|
Want a chill to go down your spine? Listen to Allan Gurganus reading Paul Laurence Dunbar's "When Malindy Sings." Or try Stanley Crouch reading "Casey at the Bat," or Cynthia Ozick matched with Poe's "The Conqueror Worm." Nearly six hours of audio (recorded at the poetry reading hosted by Garrison Keillor to celebrate the book's publication) are a wonderful reminder that much of this material was written to be read aloud, in an era when poetry was part of everyday life. There's lovely music, too: spirituals performed by the Ebony Ecumenical Ensemble, folk music, and entertaining parlor songs. The greatest pleasure, though, lies in the sheer quantity and diversity of the material on the CD. We had no idea that early American poets came in so many shapes and sizes--solitary visionaries and congenial storytellers, humorists and dissidents, songwriters and philosophers, immigrants and Native Americans--and all their voices are represented. Some we expected: Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Melville, Whitman. Others surprised: the actress Fanny Kemble, Presidents Lincoln and Adams, Zuni storytellers, Edith Wharton. So did the forms: comic light-verse, recitation pieces from the days when schoolchildren were routinely required to "speak a piece," dialect poems, healing rituals, ballads, and children's verse. It's the rare reference work that's encyclopedic without being stuffy, but American Poetry pulls it off. Just for fun we searched on "prairie," and rambled from Melville's "Clara: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land" ("the breath of Sharon's prairie land") to Emily Dickinson's "Vast Prairies of Air" to Bret Harte to Emma Lazarus's "In Exile" ("Up from the prairie the tanned herds-men pass") to a Blackfeet Indian "Song for a Fallen Warrior" ("You will scalp the enemy in the green prairie") and ended with an endearing song called "Sweet Betsy from Pike" ("Their wagons broke down with a terrible crash /And out on the prairie rolled all kinds of trash"). English homework never used to be this entertaining. The poems are a pleasure to read against handsome backdrops of period paintings, and students will appreciate the timeline, biographical notes, annotations, and extensive indexes. American Poetry combines The Library of America two-volume edition into a single definitive reference, and serves an extraordinary cultural legacy very well indeed. |
