Heard and Unheard Melodies

In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry. Produced by Rebekah Presson and David McLees. With essays by Erica Jong, Al Young, and Rebekah Presson. Los Angeles: Rhino/Word Beat, R2-72408, 1996. 4 compact discs. $60.00.

Where do poems exist? “A poem,” says Jon Stallworthy in his Norton Anthology of Poetry “Versification” essay, “is a composition written for performance by the human voice. What your eye sees on the page is the composer’s verbal score, waiting for your voice to bring it alive as you read it aloud or hear it in your mind’s ear” (lxi). Stallworthy pushes this analogy between musical notation and the printed text of a poem, quoting Eliot’s famous remark that a poet’s concerns “are more those of a quasi-musical nature . . . than of a conscious exposition of ideas,” but much as the parallel might alert Poetry 101 students to the importance of poems’ sound and rhythm for their felt life, it oversimplifies the issue. The primary experience of music is always aural: that we can learn to read a score and thereby imagine hearing a work does not alter the fact that for the great majority of us, musical experience demands live or recorded performance directed to the ear. Music does not exist for our sensuous understanding until we hear it; only then does it acquire what Susanne K. Langer called its primary illusion of virtual time, the mode by which it creates feeling (109). Stallworthy is right that we do hear poems in our head as we read them, but in a literate culture we apprehend them primarily by reading, all the while listening imaginatively—far more alertly than we listen to prose—in order to fine-tune the experience. Literacy gets us the news from poems right off the page, and while the printed text cues us to the role of sound, rhythm, and suspense in the voice, it also transmits those qualities directly to the reader, with no need of a performance medium. Tell me, where are poems said? Both in the mouth and in the head.