So I go to these readings and that old singsong starts in—half
rapt, half-assed—Thank God for the shining exceptions, the
formed intensities.
DAVID BROMIGE, “Voice // Voicing // Voices”
Strength of vocables: to bind.
EDMOND JABÈS, A Foreigner Carrying in
the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book
I want to consider in general terms the vexing question of whether it is possible to read a poem aloud badly—and of course, its corollary, whether (and under what conditions) it might be possible to read a poem aloud well. On the face of it this looks pretty absurd, since we’ve all been to lifeless readings of leaden parlour-poetry, or have walked out of mumbled (or shouted) performances by drunken readers more attentive to their friends in the audience than to the inept words they are attempting to read.1 If, as Charles Bernstein suggested in a slightly different context, “a poetic reading can be given to any piece of writing” (his emphasis),2 then, plainly, so can an unpoetic. Clearly, the question of what “poetic” and “unpoetic” might mean is crucial, though it remains unstated throughout my discussion, partly because of its great complexity. It is deeply intertwined with the notion of readerly competence, and that notion is under scrutiny, implicitly more often than explicitly, pretty well throughout what follows.
I shall not explicitly consider obviously “bad” readings of the kind I’ve mentioned at all, though it seems to me that the terms good and bad are notoriously up for grabs, and a moment’s reflection will suggest that readings of this sort are perhaps most appropriately to be considered as primarily social rather than “aesthetic” or “literary” occasions. And I want to simplify my discussion by excluding from detailed consideration such (possibly lesser) extremes of apparent readerly incompetence as those of first-year university English courses and the like, where (sometimes) an embarrassed youngster reads aloud to her or his more or less inattentive peers a poem s/he’s never seen before. It may be that such a performance, with its social ineptitudes and attendant miseries, does not constitute a “reading” at all, for it is frequently hesitant and confused, marked by stumblings, mispronunciations, stutterings, and mumblings—or it is delivered at breakneck pace and metronomic regularity with scarcely a pause for breath and scarcely any inflection whatsoever. But anyone who has heard John Cage reading “Mureau,” with its attendant inaudibilities and sudden clarities (as the poem moves into and out of various articulations), or has heard Tom Raworth’s mercurial gallop through a poem like the highly political “Survival” 3 will perhaps suspend judgment. Raworth said after his 1991 reading of part of that sequence in Vancouver that he takes the poems at speed because that’s the only way he can get through them to make sense to the ear and voice; read slowly with the eye, certainly, they present an almost baffling opacity, which seems designed to defeat any attempt at intelligible inflected expressive voicing as speech.
For the moment, however, it is convenient to think of these as special cases, though we should caution ourselves, too, that the sort of reading that is learned in high school and university English courses is also a special case. Or rather, a series of special cases, since it is plain to everyone who has undergone the process that reading practices and performances vary widely from teacher to teacher and room to room as teachers privilege their expert reading. It is equally evident, though, that experienced readers have learned to take the poem slowly and/or repeatedly, paying attention to each word as it combines with others into the sentence, heeding each word as it unfolds to the ear, balancing the play of speech patterns with or against prosodic patterns, following the syntax as the resonances of the work draw forth. What I’m saying, I need hardly add, makes it pretty clear that what I have in mind are more or less conventional poems, not necessarily rhyming or metrical, but certainly recognizable as poems by pretty well any reader, written within a clearly identifiable and familiar poetic tradition. Such poems as a rule have a long history of interpretation, and enjoy what can be loosely referred to as canonical status.
