In 1972, I recorded Poe’s “The Raven” as an exercise for a graduate seminar led by Prof. John Fraser, who was then teaching in the Department of English at Dalhousie University in Halifax. I remember parts of the next meeting of our little group in John’s living room, where, as was our habit, we spent some of the time listening to each other’s recordings and commenting on their effectiveness (or, as sometimes happened, the lack of thereof).
On this occasion, John played the whole of my Raven performance, which was followed by at least a minute of total silence punctuated by an occasional “Hmmf,” and “Uh huh,” and “Interesting.” I seem to remember a cat or two walking around. Finally, one of the guys in the group said, “Well, of course, you could read the phone book and make it sound like poetry.” I allowed that he was probably right, after which I launched into one of my mini-tirades about how the prosodic features of great poems are informed by their inherent musicality, not the other way around. Then we moved on to other recordings and topics.
And there the matter rested for nearly 40 years. In 2004 or 2005, John emailed me to ask for permission to use my Raven recording on his website, Jottings, a rich collection of his own writing, and the location of possibly the most fascinating and eclectic poetry anthology I’ve ever seen (and one which continues to grow as I write this), collected with an original and unerring eye for the best, as opposed to what many other anthologists have made conventionally “the best” a few times too many.
My recording appears along with ones made by other students in other years, not as parts of the anthology, but as illustrations to accompany points he makes in an article about the vocal performance of poetry. It’s there in a fairly modest capacity, although John does refer to it with an admiration I’d had no idea he felt for it until then.
In the ensuing years, the web crawlers found Jottings and launched his link to my reading into deep cyberspace, where it was picked up by Poe fans around the world searching for material on “The Raven.” Links to it and to copies of it propagated to other servers began to pop up on web sites in several countries on various continents. It’s not as ubiquitous now as it was for a while, but it still appears on a number of “free mp3 files” listings in various languages, alongside popular readings of the poem by Christopher Walken, Vincent Price, and other notables whose names I won’t drop (here).
All of which has been both gratifying and worrisome. I think the performance stands up all right, but the quality of the recording is awful. It wasn’t top-notch even in 1972. It’s full of pops and clicks and me creaking the chair, turning the page, and bumping into the microphone, against the continuous background of tape hiss and the Uher tape deck’s motor turning the reels. On top of that, consumer-grade audio tape just wasn’t designed to last 40 years. There’s been the inevitable signal deterioration, and some two or three words have disappeared completely from the second line of the poem.
So I’ve made a new recording of the poem (even newer than the one I uploaded last week, which contained a couple of bloopers), using my present-day voice and interpretive impulses. With a few niggles, I’m personally more happy with this version. But I’ve yielded to opinion that the old one isn’t just different, but better. After a fair amount of thought, I’ve reached the conclusion that, given my unique perspective on both readings and both readers, it’s frankly impossible to decide with any objectivity.
Accordingly, I pulled it up in my audio editing software yesterday, removed most of the pops and clicks and squelched the continuous interference as much as I could without audible voice loss. I enhanced the voice timbre as much as I could, and with these changes, I’ve re-adopted it. Here it is: