Posting for 1/19 (a slight time travel)

1.) Marjorie Perloff's scansions of her selected poems are a little strange. She asks, "So what do the poems in this anthology look and sound like?" My question (that I'll try to answer below this) is this: can a set of marks really show what something sounds like?

What's odd about this to me, is that there is no audio provided on the site in addition to the text, so based on her preface, these marks should reveal what the poem "sounds" like. From the Bernstein essay from last week and from Rothenberg's article on performance, it seems like what the poem sounds like happens in the moment of its sounding--a reader reads the poem to be heard. Interestingly, Perloff also doesn't provide a key for her marks, limiting the audience who could even begin to understand what that means. Also, the marking implies that emphasis is somehow predetermined before the reading and should be clear and singular. Although I'm still new to this whole thing, that seems to go against Bernstein's convincing arguments and what I know about reading already. Had the writers themselves provided this scansion, it might be more interesting, but no more definitive and still just as mute.

Ezra Pound's reading of "Canto I" was nothing like I would expect from a man from Idaho regardless of the time period. Between the rolling of each "r" sound and his strange vibrato, I couldn't tell what I felt about these sounds (or why I could only picture, for some reason, some cartoonish English pirate). What does this performance add to his poem? In other words, what should a listener do with a reading like this in terms of interpretation. I know that I was lost and so focused on his voice that I paid almost no attention at all to what he said.