{"id":140527,"date":"2019-10-29T09:00:02","date_gmt":"2019-10-29T13:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=140527"},"modified":"2019-10-29T12:19:27","modified_gmt":"2019-10-29T16:19:27","slug":"john-ashberys-reading-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/10\/29\/john-ashberys-reading-voice\/","title":{"rendered":"John Ashbery\u2019s Reading Voice"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c75 at 75<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0a special project from the 92nd Street Y in celebration of the Unterberg Poetry Center\u2019s seventy-fifth anniversary, invites contemporary authors to listen to a recording from the Poetry Center\u2019s archive and write a personal response.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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John Ashbery at 92Y in 1970 – Frank O\u2019Hara Tribute reading (photo by Jack Prelutsky)<\/p><\/div>\n

The Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y has a seventy-year archive of recordings\u2014it began hosting readings in 1939 and recording them in 1949\u2014and it offers a unique opportunity to study poets\u2019 voices and reading styles. Between 1952 and 2014, John Ashbery made seventeen appearances on the stage of the Poetry Center. He read with other poets\u2014Barbara Guest, Mark Ford, Jack Gilbert, John Hollander, J. D. McClatchy, W. S. Merwin, Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, and James Schuyler. He read with painters\u2014Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers. And he joined in readings honoring other poets\u2014tributes to Frank O\u2019Hara (1970), Elizabeth Bishop (1979) and Marianne Moore (1987). Ashbery, who made regular Poetry Center appearances from the ages of twenty-four to eighty-seven, is on a short list of poets whose Y readings spanned so many decades (others include W. S. Merwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, and Galway Kinnell).<\/p>\n

As a scholar and poet who uses software to analyze performance style in poetry recordings, I was thrilled when Bernard Schwartz, the Poetry Center\u2019s director, invited me to study the archive. The Ashbery readings seemed, to me, like a perfect corpus to begin with.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But even those who loved attending Ashbery\u2019s poetry readings (I am one of them) might feel that he\u2019s the last poet in the world whose performance style is worth studying. He typically read in a restrained, unassuming voice, and the unofficial consensus is that the performative energy of his poetry plays out not in the vocal delivery, but in the slippery syntax, the sly comedy of skewed idioms, the rich mixture of vocabularies and startling tropes, the momentum of swerving thought. His poems can elude the audience\u2019s understanding in a live reading, and they elude many readers on the page as well.<\/p>\n

Raphael Allison (as I discussed in Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non)Performance Styles of 100 American Poets<\/a>) describes Ashbery\u2019s reading style as \u201ca performance of nonperformance.\u201d He means this as a compliment, particularly in reference to a 1963 reading recorded at the Living Theatre. However, Richard Howard, who actually attended the reading that night, remembers Ashbery as having, in Allison\u2019s words, \u201cread with extreme dramatic flair.\u201d Ashbery was \u201cstriding up and down, smoking, wreathed in clouds of smoke \u2026 on the set for The Brig [a play about a soldier that went up in May of the same year] behind a lot of barbed wire,\u201d Howard remembered. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t certain on that occasion whether the wire was to keep him from us or us from him.\u201d Clearly Howard ascribes a certain power to Ashbery\u2019s physical presence, while Allison has only the recording to judge from.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s another perspective. \u201cJohn Ashbery\u2019s near monotone suggests a dreamier dimension than the text sometimes reveals,\u201d writes Charles Bernstein.<\/em> Once we have heard a poet like Ashbery read, he feels, \u201cwe change our hearing and reading of their works on the page as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

I witnessed Ashbery read on four occasions. At one of these, on April 8, 2001, he cleared the room\u2014the beautiful Morrison Library reading room at the University of California, Berkeley. The reading began as standing-room only. My boyfriend and I were the last to squeeze in the door. Charles Altieri introduced Ashbery with sincere, abstrusely articulated enthusiasm, sat down, and soon fell asleep.<\/p>\n

I watched as many in the audience become visibly, unduly mystified by the poetry, or Ashbery\u2019s manner of reading it, or both. Or they were simply bored. The undergraduates, drawn by the aura of Ashbery\u2019s name, streamed quietly out of the room in ones and twos and threes, until it was more than half empty. But I was committed to the end. I was writing my dissertation in part on Ashbery\u2019s poetry, and his writing had changed my attitude to boredom, to poetry, to language itself.<\/p>\n

It is common to be bored at a poetry reading, or at least under-stimulated, especially by poets esteemed in the academy. My own inarticulate pleasure in, and intense irritation with, certain poetry reading styles is what led me to research poetry performance in the first place.<\/p>\n

If I\u2019ve learned anything in this rather rarefied line of research, it\u2019s that the voice is a slippery thing, and so is our perception of it. Speech scientists concur with Robert Frost that the \u201ctone of meaning … without the words\u201d\u2014the intonation and rhythm of the voice\u2014are often perceived as more important than the words. Whenever we listen to a voice, we bring all sorts of unconscious and half-conscious expectations and biases to the experience.<\/p>\n

