Ghosts Are Real: Poets And Their Voices

by Sophie E. Eikli

What is a ghost? Is it a figure; an apparition moored by grief and trauma, unable to move on from a battlefield or house? Or is it a feeling within us, a nonlinear emotion that arises within us upon interaction with an environment. My suggestion of a definition is this- a ghost is the concentrated substance of a person who is no longer there. A ghost is the continuation of someone or something who has ceased to exist on the physical plane. 

Let me describe a voice to you: A voice soft at the middle but with edges that sharpen against the teeth. A soul of Detroit, that American ‘r’ pushed back into the mouth so hard you could choke on it. A dry voice that has been whetted by experience like a stone and smoothed by hundreds of poetry readings, discussions, and perhaps protests. It is a man’s voice. But it is not the voice of a man who yells; it is the voice of a man who considers his words to perfect finality until they leave his voice as declaration. It is a conversationalist’s voice, it is an orator’s voice. It is a voice out of time.

In the August of 2022, I started my university education far away from the place I once called home. Part of this endeavour demanded that I find a residence, which I did. Like many thousands of students around the globe, I perused and begged the different channels of the internet to find a landlord who hadn’t personally placed rats in the house and who wouldn’t have a vested interest in my demise. Besides this, I also decided to make compromises in order to get a place that was ‘prettier’ even if that meant less functionality. Call me naïve, call me spoiled, and both of these things would be true; but I had stayed in enough city apartments to know that they would mark a specific death, like a black spot on the pirate’s parchment of my mental health. 

So I invested in a flat that lay further from my campus in exchange for time spent in nature. It was less expensive, too, due to its distance from the city, but both of these things came at a cost. Every day required a 20-minute walk with no access to public transport as well as a generous amount of uphill training (for suburban kids like myself). I used the time spent walking to listen to music until it bored me half to death, and only then did I discover podcasts. While I had never before been able to focus on podcasts, interviews with poets now allowed me to listen to poetry while also learning about craft and writing systems. 

I became hooked. After hearing all Richard Siken interviews and devouring the near entirety of the Poetry Off The Shelf archives, I crossed over into the Poetry Foundation’s poem lectures. And this, dear reader, is how I discovered the reading done by Philip Levine, released on September 14 2011. 

It was a 47 minute reading which included such poems as ‘What Work Is’ and ‘On the Meeting Of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane’. With my having stumbled onto the latter poem a few days earlier, it occurred to me that the poem seemed to have snuck into my life on purpose. With my desire to understand poetry, this particular piece continued to occur to me and approached me both directly and indirectly through documentaries on Spanish literature as well as poetry in general. 

So when I opened the podcast from 2011, it had the feeling of fate even if it wasn’t reality. When I walked through farmers’ fields,  his voice came with me. I heard his humour as he spoke of dullness and a life spent not working, in spite of his title as the Worker’s Poet. “You know what work is— if you’re / old enough to read this you know what / work is, although you may not do it” was laughed at by a room of self-deprecating scholars and poets, and the laughter rippled through the room and through me. There was a dryness of wit in his voice, and a humour that punctuated both his poems and the spaces between them. 

I subsequently devoured his podcast interviews in an act of aural devotion. It became important to me that his poetry dictate the lines and prosody of my walks at sunrise and through supermarket aisles. It could be argued that there was a type of reverence in the way I looked for Levine in the stocks of butter, flour, and onion powder. Over the next two weeks he became my main companion; a constant voice that never left me and that often had me uttering in genuine outrage at his genius. 

Then I discovered that he was dead.

I discovered that he had died of pancreatic cancer in Fresno, California, half a decade ago. 

As I said, I had only ever heard him. I had not opened any biography or Wikipedia profile since that first listen. It was only when I grew starved of content that I finally drew up his profile on PoetryFoundation.org, only to see the 1928 - 2015 written under his name. 

The truth is that I felt cheated, in spite of the fact that our possibility of academic convergence was nearly exactly nil. He had never belonged to me and yet I felt like an imagined correspondence of poets had been stolen from me by death itself. In my search for poetry he had emerged as a preeminent inspiration for my own work, and I worshipped his perfection of form and metre that I had found nowhere else. And through it all had been his voice, dry and joking as he dictated my mind’s visualisation of line breaks and stanza forms. All of these were very different to the direction that they took on the page, his voice severing sentences that otherwise carried on, and continuing things that had ended. I felt like I had lost a teacher who had told his poems to me in confined quarters. I felt like I had lost a friend.  

I have since heard readings by other poets who are no longer with us. Sylvia Plath’s is the voice that truly inspired this essay through her posthumous contribution to a Poem Talk episode called The After-Hell. In her reading of ‘The Stones,’ her accent is near transatlantic; her voice weighed down by a gravity of postmodern grief. There is an unavoidable quiet in her voice, just like the “still pebble” of which she speaks, that simultaneously spreads to fill every crevice in the room and in our minds. She speaks like a woman, yes, but also like a girl who has not fully come to form. She sounds sad.

