Audiobook · read by volunteers
What Think You I Take my Pen in Hand?
Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
Read by Alan Davis Drake (1945-2010), Kristin Hughes (1974-2021), Betsie Bush, Julian Jamison, Elizabeth Palmer, Ezwa, JudithA, Joe Brenneman, Jason Oakley, Jeanette Ferguson · 15 chapters · 14 min
About the book
Walt Whitman opens this short poem with a question, and the answer is not the one a reader might expect. What has he taken up his pen to record? Not a majestic ship under full sail, he says, nor the glories of a great city, but a small human moment between two friends. This collection brings together fifteen recordings of the same poem, each voiced by a different LibriVox volunteer. Listening to them one after another, you hear how much a poem changes with the breath, the pace and the personality of whoever speaks it. A pause falls in a new place, a line lifts or falls, and a familiar passage suddenly takes on a fresh meaning. Each version is brief, about a minute at most, so the whole set is easy to sample, compare and enjoy at your own pace. It suits anyone who loves hearing poetry aloud.
Introduction
Walt Whitman was born on Long Island, New York, in 1819 and died in Camden, New Jersey, in 1892. His book Leaves of Grass, first issued in 1855 and expanded through many editions during his life, broke with the regular metres of earlier verse and spoke in long, flowing lines about democracy, the body, nature and the self. He worked as a printer, teacher, journalist and wartime nurse, and many of his poems carry the energy of the crowded streets and open roads he knew.
The poem recorded here belongs to that body of work, and its title is a question addressed to the reader. Whitman liked to speak directly to the listener, to challenge expectations and to say what a poem could be. It is a good example of why his verse suits the voice so well: the rhythm is that of speech, and the lines gain life when they are read aloud.
This collection began as a weekly poetry project among LibriVox volunteers in the spring of 2007. In such a project, many readers record the same short text, and the results are gathered together. The set contains fifteen versions, so the total running time is only about a dozen minutes. It is a pleasant way to compare readings, or to hear one of Whitman's compact poems several times without growing tired of it.
A project of this kind has a particular charm. It shows how a community of amateur readers, scattered across the world, can gather around one poem and give it many faces, and it invites you to decide which voice, in the end, suits Whitman best.
Public domain
Walt Whitman died in 1892: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text