Poetry readings, of course, take place in a great variety of conditions, and the contingencies attendant upon the occasion affect the reading performance itself. It is one thing to hear a text for the first time (and be obliged to cultivate your aural memory), and another to be able to follow that text with the eye (because you bought the poet’s new book on your way into the reading). Texts that are familiar to the audience might well be heard in a more critical frame than would texts that are completely new to the hearers, perhaps because the recital of a familiar poem, as well as the reading occasion itself, affords a kind of comfort food for the spirit. This certainly seems to have been the case at Dylan Thomas’s lucrative public readings in the 1950s, though unquestionably the cult of his personality also helped pack the crowded halls, as did his slight Welsh lilt, which lent the music of his recitation an exotic air. And it is true that, once you’ve heard Thomas reading, his Welsh voice flavors the sound of all of his poems. His readings were very much a Public Occasion and enjoyed a ceremonial and even ritual status. That flavor leaches over into some of his recordings (notably his readings of Shakespeare and Webster).4 As a public reader, Thomas was enormously influential, setting a standard for mellifluous expressiveness that could famously lull the hearer along on the wings of poesy, and it is instructive to compare his readings with those of his chief disciple and imitator, Theodore Marcuse.5
Marcuse, a professional actor, emphasized the expressive while keeping an eye (if that is the right word) on the mellifluous, and it is hard indeed to see why his readings were at all popular. His performances of Keats and Shelley (to crowded performance halls) are blatantly virtuoso. It is extremely difficult to describe his performance of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” at all: the drawn-out vowels and the highly nasalized consonants of the opening, lingering especially (I think for as long as a second) on the mbn of “numbness,” presage what is to come: exaggerated and dramatic expressiveness. Marcuse’s articulation of “Fade far away and quite forget,” for instance, is to my ear more appropriate to a performance of King Lear’s most histrionic speeches: a somewhat high-pitched diminuendo through the first three of those words, so that by the time he reaches the word “away” his voice has faded to the lower limit of audibility; it is followed by a quite rapidly rising crescendo which climaxes in the last syllable (almost a shout) of “forget.” To put it bluntly, Marcuse’s reading is tediously funny (I cannot even attempt a description of his performance of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”). His reading is, I think, almost unhearable, and affords this listener at least little instruction and some unintended pleasure. As a virtuoso performance it draws our attention to the performer and his skilled range of voice and expression, rather than to the poem—in this, I think, it is representative of many actors’ readings, as well as of readings by imitators of Thomas’s luxuriant style. Thomas’s own style, however, has a long tradition: “There is a chaunt in the recitation both of Coleridge and Wordsworth,” William Hazlitt recorded in 1823, “which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the judgment.”6 But fashions of reading change.
Another difficulty is much more perplexing. When Marcuse lingers on a syllable, or prolongs a consonant, our ear is so caught up in the sound itself (an almost two-second sibilant, for instance) that we tend to lose the syntax and the sense. Which is to say, we lose track of what presumably the reading is all about: the narrative/discursive thrust that this reading of Keats’s “Ode” is presumably trying to bring forth. Such apparent inconsistency should not be dismissed out of hand, however, as symptomatic of “badness.” In the first place, for me to do so is to claim that my own historically flavored response is exempt from historical contingency: fashions of reading and recital change, sometimes quite rapidly. In the second, to anyone familiar with them, Marcuse might well seem a forerunner, however unwitting, of the pataphysical performances of the Four Horsemen or the sound poetry of bill bissett, just as he might equally perhaps be seen as an unconscious follower of Hugo Ball or Velimir Khlebnikov. Similar effects are achieved, on occasion, by readers with a strong (“foreign”) accent; hearing them, we find ourselves responding to the nonsyntactic and nonsemantic qualities of the language, and even on rare occasions feeling as though we have stepped outside our own language, and are viewing it as a foreign tongue.
This might suggest that a poem, then, would best be read in the dialect of its maker. But Wordsworth’s Cumberland dialect rhymed water with chatter, July with duly, and according to Hazlitt he talked “with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his voice, a deep guttural intonation, and a strong tincture of the northern burr, like the crust on wine” (118). What would an audience expecting the koiné make of him, puzzling out the words as it well might need to? Audience expectation (and for that matter, I suppose, audience “competence”) does to some extent determine the success and the nature of a performance. Marcuse and Thomas both read in a more or less standard koiné unlikely to offend the ear—Marcuse, cis-Atlantic American; Thomas, educated Anglo-Welsh—and this in turn might suggest that a poem might best be read in the dialect of its audience. That’s a very tall order, though, for a public reading. Most of us manage our vowels with consistency and precision (or so we suppose), but each of us manages them differently, and if we move into an unfamiliar dialect region we may find (as a result of our listening) that our vowels begin to slide all over the place. The instabilities and inconstancies of pronunciation vexed Spenser and Harvey in their correspondence, and the sound of the vowel slides as it dopplers through time. “I compose by the tone-leading of vowels,” Robert Duncan wrote; “the vowels are notes of a scale, in which breaths move, but these soundings of spirit upon which the form of the poem depends are not constant. They are the least lasting sounds in our language; even in my lifetime, the sound of my vowels alters. There is no strict vowel standard.”7 How, then, read well? Dialect, inflection of sentence pattern: the perplexing variables. Markers of class, of economic and educational status, and of race. To insist on—or even expect—any sort of uniformity is to privilege one reading community over another, is to make the sort of reading we learn in high school and university English courses the universal, transcendent case, rather than the special case it actually is.
