This holiday season is
a rich one if you're looking for a gift for a poetry
fan. New and interesting titles abound, but my
recommendations this year ignore nearly all of them.
Indeed, this year's list is barely concerned with
books of poetry at all. Instead, I offer this guide to
audio recordings of poets and poetry. And why not?
Poems (some more than others) deserve to be heard as
well as read on the page. This year, give the gift of
sound.
Released barely two
months ago, one collection of recordings has quickly
become indispensable: Poetry Speaks (SourceBooks
Media Fusion, $49.95). This three-CD set offers
readings by Tennyson (speaking into Thomas Edison's
newly invented sound-recording cylinder), other
19th-century lights (Robert Browning, Walt Whitman),
and 39 others, from Yeats, Frost, and Sandburg to
Pound, Ransom, and Hughes (Langston), from Louis
MacNeice, Thomas, and Bishop to Ginsburg, Sexton, and
Plath.
Two examples will have
to suffice. It is difficult to convey what a treat it
is to listen to Yeats' oddly flat, rhythmic readings,
which he explains (borrowing from William Morris) by
saying: "It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble
to get into verse the poems that I am going to read.
And that is why I will not read them as if they were
prose." At the opposite end of the emotional
spectrum, Sylvia Plath's searing recitation of
"Daddy" is nothing less than devastating.
Text holds bonus
poems
All of the poems on
the CDs, and more as well, are contained in the large
book that accompanies the recordings. For each poet,
there is a brief biographical sketch, followed by an
appreciation offered by a modern writer. Some of the
pairings, at least in retrospect, are obvious but
still pleasurable (Galway Kinnell/Whitman, Seamus
Heaney/Yeats, Richard Wilbur/Frost, Billy
Collins/Ogden Nash) while others surprise and delight
(Rafael Campo/H.D., Mary Jo Salter/Philip Larkin). To
borrow from David Lehman's essay on Frank O'Hara, this
collection "can fill an otherwise sane citizen
with the sudden overwhelming urge to be a poet."
Less of an
entertainment, but equally inspiring, are the lectures
by Willard Spiegelman, How to Read and
Understand Poetry (The Teaching Company,
$129.95 [audio] or $199.95 [video]. Part of The Great
Courses on Tape series, these 24 lectures offer sharp
insights into poetry's "techniques, patterns,
habits, and genres," as Dr. Spiegelman says in
the course guidebook. He charts the course of
individual poems, and poetry itself, across a vast
emotional and political canvas but never loses sight
of the intimate relationships between the poet and the
page and between the words and the reader.
Dr. Spiegelman's close
readings of more than 100 poems are particularly
instructive and bear repeated listening to capture the
cumulative effect of his comments. The price for these
tapes is steep, but The Teaching Company frequently
offers sales through its website. I paid less than 50
percent of the list price, but after listening to
these tapes, full price would have been worth it.
Nearly all of the poems analyzed by Dr. Spiegelman can
be found in The Norton Anthology of Poetry (4th
edition) (W.W. Norton, $56.80 paperback), which no
personal library should be without.
Voicing the Bard
I am equally fond of
Helen Vendler's Poems, Poets, Poetry: An
Introduction and Anthology, which – like Dr.
Spiegelman's taped lectures – rewards return visits
to its pages. There is no need to run out today to
search for a copy: A second edition will be published
by Bedford/St. Martin's ($47.60, paperback) next
month. Meanwhile, consider Dr. Vendler's The Art
of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Belknap/Harvard,
$35). Although it is available in paperback for half
the price of the hardbound edition, the latter
includes a CD recording of Dr. Vendler reading 65 of
the 154 sonnets that are lovingly and painstakingly
analyzed in the book. She is a skilled reader, and the
music of these sonnets shines through her renditions,
which complement her close textual analyses. In both
media, her performances illuminate these sonnets and
make them fresh.
Some years ago,
William Harmon published the 100 most-anthologized
poems and updated the list in 1998: The Classic
Hundred Poems: All-Time Favorites (Columbia
University Press, $17.50 paperback). The audiotape
($29.95), CD ($39.95), and CD-ROM ($175, multimedia)
versions were issued the same year and are still
available. There are 17 readers – actors, an editor,
poets (including James Merrill, Rita Dove, and Paul
Muldoon) – whose readings are simply superb.
Poets' voices
Finally, Caedmon (a
division of HarperCollins) offers a collection of
audio recordings – most digitally remastered – of
poets reading their works. The Frost readings, as one
example, fill two audiocassettes and play for 100
minutes. For fans of the individual poets included in
this series, this is definitely the way to go.
Tom Mayo, an
associate professor of law at Southern Methodist
University, teaches "Law, Literature &
Medicine" at the law school and at the University
of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas.
