ALOUD

==** note: 'discussion' tab above is for posting comments, observations and/or questions about reading ALOUD.** ==

== = = = = =Our hearing is far more sensitive than our sight - we can hear NINE times more than we can see in terms of the range of wavelengths we can perceive.=

= = =Reading ALOUD...= ==Next time you are reading Shakespeare or other difficult text, see if it helps to read it ALOUD. Plays and poetry were specifically meant to be __heard__ and you might be surprised at how much more you understand when you both **see __and__ hear** a difficult or unfamiliar text.== = = = = =a few excerpts to read aloud....=

I would not change it.
=== Richmond is where Edgar Allan Poe made his name while working at the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe's famous poem [|"The Raven"] was an instant success and is one of the chief ways he is remembered today. Review the poem and then read it out loud to yourself - do you experience it differently? ===



**[|Heart of Darkness] section 3 Joseph Conrad ** "Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance, flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest, and near the river two bronze figures, leaning on tall spears, stood in the sunlight under fantastic head-dresses of spotted skins, warlike and still in **statuesque repose**. And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous **apparition** of a woman.

"She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and **stately** in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the **fecund** and mysterious life seemed to look at her, **pensive**, as though it had been looking at the image of its own **tenebrous** and passionate soul.

"She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us. Her long shadow fell to the water's edge. Her face had a tragic and **fierce** aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an **inscrutable** purpose. A whole minute passed, and then she made a step forward. There was a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of fringed draperies, and she stopped as if her heart had failed her. The young fellow by my side growled. The pilgrims murmured at my back. She looked at us all as if her life had depended upon the unswerving steadiness of her glance. Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, and at the same time the swift shadows darted out on the earth, swept around on the river, gathering the steamer into a shadowy embrace. A **formidable** silence hung over the scene.

"She turned away slowly, walked on, following the bank, and passed into the bushes to the left. Once only her eyes gleamed back at us in the dusk of the thickets before she disappeared.”

**Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15) ** by [|Lawrence Ferlinghetti] Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs of his audience the poet like an acrobat climbs on **rime** to a high wire of his own making and balancing on **eyebeams** above a sea of faces paces his way to the other side of day performing entrechats and sleight-of-foot tricks and other high theatrics and all without mistaking any thing for what it may not be
 * above the heads**

For he's the super realist who must perforce perceive before the taking of each stance or step in his supposed advance toward that still higher perch where Beauty stands and waits with gravity to start her death-defying leap
 * taut truth**

And he a little charleychaplin man who may or may not catch her fair eternal form spreadeagled in the empty air of existence

** from //A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems//. Copyright 1958 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. **

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