On Listening to Poetry

Usually it’s at the beginning of a poetry class. Usually there’s some fumbling around with cords, plugs, outdated or unforeseen technologies—there’s no HDMI, there’s only HDMI. Sometimes there’s static or the volume will go only so high. Students are asked to gather in closer. Maybe they have their books out; maybe they’ve been asked to follow along. At the end, there’s often silence, a hesitation that might hold fascination and confusion. What was that? Usually class moves on. That was just the poet reading. Students are asked to turn to “the text,” often without pausing to consider what they’ve just heard—how reading and performance styles might impact their understanding of what’s on the page in front of them or lead to questions about poetry’s cultural work.

In high school and college, I took classes in which poetry recordings were used this way; I’ve taught classes like that myself. I’ve assumed recordings were self-evidently interesting or important but useful only insofar as they acted as a gateway to the real object of study: the poem on its page or in its book. Poetry classes, particularly introductory classes, tend to marginalize poetry’s history as a performed art and favor training students in textual interpretation (even as contemporary poetry exists vibrantly within digital and online platforms and is thriving through performance practices such as slam, spoken-word, and poet’s theater). Listeners can experience T.S. Eliot’s staid incantation of “Prufrock” or William Carlos Williams’s casual style of address as he reads “The Red Wheelbarrow” but don’t often stop to consider the contrasts between their performances and what those differences might mean. This article explores ways to introduce and teach aspects of 20th-century poetry through audio archives available online: we’ll link to some good examples of readings from the Library of Congress, PennSound, Poetry Center Digital Archive, and the Poetry Foundation. These archives are interesting, important, and useful—not just as opening acts but also as topics of sustained attention and discussion.

When you use recordings to teach poetry, you invite your high school or college students to examine poetry’s responsiveness to cultural debates around emotion, voice, and presence; to technological innovation and change; and to social and political history. Grounding lessons in an audio archive generates opportunities to craft exercises that ask students to engage their own styles of reading, habits of vocalization, and assumptions about performance. Inviting students to consider not just that poets have voices but also that the tones, tempos, and intonations of those voices change over time and within different contexts can open exciting lines of inquiry. Recordings also help students grasp the plurality of poetic meaning as it circulates between text and performance, the way “meaning is extended, complicated, and sometimes transformed by performance,” in Peter Middleton’s words. Finally, poetry reading styles, and poetry readings themselves, are fundamentally linked to specific sites, scenes, socioeconomic realities, and eras. They offer a window into the cultural spaces poetry occupies and how it has done so.

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Though it’s now taken for granted that poets are the primary readers of their own work, this wasn’t always the case. Recitation was the most popular means by which 19th- and early-20th-century audiences absorbed poetry in forums such as classrooms, recitation contests, pageants, and family or community gatherings. Amateur recitation was hugely popular and often linked to civic or patriotic purposes. Audiences were also likely to hear actors or speakers on the lyceum circuit perform poems from memory. Such performers were trained in elocution traditions that emphasized oral skills poets themselves might not have. “Many modernist-era poets were schooled in the presumption that the poet would rarely be the best oral interpreter of her own poetry,” Lesley Wheeler notes, “and that superior recitation required unusual skill and sensitivity in the performer.” After all, poets write, and actors perform.

Scholars such as Wheeler and Middleton, among others, have begun to investigate how reading cultures shifted over the 20th century to our current situation, where poets nearly always—and only—read their own work. Some of this scholarship is quite accessible (there’s a reading list at the end of this article) and can provide useful background information. But recordings and broadcasts can help students hear such trends for themselves. Recordings by H.D., James Weldon Johnson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, or Wallace Stevens may sound strange to students, and that strangeness is precisely what you’ll want them to think through. Which recording you choose isn’t as important as that you ask students to listen closely—and help them understand what they’re listening for. The goal is to enrich and sensitize awareness of how poetry’s sounds and poets’ voices transform over time and to develop language to talk about those changes.

Where to begin? You might ask students to flip through an anthology or read preselected poems out loud and in pairs. As a class, you could discuss in advance the “four features, or vocal gestures” Charles Bernstein declares have special significance for poetry reading: “the cluster of rhythm and tempo (including word duration), the cluster of pitch and intonation (including amplitude), timbre, and accent. The first two of these features can be visually plotted with waveforms; the gestalt of these features contributes to tone.” Tone is the overall effect of variations in tempo, pitch, accent, and timbre (the quality of voice—breathy, smooth, rough). Students likely have some prior knowledge of these terms, and together you can begin drawing connections between musical and speech-based examples. In small groups, can students track the tempos and intonations—can they characterize the timbre, accent, and tone—of their voices or each other’s voices? A shared vocabulary of terms and even adjectives will be especially helpful as you begin to track reading styles across longer periods, such as decades or eras.