Douglas Oliver has suggested that poems, where there is an “absolute agreement” between different readers in a given dialect group about “the semantic, emotional and syntactical interpretation,” have “an ineffable ‘neutral’ tune” that is “fairly standard across many performances.”8 I find this somewhat imponderable, since (as Oliver’s “absolute” recognizes) it boils down to a reading group of one; plainly no such “agreement” is possible, and the hypothesized tune is, as Oliver says, “unattainable” (x). This is partly because, as Deleuze and Guattari have famously pointed out, “[t]here exists no ideal ‘competent’ speaker-hearer of language, any more than there exists a homogenous linguistic community.”9 But it also has to do with the nature of sound itself. Tape recordings have confirmed the intuition that no two readings of a poem are ever exactly the same; sound is the least constant part of the poem, the least durable, and possibly the most elusive. The visual habit of print has taught even professional readers to ignore by and large the momentary nature of close hearing, caught in the instant as it is, and to forget that each time we read the poem it sounds itself differently in that voice we all (except perhaps those of us born deaf)10 have in our heads.
But the more any of us reads a given poem, silently or aloud, the more established becomes an inward notional neutral tune that persists from reading to reading, familiar but elusive in its fine detail. There is a wide and inevitable disparity between how we hear the poem when we read it silently, and how we sound it, saying it aloud; the poem performed in the head is an imagined poem in the world of sound. This may be why, when we voice the poem, we can never match what we breathe to what we think we heard. The inner speaking we hear as we read is not the voice we hear when we outwardly speak, and the noises we make when we read a poem aloud are never the noises we think the poem makes. But the difference between our internal reading and our oral performance will vary from poem to poem, and also from occasion to occasion. Maybe the variation has to do with the familiarity of the poem, or the fixity of our interpretation, or the frequency of our performance.
The difficulty in voicing the poem, though it has something to do with our understanding of the work, may also have to do with a kind of tentative polyvocality, a simultaneity of possible tones and interpretations, possible (at least in a gestural sort of way) inside the head but impossible of public performance—a kind of undecidable music or tune. The eye moves so much faster than even the inward voice and ear that by the time we begin inwardly to “hear” a speech segment we’ve already considered a number of alternative voicings in light of what is to come. Some poets deliberately surprise the mind by exploiting undecidability of voice, as in the Janusheaded “near” of:
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea11
That “near” is an odd sort of voiced noncommittal crux in the unorthodox syntax/sound of Williams’s poem. Temporal in relation to the words before it, and spatial in relation to those following, “near” obliges the reader of the poem radically to rebalance the rhythm- and intonation-pattern the sentence seems to demand, and the voice necessarily flattens out into a curious and unanticipated music.
But the rhythm is a problem. Since Williams’s poem is unpunctuated, and the syntax rather unorthodox, some readers provide their own punctuation to clarify their voicing of the poem. The poem seems in such cases to resolve into three or four sentences, but their boundaries are undecidable, and a variety of punctuations is possible. Sentence breaks affect intonation: they are usually signaled by a falling pitch. For ease of discussion, I write the poem out as prose:
According to Brueghel, when Icarus fell it was spring. A farmer was ploughing his field, the whole pageantry of the year was awake, tingling. Near the edge of the sea, concerned with itself, sweating in the sun that melted the wings’ wax, unsignificantly, off the coast, there was a splash quite unnoticed. This was Icarus drowning.
