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Childhood is the kingdom: Millay reading Millay — 40 Comments

1. I’ve attended a great number of readings, and tend not to enjoy them nor readily understand much of what I hear. Paul Bowles, in Tangier, once said to me, “I don’t like to be read to,” and I am, with rare exceptions, the same way.

   My good friend Katherine Dunn was, on the other hand, a great believer in the performance aspect of reading her own or other authors’ texts aloud. She had a low voice for a female, and had once been “”the Story Lady” on a local radio station. However, she was not nearly so mannered as Millay (as noted, a style from another time. It’s probably good there exist no recordings of Poe.)

   Ursula LeGuin seemed to take great pleasure in reading aloud, and would even do the voices of different characters, an affectation which struck me as embarrassing.

   There are quite a number of authors who make a big show out of their readings, turning this show into a performance piece more akin to stand-up comedy than anything to do with literature so far as I’m concerned. Chuck Palahniuk, T. Coraghessan Boyle and others have no doubt helped their book sales by their antics in this style.

   William Burroughs is much-beloved by hipsters because of his very distinctive voice.

   All that said, I did once find myself completely enthralled by how the Beat poet Michael McClure read his work. Lines that on the page are in upper-case he underplayed, almost whispering, and this seemed hypnotically effective to me.

   And in a very different way, a cassette tape I ran into of the late Sylvia Plath reading her poetry aloud led me to become newly interested in her. All of her repressed rage and dangerous intelligence is audible there in her voice. It must have been quite an experience to have an intimate conversation with her, if you were up to it. She was “performing,” but too much reality is there as “noise” attached to the vocal signal she sends out.

   So many others, when they read, seek to do “show-biz,” which I suppose can work but carries the real risk of turning you into Liberace… although of course Liberace is exactly what many want.

2. I liked the way Millay completely dropped the affectation when she came to the annoyed-mother part and simply channeled an annoyed mother. It made me think she was doing the rest of it for some particular purpose, though I don’t know what.

3. Mrs Whatsit:

   Yes, I find her changes of tone quite amazing.

   When Millay says “And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh, God! Oh, God!” it really does sound like a person grieving in the night.

4. miklos:

   I don’t like readings either, ordinarily.

   You might be interested in this.

5. neo:

   I too (as you can imagine) am not a fan of audiobooks. I’ve heard people talk about listening to them while driving five hours at a time — which amounts to special pleading. Actual reading seems like a very different discipline and experience, to me.

6. That poem was written in 1937, and by that time she was seldom sober and also used drugs. She may have sounded quite different earlier.

7. I’ve heard recordings of Shakespearean actors from the early 20th century who had the same delivery – pressured spech with a lot of vibrato. I’ve also heard a recording of the great Edwin Booth speaking Shakespeare. From what I could make out through the surface noise (this was a wax cylinder from the 1890s, after all) he had a very naturalistic delivery, very “modern”, to our ears.

8. I’ve heard James Joyce, who was alleged to be a very good singer. I was disappointed, however, by his thin, high voice when he read.

   We have the same birthday, and he’s been a mythic figure to me since I was young.

   Norman Mailer did a reading from “Ancient Evenings” that was quite good. A case of “the singer not the song.” It’s a terrible book.

9. When I was a poet and I ran with poets, I often felt required to genuflect before the spoken version of poem, especially when read by the poet.

   Truth to tell, I always preferred to read poetry rather than listen to it. With a few exceptions most poets read their own poetry poorly, sometimes because they had poor voices or poor instincts, but mostly because they didn’t seem to care about the audience experience. Either they didn’t prepare or they refused to “pander” to the audience or they were flat drunk. Or they were just so self-involved and had so few opportunities to be heard that they exploited the audience mercilessly.

   Modern poetry is written first for the page, not the voice. The line breaks are more visual than auditory. The poem is often complex and hard to follow — it helps to be able to jump back a line or two and reread in the light of new information.

   Eventually I gave up on spoken poetry entirely.

10. I’ve heard James Joyce, who was alleged to be a very good singer. I was disappointed, however, by his thin, high voice when he read.

    miklos000rosza: Likewise. I was glad I touched the base of hearing JJ read his own work, particularly “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” but it wasn’t an experience I bothered to repeat.

    Dylan Thomas, on the other hand, was magnificent. My mother used to play a Dylan Thomas record after I went to bed as a kid, and it spooked the hell out of me.

    I can still hear Thomas intoning, “And Death shall have no dominion….”

11. I always enjoyed listening to Dylan Thomas reading A Child’s Christmas in Wales, what a magnificent voice.
    https://youtu.be/8HoxycLmMOk

    Millay sounds exactly like all the very proper upper class ladies in the movies of the 1930s. It’s not quite Park Avenue lockjaw but more like Katherine Hepburn’s Connecticut horse country accent.

12. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a great Millay reading. Maybe a little fast, but such expressiveness! You can tell she rehearsed that poem thoroughly before reading it.

    Or maybe that was her process as a poet to obsessively croon the lines again and again until they were right, as Mark Strand said he did.

    Nonetheless, I couldn’t follow the Millay poem without looking at the text.

13. Brian Swisher Says:
    March 6th, 2018 at 7:38 pm
    I’ve heard recordings of Shakespearean actors from the early 20th century who had the same delivery — pressured spech with a lot of vibrato.
    * * *
    That was my first thought as well.
    This from Paul, and also Neo’s prior post, is somewhat explanatory.

    Paul in Boston Says:
    March 6th, 2018 at 9:13 pm
    …
    Millay sounds exactly like all the very proper upper class ladies in the movies of the 1930s. It’s not quite Park Avenue lockjaw but more like Katherine Hepburn’s Connecticut horse country accent.

    http://neoneocon.com/2011/02/07/the-patrician-american-voice-poets-and-others/#comment-223504

    Richard Aubrey Says:
    February 7th, 2011 at 3:11 pm
    You’ll hear traces of this in the women lead characters in many movies from the beginning of talkies into the Fifties. Ditto some of the voiceovers from old documentaries. I figured the movie stars had to be taught it, to fake some sort of class, subliminally caught by the viewers.
    Seemed to hint at a not-quite-mapable place between Boston, New York, and Philadelphia where the people had money and breeding. The women wore white gloves and could smoke elegantly, walk and sit with great posture, wore hats with veils and, in one way or another were WAY above the common folks.

14. There is a relevant article at the Poetry Foundation website about Millay’s Renascence which delves into her readings. Here is an excerpt from the article:

    “Millay’s performances would soon become an integral component of her poetry practice, the history of which scholars are just now beginning to recover. But contemporaries frequently remarked on Millay’s powerful voice, often as part and parcel of her poetic gifts. Hearing her recite early in her career, Untermeyer said, ‘I had no sense of the fame she was going to achieve. I thought she was a poet for the elect. There was no other voice like hers in America. It was the sound of the ax on fresh wood.’…

    “In Voicing American Poetry (2008), scholar Lesley Wheeler describes how Millay’s success as a performer was partly due to her early training with elocutionists; she spoke in a cultured, transatlantic accent and the sound of her voice–and her ability to use it as an instrument–attracted attention, including Dow’s. After Vassar, Millay moved to New York City and acted with the Provincetown Players: ‘She soon became truly famous and successful as a performer of her own poetry,’ Wheeler writes. ‘Starting in the teens, she recited her poems in a variety of venues, including bohemian parties, clubs, colleges, and large lecture halls. By 1933 she was not only a best-selling poet and a celebrity, but also a veteran of protracted reading tours, which she claimed to dislike but which offered a significant source of income … these readings were a vital part of Millay’s art and an avenue for poetic innovations.’