How students read poems out loud now will likely differ significantly from how poets read in the past. These differences can initiate productive discussions. And recordings can recast poems students might expect to encounter only in books. A poem such as Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo” all but forces even reluctant readers into singsong; read aloud, the poem’s rollicking rhythms might simply reenact its high-spirited tale. Millay’s performance, however, intimates more clandestine undercurrents. Listen to the link above, and notice how Millay clips and extends certain sound patterns and syncopates where we might expect regular rhythmic beats to fall. Such effects imbue a phrase such as “we had gone back and forth” with seductive possibilities, introducing a kind of intimate irony or ironic intimacy—the listener is invited into the memory, even as its exact contents are coyly withheld—into what might otherwise read as a nursery rhyme. What kind of night has this “we” just had?

Millay’s readings were frequently broadcast over the radio. Her poems are “performance pieces,” Wheeler notes, that destabilize and complicate what can appear to be simple, even artless, subject matter. In tracking and characterizing Millay’s shifts in tones, tempo, and timbre, you can introduce students to some basic ideas about mediation, problems that preoccupied poets dealing with recording, and broadcast technology that distanced writers and their audiences in new ways. What strategies does Millay employ to close the gap between unseen listener and poet? How does the recording re-create and complicate poetry’s situation of intimate address? Millay’s recordings are useful because the expressive conventions underpinning her use of her own voice differ from our own (she was trained in elocution); because Millay recorded her poems many times over the course of her long life, they illuminate how performances challenge the idea that poems have fixed and eternal meanings located “inside” the poem as printed. (See, for example, this poem guide on another Millay poem with a long history of performance, “Renascence.”)

Gertrude Stein’s 1934–35 recordings likewise dramatize differences between page and performance. Stein recorded a selection of her poems for the Contemporary Poets Series, records that were distributed to schools and sold as LPs. Her delivery of poems such as “How She Bowed to her Brother” and “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” foreground the distinct duration of listening. As Brian Reed points out, listeners can’t grasp Stein’s poems as wholes in the way readers can because reading a poem allows comparing distinctive parts and arrangements of text. Listeners can only sit through the unfolding experience of Stein’s voice without knowing in advance where the text is headed.

Stein notes at the beginning of “The Story of How She Bowed to her Brother” (published as “How She Bowed to her Brother”) that the “portrait ... is an example of a new use of periods in which I use periods to break up the story, the line, rather than commas because periods bring a more complete stop.” In the printed text, punctuation and line breaks organize the poem into a column in which clusters of end-stopped fragments alternate with lines comprised of single sentences: “Any long story. Of how she bowed to her brother. / Sometimes not.” In the printed poem, lines rebuke and qualify one another. This is not any story of her bowing but any story of her bowing and “Sometimes not.” In the recording, the emphasis line breaks generate is absent. Stein allegedly wrote the poem about meeting her brother unexpectedly on a Paris street after many years of silence; its halting quality is mimetic of their meeting but also, Stein scholars suggest, an attempt to re-create her brother’s hearing loss. The recording is notable for the way the “envelopes” (or durations) of certain sounds work against the “complete stop” of either periods or line breaks. Sounds stretch into and across Stein’s pauses, which in turn suggests another layer of mimesis. The sounds, like Stein and her brother, can’t help but echo and connect with one another.

Stein’s work is especially useful in getting students to think about listening as an interpretative practice. Performances propose organizational structures distinct from a poem’s appearance on the page. You might have students listen to Stein’s recordings before they read her poems and create visual maps based on what they hear. How are theme and variation produced through rhythm and intonation? How might students represent the many qualities and gradients of Stein’s pauses? These visualizations can provide different access points to Stein’s poetry and help students develop alternative strategies to parsing poems for semantic or paraphrasable meaning.

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Poets in the early and mid-20th century confronted changing audience expectations, shifting performance conventions, and rapidly evolving technologies. Poets were invited to read their own poems more frequently. They were also recording themselves reading their work for record labels such as Caedmon—and poets with leftist political sympathies were being recorded by state agencies—throughout the 1950s and 1960s. If particular voices were becoming valued and valuable to radio and LP sales (as well as government agencies with more nefarious agendas), voice was becoming synonymous with poetry itself. That is, poems were considered to have a voice that was the poet’s job to transmit.

