As I said, not a huge issue. Just be careful. But 2) The inside of the book is built up with pressed cardboard. That material leaves fuzzy fibers on the discs which should be removed before you slip them into your player. ItGÇÖs not just a little dust, it's a good bunch of paper fuzz. And 3) The rubber holders that insert into the spindle hole is tough to get to grip on the disc when you put them into the holder and even harder to get to let go when removing the discs from the holder. I actually thought I might crack disc four getting it out of the package.
This is a truly amazing collection of some of the finest poems composed in the English language in the last century and a half. But letGÇÖs be sure we understand that many poets are not very good at performing their own poems. Poets, sadly, quite often, labor under the delusion that the words alone will carry the emotional load for the composition. And when they are on the page, and the reader can go back over the words as often as s/he chooses, they do. But when a poem becomes a living thing, hanging as vibrations in the air between the lips of the poet and the ears of the audience, it is a quite different matter. If these poets were contemporary Slammers, most of them would be lucky to walk out of the Green Mill on a Sunday night with a pocket full of 8sGǪand some would be sadly disappointed in their 6s and 7s. Sad to say, but Alfred Lord Tennyson might not score that high. That is not to say they the poems are bad. It is to say that the verbal presentation of these excellent poems is weak at best, sometimes boring at worst. And they are accompanied by common mistakes of presentation that still bother poets on the stage. Anecdotally, Yeats at one point spends over two minutes introducing The Lake Isle of Innisfree which is only one minute and ten seconds long.
Let me tell you about my favorite pieces on these discs. There are some glorious moments.
On Disc One, the first hint that some poet has connection to a sense of drama is James Weldon JohnsonGÇÖs The Creation. There are clear performance qualities, including changes in voice and diction when he is characterizing the voice of God. (Of course, a squeaking tape reel mars the recording, but it does lend some common truthfulness to the track.) I also get a kick out of Carl Sandburg. He sounds a lot like Utah Philips. I shouldnGÇÖt be too surprised about that. There are low points: ee cummings sounds like the driest, dustiest academic you can imagine and Sterling Brown somehow sucks all the emotion out of a poem about the wretched conditions in which newly captured slaves found themselves. I donGÇÖt know how it is possible to do that. Dorothy Parker provides a little humor and some vocal variety and life. Elizabeth Bishop wrote and reads what I regard as one of the ten best poems of the Century in The Fish, but she reads it like a housewife who is trying to get this out of the way so she can get back to her laundry. The best performance work on Disc One is Theodore Roethke. Both I Knew a Woman, and Elegy for Jane were very lively and I think Roethke still believed in the messages and the poems. Then again, I might simply be biased in favor of my fellow Michigander.
At the beginning of Disc Two, the listener gets a sense that things might be getting better. But, if they are, it is only marginally. In John BerrymanGÇÖs, The Lay of Ike, I at least get a sense of his indignation. Dylan Thomas brings us his perfect diction (even though history teaches us it is highly practiced to disguise the effect of the Scotch). But finally, Gwendolyn Brooks (of course, she, like Sandburg, is from Chicago and Chicago is hugely known these days as the birthplace Poetry Slam and an ethic of really performing poems) does a delightful rendition of The Mother. One of the most disappointing moments is when Lawrence Ferlinghetti sounds like an old guy doing a cold reading of a script where he is supposed to (but fails to) sound like a beatnik. Bukowski does a little better but he is still young enough to have not developed his trademark whiskey voice and subsequent dourness of attitude yet. The absolute BEST POEM OF THE COLLECTION turns up in Hayden CarruthGÇÖs, Ray. Essentially it is a story of an old man crying late at night over pie and the death of Raymond Carver. Powerful poetry and a wonderfully sensitive performance. Later, Jack Kerouac knows the appeal of beat poetry in front of a single jazz sax. Having heard Ginsberg read several times, IGÇÖm disappointed in this performance of America where he almost sounds embarrassed to say GÇ£go fuck yourself with your atom bombGÇ¥ in public. Galway KinnellGÇÖs work is wonderful if for no other reason than to listen to his deep bass voice. And the disc ends with Anne SextonGÇÖs genuinely expressed and appreciated sadness.
