I’ll just say it: I’m not a fan. My experience has been that most poets are not effective readers of their own work (spoken word poet-actors excepted). It’s difficult to appreciate the intricacies of meaning and sound in a poem after one hearing. It helps to have a written copy in hand but, even so, you don’t have the opportunity in a live reading to sit and digest what you’ve just been fed. What I do enjoy is hearing from the poet about how they came to conceive, write, and revise the poem—the story behind its creation. Then…
…a week or so ago I was leafing through the October issue of The Atlantic and happened upon James Parker’s short essay, “Ode to Being Read To.” In it, he tells how he fixed his insomnia with whiskey and audiobooks. He’s picky about his prose (nothing “super-fancy”) and his readers (“The voice I’m listening to should be elevated, but not theatrical”) but discovered that being read to in this way lulls him to sleep.
In recent years, I’ve begun to have the occasional sleepless night. I’ve tried listening to nature sounds, Native American flute music and guided meditations on YouTube, all to no avail. Then, scrolling through podcasts one night, I happened upon Poetry Unbound and its host Pádraig Ó Tuama. I was doubtful about listening to poems in the night (what kinds of poems? what kinds of readers? would I find myself critiquing them?), but I am so grateful that I gave it a try. It’s Pádraig Ó Tuama himself who selects and reads the poems in his wonderfully comforting Irish lilt. In each 15-minute segment, over soothing background music, he reads a poem, offers commentary that illuminates it and then reads it a second time. I find that I don’t require whiskey as I listen, learn, sink down into the sound and, eventually, sleep. The perfect poetry reading!