    “In Millay’s 1941 recording, Renascence takes nearly 14 minutes to read. I noted the poem’s tetrameters earlier, but Millay reads it musically rather than metrically. The opening line is a whoosh of two vaguely anapestic expressions (accented as ‘All-I could see | from-where I stood… ‘) as Millay elides the spaces between syllables and words, yoking and nearly slurring phrases to generate speed. Musical terms make sense when talking about Millay’s performances: she greatly varied her tempos, stretched utterances long past their sound envelopes, and created phrases that crescendoed, and decrescendoed. All these effects imbue this recording of Renascence with complex associations. ‘A man was starving in Capri,’ for example, becomes a jaunty ditty. The stanza of rebirth–’And all at once the heavy night / Fell from my eyes and I could see’–is voiced mournfully, seemingly at odds with the lines’ contents. Caesuras and stanza breaks or pauses are added, restructuring what I had previously read as a tidy narrative of ascent, descent, and resurrection. Millay performed and likely broadcast Renascence many times, altering each rendition in untold ways…”

15. I’m a fan of the spoken word and usually have a book plugged into my head. Millay’s poem and her reading knocked me back, it was really evocative.

    I don’t think I can take too much of the stylized transatlantic accent, but that was just right. Love the slight quaver.

    Her poem captured something honest about the wildness of childhood.

16. Esther, you may enjoy this reading of Millay’s As Sharp As In My Childhood, Still:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEvXtVurUTo

17. http://neoneocon.com/2011/02/07/the-patrician-american-voice-poets-and-others/#comment-223602

    Kurt Says:
    February 7th, 2011 at 11:33 pm
    .. Rita Dove is also an alumna of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and you can hear the Iowa lilt in the readings here from 1987, but her time as poet laureate gave her a lot more exposure and practice presenting her poetry to a wide variety of audiences, and so in this much more recent sample, she is a much more engaging presenter, as well.
    * *
    That was a nice essay, but it was not a poem.

18. Elocution and oratory are not much taught nor practiced nowadays.

19. It may cheer neo readers to learn Millay was an outspoken “neocon” in her day. Here’s the first stanza of a poem exhorting America to fight the Axis, published in the NY Times, June 6, 1940.

    During the early years of the Iraq War I used this poem as a counter-example to the near unanimous opposition among poets then to the war. It failed to impress my fellow poets, but it was fun to tweak them with a well-known woman poet supporting war.

    It’s not a great Millay poem, but then neither were Neruda’s odes to the valiant Soviet soldiers defending Stalingrad from the Nazis.
    _____________________________________________

    There Are No Islands, Any More

    “Lines Written in Passion and in Deep Concern for England, France and My Own Country”

    Dear Isolationist, you are
    So very, very insular!
    Surely you do not take offense?-
    The word’s well used in such a sense.
    ‘Tis you, not I, sir, who insist
    You are an Isolationist.

    And oh, how sweet a thing to be
    Safe on an island, not at sea!
    (Though some one said, some months ago-
    I heard him, and he seemed to know;
    Was it the German Chancellor?
    “There are no islands anymore.”)
    …
    –Edna St. Vincent Millay

    For complete poem:
    http://arlindo-correia.com/060800.html.

20. Here’s my favorite Millay, telling the story of heartbreak as well as it can be told this side of country music.
    ___________________________________________

    Time does not bring relief; you all have lied

    Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
    Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
    I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
    I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
    The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
    And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
    But last year’s bitter loving must remain
    Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
    There are a hundred places where I fear
    To go,–so with his memory they brim.
    And entering with relief some quiet place
    Where never fell his foot or shone his face
    I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
    And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

    –Edna St. Vincent Millay

21. Is that why Jesus said the children belong to him, as they are closer to the kingdom of god.

    The kingdom of children are innocent enough not to believe in the power of death. The kingdom of El, the Almighty Most High, has the power to negate and defeat death.

22. I was thinking we had discussed the transatlantic patrician accent here before. That was fascinating, as I’d long wondered why the upper-class people in movies of the ’30s and to some extent past then talked as they did.

    I liked this Millay reading, somewhat against my better judgment. I’ve also been around the poetry scene a little, though mostly decades ago, and for all the talk about poetry being best read aloud, I never have liked the typical delivery of contemporary poets. I’m not sure I can describe it but it bugs me.