Rather than highlight the oratory skills of performers, a mid-century consensus emerged that readings should draw attention to the contents of poems. Chris Grobe has written about the “prohibition” in contemporary poetry that a poet’s voice should never overpower the poem’s; in most contemporary reading styles, Grobe notes, “the author … is merely the onion-skin flap protecting the poem—the mercifully thin obstruction to poetic meaning and not its conduit.” But a neutral reading—calm, controlled, proceeding from start to finish with no interruptions—is not necessarily natural; rather, such styles have been naturalized. Again, this history has been recorded. Reading at the Poetry Center in 1957, Robert Lowell remarked that ideally poetry should be read “like a pane of glass, that is you don’t add any of your own personality.” Of course, Lowell formulated this insight in one of his many asides to the audience as he developed a style of intimate between-poem patter that is now a hallmark of conventional readings.

What about those readings? Moving from comparing individual poems in print and performance to considering the vast archive of poetry readings may be daunting. There are a few ways to teach the social phenomenon of the poetry reading rather than the reading of a single poem. You might assign students specific events, such as the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965 (where Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley all read), Etheridge Knight’s Poems from Prison reading from Indiana State Prison, the personal tapes of a poet such as Joanne Kyger discussing poetry with Creeley and Greg Hewlett in 1972.

As students listen to these events, ask them to consider the background sounds, the way recordings transmit snags, atmospheric noise, audience reactions. These seeming detriments to “clean” recordings are reminders of the ways in which poetry has reorganized social space and existed in places it otherwise hadn’t before. For example, Knight begins with an account of his reading’s location: “a large, whitewashed brick building that sits near the east wall of the prison in the recreation yard.” On the recording, there’s a loud clang—a door or a gate, a cell block closing?—that uncannily echoes the harsh spatial logic of incarceration. Yet the recording documents moments of communion and community. Knight addresses his audience throughout, inviting them to think about poetry, poets, and prison life together. In a 1985 interview, Knight described the “art of poetry as this trinity” between “the poet-person, the poem and the audience.” For Knight, the audience is part of the poem. About 19 minutes into his reading, he puts it this way: “You know somebody asked me what is poetry. … I’ll tell you what I think poetry is. I think poetry is what happens between me and the sound and you. If what goes down is good, poetry is good. If what goes down between us is bad, then poetry is bad.” Knight’s reading provides a visceral record of poetry’s existence “between” realities and communities then—as now—underrepresented in mainstream and literary culture. Given such recordings, students might generate more holistic and nuanced accounts of poetry’s social presence and effects. Listening to the entirety of Knight’s recording can also help them shape questions about the reading, rather than the book, as one of poetry’s units. Which poems does Knight choose, of his own and of other poets, to read? How does he knit the poems together through shared knowledge and experience of prison life? What do other sounds—the band, audience reactions, even flaws in the tape itself—communicate and contribute to students’ understanding of this event?

Students could also listen to different versions of the same poem, such as the many recordings of Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl”: at Reed College in 1956, in the KPFA Pacifica studio in 1956, at the Big Table Chicago Reading in 1959, at the Vancouver Conference in 1963. Working with one poem that has a rich recording history allows students to engage in comparative and historical listening. Paul Goodman wrote of Ginsberg’s performance of “Howl” circa 1957:

It was a list of imprecations that he began pianissimo and ended with a thunderous fortissimo. The fellows were excited, it was “the greatest.” But I sadly asked Allen just where in either the ideas, the imagery, or the rhythm was the probability for the crescendo; what made it a sequence at all and a sequence to be read just like that. … And yet, during those few minutes they had shared the simple-minded excitement of his speaking in a low voice and gradually increasing to a roar.

Goodman highlights the way performance can extend, complicate, and transform meaning: Ginsberg’s voice wove a list of unrelated complaints into a powerful sequence with its own logic and telos. Goodman’s description is also notable for its use of musical terms—something to add to your class’s shared vocabulary—and its emphasis on audience reaction. The poem’s reception, whether Goodman shared in the excitement or not, turned swearing into symphonic communal experience. But is this true of each recording? What changes and what doesn’t across Ginsberg’s performances? How does a single poem resonate and signify in different contexts?

