Daisy,

I think the question about actors is fine, but it might be worth asking, too, "Why are so many *poets* so often lousy readers of poetry?"

Kent

Dear Daisy,

Thanks for this post. Opens up a lot to talk about. The least of which, maybe, I'd like to throw in. I've edited two antholgoies of poetry, both include CDs, and in both actors make appearances and perform work. For this discussion, I'm thinking about the actor Ethan Hawke. I asked Ethan to do a reading of Gregory Corso's 'Marriage'. He performed a jaw-dropping rendition. The reason I asked him: 1) His acting in 'Dead Poets Society' acts (excuse the easy pun) as a nice hook 2) He recites the poem in one of his major movies (during the opening) 3) He mentions the poem in his two novels , etc. In other words, he had a relationship with the piece prior , which is what I was looking to activate. Again, the end result was that he killed the piece (Jerry Lee Lewis killed).

2 cents.

Mark Eleveld

Frankly, many Renaissance scholars feel that Shakespeare's sonnets are not as good as those of many other authors from roughly the same period. Shakespeare's sonnets come rather late in the period when sonnets and sonnet sequences were really fashionable. As a result, if you read the sonnets of slightly earlier writers, you notice how well-used some of his conceits and metaphors are, even for a period that relied on the concept of imitatio when composing poetry. "My mistris' eyes are nothing like the sun" is a rather tired conceit by the time Shakespeare writes those lines, for example. If you want to read really good, technically challenging sonnets, try reading Sir Philip Sidney. It's really a shame that our culture's irrational adulation of Shakespeare has relegated Astrophil and Stella to a mere footnote. That said, there are a handful of Shakespeare's sonnets that I like.

Interestingly, up till about the 1940s, people expected that actors would do a better job reciting poems than the poets themselves. We take for granted today that we should hear "the poet's voice" - and, indeed, you can hear actual recordings of Tennyson and Browning from the 1890s; and Joan Shelley Rubin documeneted the developing culture of public poetry readings in her book, Songs of Ourselves. But it's a fairly modern development, and to illustrate my point, Seamus Heaney told me that he still feels nostalgic for recordings of T.S. Eliot's poems - as read by Robert Speight, a professional reciter of verse. As Seamus pointed out, it was very exciting to have those poems issued on record in an actor's voice - the way he still hears them! Many poetry libraries, like that at Harvard, still have countless old 78s and LPs featuring the likes of Basil Rathbone, John Gielgud, and other celebrated actors reciting poems, including what was then contemporary work. It seems to me that the popularity of hearing the poet's own voice started to take off at around the time that elocution and public speaking vanished from the curriculum. And in fact, Harvard began the practice of recording poets (and selling phonograph records of their work) in the early 1930s at the instigation of F.C. Packard, Jr., who held the prestigious title of Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory - a position subsequently held by Heaney... and now by Jorie Graham!

Just to be sure, I really did ask that question seriously.

And I wasn't alluding only to the usual droning, deadly boring poetry reading at the campus union or the local coffee shop...

I was thinking about poets like Frost, Stevens, Bishop, Ashbery, for example, who were/are hardly great or inspiring public readers of their poetry. (If respecting linebreaks is a litmus test, for instance, Frost fails miserably.)

Come to think of it, I'll bet there are more actors who are good readers of poetry than there are poets who are good actors...

Well, poets as actors on the formal stage, I mean. Poets are some of the best actors in the world--most often when socializing at poetry readings, in fact!

Kent

Avtandil Makharadze playing the Stalin-esque lead character in the 1984 Soviet Georgian movie "Repentance" gave such a magnificent reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 66 ("Tired with all these for restful death I cry") that I went and memorized the poem. (IMDB gave me the actor's name; the performance was unforgettable.) Interesting to note, however, that the film rightly omitted the closing couplet, which is often so weak in Shakespeare's sonnets. I agree with J. E. Stone: we shouldn't let Shakespeare overshadow Sidney and Spencer in the sonnet department.

Don, the history you tell is interesting -- thanks! To add a bit: Live recitation of verse was mainstream popular entertainment 100 years ago. Nowadays most poets would consider most of the verse disseminated that way as "light verse"; the popularity of "Casey at the Bat" was spread by a touring actor named De Wolf Hopper. Last week I picked up (for 18 cents!) a 1950s collection of "American Ballads" edited by a then-elderly, now forgotten actor, playwright, and director named Charles O'Brien Kennedy. (All I know about him I learned last night on the web.) In his note to the once famous, now obscure poem "The Face on the Barroom Floor," by H. Antoine D'Arcy, Kennedy writes:

'Hughie D'Arcy always insisted to me that the title of his celebrated work was *not* "The Face on the Barroom Floor" but "The Face on the Floor." I reluctantly bow to popular usage and include "Barroom" in the title. Maurice Barrymore, brilliant father of Ethel, John, and Lionel, spread the ballad's fame by his recitation. Years after, when I was playing with the two boys in "The Jest," Hughie sent them an autographed copy. Seated in his dressing room, Jack read it to Lionel and me with the pathos that only Jack could command.'

It's a magnificently sentimental Victorian "parlor poem," and wouldn't it be great to have footage of "Jack" Barrymore reciting it in his dressing room!

I fell in love with this little video about a month ago -- thought I'd offer it up.
http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=489653

Jennifer

Most poets aren't great shakes at declaiming poems, either. Problems include "the voice" aka pitch-based prosody, head-down low talkers, too much free wine before the reading, own-biggest-fans, and in my opinion the worst, the poets who take as long to introduce the poem as they do to read it. Still, I can think of a dozen poets I didn't really get until I heard them read, and not all of them were excellent performers.