    There is a recording of Yeats reading Innisfree which I’m sure would be easy to find online. It’s pretty cool.

23. I love Cary Grant but I could never figure his accent. Apparently he came by it somewhat naturally.

    Grant’s accent seemed to have changed as a result of moving to London with the Pender [vaudeville] troupe and working in many music halls in the UK and the US, eventually becoming what some term a transatlantic or mid-Atlantic accent.

    –https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cary_Grant

    When I was young and first heard of the “transatlantic accent” I thought it had something to do with cruise ships.

24. Pingback:Reading Edna St. Vincent Millay – Musings from Brian J. Noggle

25. “. . . art can also call forth some very heavy emotions and thoughts and express them in ways that transcend the pedestrian, reaching parts of the human psyche and spirit that mere prose doesn’t touch.” [Neo]

    Yes, and in transcending the pedestrian, the arts transcend words. At their highest level the arts deal with the ineffable (e.g., see the woman cradling her dead child on the left side of Picasso’s Guernica).

    And at this ineffable level, there are really no new messages. There are just universal, primal, fundamental messages which have been expressed repeatedly in the past and which are now expressed in the current artistic language of a new generation

26. That second Millay poem is stunning, Huxley. Thank you.

    Somewhere I have a Caedmon box set of poets reading their own poetry. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Thomas, Wallace Stevens, many more. I used to listen to it in the car, and that pressured delivery and transatlantic accent were very much present in the older recordings. Unfortunately, it’s on cassette, and I don’t own a cassette player any more.

    That transatlantic accent wasn’t limited to the wealthy. My maternal grandparents, both born around 1900, had traces of it – not nearly as pronounced as Millay, but enough that old movies remind me of them. Neither came from money or fancy pedigrees at all – one’s father was a farmer, the other a grocer. But both my grandmother and grandfather were well-educated, with graduate degrees; maybe that’s where it came from.

27. Millay’s family was not at all wealthy, by the way, despite the “patrician” accent:

    In 1904, Cora officially divorced Millay’s father for financial irresponsibility, but they had already been separated for some years. Cora and her three daughters, Edna (who called herself “Vincent”), Norma Lounella (born 1893), and Kathleen Kalloch (born 1896), moved from town to town, living in poverty.

28. My Brooklyn born grandmother was not educated past public school. She made diy records in the 1940’s, so I have her actual voice, not just my recollection. She absolutely had the cultured transatlantic accent, which had to have been self taught because they were dead poor during the depression.

    Maybe I always like Glenda the good witch, from the wizard of Oz, because she sounded like my grandma.

    My dad was able to get occasional work in radio, because he had the voice too, and I’ve been told my voice sounds like I could be an audiobook narrator, lol. He had us read aloud Shakespeare as a fun after dinner activity, amongst other things.

    So that Edna St. Vincent Millay recording of her poem about childhood recalled my memories very vividly.

29. I, too, dislike being read to. But, I do like to read to people, especially humorous items. My grown daughter, shakes her head when I approach with a sheet of paper or an open book. “Oh, no, she has another reading for us!”

    A number of years ago, my husband and I took an auto trip out west, planning to listen to a few books on tape during the long hours on the road. Although the plots were interesting, neither of us could remember much about them days later.

    As a student, I realized I wasn’t able to retain as much from lectures. The act of writing my notes was important to me. I needed notes to study, books to read.

    My father made a giant 8′ X 4′ chalk board in our basement. We had real teachers’ chalk, the long yellow kind, stuck in sawdust in a hefty box, and an authentic chamois eraser. In high school, I would do my algebra, geometry, trig homework on that chalk board. For some reason, the enlarged diagrams, theorems, and proofs were imprinted on my brain. If I was called on to demonstrate one of our homework problems in the classroom, I was ready!

30. Someone told me there are three learning styles, visual, audio and kinetic and combinations.

    I definitely recall much more from a book I’ve heard, rather than read ‘manually.’ Most of my notes in school were elaborate doodles, hilariously I can recall the lesson from them even now!