An obvious alternative is to open the poem with a principal clause introducing a lyric catalogue: “According to Brueghel, when Icarus fell it was spring: a farmer …” Clauses introducing a list usually signal the start of that list by rising in pitch—a voicing, then, in complete contrast to the closing fall of an opening sentence.
Punctuation has a strong rhetorical function, and by reducing the range of voicing possibilities, it makes this subtle and complex poem (despite the interesting syntax of the third putative sentence) pretty banal; it decides what Williams left undecidable, porous, and fluid, and it fixes a narrative meaning. In the process it tells the voice what to do, how to intone. When we look at the poem as Williams wrote it, without punctuation, we see that it is actually unvoicable in any completely satisfactory way: the polyvocality, the simultaneity of possible tones, rhythms, and interpretations, is available only to the inner ear, and cannot be spoken. One might therefore conclude that it is impossible to read this poem well aloud. Certainly, it cannot be voiced as “ordinary” speech.
It may be that Williams’s poem presents such difficulties because there is not a long history of its interpretation, and because it has not been absorbed into the culture the way well-established canonical works have. It may even be that in three or four hundred years’ time a tradition may have grown of repunctuating and modernizing twentieth-century texts along the lines accorded the texts of Wyatt or of Shakespeare. In Shakespeare’s case, editorial practice has over the past three centuries focused upon deciding what Shakespeare (or his printers) left undecidable (and, perhaps, well-nigh unvoicable). The third quatrain (lines 9-12) of sonnet 129, “Th’ expence of Spirit in a waste of shame” (and especially its final two lines), is a famous instance of what I am calling voiced noncommittal crux:
Made In pursut and in possession so,
Had, hauing, and in quest, to haue extreame,
A blisse in proofe and proud and very wo,
Before a ioy proposd behind a dreame,
(version of 1609)
Editors since Lintott in 170912 have assiduously recast and repunctuated this text, in most cases agreeing with Booth’s 1977 version, which is as follows:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme,
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe,
Before, a joy proposed, behind, a dreame.13
The impulse behind this editorial activity is akin to that behind the late-twentieth-century practice of tape-recording poets reading their own poems: to provide an authoritative and authentic register of the poem’s sound—how it should be said in order to keep the meaning straight. Such practice congeals an interpretation and defines a voicing that, as Laura Riding and Robert Graves argued, severely limits available responses to the poem, in effect closing it down.14 It is arguable, perhaps, that all readings of the repunctuated sonnet 129 are “bad,” and that no “good” reading of the 1609 version is possible. Whether or no, the punctuated version of line 12 (the last line quoted) completely forfeits the tenuous polyvocality of the 1609 version and establishes an orthodoxy that necessarily determines the criteria by which to determine the quality of a reading.
Not all canonical poems, however, have suffered this fate. Donne’s first Holy Sonnet offers a much more complex instance of voiced noncommittal crux, because the poem has a long history of canonical recognition and interpretation, and because we know what we do of the circumstances of its author and its composition. “Misvoicings,” though possible, are dismissed as eccentric, unimportant, and “bad.” The crux is in the opening line, indeed in the first four words:
Thou hast made me, And shall thy worke decay?
Repaire me now, for now mine end doth haste,
I runne to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday;
I dare not move my dimme eyes any way, 5
Despaire behind, and death before doth cast
Such terrour, and my feeble breath doth waste
By sinne in it, which it t’wards hell doth weigh;
Onely thou art above, and when towards thee
By thy leave I can looke, I rise againe 10
But our old subtle foe so tempteth me,
That not one houre my selfe I can sustaine;
Thy Grace may wing me to prevent his art,
And thou like Adamant draw mine iron heart.
What’s interesting about this poem is its emphatic vehemence, which Donne achieves through a high count of monosyllables, dense consonant clusters (especially but not only in the opening line), a prosodic variety that ranges from the iambic almost-doggerel jingle of line 4 to the paired anapests opening line 10, and his characteristic measure of adjacent strong stresses (speech stress overriding the perhaps anticipated weak syllable characteristic of strict iambic pattern). The poem’s strict control of pace, indeed, emphasizes the quantitative rather than the accentual elements of the sound, and draws us to pay attention to the duration of the syllable as much as (if not more than) to the stress. Consequently, we tend to process the utterance one word at a time rather than in our more habitual speech clusters.
