Poetry speaks expanded Hear poets from Tennyson to Plath read their own work

This large book allows long poems to fill the page like a musical score, while short poems are paired with photographs of poets and reproductions of handwritten manuscripts. This physical largesse is matched by generosity of spirit as living poets offer crisp and empathic commentary on 47 poets who have gone before them. Here, thanks to the expertise and good taste of editors Paschen and Mosby, is Rosellen Brown on Carl Sandburg, Billy Collins on Ogden Nash, Susan Hahn on Dorothy Parker, Edward Hirsch on Robert Browning, and Mark Strand on Wallace Stevens. Then there are the three accompanying CDs. Fluently hosted by Charles Osgood, they contain mesmerizing recordings of each historic poet reading her or his work. This grand immersion in poetry follows the best-selling Poetry Speaks (2001) and includes a never-before-published and thrilling recording of James Joyce reading Anna Livia Plurabelle from Finnegans Wake. Book and CDs work beautifully together, kindling deeper appreciation for the transmuting power of poetry.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2007 Booklist

This second edition of the popular anthology is an accessible introduction to 20th century poetry on the page and in the air. Forty-seven poets-beginning with Tennyson, moving through Eliot, Kerouac and Bishop, among many others, and ending on Plath-are represented in this book and CD package. Attesting to the fact that poetry remains a spoken art form, this book may convince readers that well-chosen words gain vitality when heard aloud, as Allen Ginsberg?s incantatory rendering of "Howl" proves. William Carlos Williams? "The Red Wheelbarrow," in the poet?s voice, takes on a playful singsong quality. Gwendolyn Brooks, reading "We Real Cool," affects her subjects? swagger and attitude, shifting to solemnity for the grave final line: "we die soon." The book also includes useful biographical information and a literary essay on each writer by contemporary poets, who locate the poets in historical context: Anne Stevenson, for instance, comments on Plath and Paul Muldoon on James Joyce, by whom this edition also contains a previously unreleased recording of the "Anna Livia Plurabelle" section of Finnegan?s Wake. Reluctant poetry readers may find themselves drawn to the printed page by the spoken work, and poetry fans are likely to find much to love here. (Oct.) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

Introduction

A poem can change your life. In poems, we discover the words and images to understand and interpret the world. Whether writing birth songs or elegies, love vows or political anthems, lyric outbursts or vast narratives, great poets throughout the ages transform ordinary experience, thought, and emotion into something memorable.

A poet regards the page differently than the prose writer. As the French poet Paul
Valéry wrote, "Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking." The poet, when writing, considers the borders of a right and left margin and chooses where to begin and end the line. "Verse" derives from the Latin versus, or "turn," as in turn of the plough, furrow, or line of writing. Unlike the prose writer, who will continue writing the sentence until the typewriter or computer pulls the line over to the left margin, the poet "carves" the line onto the page.

Just as poetry differs from prose on the page, poems have a unique power when read aloud. Poets are attuned to sound as they "make" their poems or, in Robert Frost's words, create "the sound of sense." Hearing poetry read aloud, the listener may glimpse the poet's psyche. Recited well, poetry can even mesmerize.

Recall the first time you heard a poem read out loud: perhaps your mother or father recited "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" when you were young. Or maybe, when older, a high school teacher read to the class T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" or Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool." What if we could hear Eliot or Brooks, Frost or W.B. Yeats recite poems in their own voices? Yeats wrote, "I wanted all my poetry to be spoken on a stage or sung....I have spent my life in clearing out of poetry every phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back to syntax that is for the ear alone." The force of a poem is empowered by the voice behind the poem. I remember the first time I heard Yeats reciting his poetry. I had researched a script for a Bloomsday Joyce/Yeats tribute in New York City. The program concluded with a recording of Yeats reading "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Although I had studied and written about the poem, it was not until after hearing Yeats's sonorous tone, his inflections and rhythm, that the work gained new dimension. When I later visited the Lake Isle of Innisfree in Ireland, the memory of Yeats's voice reverberated through the landscape. The sound of the author's voice resurrects the poet vividly in the imagination.

Poetry spoken aloud recalls the oral origins of poetry. In every culture, poetry emerges before writing. In traditional Native American societies, poetry was expressed in prayers and ceremonies, as in the Navajo Blessingway Chants. In Babylon, in the early twenty-first century b.c., court entertainers sang for King Shulgi early versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh. During the fifth century b.c. in Greece, Homeric bards recited The Iliad from memory. These early spoken performances have been revived in our own day as we witness the popularity of Slam, Hip Hop, Rap, and Cowboy poetry, as well as more traditional poetry readings.

The force of modern poetry resides in this union of the written and the spoken word. With this insight in mind, we have compiled in Poetry Speaks a collection that features memorable poems of the last century and a half-works that, remarkably, have also been recorded in the poets' own voices. Here is a rare mix of poems for the eye and the ear, where the lover of poetry may act as both reader and listener. We hope that you will discover, in these pages and on these discs, poems that change your life.

Elise Paschen Excerpted from Poetry Speaks Expanded All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.