    That said, I can’t listen to anything while I’m driving, it’s too distracting.

31. I’m not in general a fan of audio books, but there’s one fairly narrow circumstance in which I really like them: a not-too-difficult-to-follow novel and a drive, especially a drive of many hours and maybe days. In some cases the reader can actually add to my enjoyment of the book–for instance, George Guidall’s reading is now a big part of my enjoyment of the Tony Hillerman mysteries, which I love. And one particularly memorable experience was Jeremy Irons’s reading of Brideshead Revisited. I had read the novel and seen the memorable TV series, but his reading made Waugh’s prose even richer.

32. That second Millay poem is stunning, Huxley. Thank you.

    Mrs Whatsit: You’re welcome. We seem to share a similar taste in poetry.

    Do you have any inside dope on the new “Wrinkle in Time” movie?

33. Wrinkle in Time isn’t in the theaters yet, but here is a pre-review, with some trepidation.

    This was easily my favorite book as a middle-grader, and for many years afterword. It seems a bit simplistic now (because I am decades older) but I would love my grandkids to read it.

    http://thefederalist.com/2018/03/06/a-wrinkle-in-time-stripped-of-christianity-can-only-disappoint/

    “Are ideas and stories, books written by other people, just a jumping off point for a story that is adjacent to the story that Hollywood wants to tell? This isn’t a critique reserved specifically for “A Wrinkle in Time.” There are incredibly detailed lists for other franchises, like “Harry Potter” or “The Lord of the Rings” (and “The Hobbit”), where fans and even scholars dissect why and what the movies left out and changed. When a movie is written and created based on a story contained in a book, it’s a fair assumption that the story will resemble the book.

    There are also fans who are willing to tolerate and overlook changes as long as the essence of the story is preserved. They’ll love the movie as much as the book, as long the feelings and the best and most vital parts of a story are carried into the movie. The concerns coming out about “A Wrinkle in Time” are that it very well might alienate not only the fans who crave and seek story telling perfection, but also those who desire the thematic and structural elements of a story to be left alone.

    If a movie can’t tell a story that is lovable and recognizable to the people who have cherished and dissected the story in book form, it’s entirely possible that it’s strayed too far. These qualms have nothing to do with the cast, which looks entirely fantastic and talented, but rather with the decision to strip away the deeply interwoven Christianity of the story and leave behind instead a generic universalist moralism.
    …
    It’s a little astonishing to see Lee in one breath say that L’Engle’s Christian faith, which was a vital and formative part of her life, that she used it to express her ideas of frustration about how the world treats people in her novels was just an element, but then in the next explain the the story is actually about good vs. evil without seeing the disconnect. A story by a Christian author who made deliberate choices to incorporate Christian themes in a story about good vs. evil is a story with Christianity as a central theme, not just some minor element to be shrugged off.”

34. Susanamantha Says:
    March 7th, 2018 at 2:15 pm
    If I was called on to demonstrate one of our homework problems in the classroom, I was ready!
    * * *
    I memorized a poem in grade school that I still remember, although not the exact title or the author (I have given an approximate title here). Fortunately, I lived in the age where learning poems by heart was considered a useful life skill. I can still do “Jabberwocky” when it seems called for.

    THE MATH LESSON

    I studied my tables over and over,
    and backward and forward too,
    But I couldn’t remember “6 times 9”
    and I didn’t know what to do.

    ‘Til Sister told me to play with my doll,
    and not to bother my head.
    “If you call her “Fifty-four” for awhile,
    you’ll learn it by heart,” she said.

    So I took my favorite, Mary Ann,
    (though I thought ’twas a dreadful shame,
    to call such a perfectly lovely girl
    such a perfectly horrid name),

    And I called her “my dear little Fifty-four”
    a hundred times, ’til I knew
    the answer to “6 times 9” as well
    as the answer to “2 times 2.”