Disc Three continues the beat. It is full of some of the best poems ever written. I consider Adrienne RichGÇÖs Diving Into the Wreck one of the finest of the modern era. But her reading of it deserves no more than a B- in any college oral interp class. Etheridge Knight, however, in The Idea of Ancestry does a credible job. Sylvia Plath doesnGÇÖt seem to hate Daddy but she has some authentic disdain. And then Amiri Baraka gives us that AHA! Moment when he performs all three of his poems in a way that makes us feel like his poems are full color and three dimensional and everyone elseGÇÖs are black and white photographs. We donGÇÖt feel anything like that again for five more poems until Lucille Clifton delivers her poems with more inflection, like animated conversation. Charles Simic should be read by every student of poetry. I love his words. I love his accent. His ironic handling of language and dramatic situation is always understated. Unfortunately, so is his handling of performance. Seamus Heany, with that glorious command of language and a wonderful Irish accent is listenable. But he could learn to dance more. Al Young knows he is performing a script, even pronouncing GÇ£theGÇ¥ as GÇ£theeGÇ¥ and GÇ£aGÇ¥ as GÇ£ay.GÇ¥ The last poem on the disc is Erica JongGÇÖs Ode to My Shoes. She says the same thing at least three times in introducing the piece. There is so much these poets could learn about performance if they wanted to.
Disc Four is, probably because it contains the newest poems, the oddest collection of work. But it is especially obvious how flat and somnambulant these poets sound because of the contrast of a few pieces. The disc begins with Sharon Olds and James Tate reading the same way poets have read for a hundred years. Lines inexplicably rise at the end and all the rest is delivered as flat and dead as possible. In a writing class they would receive perfect A+s but in a performance class, if they didnGÇÖt skip and if they did all their homework, IGÇÖd award them with Cs and wish them well. Pedro Pietri, whom I have heard before, is brilliant, but even he, although he is capable of much more, would earn no better than a B- on this performance. Then comes the first of four anomalous poems. Anne Waldman delivers Uh Oh Plutonium in front of her band. It makes her sound like Devo meets the Beatniks. Great fun, great energy, but it doesnGÇÖt seem to fit this collection. (It is, however, one of about ten poems that makes this collection worth the purchase price.) It is followed by Adrian LouisGÇÖ rage against alcoholism but all the rage is smothered beneath dusty pillows and feather ticks. Along comes Juan Felipe Herrara who is accompanied by a guitar and the confluence of the word and music sparks interest again. Joy Haro, a few cuts later is performing something like pseudo-folk music too. And that is followed later by Carl Hancock Rux in front of something like a blues band. Each of these pieces has heart because the musicality forces real vocal interpretation of the words, exactly what is missing in most of the other performances.
So, all totaled, itGÇÖs a collection of great poems dating back to the time of Jack the Ripper, but mostly delivered with all the passion of the rest of the Elizabethan age.
Poetry has learned something in the latter part of the 20th Century. It has learned to stand on the stage and command an audience to pay attention to it, to run with it in the groove of its living blood, to breathe heavily with it at the end of the performance. This collection mostly doesnGÇÖt do that. Disc Four would have benefited immensely from inclusion of a liberal sprinkling of contemporary performance poets. It would have benefited from some war poems, or anti-war poems. It would have benefited from some political poems and some sex poems. And where-oh-where are the hip-hop poems? See what I mean about how the editorGÇÖs values are reflected in the anthology?
So, bottom line: who should buy this collection? Everyone who is even mildly interested in the history of poetry. It is that important historically. But buy with this caveatGǪit wasnGÇÖt called spoken word back then for a reason.
Steve Marsh
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