The first four words, “Thou hast made me,” set the whole poem up. How they are said determines how the rest of the first line shall be said—it’s a matter of tone—and how the first line is said determines our understanding (the meaning) of the whole poem. Meaning, after all, determines tone; tone determines quantity; quantity is (usually, in English) a function of stress. When I was a schoolboy we used to bait our teachers by saying “good morning” sexily, angrily, comically, obsequiously, scornfully, and so on; everyone knows how to pack the most trite expression with strong and malapropos feeling. Change the stress, and you change the quantity; change the quantity, and you change the tone; change the tone, and you change the meaning.
So how voice those first four words? My own rather conventional and orthodox ear bids me to take them slowly, delivering them with more or less equal duration but by no means in a monotone. This severely slows down a line that is already slowed by the density of its consonant clusters (st/m; d/m; ll/th; k/d), and almost completely overrides what iambic imperative the line seems at first glance to have, yielding a sound that is very close indeed to one word at a time (I italicize the long syllables) :
Thou hast made me, And shall thy worke decay?
I’m talking duration here, rather than accent, though clearly there is a relationship between the two, and I must add right away that I’m not at all sure that I can satisfactorily say the poem this way, it gets too rodomontade (I’m not at all sure that I can sound this poem in any other way either). But my inward ear—what Don Wellman once called “a speaking within hearing”15—tells me this is how the line should sound; those first four words are a voiced noncommittal crux. This is not simply because of the poem’s curiously meditative vehemence, but because almost any other distribution of durational (quantitative) stress radically alters the speaker’s attitude towards “Thou,” and quite possibly eliminates the meditative note altogether. Put primary stress on “Thou” and “thy” and the speaker might be blackmailing the Lord—I’m not sure Donne is incapable of such an attitude, but the unorthodoxy or inappropriateness of such a reading gives me pause. So does that of other readings, distributions of stress and duration, which by turns make the speaker sniveling and whining, truculent, self-regarding, or scornful, and my difficulties arise from what I know of the circumstances of the poem’s author and its composition.
My assumption here is not that my ear is “correct,” or even that it’s a representative index of any heard emotional register other than my own; my voicing of this poem is quite possibly very eccentric. The semiotics of tone in ordinary and even in highly structured formal speech is notoriously uncertain: the fearful voice can be heard as resentful; the shy but friendly as aloof and ironic. Weeping is sometimes mistaken for laughter.16 Donne’s poem and its various readings demonstrate in a quite obvious and dramatic way that tone is a matter of quantity is a matter of meaning, and confirm—were confirmation necessary—that there can be no ideal “competent” hearer of language any more than there can be such a speaker; to some extent each of us speaks a foreign tongue. Some, more foreign than others, perhaps. Students, inexperienced readers coming across the poem in a footnoted textbook in a classroom setting, have much to contend with: “knowing” that they had better understand the poem “correctly” they find themselves confronted with their ignorance, and bullied by it. It affects the way they say the poem. Teachers, (presumably) experienced readers, bring to the poem their knowledge of the canon, of Donne’s place in it, and of other of Donne’s poems. They find themselves confronted with their knowledge, and possibly bullied by it. It affects the way they say the poem.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Donne’s (or even perhaps any) poem needs to be protected from the reader’s knowledge, but the modernist practice of “make it new” led some poets to court an unpredictability designed to undermine the presuppositions and expectations that accompany any experienced reader’s knowledge of poetry generally. Yet they almost invariably sought to control the sound. William Carlos Williams, pretty well throughout his career, sought a notation-system that would adequately register the sound of the poem as he heard it, was at one stage strongly attracted by Sidney Lanier’s notions of musical notation, and for much of the time (but especially in the 1920s and 30s) tinkered with the shape of the poem on the page with aural as well as visual considerations in mind.17 A slavish obedience to line break, however, has led many an inexperienced reader (to the bored dismay of the listener) to intone each line as if it were a complete sentence, and many a younger poet—following perhaps his or her reading of Olson’s Projective Verse—to recite a poem in “that old singsong” that David Bromige complained about, “half rapt, halfassed.”18
The poet’s determination in this century to control the sound of the poem notationally was no doubt largely responsible for the enthusiastic and widespread recourse to electronic recording once the technology became available. With the advent of cheap tape recording, what Doris Sommer has called “the readerly will to appropriate a writer’s position”19 could turn to the poet’s own reading for clarification and enlightenment, and the poet’s own voice gains the status of Authentic Source. The listener can feel that he or she is now in touch with the genuine and originary poetic voice. However, such pursuit of the authentic (which I have elsewhere called the archaeological fallacy)20 gives rise to some very real problems, not least because it establishes some readings as normative, and suggests that a “good” reading is timelessly stable, transcendent.21 Thus the 1962 liner notes to the Caedmon record of Dylan Thomas reading Shakespeare and Webster comments, “All who have written of Dylan Thomas’s recordings agree that the voice holds the absolute key to the works.”22 What would a late-twentieth-century audience make of Keats’s cockney, I wonder?
