Andrew Latimer: On Listening to the Poets

William Letford performs his poetry

It looks well on the page, but never / well enough - Basil Bunting, Brigflatts

Pound believed in an ‘absolute rhythm’, writing that ‘a man’s rhythm must be interpretative, it will therefore be, in the end, his own, uncounterfeiting, uncounterfeitable’*. For all his proselytising about ‘how’ to write, this is a remarkably democratic statement. It implies that each poet, if competent, will bring their own unique sense of rhythm to the art of writing - and importantly, reading poetry. Pound’s natural rhythm was something like that of a jazz drummer.  It worked around metrical regularity, if there was any, and was constantly altering and reworking itself, as  a ‘4:4 time signature is used as the basis for elaborate improvisation’.**

This is best heard on the 1939 Harvard Variorum recordings, available at PennSound. His odd phrasing, eccentric sense of rhythm and faux-Yeatsian accent can be a challenge to the listener, at first. The Cantos, with their fragmentary approach to voice and identity, could quite easily become cacophonous when read out. Pound, in the Harvard recordings, uses his jazz-drummer sense of rhythm to overcome these gaps in persona and changes in style; working interpretatively. It is this that makes his rhythm ‘absolute’.  His voice rises high and quavering in the middle of the phrase, dragging its many personae upwards and ends in that uncounterfeitably Poundian way, with a descent into the dulcet, lower registers of the voice.

In a poem such as ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, this delivery can be crucial. With his up-and-down style of almost-singing, the bitingly ironic last lines of each verse are sometimes reduced to a barely audible mutter. Clarity is sacrificed for the sake of performance. This, it could be argued, adds another voice to the poem, another speaker on top of the already slippery narrator.

Also available at PennSound are the recordings of Wallace Stevens. Some of these readings are remarkably at odds with our experience of reading the poems. Stevens has a habit of dividing each line into three distinct breaths: ‘She sang || beyond the genius || of the sea’.  The result is not an effortless performance, but something more in line with a large man out of breath climbing a flight of stairs. Many of his poems were written on his way to work and these recordings have something of that long walk about them. Stevens’s voice does not respond interpretatively to a line of poetry, but then his is not really a poetry of the voice but instead a poetry ‘of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice’. Stevens’s rhythm is perhaps best heard on the page.

*

Two Carcanet poets, Oli Hazzard and William Letford take full advantage of the extra dimension a poetry reading can add to their work. Hazzard’s delivery of his poem ‘A Few Precepts’ (see above) is very dry, and deliberately so. He mimics the sound and cadence a voice has when we are not really listening. Reading his poem in this way, Hazzard downplays the absurdist tricks he is playing with language and as a result is able to make advice such as ‘Be prepared to eat shit / sandwiches’ sound plausible, even ordinary. The text of the poem is full of tactically placed line-breaks which, in his reading, Hazzard motors through.  It takes time and skill to bend language out of shape the way he does in this poem, but it takes an ‘absolute rhythm’ to put it back together again and make it sound like the speech we use every day.

William Letford’s method appears to be the reverse of Hazzard’s. He moves from the ordinary to the extraordinary, refreshing the sound of everyday speech with an ‘uncounterfeiting’ delivery.  There is something distantly familiar about the starts, stops, ‘chuff’s’ and ‘woof’s’ in his reading of the poem ‘Thurs hunnurs a burds oan the roofs’. By foregrounding the absurd and withholding the normal, he is able to take the listener on a tour of the latent rhythms of common speech. It is a trick of perspectives, and one that works particularly well in Scots - being different, but so close to English. The effect is something like that of hearing a foreign language, but Letford’s skill is to remain close to the English - without ever straying too far - improvising around ordinary speech.

Despite all this, most poetry is still a majoritively textual art form, and should remain so. Poetry readings are interesting as supplements to the printed poems. Occasionally, however, a poet will read their work in such a way as to enliven it, and when this happens poetry readings can have a similar effect to good criticism. They can change a poem (without adding to it) by discovering something already latent in the text; something like the poet’s ‘absolute rhythm’.


*Ezra Pound, ‘Credo’, in A Century of Poetry Review, ed. Fiona Sampson  (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2009)  p. 10
**Humphrey Carpenter,  A Serious Character (London: Faber & Faber, 1988) p. 387

Andrew Latimer, Carcanet Intern

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Carcanet Poetry Night, 6th March 2013
Oli Hazzard will be reading alongside Jane Yeh and Caroline Bird at the Carcanet Poetry Night at Dulwich Bookshop, on Wednesday 6th March. Click here to find out more and book tickets.