I can only think of a few over-trained poets, and they I'm sure wouldn't need to defend their entertainingly artificial styles. Most poets would benefit from an elocution class or two with a trained actor or vocal coach.

The best poetry reading advice I've heard: Relax, have a (single) glass of wine beforehand, don't change the reading at the lectern, never say "just two more" or "how'm I doing on time," and above all, like the work you're reading.

J.E. Stone wrote: "If you read the sonnets of slightly earlier writers, you notice how well-used some of his [Shakespeare's] conceits and metaphors are, even for a period that relied on the concept of imitatio when composing poetry. "My mistris' eyes are nothing like the sun" is a rather tired conceit by the time Shakespeare writes those lines, for example."

Yes - and isn't it clear that the line mocks the tiredness of this conceit? The speaker says his mistress's eyes are "nothing like" the sun; the comparison is not merely tired but false. Isn't this whole sonnet concerned with mocking the staleness of the kind of stock images then rife in the Petrarchan sonnet? Surely this poem is a prime example of Shakespeare's re-energizing of the exhausted sonnet form.

I should add, in case anybody wants to track the poem down, that "The Face on the Barroom Floor" includes an example of a now outmoded ethnic stereotype that contemporary sensibilities -- mine included -- would reject.

Does anybody know; Do very many poets read other poets' work? I once came across an anthology of other poets' poems that Dylan Thomas recited publicly; I regret not buying it.

John, you can still hear Dylan Thomas recite poems by others; his Dylan Thomas Reads: a Personal Anthology is now part of a CD box set, Dylan Thomas Unabridged: The Caedmon Collection.

The disappearance for a taste for public recitation may be related to the stylistic change in poetry wrought by modernism -- as well as the growth of the movies.

Actors used to TV and Hollywood writing, or Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams, or even Shakespeare and Aeschylus, might simply have no performative reference with which they could relate to pages from H.D. or Williams or Zukofsky or Creeley.

This doesn't make the actors stinky.

19th century poetry had a close tie to oratory and dramatic monologue as well as song. Browning has important things in common with "Casey at the Bat" and "The Face on the Barroom Floor" that he doesn't with H.D. and Zukofsky or Pound, just as Brahms has things in common with Sousa and J. Strauss that he doesn't with Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

Rexroth contended that most modernist American verse was difficult to project in recitation. With the exceptions of the Beats and the Illinois poets Sandburg and Lindsay (and Masters?), and maybe Stein, I agree.

Don's observation about the decline of elocution and public speaking from the curriculum is extremely suggestive in all sorts of contexts. Related to the decline of public space? Coincidental? Incidental or coincidental to the rise of the movies? In any case, probably related to the decline of professional recitations.

Recitation isn't dead -- I've recited Sandburg and sentimental 19th century poetry at parties, and people have enjoyed it, me included. I've seen Stein recited to good effect. If you want to recite to a non-specialist audience, the poetry has to lend itself to projection.

And Don, thanks for the tip! I'll check to see if the library has it.

Actors who are trained in meter and scansion--as certainly used to be the case with Shakespearean actors in the UK--do a much better job with metrical verse such as Shakespeare for a lot of obvious reasons. But when actors or poets gallop across line breaks and bend meter to the "natural" sense of the line (as one sees in so many newer films of Shakespeare plays--that are almost unintelligible because of it), they miss the point. It is meter that tells us how a line is to be emphasized, not emphasis that tells us how to scan--otherwise, in fact, there would be little point to blank verse. And it is this tension between "natural" rhythm and "metrical" emphasis--sometimes suspended, sometimes resolved--that gives English meter under the mastery of Milton and Shakespeare its glorious depth of color and tone.

I should clarify, per Tim's remarks. Yes, Shakespeare's sonnets are part of an anti-Petrarchan wave that was sweeping across Europe. But remember, several hundred years had passed between Petrarch and Shakespeare. An entire genre of poems often referred to as the "deformed mistress" poems were in vogue prior to Shakespeare penning those lines--they were not all sonnets, it should be noted, but certainly took part in anti-Petrarchan imagery. Sidney has anti-Petrarchan moments, as does Daniel, Fulke Greville, and others. Donne engages in some significant anti-Petrarchan imagery at about this time as well. Remember, the English Renaissance poets start using Petrachan conceits much later than the Italians and the French--they're modeling themselves on poets from other countries, as well. The French sonneteers, who write several decades prior to the hey day of English sonnets, use anti-Petrarchan imagery.

All I was saying was that our culture is most familiar with Shakespeare's work, and we tend to think that his work is exemplary of everything that is original or that he "reinvents" things. But, in terms of his poetry perhaps more than his plays, he operated on the principal of imitatio as well, and picked up on things that were fashionable. The trick of any poet in this period is to imitate, and in imitating, add your own twist. "My mistris eyes" is a fine poem, but a little flat and conventional compared to some of the more inventive takes on this subject.

Jennifer--I *love* the Tom Waits reading Buk video. Thank you! (Of course, he's not an actor...) Daisy

In fact, Daisy, Tom Waits has acted in numerous films, including The Outsiders, The Cotton Club, Ironweed, The Fisher King, Coffee and Cigarettes, Short Cuts, Domino, Wristcutters: A Love Story, and the forthcoming The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

how dare you actors are amazing you guys do not know good intertamit

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