Perhaps it is the knowledge of what came after this that strikes us. The particular reading I listened to is estimated to have been performed in 1962. She would die by her own hand in the following year, aged only 30 years old and leaving behind a small, yet monumental body of work. Perhaps it is the gravity of the future that we hear within Plath’s voice, even as she reads a piece from 1959, when her world had only just begun its final capsize. Perhaps it is dramatic irony come to life through our own understanding of history.

What do we lose when a poet stops speaking?

What does it mean that no one alive has ever heard the voices of John Keats, and that we will never know the exact way he pronounced “past” or “bugle”? What does it mean that we can hear the voice of Langston Hughes, and the way he pulled the word “poem” into something that seems to twist. Po-eem, Hughes says. Is there an element of his poetry that is lost when one strips away the Midwestern accent?

Since 2004, there has been a persistent movement to bring Shakespeare back to so-called “Original Pronunciation.” While this has been met with varying responses, the flush of an accent that sometimes resembles Scottish reveals rhymes that once were hidden beneath the pronunciations of Olivier and Received Pronunciation (The typical ‘British’ accent that one associates with Shakespeare). This instinct of rhyme is also able to be replicated in other hard rhymes from Blake, where “symmetry” must have once rhymed with “eye” (although the modern reciters I have heard do not pronounce it this way).

There exists a soul within a voice, and within a voice that reads a poem. It is the last way in which a poem can be owned by its writer. Hidden beats that persist past line breaks reveal shades of a poet’s individual character that cannot be deciphered through text alone. Through recordings, however, that soul continues to form around poems even past the point of death. Humour that was present is returned to us, as is grief. Through technology they speak not just as figures of the past but as elements of the present, preserved forever alongside that which they have created. 

In Philip Levine’s poem ‘The Poem of Chalk’, the speaker describes a meeting with a Senegalese man who “[knew] the whole history of chalk”.  The poem goes on to describe the man’s near encyclopaedic knowledge of its substance and past, and that “he knew / what creatures had given / their spines to become the dust time / had pressed into these perfect cones.” In an isolated line analysis I would have imagined this “dust time” as being an element of poetic substance given the idea of poetic time.

And yet, Levine continues past “time” in order to make the last two lines one sentence! Alive, the poem becomes almost declarative: “He / knew / what / creatures / had given their spines / to become the dust time pressed into these perfect cones”, elevating the subject of the poem into something that announces itself as exceptional. The man, himself a reference to an imagined shared figure of Garcia Lorca and Juan Ramón Jiménez, is shown the centre of the poem.

Although the poem is amazing even when written, Levine’s voice gives us something that an 18th Century existence would have stripped from us. He gives us his passion in this poem; lets his tone reflect on the vitality of  “[speaking] to a piece of chalk”, a piece of calcified life which has gone on to provide us with poetry and with song. Through his live reading, Levine describes a strong appreciation for this figure and the legacy of written art.

At the time of his 2011 reading, Levine was 83. Despite spending his whole life in the United States, the Jewish poet experienced the antisemitism of the 1930s and the years that followed. He experienced factories from the age of 14, experienced cars and grease and exhaustion. Standing on a podium, Levine described his knowledge of “how great a gift” the legacy of poetry was. When his speaker writes his “thanks on the air / where it might be heard forever”, the audience is also turned to wish the other man’s departure. We, too, bear Levine’s thanks.

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Let me describe a moment to you: Me in my flat in 2023. Curled up in pyjamas, I turn on the Poem Talks lecture from September 14 2011. I follow it up with a chaser of Levine’s inaugural reading from that same year, after having been selected as the U.S. Poet Laureate, and then with a heavy dose of interviews. In all of them, his voice is the only voice of his that I have ever heard. An old man’s voice nearing the end of his life. Firm, midwestern America, sliding and stretching vowels into the particular shapes of the American daydream. I laugh at his jokes as though he is beside me, drinking black stout like a poetical grandfather. 

What is a ghost?

Is it a figure of Hamlet Sr. in a mediaeval Danish fortress? Is it a soldier on a battlefield, shirtfront crimson with blood? Is it the dream of a loved one who has gone, returned to talk to me through the valley of my subconscious?

Or is it a voice, repeating forever, and ever, and ever. Just so long as I press play. 

Credits given to:

PoetryFoundation.org

What Work Is, On The Meeting Of Garcia Lorca and Crane Hart, The Poem of Chalk & other poems by Philip Levine (1928 - 2015)

The Stones by Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963)

The Negro Speaks Of Rivers by Langston Hughes  (1901 - 1967)