"Downtown Women": Five Audio Recordings

[jjhunter]

There's something about how listening to a poem can change the way you experience it. I find that is doubly true when I have the opportunity to listen to several different readers' interpretation of the same poem. If one or more of the following recordings moves you as a listener, try to articulate why in the comments. Likewise, readers, please feel free to share your own thoughts about the experience of recording this particular poem.

Note that you may need to click the play triangle twice on some of the audio players.

Julia Niedermaier (LibriVox) [mp3 link]

=

CP [mp3 link]

=

luzula/Elin (LibriVox) [link to SoundCloud page]

=

Tricia G (LibriVox) [mp3 link]

=

J.J. Hunter/jjhunter [mp3 link]

Comments

[jjhunter]

I'm very much a novice compared to the other readers, most notably in terms of technical sound quality. Still, I like how preparing and delivering a poem recital helps me focus on certain elements of a poem's mouth feel and rhythm.

For example, in "Downtown Women", the lines

I come from downtown women,
                   not uptown ladies.

are repeated five times. They offer a stylistic challenge: should I repeat them the exact same way each time, or should I attempt to give them a slightly different spin each time?

In the take I choose to use for the post above, I decided that the first iteration I would deliver neutrally; for the second, after the lines about throwing the uptown ladies' charity baskets back at them & telling them to 'go to hell', I would emphasize 'downtown' versus 'uptown' to stress the class differences at play. For the third, I switched the emphasis to 'women' versus 'ladies' in reference to the previous line "I organized a band of twelve immigrant girls" [emphasis added] and the line directly following about men workers laughing at the speaker's band. I didn't make deliberate choices for the fourth and fifth iterations, but I found the diction choice of 'women' over 'girls' (and note that 'girls' can refer to immigrants OR those who attend Ivy League girls' colleges [emphasis again added]) for the refrain very telling and powerful - the speaker comes from responsible, powerful adult women, not people who allow themselves to be defined as child-like on account of their gender.