Poetry On Audio

Listening to "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge."

W. B. Yeats (File Photo)

This issue of Book World marks the 10th anniversary not only of the "Poet's Choice" column but also of National Poetry Month itself. It was inaugurated by the American Academy of Poets, which hoped to lessen the effect of T.S. Eliot's having dubbed April "the cruelest month." The Academy is generous with offerings for those of us who would like to listen to poets giving voice to their own creations. The Academy's excellent Web site (www.poets.org) incorporates audio clips drawn from its archives, while full readings by more than 60 poets are available on CD at $12 each from the Poetry Store (www.poets.org/store). This month's audio events include the launching of poetry podcasts, as well as the publication of the Academy's "Audio Archive Anthology, Volume III" ($12), which includes more than 20 poets reading from their own works in recordings made over the last 50 years. The anthology's selection is diverse, to say the least, encompassing Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Anthony Hecht and Robert Pinsky, to mention only a few.

Voices of the Past

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Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work, 1888-2006 (Shout! Factory, 5 hours, 4 CDs, $48.98, www.shoutfactory.com) begins with Alfred, Lord Tennyson whaling away at "The Charge of the Light Brigade" on one of Edison's wax cylinders. It tumbles along sounding like hoofbeats, firing off volleys of static, while in the midst of the fray we hear Tennyson chanting something like, "Half a leg, Half a leg,/Half a leg onward,/All with the bully of death. . . ." The bellicose stylus of circa 1890 seems to have intruded its own formulations, but you can still hear and marvel at the pompous cadence with which the great man delivers the goods. Robert Browning, up next, pits himself against an even more alarming racket and is "tebbly sorry" that he "cawn't remembah" something or other. Then comes Walt Whitman. His old-fashioned American accent and slightly hammy manner are oddly reminiscent of Oliver Hardy, while his stirring words from "America," are set against the chug of what sounds like a mighty steam engine.

With William Butler Yeats, recording quality achieves the relative clarity of the 1930s. Known for his incantatory delivery and criticized for it, Yeats seems a little put out, saying that the poems he will read gave him "a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse . . . and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose." That's for sure: He spares no tremolo or Celtic sonority in bringing forth from the inner oracle "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" and "The Song of the Old Mother."

With the passage of years, the poets begin to climb down off their high bardic horses, and a conversational mode of uttering poetry begins to prevail -- well, not with Dylan Thomas, perhaps, or Allen Ginsberg, or Lawrence Ferlinghetti on "Underwear," or Theodore Roethke, who sounds as if he'd like to pop someone in the kisser, or John Berryman, who is scary and might be on the outside of a couple of shots. Some of the modern poets are quietly conversational. A good deal of noise enters the picture as we enter the 1980s and people start carrying on with musical accompaniment. Anne Waldman, who sings, makes a big rumpus; Carl Hancock Rux has a whole band and chorus. Juan Felipe Herrera, though accompanied by a guitar, is quiet and eloquent.

Listening to the voices of these characters is endlessly absorbing. Ezra Pound actually does sound a bit crazy and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) a little upset. Gertrude Stein's voice is determined and genteel -- in that order -- delivering no-nonsense nonsense that you wouldn't want to question to her face. Edna St. Vincent Millay sounds happy and high-stepping when she announces that "We were very tired./We were very merry." Elizabeth Bishop has a fragile voice, while her friend Robert Lowell's is a little querulous.

There are innumerable small revelations in the manner in which the poets speak their own words, sometimes in an intensifying of sensation, as when Seamus Heaney says "warm thick slobber of frogspawn" in "The Death of a Naturalist" or, in an unexpected stress or lack of it, as when James Weldon Johnson reads "The Creation." The passages that tell of God's astonishing deeds come out in a great voice, but when God says to himself, "That's good!," it is with an air of quiet satisfaction rather than triumph -- as one would expect from a being who, "toiling over a lump of clay" to create man, is "like a mammy bending over her baby."

That Beautiful Thing

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According to Mary Oliver, a "poem is meant to be given away, best of all by the spoken presentation of it; then the work is complete." To this end, she has come up with "At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver" (Beacon Press, 1 hour, 1 CD, $19.95, www.beacon.org ), her first-ever recording. The CD is housed in an elegant little cloth-bound book that comes with a short essay and a yellow satin ribbon to mark your place if you're a very slow reader. Oliver reads 40 poems, all about nature and its wonderful creatures, in a sweet, neat, compact voice. "The ear bone," she says in "Bone," "is the portion that lasts longest/in any of us. . . ." This little collection, resonant with her voice, is a tribute to it. ·

Katherine A. Powers, who regularly reviews audio books for Book World, writes a literary column for the Boston Globe.