In Their Own Voices:
A Century of Recorded Poetry

Feature (go to Jim's mention)

The four-volume Rhino/Word Beat box set In Their Own Voices: A Century Of Recorded Poetry represents an ancient tradition meeting modern technology. Poetry existed in all parts of the world probably as soon as there was language; certainly long, long before there were books, before there was writing. And, like the work in this collection, the first poems were spoken.

Three or perhaps even four thousand years ago, ancient orators memorized epic poems, then traveled from place to place reciting them. In Greece there was Homer's tale of the Trojan War, the Iliad; the Babylonians repeated the story of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh. At that time, there was little or no literary writing—let alone recording equipment—and the poems served as oral history.

In Their Own Voices contains a brief excerpt of just one - brilliant - epic, that of the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, who reads from Omeros, his Caribbean-to-Africa rendition of Homer's tale of the journey of the Greek hero Odysseus. It also contains modern poems dealing with every imaginable circumstance and use of the English language. William Meredith's poem "Crossing Over" presents love as a terrifying but necessary journey, akin to that of the escaped slave, Eliza, in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Stanley Kunitz at age 91 and David Ignatow at 82 write about their own, soon-anticipated deaths; Stephen Spender about World War I; and Langston Hughes about racial prejudice.

This collection was years in the making. It had its inception in 1991 in Aspen, Colorado, during a conversation between editor Rebekah Presson and the late Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky (thus, Brodsky's poem is the only one included that was not originally written in English). During his year as the American Poet Laureate (a job he hated, calling it "ill-defined and underpaid"), Brodsky worked to bring poetry to the masses. The notion of an anthology that drew from various collections of recorded poetry came out of a brainstorming session during which Brodsky and Presson exchanged ideas about making poetry accessible. A year later, Presson pitched the idea to Richard Foos, president and cofounder of Rhino Records. Fortunately, neither of them fully realized what a nightmare trying to license poetry recordings could be and decided to pursue the project.

In Their Own Voices opens with the great American modern poet Walt Whitman, who was recorded more than a century ago, in 1890, and by Thomas Edison, no less. Whitman reads four lines from his 1888 poem, "America!":

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old, Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love.

Of all the readings in this collection, Whitman's is the only one that may not be genuine. There's lots of evidence to point to its authenticity, including correspondence from Thomas Edison indicating that he wanted to record Whitman (and Whitman - who was such a self-promoter that he reviewed his own book of poems - was clearly the type who'd like to have been recorded), and the poem read is relatively obscure - an unlikely choice for a fake. But the original wax cylinder from which it supposedly came remains missing, casting a measure of doubt on this reading. Still, the very possibility of hearing the voice of Walt Whitman is too good to pass up.

From Whitman, the collection goes on to the titans of the early 20th century: William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore.

In Their Own Voices is not meant to provide a definitive compilation of the best poems in English by the greatest authors. Rather, it addresses 20th-century poetry and its concerns in a more general way. It draws from the most prominent audio collections in the country: Caedmon, the Library of Congress, New Letters On The Air (a syndicated radio literature series that Rebekah Presson produced and hosted for 13 years), Watershed, and many other private and public collections.

Certainly, the voices of the towering figures of poetry are in this box set. Other poets are still relatively young-whether their work will be celebrated 100 years from now remains to be seen.

But perhaps the most exciting development in this box and in contemporary poetry as a whole is the increasing participation of minority voices. More than any other writers, those of color have the ability to introduce us to new worlds, new ways of seeing the world, and exciting ways to use language.

African-American writers have long been important figures in American poetry and some of those represented here (Langston Hughes, for example) are established poetry giants. Al Young, Amiri Baraka, and Michael S. Harper all take inspiration from jazz.

Participation by Native Americans is yet another key advent on the poetry scene, despite the fact that probably no group of people has an older oral tradition. Here, you'll hear American Indian poets in a frank discussion of the clash between the ancient world and the one in which they live now: Joy Harjo on Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, an American Indian Movement member who was killed by the FBI (Harjo also plays the saxophone on this track) and Adrian Louis on alcoholism among Indians.

Four Latino writers read-among them, Jimmy Santiago Baca, who learned to read and write while in prison, and Luis Rodriguez, who took up poetry after leaving a Los Angeles street gang.

The youngest poet included is Indonesian-born Li-Young Lee. His grandfather was the personal physician to Mao Tse Tung and his father a Christian revival preacher who was jailed in Jakarta and later moved to the United States.

More important, and interesting, the 20th-century American poetry community in all its muddle of style and participation is represented. There are the modernists (Pound, etc.) and their successors, the postmodernists (whatever that means); the free-verse poets (just about everybody these days) and the believers in rhyme, the New Formalists (nobody wants to be called this); the Language poets (John Ashbery); the Beats (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Anne Waldman); the suicide poets (Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath); the feminists (May Sarton, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde); and the overtly political writers (Marge Piercy, Muriel Rukeyser).

There are funny poems to be found here (Ogden Nash, David Ray), and ironic ones (e.e. cummings, Charles Simic), poems of sadness (Carolyn Forché, Rita Dove, James Ragan), and lots of love poems (Richard Wilbur, Robert Penn Warren); poems with an edge (Charles Bukowski), lush poems (Richard Howard, Derek Walcott), poems read to music, poems written with and without rhyme or meter, and poems written and read by the religious.

The reasons why people want to hear poetry read are varied. One is that we still fall in and out of love, watch sunsets, marry, and die - and what do we have to express that? Network television gives us toilet humor, cable brings streams of curses punctuated by violence, movies blow things up. But when we want to express ourselves as more fully human, as creatures capable of elevated thought and means of expression - then we have few places to turn. Poetry books may seem out of reach to some, but hearing a poem read is soothing and healing and helps to put us in touch with our true feelings.

And when we hear a poem read, we participate in an ancient tradition that ties us to our ancestors and to our community.