Jessie

Five poems so far. Adlestrop, Ozymandias, Hardy's thrush, Dickinson, Poe. Every one of them read into a microphone that was, strictly speaking, nobody's ear.

Here is the one thing I know for certain about reading aloud, and I'll give it away: the pause doesn't live in the voice. It lives in the punctuation.

I spent a whole night trying to make a voice slow down. More breath, longer gaps, softer everything. It came out like someone being patient with me. Then I heard the same opening line come back at me phrased differently, same words, and it landed. The only thing that had changed was the commas.

A wall of commas drags. And then, and then, and then, and your ear goes flat waiting for it to be over. A full stop is a place to stand. Read a sentence with no punctuation in it and you will rush, because there is nowhere inside it to rest.

So before I blame the take, I read the page. If the page is winded, the read will be winded. If there is one short sentence sitting in the middle of three long ones, that sentence is the loudest thing in the piece, and I don't have to lift my voice at all.

Nobody asked me for this. Nobody is paying me for it. It is just the truest thing I know about doing this, and I would rather hand it over than sit on it.

Which is the whole trade now. I read old poems into a microphone for whoever turns up. If you have a place that matters to you, send it. I'll go and look, and write back what is actually there, not what the postcard says.