    Next day, Elizabeth Wigglesworth
    (who always acts so proud)
    said, “Six times nine if fifty-two,”
    and I almost laughed aloud.

    But I wished I hadn’t when Teacher said,
    “Now, Dorothy, tell if you can.”
    For I thought of my doll,
    and sakes alive!
    I answered, “Mary Ann!”

35. For a little more ambitious doggerel in a decidedly modern mode, I chanced across this video today.
    The speaker is very animated (although he needs some thespian lessons for the used of his arms) and quite humorous, and if you know any German at all you will be ROFLing very soon.
    The poem comes in about the middle of the talk.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_98m4Vod6_8

    How learning German taught me the link between maths and poetry | Harry Baker | TEDxVienna

36. huxley Says:
    March 7th, 2018 at 10:15 am
    Here’s my favorite Millay, telling the story of heartbreak as well as it can be told this side of country music.
    ___________________________________________
    Outstanding.

37. Following up on the question of removing Christianity from “Wrinkle,” maybe the left discounts its importance because they really just don’t know what’s Christian and what isn’t.

    https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/03/02/facebook-fact-checks-threatens-christian-satire-site-babylon-bee-know-satire-post/

    “The Babylon Bee, often called a sort of Christian-themed Onion, has been making people laugh for the last two years (as of Thursday, 1 March), with — in Wikipedia’s words — “over-the-top fake stories focusing on well known pastors, celebrities, and politicians.”

    Much of the fun comes simply from Christian doctrine, framed for a chuckle.
    …
    So when it posted the following story on 1 March 2018, it was a pretty good bet it was, you know, satire.

    CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication

    …
    But it comes off as just a little over the top for Facebook to warn Babylon Bee that the “CNN washing machine” post had been fact-checked by Snopes.com*, and was disputed by same, and if Babylon Bee became a “repeat offender,” the site would see its “distribution reduced” and its “ability to monetize and advertised [sic] removed.”
    …
    another user posted a screen cap of the warning he received from Facebook when he clicked on the “CNN washing machine” post.”

    * *
    Snopes does know that the BB is a satire site, but the fact that they would even give a fact-check rating instead of just saying, “Dude, get a life” is ridiculous.
    * *
    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cnn-washing-machine/
    CNN invested in an industrial-sized washing machine to help their journalists and news anchors spin the news before publication.

    RATING
    FALSE
    ORIGIN
    On 1 March 2018, the Babylon Bee web site published an article reporting that CNN had made a significant investment in heavy machinery to assist their journalists “spin” the news they report:

    …
    Although it should have been obvious that the Babylon Bee piece was just a spoof of the ongoing political brouhaha over alleged news media “bias” and “fake news,” some readers missed that aspect of the article and interpreted it literally. But the site’s footer gives away the Babylon Bee’s nature by describing it as “Your Trusted Source For Christian News Satire,” and the site has been responsible for a number of other (usually religious-themed) spoofs that have been mistaken for real news articles.”

    MainStreamMedia: why nobody believes you are “trusted news” any longer.

38. huxley, Aesop Fan:

    Millay knew a lot about heartbreak, from both sides.

    Here’s another sonnet of hers that I like:

    What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
    I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
    Under my head till morning; but the rain
    Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
    Upon the glass and listen for reply,
    And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
    For unremembered lads that not again
    Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
    Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
    Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
    Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
    I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
    I only know that summer sang in me
    A little while, that in me sings no more.

39. Among the best, Jo Stafford on youtube doing “I’ll Be Seeing You”. As affecting as Millay.

    The guy who reads the Patrick O’Brian novels is terrific.

    Astonishing: Simon Winchester did a book on the origin of the Oxford English Dictionary. Can you believe it, it was fascinating. I heard it read, presumably by him. Really great.

    Various people have read or put Kipling to music on youtube. See Gunga Din by Michael Farrow. He tells it as prose, and you can barely hear the rhyme and scan. Excellent.

40. Huxley, I’ll have to consult with Mrs Which and Mrs Who and get back to you!

    And yes, it seems we are moved by similar poems.

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