Quick Take
- Narration: Alexander Neubauer reads the connective tissue between recordings with appropriate scholarly remove; the archival cassette recordings of the poets themselves are the real narrators here, and hearing their actual voices is the audiobook’s irreplaceable offering.
- Themes: The poem as process rather than product, the workshop as a space of creative revelation, the gap between intention and revision
- Mood: Intimate and historically charged, like sitting in on conversations that have no business being this candid
- Verdict: An audiobook with no real print equivalent, the archival recordings of Pinsky, Clifton, Muldoon, and others discussing work-in-progress are primary documents of how poems are actually made.
I came to Poetry in Person through a friend who is a working poet, the kind of person who has spent years studying how poems are made and still finds the question genuinely open. She said: “There are a hundred conversations with poets in those boxes. This is eight of them. Listen.” She was not wrong about what that means.
The story behind this audiobook is unusual enough to be worth telling clearly. Pearl London ran a workshop at the New School in Manhattan from 1973 to 1998, inviting poets to bring their working drafts, not polished finished poems, but the notes, the crossed-out lines, the things jotted on the back of envelopes, and discuss how they got from initial impulse to finished work. Nobel Laureates came. National Book Award winners came. U.S. Poets Laureate came. Word spread through the poetry world and her class became something remarkable: a multi-decade archive of working poets talking honestly about process. After London died in 2003, three boxes of cassette tapes were found in her home. This audiobook presents eight of those conversations, restored and produced for audio.
Process Conversations That Should Not Exist
What is surprising about these recordings is how unguarded the poets are. Robert Pinsky walks through a poem that has not yet found its form; James Merrill discusses a draft revision with the kind of candor most writers reserve for private notebooks; Lucille Clifton talks about where her compression comes from with a simplicity that is more illuminating than any critical essay about her work. Paul Muldoon is characteristically oblique about his process and characteristically precise about the individual line. Muriel Rukeyser, William Matthews, Eamon Grennan, and Edward Hirsch round out the eight conversations included.
These are not performances or retrospective accounts. They are conversations that happened as the poems were being made, and the difference is considerable. The poets are saying things they might not have said in a more formal or public context. London herself, as a questioner, had a gift for asking about specifics, not “what is this poem about” but “why did you choose this word here” and “what were you trying to do that you haven’t yet done”, and the poets respond to that precision with precision of their own.
Alexander Neubauer’s Editorial and Curatorial Role
Neubauer edited the original book from London’s cassettes, and his narration in this audio version serves as connective tissue between the conversations, providing context about each poet’s place in contemporary American poetry and about what London’s class represented. His prose is scholarly but accessible, and his narration is measured without being remote. He is clearly devoted to the archive and to London’s legacy, and that care comes through without becoming hagiographic.
The listening experience shifts registers as it moves between Neubauer’s framing prose and the archival recordings. The archival recordings themselves are audibly older, the cassette quality is present, but the content is so compelling that the audio artifacts quickly become part of the texture rather than a distraction. Hearing Clifton’s actual voice or Pinsky’s is not incidental to the project; it is the project.
Why Audio Outperforms Print Here
This is one of the cases where the audio format does something the print edition cannot. The book version of Poetry in Person is excellent as a collection of transcribed conversations, it was named one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2010. But transcription loses what recording preserves: the hesitations, the tone of voice when a poet says “I’m not sure this works yet,” the audible pleasure when London’s questioning touches the live nerve of an unresolved problem. These are primary documents in the history of American poetry, and hearing them is qualitatively different from reading them.
At five hours and fifty-five minutes, the audiobook is generous enough to feel complete but short enough to be consumed in two or three sessions. It rewards re-listening in a way that few audiobooks do: the conversations between London and the poets become more layered the second time through, when you already know how the finished poems resolved the problems being worked through in real time.
Who Should Listen, Who Should Skip
Working poets, poetry readers with serious interest in craft, and students of creative writing will find this audiobook revelatory. It is not a poetry anthology in the conventional sense; it is a craft archive. Listeners with only casual interest in poetry may find the level of process detail more granular than they were expecting. Those who have read and admired any of the eight poets represented will find their understanding of those poems substantially deepened by hearing the conversations behind them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are the archival cassette recordings audible despite their age, or is the sound quality a genuine barrier?
Audible and functional. The cassette quality is present but the conversations are intelligible, and the production team has done what can be done with older recordings. Listeners familiar with archival audio will acclimate within a few minutes. The content makes the slight roughness of the sound worth it.
Do I need to be familiar with the eight poets included to get value from the conversations?
Familiarity deepens the experience considerably, but it is not required. Neubauer’s framing sections provide context about each poet’s work and importance, and the conversations themselves are grounded in such specific craft details that they function as introductions to the poets’ sensibilities even for listeners who have not read their finished work.
Is this primarily a historical document or does it have practical value for writers working today?
Both simultaneously. As a historical document, it is irreplaceable, these conversations cannot be re-created, and the poets in them are discussing problems that were genuinely unresolved at the time of recording. As practical craft guidance, the conversations about the gap between intention and execution, the logic of specific word choices, and the management of form versus impulse are as applicable now as when they were recorded.
How does this compare to other craft conversations in audiobook form, recorded interviews, craft lectures, workshop recordings?
The distinguishing feature is that these conversations happened while the poems were being made. Most craft conversations are retrospective, poets discussing finished work from a position of knowing how it came out. The Pearl London recordings capture the uncertainty and live problem-solving, which gives them a different quality of honesty than any retrospective account can achieve.