Those who walked out on Ashbery at Berkeley in 2001 probably thought, in some way, that he wasn\u2019t reading the way a poet should, or that his poems were not what they thought poems should be. When we hear a voice, and especially when we listen to a disembodied voice\u2014we listen with expectations and biases in regard to gender, age, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, cultural or religious background, education, educational background, region, nationality, mood, et cetera. We try to pin down the speaker\u2019s identity, and complain if they do not fit our expectations. The Berkeley undergraduates of 2001 might have expected Ashbery\u2019s vocal delivery to sound more like a poet, or more queer, or more like a New Yorker, to correspond with whatever vocal stereotypes or conventions they had in mind for these roles or identities.<\/p>\n

In her recent book, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre and Vocality in African American Music<\/em>, Nina Sun Eidsheim gives us a term for the question we ask when we listen to a voice: Who is this?<\/em> We don\u2019t just ask this when we answer a phone call from an unknown number. When we listen to any stranger\u2019s voice, we try to pin down the speaker\u2019s identity\u2014and thus radically reduce that voice\u2019s individuality to conform to or be rejected by our expectations. Eidsheim calls this the acousmatic question<\/em>\u2014after Pierre Schaeffer, who \u201cderive[s] the \u2026 root [of acousmatic] from an ancient Greek legend about Pythagoras\u2019s disciples listening to him through a curtain.\u201d She argues that it relies on fundamental misunderstandings of the human voice and our own listening practices, particularly in regard to vocal timbre. One of her case studies is the voice of Jimmy Scott, a jazz singer who was sometimes characterized as a freak (as he arguably was in Episode 29 of Twin Peaks<\/em>). Though he was a cisgender male, Scott suffered from Kallmann syndrome (delayed or absent puberty), and had a limited career due in part to racialized assumptions about how a black man should sound.<\/p>\n

Who is this?<\/em> is often the wrong question, but we are always asking it anyway. The next time you listen to a recorded voice without knowing the speaker\u2019s identity, ask yourself what assumptions you are making about their identity, and why.<\/p>\n

In The<\/em> Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction<\/em>, Jonathan Sterne advances a persuasive critique of conventional assumptions about hearing versus seeing, which he calls \u201cthe audiovisual litany,\u201d including the notions that \u201chearing tends toward subjectivity, vision tends toward objectivity\u201d and \u201chearing is a temporal sense, vision is primarily a spatial sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, seeing is no more objective than hearing, and both hearing and seeing operate spatially and temporally. But a poem holds still on the page when we study it. A recorded poem does not. Nor do our perceptions of what we\u2019ve heard. And so what I call slow listening<\/em>\u2014listening repeatedly to the same recording, and making some attempt to analyze recorded voices as physical phenomena, to visualize their effects, and to analyze quantitative data about them can illuminate (there\u2019s the hegemony of the visual for you!) what it is we have just heard. Slow listening serves as a refinement of, and sometimes a corrective to, our impressionistic perceptions; developing this technique has made me more aware of my own biases as a listener, and it has made me listen more precisely.<\/p>\n

So what was Ashbery up to as a reader? Studied calm? Dramatic flair? Trance-inducing monotone? Was he an unusually inexpressive reader, not to say boring? And did he always read in a similar manner? What was characteristic of his voice, anyway?<\/p>\n

When I analyze a poet\u2019s voice, I start with pitch and timing patterns. Based on some linguistic research and our own intuitions about what makes a voice sound expressive, neurobiologist Lee M. Miller and I have developed a toolbox of prosodic measurements called Voxit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Pitch is typically measured in Hertz, or cycles per second; with the human voice, this means the number of times the vocal cords vibrate per second. Among the fifty male American poets I sampled in \u201cBeyond Poet Voice<\/a>,\u201d the average pitch was 115 Hz. (Richard Blanco, Carl Phillips, Ted Kooser, Robert Pinsky, Matthew Zapruder, Peter Gizzi, and Mark Doty ranged from 81 to 91 Hz, while CA Conrad, Amiri Baraka, Joshua Clover, Robert Hass, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Alberto Rios were at the upper end, from 139 to 151 Hz).<\/p>\n

What about Ashbery? In a sampling of recordings drawn from his readings at the Poetry Center, his pitch ranged from 100 to 149 Hz. As a generalization, Ashbery seemed to use lower pitch when he was younger and higher pitch when he was older. A much larger sample would be needed to confirm this, but the finding aligns with the research: the pitch of male voices tends to rise with age.<\/p>\n

People may raise their pitch when emotions become more intense, as when Ashbery read Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s \u201cOver 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance\u201d at the Y\u2019s Earth Day event in 1997. In The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets<\/em>, David Lehman remembered that, \u201cWhen [Ashbery] reached the last stanza, he cried.\u201d As you can hear, Ashbery starts to sound hoarse and teary around line 54 (\u201casking for cigarettes\u201d), part way through the second stanza. He recovers and breaks down again for much of the last stanza, beginning with \u201cWhy couldn\u2019t we have seen \/ this old Nativity while we were at it?\u201d<\/p>\n