On the evidence of tape recordings, for instance, the opening of Louis Zukofsky’s “So That Even a Lover” should properly be read
Little wrists,
Is your contént
My sight or hold …
since that is invariably Zukofsky’s voicing.23 Zukofsky had one of the finest ears in the business, and in this poem—as in so many of his short lyrics—he is working for the tune. This does not mean, however, that a reading that substitutes “cóntent” for “contént” is inept, or even inappropriately jars the tune: that “hold” in the third line suggests Zukofsky’s awareness of that pun and its resonance in this context. No reading can be definitive, either reading opens up the poem.
That tiny voiced noncommittal crux becomes, in the practice of a poet like Robert Grenier, a basic compositional tool. His fairly early poem “Warm,” for instance,24 exploits undecidability and is extremely difficult if not impossible to voice at all satisfactorily. The poem is designed, I think, not to be heard, but to be read with the eye. It’s a very deceptive piece of writing, for it comes trippingly and easily off the tongue, it makes a very pleasing noise. But voicing the poem closes down its play of indeterminacies.
WARM
Bones in the child
child in the womb
womb in her
body in
bed in the room
room in the house
house in the
plain
moon
drifts
blackness
because we have
drawn curtains
It reads like a series of notations, hastily jotted down. It works so strongly for the eye that it is difficult to imagine any satisfactory reading aloud, save possibly to an audience that has the text before it. The use of line break (is the “womb in her,” for instance, or “in her body”?); the extreme recurrence of “in” (which appears in lines 2–9 and line 14—i.e., nine times in this fourteen-line poem); the shifts or ambiguities in the parts of speech (is “drifts” a noun or a verb?); that “have” of line 13 (does it signify possession, or tense?); are the curtains open or shut? But it also reads—especially at the beginning—like a nursery rhyme, and it invites the voice to sing, or at least chant. The poem is, then, a really quite dense play of possibilities, the possibilities afforded by the eye playing with and against those afforded by the ear. A Zukofsky trick, maybe. Or Donne’s. Or Shakespeare’s.
Unsayability, in the sense I have been discussing, is a central feature of a great number of poems, of this and of earlier centuries. How curious, and how interesting, that Shelley’s punctuation is so problematic. How important it was in the eighteenth century to pin Shakespeare’s noise down. The attraction of firm punctuation is the attraction of the clear voice, which is in turn the attraction of the authentic and the sure: certainty is transcendent. But the unsayable casts doubt on the reader’s/hearer’s capacity to know, all uncertainty removed, without (and I borrow my phrasing from Doris Sommer) “allowing incapacity to float into the comforting, unmanageable mists of ambiguity” (264). The unsayable cripples masterful understanding by holding on to an inexplicable and perdurable residue. Its cultivation has important ethical and political implications, for it leaves us uncompromisingly face to face with the unknowable and different. It is the allure of the unsayable that has led so many poets to a courtship of the unpredictable, because the unpredictable disconcerts: Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Susan Howe, Robin Blaser, Rae Armantrout, Bruce Andrews; the extravagance of Robert Duncan, the economy of Lorine Niedecker. As Howe cogently and vividly has instructed and reminded us in My Emily Dickinson and elsewhere,25 the last half of this century especially has been the age of the stammering poet, groping for words, stuttering in quest of articulation, refusing the preset certainties of pattern. The stammerings of Billy Budd and the astonishing hesitancies of Emily Dickinson plumb us in the undecidability of language as it moves through us. They have become representative voices of the last half-century, along with Olson, say, especially in his emphysemic breathing through his poems. Or Jackson Mac Low, and his use of random or indeterminate procedures. Or Kathleen Fraser, and her incorporation of error into her text. And dozens upon dozens of others.
