On making an odd hobby socially useful

Sometimes people ask me how much I disliked my old job and I tell them I disliked it very much. I tell them how, to make myself feel better about hating my job so much, I would get home and read something aloud to myself. Maybe a Samuel Beckett play, or some Wilde, or some Yeats. My housemate would hear me in my room and think I was insane. Still, as Richard Ellmann said, maturity is finding justification for what, in immaturity, you felt embarrassed about, so I thought I could enlist the blind as an excuse to read books aloud again. I could record the results, and upload them to iTunes.  A bit of googling didn’t reveal any blind people in need of my services, but I did find Librivox, which accepts recordings people make at home.

There’s so much advice for beginners out there you actually need a beginner's guide to beginning, which is what I’ve created. They recommend you start by recording and getting feedback on their weekly poem, which is what I did.

1. Go here http://forum.librivox.org/viewforum.php?f=19
2. Go to the thread that begins [Weekly Poetry]
3. Open your recording software. If you, like me, don’t have any, you can download some for free for the Mac here: www.versiontracker.com (search for ‘Audacity’)
4. This will only save files as .auds, which are no good to anyone, so download the unpromising-sounding ‘Lame’ from here http://lame.sourceforge.net/ to turn these files into MP3s.
5. Go over the poem of the week two or three times, then record it, beginning with ‘[poem name] by [poet], read for Librivox.org by [your name]. Then end it with ‘End of poem. This recording is in the public domain’.
6. Rather than saving the file as a .aud, go to File -> Export and save it as an mp3.
7. Register as a user of Librivox. Because they have such problems with spammers, they need a personal email on why you’ve joined. I submitted mine and am waiting on a response…

8. Here's the result

My ultimate aim is to do a recording of all of Oscar Wilde’s ‘De Profundis’. I’ll keep you posted…
***UPDATE*** You can now download my recording of 'De Profundis' for free from the iTunes shop!

On why I think writing poetry makes you a better reader of poetry

Until recently, late at night after I had finished work, I would cycle around north Bristol. Usually into Clifton, across the fairy-lit wrought iron of the suspension bridge and back then, skirting the southern edge of the Downs, down into the steep Victorian streets of Redland. As well as getting some necessary movement for my limbs after spending all day at a desk, it meant I could see the tall Georgian and early Victorian houses in ashlar sandstone around Clifton, and the pointed greyer stone of the later Victorian and Edwardian houses around Redland. The moon would appear at unexpected intervals at the ends of some roads and the icing on the cake was to listen to something tweedy on my iPod – the memoirs of David Niven or Stephen Fry, or a Sherlock Holmes story.

This audiobooking led to my painfully literal downfall, as I went over the handlebars and broke my wrist. So I started walking around after work instead. During one of these walks, the unstoppable bit of my brain which makes schemes for self-improvement was at its unpleasant work and, as it was coming to a moralizing conclusion which I have happily forgotten, I glanced up at the moon over a roof. For reasons that I can’t quite explain, I was certain that I would see an impassive, imperious animal staring down at me from the chimney-pot: a cat or an owl. I came home and covered a page in words in a way that I often do (Question from Michael Longley: Adam, do you write poetry? Adam: Um, I cover pages in words. ML: *nods sagely*). The result was this:

Nature

Walking home, making resolution

After resolution, and looking at

The moon over chimney-pots,

I half-expect to see

An owl, or perhaps a cat,

Who got there who-knows-why,

Looking at me curiously.

(I mention Michael Longley as making a short poem of a single sentence with clauses angled to leave spaces for new meanings is one of Longley's traits that I try to emulate.) I now think that this poem was a message, in the dream-language of symbols, that my sadly irresolute and forgetful nature would not be swayed by any resolutions that I could make. There, unmoved, immovable and clearly ruling the roost, my nature was looking down on my forlorn promises.

But coming to this conclusion started me thinking of other nature poems. Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondences’:

Nature is a temple in which living pillars 


Sometimes give voice to confused words; 


Man passes there through forests of symbols 


Which look at him with understanding eyes.

Perhaps the forest is man’s own nature, and the sonnet is not about the world outside of man, but the multiple worlds inside. Or what about 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'?

And I had done a hellish thing,


And it would work 'em woe:


For all averred, I had killed the bird


That made the breeze to blow.


Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,


That made the breeze to blow!

Was the Mariner being punished for attempting to destroy his own nature? For all I know, these readings are unoriginal, but the poems have been revivified for me because I have been able to connect them to my own experience. I now have a strong suspicion of what a silent, indifferent and knowledgable animal can represent, and can now read that understanding into other poems that contain similar creatures. It’s like the difference between proving Pythagoras by drawing right-angled triangles all day, and understanding the formula.

What I do when I open a book of poems for the first time

When I was in the Poetry Library in the Southbank Centre recently I read an excellent account by Michael Laskey of how he reads poems. He reads quickly at first, to see if anything grabs him, and doesn’t get too hung up on getting everything, as he’ll go over it again. While reading, he says he needs:

‘some rewards along the way, some encouragement: a striking phrase, an exact description that excites instant recognition, a mysteriously powerful image, a flash of wit.’

Quite. Then, weirdly, I came upon a book of his poems on the shelf. This little coincidence made me decide to emulate his example by writing a brief description of what I do when I pick up a book of poems for the first time.

I go straight to the titles page. My eyes flip down the titles and back up, as I’m keen to find something like me. Because poem titles are so small and specific, and there are so many, chances are I will find something that will match with my own experiences or interests.

If I were to find a poem called ‘Being A Toddler in Howth’ or ‘On Having Gone to School in Guildford’, or ‘The Truth About Being Thirty’, I’d turn to it first. I’d read it fairly quickly the first time, as Laskey describes. What I’d be looking for are lines that hit the ear like a depth-charge (the best example of one of these I can think of at the moment is Derek Mahon’s ‘Magi, moonmen, / Powdery prisoners of the old regime, / Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought / And insomnia […]’). I think training my ear on Yeats years ago has given me an incurable weakness for the resonant and plangent.

If I don’t find lines like these, what I’ll look for next is something that strikes me as true. Imagine I found a poem called ‘The Truth About Being Thirty’. Imagine it went something like this:

With the increasing desire to jog

comes increasing pain in the calves

and photos confirm that I look horrifying

when I’m trying to look happy.

I’d be looking at these for social reasons. Knowing them would mean that the next time I was talking about being thirty, instead of saying ‘I find I look horrifying when I look happy’, I could say ‘it’s like Michael Laskey (or whoever) says: ‘photos confirm that I look horrifying / when I’m trying to look happy’. It’s become ratified by publication, it connects you and your interlocuter to a wider world, and it makes something depressing into something fun, or at very least something rueful, through the fact that it is communal.

And if I don’t find something I like the sound of, or something I can quote within three or four poems, I put the book down…