“By the time you’re done, your biggest problem may be that you wish there was more.”
– WALL STREET JOURNAL

“The definitive anthology of poets reading their own work.”
-- PUB...

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

Poetry Speaks (Sourcebooks, 2001) has been expanded to include James Joyce, Robert Graves, May Swenson, Jack Kerouac, and Ted Hughes. Each of the 47 poets, all deceased, is introduced through a biographical sketch, an essay by a contemporary poet, the text of a few representative poems and, of course, select recordings. The inviting layout and scattering of primary-source material (gems include a handwritten poem on a paper plate by Etheridge Knight and an edited draft of W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939”), and the invaluable effect of poems read by their creators remain the collection’s hallmarks. The experience of listening to Joyce read an excerpt from Finnegans Wake with his thick Irish brogue will inevitably take any dissection of his work to new depths. This volume will continue to prove a playground for poetry lovers and a spark for any literature class.

Poetry Speaks Expanded is the newest edition of the 2001 bestseller Poetry Speaks . Like its predecessor, it takes a traditional form (poetry) and adds a 21st-century twist (audio). Poetry is meant to be heard and not just read. Poetry Speaks Expanded takes 47 poets and, across the span of three audio CDs, features them reading selections from their work. There are 107 poems total, each presented in written form alongside a short, biographical sketch of the author. Critical essays by well-known writers add to the anthology’s comprehensive scope. In more ways than one, it’s a hefty collection.

Nineteenth-century poets like Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Walt Whitman are represented, as are 20th-century greats like Elizabeth Bishop, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes and Wallace Stevens. Anne Sexton’s here, as is Ezra Pound and e.e. cummings. New additions to the anthology include Jack Kerouac and, in the biggest coup of all, James Joyce. Previous difficulties with securing the rights to his work prevented his inclusion in 2001, but now readers can listen in awe as he reads from "Anna Livia Plurabelle" in Finnegans Wake . Poetry is the oldest of art forms. It’s fitting, then, that here its voice rings louder and ever more true.

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 truly 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, a practice of discipline, skill, and magic.

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.

Mention the word “poetry” and you are likely to get a number of responses ranging from adoration to hatred, with plenty of misconceptions in between. Although poetry was once read, understood, memorized and recited on a regular basis by entire families from the middle class upwards, poetry in the 20th century fell out of general favor largely because of the elements that made it “modern.” It was sequestered into anthologies and studied by unwilling high school students, enjoyed in the realms of academia, but it was definitely no longer a fixture in the family parlor.

Which is a pity. Although it is true that poems such as T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” cannot truly be appreciated without extensive footnotes, the 20th century produced a myriad of poets who wrote verse which is both beautiful and, within certain frames of reference, perfectly understandable.

Seeking to communicate this poetry to those who may have not given it a second look after high school, Sourcebooks has published Poetry Speaks Expanded . Featuring 47 of the most famous 20th-century poets (and including – remarkably – a handful from the 19th), it features, for each poet, a photo, a biography, an in-depth but immensely readable critique of the poet’s work, a selection of poems and even, in some cases, a facsimile of verse written in the poet’s own hand.

But the obvious highlight of this anthology presents itself in the form of three CDs which feature recordings of the poets reading their own verse. Poetry was (and is) meant to be a living thing – some have said that the page is a temporary stop but not an end for a poem. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the CDs included in Poetry Speaks Expanded . The poets reading here often change their poems, seemingly on the spot; this is especially apparent when the reader follows along in the book (and every recorded poem can be found in the book, which also contains additional poems not included on the CDs).

Whether or not any poet is ever absolutely finished with a poem, the point remains that poetry is meant to be heard. Just as one cannot conceive of fully enjoying a Cole Porter, John Lennon or Oscar Hammerstein lyric merely by looking at them, so, in a very real sense, one should not imagine that a silent reading of W.B. Yeats, Dorothy Parker or Walt Whitman can produce pleasure equal to hearing their poems read aloud.

And listening to these poems read by their authors is a truly remarkable experience because the verse comes alive in a way that their creators originally intended. Who knew, for example, that Tennyson meant to place such great emphasis on the word “rode” (as in: “into the valley of death RODE the six hundred”) in his poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” or that Gwendolyn Brook’s “we” of “We Real Cool” was meant to be so understated so has to be a quietly syncopated extra beat in her short, rhythmic poem.

The recordings also illuminate the poets themselves in ways that those already familiar with them might find surprising. Although one may understand that Carl Sandburg was a Midwestern poet seeking to reach the common man, one might not realize that his mother-tongue was Swedish until hearing him speak. While one may associate James Joyce with the “stream of consciousness” literary technique, hearing his rapid-fire delivery of a portion of “Finnegan’s Wake” gives this connection a startling new twist. And while one may realize that Dylan Thomas was Welsh, nothing can prepare the listener for the powerful lyric beauty of his voice. The bitterness in Sylvia Plath’s voice, the drama in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s, the weariness in Robert Frost’s – all these add a rich depth towards a comprehension of these poets.
Enlightening from beginning to end, Poetry Speaks Expanded is a remarkable experience, a wonderful and living addition to any poetry library and a tremendous introduction to the beauties of 20th-century verse.