ON READING POETRY

VERSE - OR WORSE.

I was invited to a poetry reading recently. To more than one, in fact. It seems to be the season – or Something Going Round, like the ‘flu.

Anyone who reads these pieces will know how I delight in the human voice raised in rapture. Singers come first but I’ve always had a soft spot for a great voice reading anything aloud. Laurence Olivier and Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?, of course. But Orson Welles snarling “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” or Will Geer reciting Whitman to the greater glory of Levi’s jeans? Why not?

I could always speak well enough, but one has to be born with a voice like those. At sixteen, I tried for a job as a radio announcer. The assessors agreed I could pronounce well enough, but the voice… They offered me a job as a trainee producer. I turned it down. Even then, I knew that, if you weren’t in front of the microphone, you were Little People.

Fortunately I fell in with the BBC when I moved to England, and some kindly professionals took me in hand. I might never sound like the man behind the cigarette ads – “When only the best will do – and isn’t that all the time?” – but they could at least teach me the tricks of his trade.

Mostly those consist of exaggeration. Speaking to be listened to is not conversation; it’s performance. You don’t talk; you declaim. What Alexander Pope said of writing, that “true ease comes from art, not chance/As those move easiest who have learned to dance,” goes double for the public voice. My admiration is boundless for the people who do the Audible versions of my books. I tried it once. Never again.

When it comes to poetry readings, I’m one of the walking wounded. I even survived, barely, the brief fad for poetry read to jazz. Think of tin cans emptied down a stone staircase while someone bawls extracts from the labels.

Paradoxically, the best poets are often the worst readers of their work. T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden sounded as if they were reciting laundry lists, and what Clive James called Dylan Thomas’s “parsonical bray” wore down even the most enthusiastic admirers. As for Ginsberg readng Howl….. Peter Shaffer got in right in Amadeus with his portrait of Mozart as a cackling adolescent who couldn’t possibly have written such great music. The artist is not the art.

I wish poetry could sound in real life as it does in my mind, but that’s seldom the case. I rely instead on the impassioned amateur, to whom I leave the last word. Could Hart Crane have read his work better than this?