To a Green Thought: Garth Greenwell on Poetry Reading with the Voice (Essay‪)‬

His voice eludes description. Much of its authentic strangeness survives the dated recording, the poor quality of the little speakers in my classroom. Unsteady and fastidious, strenuous and soaring, eschewing most of the conventional beauties, it seems willfully to rebuke our expectations. A long note, uncomfortably high, begins tremulous, hollow, then swells, acquiring heft and bite, like a skeleton taking on flesh. Extraordinarily graceful, each of its graces has come at a cost and shows it; it is a voice for which every accomplishment is a victory of technique over limitation. Of its imperfections--the way it hovers just slightly beneath the pitch here, the vibrato sprawling a bit there--somehow it has made the virtue of expressiveness: each crack in the veneer seems revelatory of emotion. It is one of my favorite sounds in the world. We're listening to a recording of The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, a song cycle for tenor and piano by Benjamin Britten, one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century, and one of the greatest composers for the voice in any age. Britten himself is at the piano; the singer is his life-long collaborator, Peter Pears, one of the more curious operatic stars of recent history. The class is tenth grade English, a survey of British literature, and we're about to try our hands at writing sonnets.