The Art of Listening

As a form of literacy, listening might be considered an impostor. Its orphan status in the curriculum is both parodied and applauded in the last, unfinished Dr Seuss book Hurrah for Diffendoofer Day (1998) where, in Diffendoofer School, ‘Miss Bobble teaches listening … Miss Fribble teaches laughing’. While it is often assumed we can all listen if we want to, how good are our ears as critics? As a culture, have our collective listening skills been dumbed down so that most of the time we merely hear things without taking the trouble to listen to the complex and the subtle? Is listening too much like hard work, and what would Miss Bobble say about all this?

Comprehension of the spoken word takes more active memory work than reading. When we were an oral culture, listening was the important first step in transferring knowledge. Both fiction and non-fiction used poetry, with its sound prompts to memory, to provide the framework for storytelling—rhyme and repetition were added to the mainstays of narrative and image to make a sticky neural fixing agent. Remnants of this persist: ‘thirty days have September, April …’ still works for me. Yet while there has been a resurgence of listening (audio-books are claiming more and more of shelf space in bookstores), listening to poetry can be more demanding than listening to prose. One of the key differences between prose and poetry is that all the little wheels in a poem—the spoken word—are liable to work on each other in various ways, so when it comes to listening to the poem, the job is to hear the interaction of sound patterns as you work out what the condensing lens of the form is conveying directly, metaphorically and culturally. The reward sought by the reader is the transformative moment of empathic understanding and revelation, where a set of mirror neurons inside your head are convincing you that you might well be the poem’s narrator. As a publisher of audio CDs of Australian poetry, listening accounts for a great part of what I do. Listening is a great help in finding new work, recording and editing poems for accuracy, sorting out bumps, distortions, plosives, fade outs, slurs, background noise, mouth noises (don’t ask) and breath. But how do people read their work? Audiences have a range of one-liners to put down a poor reader—I’ve heard readings described as having the aural drive of a washing machine and a voice likened to cheap china falling on cement—but when we hear something well read we pay little attention to why or how this is so.

In March this year, the UK Poetry Archive’s Co-Director and then British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion announced the inclusion of five Australian poets—Judith Beveridge, Peter Boyle, joanne burns, Stephen Edgar and Vivian Smith in their impressive online archive of audio poetry (poetryarchive.org), saying: ‘It has always been our intention to make the Poetry Archive as widely representative as possible of poetry in English, and these latest additions, by very distinguished Australian poets, are an ornament to the site. We’re proud and grateful to have them, and the wider world will be grateful too.’ Each poet’s profile included a critical appraisal of their opus, and as part of that it fell to me to contribute a sentence or two on how they read their work. While there is a long and sophisticated history of music criticism and of literary criticism, the cupboard with the commentary on reading is not well stocked. But as Andrew Motion asked for a sentence or two it seemed I should oblige.

Commentary on how a poem is read is a tricky, but by no means impossible, task. Although this aspect is not often dealt with in any detail in poetry reviews, I set out to get some understanding of how a poet’s speech works. Back to Miss Bobble. How a poet reads their own work is akin to their DNA, only more personal. Reading could be classed as the writer’s art phenotype; it lets the astute listener in to see how the poet wears their poem. The poem is a kind of aural clothing, and in reading the poet is your dresser—showing you how the sleeves fit, for example, or those little syntactical shifts so you can get into their shoes and walk around. They give you a guided tour of this architecture of words, opening surprising doors and nuances of meaning. The different spin that can be put on a single word will not be underestimated by anyone with teenage children or friends who have been told ‘whatever’ in four different ways.

What can be said of these selected recordings? Some things about the reading reflect the work itself. Beveridge’s reading of her poems, for example, has a flawless tempo that shows the rhythmic structure that supports her writing. Her voice has a gentle diplomacy and a concision that naturally enhance those parallel qualities of intimacy and clarity that define her poetics. In Stephen Edgar’s CD Photography for Beginners, a selection of his poems ranging over his last twelve years in print, his reading is characterised by clarity and expressiveness, accompanied at times by an understated sense of humour. Interestingly joanne burns, for me, sets up a theatre of words, easing listeners into a satisfying space between following her and cogitating on where they might possibly go.

How a poem reads is the litmus test for some and extraneous to others, but without privileging either page or sound, it is worthwhile to listen for yourself. Miss Bobble will proud of you.