The voiced noncommittal crux is the voice of coming-to-speech, that moment on the threshhold of speech where syntax as we have been taught it is thrown over as we come to words, as words come to us. As we move to utterance, the mind and the body cast for and negotiate possibilities, overriding if only momentarily the rhetoric of socially differentiated understanding, with nothing quite adequate to the exact event, never exactly sayable. Robert Grenier, in his well-known 1971 essay “On Speech,” put it this way:
what now I want, at least, is the word way back in the head that is the thought or feeling forming out of the ‘vast’ silence/noise of consciousness experiencing world all the time … I want writing what is thought/where feeling is/words are born.26
Where words are born. A century and a half ago Whitman said of the American poet, in one of those extravaganza flourishes that informed and directed him, possessed him and thought him through his 1855 Preface that “Mississippi with annual freshets and changing chutes, Missouri and Columbia and Ohio and Saint Lawrence with the falls and beautiful masculine Hudson, do not embouchure where they spend themselves more than they embouchure into him”—and they stutter out again, disjointed inarticulate freshets of lists, fragments and piled clauses, heap upon heap of them. Almost, if not completely, unsayable. Voiced, tentative, noncommittal cruxes. Which make poems poems, whatever their ideological stripe. Good reading, bad reading: neither is wholly possible; either might bring us to the threshhold of speech. Strength of vocables: to bind.
1. I have in mind the kind of reading described by Jonathan Williams in “Take the Number 78 Bus to Helicon,” in The Magpie’s Bagpipe: Selected Essays, ed. Thomas Meyer (San Francisco: North Point, 1982), pp. 127–30, or by Paul Metcalf: “[I]ncredibly bad. Stoned out of his mind, mumbling inaudibly, chain-smoking throughout the reading, begging drinks, ignoring all of us save for an occasional leer … I’m told he grosses something like 90 thou a year for this sort of performance” (quoted by Jonathan Williams, “‘Anyway, All I Ever Wanted to Be Was a Poet,’ Said Leon Uris, with a Smile, as We Strode Together into the Vomitorium …,” Magpie’s Bagpipe, p. 74).
2. Charles Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption,” in A Poetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 9.
3. John Cage, “Mureau,” M: Writings ’62–’72 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), pp. 35–56; Cage’s reading of part of “Mureau” at St. Mark’s Church, New York, 1 January 1975, is on the LP Biting off the Tongue of a Corpse (Giorno Poetry Systems Records GPS005); Tom Raworth, “Survival,” West Coast Line, vol. 7 (spring 1992), pp. 7–14; Survival (Cambridge: Equipage, 1994). Raworth read “Survival” at the Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver, in fall 1991.
4. Dylan Thomas Reading from William Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and John Webster’s “The Duchess of Malfi” (Caedmon TC1158).
5. Keats and Shelley read by Theodore Marcuse (Lexington 7505). Lexington Records was a division of Educational Audio Visual Inc., New York.
6. William Hazlitt, “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P Howe, vol. 17, Uncollected Essays (London: Dent, 1933), p. 118. The essay first appeared in Leigh Hunt’s The Liberal, vol. 3 (1823).
7. Robert Duncan, “The Truth and Life of Myth,” Fictive Certainties (New York: New Directions, 1985), p. 50.
8. Douglas Oliver, Poetry and Narrative in Performance (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), p. x.
9. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Rhizome,” Ideology and Consciousness, vol. 8 (spring 1981), p. 53.
10. For a preliminary discussion of the speech perception of those born deaf, see Ivan Fónagy, La Métaphore en phonétique, Studia Phonetica 17 (Ottawa: Didier, 1979), PP. 111–20.
11. William Carlos Williams, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” in The Collected Poems, vol. 2, 1939–1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions 1988), p. 386.