Or you might ask students to choose a poet with a history of public reading and performance that stretches over decades. Poets such as Creeley, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Adrienne Rich all had long, documented reading careers. Which poems do poets read and reread? Do a poet’s reading and performance styles change significantly from early to mid to late career? Here, you might broaden the definition of envelope (the attack, sustain, and decay of a sound) to include how poets utter individual sounds or words within a given reading and how they do so across decades. This kind of close listening can help students draw general claims from local observations. Instead of starting from a proposition about the meaning of a poem or poet’s work, students gather evidence from close and comparative listening that allows them to formulate some account of changes across the various instances of a poem or appearances of a poet in public performance.

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As you consider how best to navigate and share the resources of the audio archive with your students, remember that reading styles are individual and institutional, guided by a poet’s “personality” and the shifting cultural meanings of “voice.” Your students will likely think some poets are “good” readers and find others “bad” or “boring.” It’s important to ask what’s behind those judgments and how current cultural assumptions, informed by recent styles such as slam poetry, can affect reactions to archival recordings. For example, Raphael Allison divides mid-century poetry reading styles into two strains: there’s the “humanist strain” that flows out of Beat poets such as Ginsberg and emphasizes presence, the presumed ability of the poet’s voice as well as body to authenticate a poem as vatic or oracular transmission, and a “skeptical strain” that undermines the poet’s performance of sincerity through ironic detachment and flat delivery. However, Allison points out that these are not polarities so much as tendencies that end up twisting around and turning into one another. Sincerity in the humanist vein is a kind of performance: Eileen Myles, attending poetry readings in New York City in the early 1970s, declared, “Poetry readings were like early teevee in that everyone had their own little show.” But detachment or “neutrality” can create something akin to religious ritual, making poetry readings the site of potential conversion to poetry’s high art.

Frequently sponsored by schools, public libraries, and bookstores, conventional poetry readings don’t eschew performance but ask listeners to think about performance as any means by which voice and the presence of a speaking body can sculpt, shape, nuance, determine, even redistribute their attention. Marit MacArthur, listening closely to the seemingly neutral reading styles of poets ranging from Natasha Trethewey to Juliana Spahr to Louise Glück, describes a contemporary style of “monotonous incantation” with roots in Presbyterian sermonizing. Privileging the cadence and rhythm of language over and above semantic meaning, such styles can “enthrall” audiences. Lurking within these performances, according to MacArthur, may be potent beliefs “in the enduring significance of literary tradition and the system of higher education that sponsors it.”

Your students don’t need to read articles to understand these distinctions, but Allison, MacArthur, and Myles provide frameworks to work with the abundance of 20th-century reading styles and sites of performance. You might invite your students to consider the profusion of poetry readings in the context of political movements from the 1950s and 1960s. Sit-ins, the occupation of institutional spaces, street protests, and other forms of direct action all sanctioned the political importance of being in public and suggested ideological commitments—and, as Lytle Shaw notes, the politics of poetry readings led to government surveillance of poets and poetry communities. These commitments influenced where poetry occurred as well as how it did so. Reading styles were inflected with political urgency. In this era, too, a few select poets became pseudo-celebrities through extensive reading tours, performances, and media coverage. More were ensconced in creative writing programs and invited to read their work at other institutions. To this day, poets often need to tour and read their poems, sometimes for little to no money, to promote their books. Such conditions continue to govern styles of reading and habits of reception that students might find they share or have strong reactions to. By the end of their work with poetry’s audio archives, these may be responses students can understand as, at least in part, learned associations and expectations. As your students become familiar with the styles and scenes of poetry reading, they also gain awareness of how conventions and expectations around voice and performance shift over time.

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Reading List:

Allison, Raphael. Bodies on the Line: Performance and the Sixties Poetry Reading. Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2014

Bernstein, Charles. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998

Green, Brian. “Now Not Now: Gertrude Stein Speaks.” ESC: English Studies in Canada 33, no. 4 (December 2007)

Grobe, Chris. Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV. New York: NYU Press, 2017

Hayes, Terrance. To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight. Seattle: Wave Books, 2018

Hoffman, Tyler. American Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2011

MacArthur, Marit, “Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies,” PMLA 131, no.1 (2016)

Middleton, Peter. Distant Reading. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2005

Myles, Eileen. “Readings,” in Inferno: A Poet’s Novel. New York: OR Books, 2016

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. Black Chant: Languages of African American Postmodernism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997, and Integral Music: Languages of African-American Innovations. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2004

Perloff, Marjorie and Craig Dworkin. The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009

Shaw, Lytle. Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research. Redwood City, California: Stanford University Press, 2018

Wheeler, Lesley. Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2008