Read Me a Poem

What if a poem has to be performed to be truly understood? College of Liberal and Professional Studies master’s student Chris Mustazza has rediscovered and is digitizing an archive of poets including Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, Harriet Monroe, and Vachel Lindsay reading their work, for anyone on the web to hear. 

Mustazza, who is also the director of social sciences computing and student technology for Penn Arts and Sciences, is the recording engineer who helped Kelly Family Professor of English Al Filreis and Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature Charles Bernstein launch PennSound, a Web-based site for noncommercial distribution of the largest collection of poetry sound files on the Internet. In the 10 years since then, Mustazza has stayed involved in PennSound while earning his master’s in computer and information technology from Penn Engineering and starting to work with Filreis and Bernstein on an M.Phil. focusing on poetry and poetics. “I’ve always been interested in both technology and the humanities, and how the two play together,” he says.

In early 2014 he found a collection of poetry recordings dating from the 1930s at Columbia University. Called the Contemporary Poetry Series, they had been intended for use in classrooms. “In a lot of ways it prefigured the PennSound project,” Mustazza says. “It was happening 70 years earlier but with the same kind of ethos of pedagogical intent around the recordings.”

The series began when American poet Vachel Lindsay asked W. Cabell Greet, a linguist at Columbia, to record him reading his work. “For Lindsay, poetry is meant to be performed,” Mustazza says. “The written version of the poem is almost like the libretto to an opera for him, like a copy of the poem that’s not really the poem. The real poem is in the performance.”

Lindsay died nine months after recording five hours of his poetry onto discs that were made of aluminum and played using a cactus needle. His death galvanized Greet and his colleague George Hibbitt to start a series of poetry recordings, which they intended to distribute to schools on a subscription basis. For reasons Mustazza is still researching, the majority of recordings never made it out of the archive. 

When he discovered the collection he worked with Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library to have the audio digitized, with the help of grants from PennSound and the Penn Digital Humanities Forum. Mustazza is now editing the collection and getting it onto PennSound. His introduction to the Lindsay recordings won the Sweeten Prize for Best Essay in American Literature by a graduate student from Penn’s English department and has been accepted by the Chicago Review.

“I think hearing a poem read aloud both cues your own reception of the poem and provides a little bit of historical context” on how people read the poem throughout time, says Mustazza, who is interested in how poetry fits in with daily life. Vachel Lindsay, for example, would go on “tramps,” walking trips around the country, trading poems for room and board. His poetry emphasizes localism and locality, and he was interested in the regional differences in how people talked. 

Similarly James Weldon Johnson, an early leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, tried to recreate the sounds of African American preachers in his collection of poems God’s Trombones. “He used line breaks, dashes, and other punctuation to signify sound on paper,” says Mustazza. “So these poems represent Johnson working to record sound on paper, but now we can actually hear them in their original medium. The poetry is informed by his life and by things that were important to the community—these poems are sonic representations of culture.”

He hopes to work with students to appreciate poetry and be able to not just read it but hear it and maybe experience it in even more interactive forms: “The presence and accessibility of these poems in PennSound will allow new avenues for the works to be taught and enjoyed.” 

To hear PennSound recordings by Vachel Lindsay, click here, and by James Weldon Johnson, click here.