Djelloul Marbrook

You can now hear me reading my poems and talking about poetry at From the Fishouse, an Audio Archive of Emerging Poets.

To be in the presence of such wonderful poets is immensely rewarding. My thoughts turn at this moment to Tony Barnstone whose magnificent Tongue of War I’m writing about now. But there are many other poets whose work I know and admire, and still others whose work awaits me.

Recording this archive was a joint project between Matt O’Donnell, Fishouse’s director, my wife Marilyn and me. Matt sent us a sophisticated little recording device in a box that looked like a first aid kit. The instructions admonished us to silence background noise from fans, furnaces, radios, television, faucets, doors, birds—the list is long when you think about it and comprises the measure of modern distractions.

Marilyn created a kind of sound booth with pillows on a dining room table. Then she covered them with bath towels. She nestled the recording device into this cove, and then I inserted myself. The first thing you discover when you record something is that you don’t sound to others as you sound to yourself. I sound adolescent and whiny to myself, but I’m told I sound better to others. Our skulls must have different resonances.

I had powerful qualms about this undertaking, even though I had won some oratorical contests as a student and have done quite a few readings. Perhaps it was because I understood the importance of the Fishouse concept and stood somewhat in awe of it. I thought of people long after I’m gone listening to me, and the thought tempered each session in Marilyn’s improvised studio.

I had to watch those plosive Bs and Ps that burst into the microphone like machine gun splatter.

But the biggest task was to convey the sound of my own mind thinking. I wanted to give an idea of what the poem sounded like when it occurred to me, and I felt that too practiced, too smooth a delivery would put listeners off. I had witnessed this at readings where I often followed grand deliveries and felt intimidated. Not so, I found. Listeners would lean towards me to hear me if I sounded like myself and not a facsimile of Richard Burton. If I faltered, they would forgive me. If I repeated a botched line, they would nod and smile. But why? I think it’s because they got that I wanted to give them the poem rather than deliver it. A subtle difference, to be sure, but one I think poetry audiences understand.

I find in my old age that I have zero tolerance for over-the-top performance. I like the actors and poets who make room for everybody else in the room, who defer to circumstance rather than trying to overwhelm it. I walk out on people who fill a room.

I hope you’ll listen to me at the Fishouse web site, directed by Matt O’Donnell, associate editor of Bowdoin magazine at Bowdoin College in Maine. I promise you won’t hear me rant and rave. It’s not my style in poetry. I can’t promise you’ll like what you hear, but I’ll give you a hint: if you like Emily Dickinson you probably won’t hate my poems. —DM