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What Poets Want

Jens Ferdinand Willumsen: Sophus Clausssen Reading Poems 1915

What poets want is to be heard. As Owen Dunkel said, “I love my poetry.” Most poets will read at the open mike forever if they are not stopped by the clock.  Sometimes even the clock cannot stop them. This phenomenon, however, is not unique to poets. Artists and musicians have the same craving. “Such exhibitionists,” commented Joseph Flummerfelt, choir conductor. To meld all the voices into one without the singers trying to outdo each other is a tough job. Deep down inside every choir member wants to be the soloist.

When it comes to sharing our arts we have little self control. Time is for others to keep.

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3 thoughts on “What Poets Want”

  1. “To meld all the voices into one without the singers trying to outdo each other is a tough job. Deep down inside every choir member wants to be the soloist.” Consider my choral pieces. Are they like that? Are the two voices “melded” into “one”? And listen to The Golden Gate Quartet. Their pieces remain within the limitations of “harmony,” of course, but the parts and voices are so distinctive that each member is more or less “the soloist.” How does a poem allow different aspects of the mind–different “voices”–to do the same thing? What does a barbershop quartet (what does Bach) have to teach us about the recitation of poetry?

  2. Couldn’t disagree more: Time should be kept by each of us. And self-control is exactly what each artist needs most of all, but it needs to be transparent to the creation.

  3. Funny this should come up. Just today some wonderful a capella choral music came on the radio, and it reminded me of singing in choruses and how it was so wonderful to be part of a whole section making a melded sound and having it go together with the other parts that were being sung by the sopranos, tenors, basses, etc. (I was an alto, which I liked because I was partial to the warm sound of the altos compared to the sometimes shrill sopranos — who, I must admit, sometimes seemed to be trying to outdo one another). But I think that all of us some or much of the time were getting off on making music together, taking part in something of which we were only a part and which together was bigger than the sum of its parts. Very great pleasure, blending my voice with others’.

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