the cruellest month, you were thinking, you t.s. eliot fans, but no.
well, it might be the cruellest month, okay, it's not like I think my first poetry crush would lie, but the point of this post is that April is National Poetry Month, and I'm going all-in this year. the plan is to record a poem every day and stick my voice up on my blog.
I'm a little nervous, mostly because I really dislike the sound of my voice when it's recorded (& I always think - man, if that's what my voice really sounds like, well, that's annoying & terrible). but listening to Christian Wiman recite poems on the OnBeing podcast inspired me - I decided that one thing I really want to be better at is speaking poems aloud. so, in the interests of improving my skill in the art of the spoken word, I'm going to pick one poem from each of the twenty (yes, twenty) poetry books I own, and record myself reciting them. That will take me to April 20, and then there will be ten days to pick ten other poets who I haven't yet added to my shelf.
thia says I should add poetry commentary to the posts. we'll see how ambitious I get. also how much time I have, because poetry thoughts take a lot of time to think and write down.
I probably shouldn't put this up on my blog because I will never be this good, argh.
"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp," Robert Browning said. Poets, always with the good advice. Anyway, it's lovely, so - another Christian Wiman recording, this time of one of his own poems, "From a Window."
[Also, the commentary to go with this post will just be a Stanley Kunitz quote, plus a few brief sentences of my own analysis:
"...few young poets have mastered traditional prosody. The result is that they don't really know how to make language sing or move for them. There's a modicum of music in most of what's being written today. They're not testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed."
I love Christian Wiman's poems for the way they sound, and how this sound is inextricable from what the poems mean. This is hard to explain - my best example is that when I heard him recite "From a Window," I realized that the line "pressed my face to the pane" could also be heard "pressed my face to the pain," and that double meaning changed the whole poem. I started to hear the poem like this: as he leaned into the pain, he saw the life that was not the life of men, and that was where the joy came in...
And I didn't get that until I heard it read aloud.]
well, it might be the cruellest month, okay, it's not like I think my first poetry crush would lie, but the point of this post is that April is National Poetry Month, and I'm going all-in this year. the plan is to record a poem every day and stick my voice up on my blog.
I'm a little nervous, mostly because I really dislike the sound of my voice when it's recorded (& I always think - man, if that's what my voice really sounds like, well, that's annoying & terrible). but listening to Christian Wiman recite poems on the OnBeing podcast inspired me - I decided that one thing I really want to be better at is speaking poems aloud. so, in the interests of improving my skill in the art of the spoken word, I'm going to pick one poem from each of the twenty (yes, twenty) poetry books I own, and record myself reciting them. That will take me to April 20, and then there will be ten days to pick ten other poets who I haven't yet added to my shelf.
thia says I should add poetry commentary to the posts. we'll see how ambitious I get. also how much time I have, because poetry thoughts take a lot of time to think and write down.
___
I probably shouldn't put this up on my blog because I will never be this good, argh.
"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp," Robert Browning said. Poets, always with the good advice. Anyway, it's lovely, so - another Christian Wiman recording, this time of one of his own poems, "From a Window."
[Also, the commentary to go with this post will just be a Stanley Kunitz quote, plus a few brief sentences of my own analysis:
"...few young poets have mastered traditional prosody. The result is that they don't really know how to make language sing or move for them. There's a modicum of music in most of what's being written today. They're not testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed."
I love Christian Wiman's poems for the way they sound, and how this sound is inextricable from what the poems mean. This is hard to explain - my best example is that when I heard him recite "From a Window," I realized that the line "pressed my face to the pane" could also be heard "pressed my face to the pain," and that double meaning changed the whole poem. I started to hear the poem like this: as he leaned into the pain, he saw the life that was not the life of men, and that was where the joy came in...
And I didn't get that until I heard it read aloud.]