12. Bernard Lintott’s was the first “responsibly edited” reprint of the Sonnets (Stephen Booth, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Edited with Analytic Commentary [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977], p. 543); further and more scholarly editions appeared in 1766 (one edited by George Steevens, another by Edward Capell) ; and in 1780 (as part of Edmond Malone’s great annotated edition of the complete works).
13. Booth, 111. Among those accepting the 1609 punctuation is John Dover Wilson, who remarks that “as [Martin] Seymour-Smith insists, to impose a modern punctuation on the Sonnets would indubitably lead to misrepresentation” (The Works of Shakespeare, ed. John Dover Wilson, vol. 36, The Sonnets [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966], p. cxxiv).
14. Laura Riding and Robert Graves, “William Shakespeare and E. E. Cummings,” A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1927). For a vigorous contrary view, see Booth, 441–52.
15. Don Wellman, “Preface,” O.ars, no. 6/7, Voicing (1989), p. 1.
16. The semiotics of tone is extremely complicated, and is inextricably compounded with the question of whether (all? some? of) language is motivated rather than arbitrary. The notion that the meaning of tone is universal attracted a number of modernist writers: Basil Bunting, for instance, was not alone in his belief that “it is perfectly possible to delight an audience by reading poetry of sufficient quality in a language it does not know” (“The Poet’s Point of View,” Three Essays, ed. Richard Caddel [Durham, England: Basil Bunting Poetry Centre, 1994], p. 34). Bunting’s practice of reading Goethe and Hafez to students in North American classrooms (at, for example, the University of British Columbia in 1970) has kinship with Zukofsky’s adoption of transliteration as a compositional principle in his and Celia Zukofsky’s translation of Catullus (London: Cape-Goliard, 1969), and elsewhere. The literature on the semiotics of tone is vast. I owe much to excellent discussions in David Appelbaum, Voice (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); Ivan Fónagy, La Vive voix: essais de psycho-phonétique (Paris: Payot, 1983); Roman Jakobson and Linda Waugh, The Sound Shape of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979); Reuven Tsur, Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1992); and—also by Tsur—What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive? The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992).
17. “Some Simple Measures in the American Idiom and the Variable Foot”—and especially the “Exercise in Timing” (Collected Poems, vol. 2, pp. 418–23)—confirm Williams’s use of line break as a semantic, syntactic, and above all rhythmic control, though his recordings—most of them made after his stroke—don’t usually follow the line breaks.
18. David Bromige, untitled contribution to “Voice // Voicing // Voices. A Forum on the Theme of Voicing,” O.ars 6/7 Voicing (1989), p. 26.
19. Doris Sommer, “Textual Conquests: On Readerly Competence and ‘Minority’ Literature,” in The Uses of Literary History, ed. Marshall Brown (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 260. This is an extremely useful discussion, to which I owe a great deal; at one or two points in my essay my own phrasing echoes hers.
20. Peter Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 124–25.
21. For a brilliant discussion of the hubristic aspects of the archaeological fallacy as it relates to the “authentic” performance of music, see Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). In the introduction (14), Taruskin quotes the following from the article on “Performing Practice” in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (14:370): “The principle that the performers should be allowed some scope to ‘interpret’ the notation subjectively has been challenged successfully for the first time … with the advent of recordings and electronic means of fixing a composition in its definitive form once and for all.”
22. The liner notes list five further LP recordings of Thomas reading his own work, plus a two-disk set of Under Milk Wood (Caedmon TC 2005), and add: “At no former time in history has a poet’s own voice been treasured and familiar in so many thousands of homes.”
23. Louis Zukofsky, Complete Short Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 114. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, at the University of Texas at Austin, has what may well be a complete collection of Zukofsky’s taped readings.
24. Robert Grenier, “Warm,” Series: Poems, 1967–71 ([Oakland] This, 1978), p. 17; also In The American Tree, ed. Ron Silliman (Orono, Me.: National Poetry Foundation, 1986), p. 6.
25. Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 1985); The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993).
26. Robert Grenier, “On Speech,” This, vol. 1, no. 1 (winter 1971), n.p.; also in In the American Tree, 496–97.