Sarah Kanning

Every Friday, I read the front page articles of the Kansas City Star into a little headset that records them into a phone system that people who are visually disabled can call to hear the stories read back to them. It’s a great program (Audio Reader), and the perfect volunteer opportunity for people who are introverted and have really clear speaking voices.

Anyway, today’s front page story was all about Barack Obama’s speech last night, and included long excerpts from it. I hadn’t caught the speech last night, so this was my first impression. The parts I read of it seemed good, and were likely very inspiring, but what struck me was how long the sentences were — I kept running out of breath before I got to the ends of sentences and would have to re-record so I didn’t gasp like a guppy in the recording — but everything was still extraordinarily clear and understandable. Typical newspaper article sentences are really short by comparsion. Maybe all those dramatic pauses speechmakers make are really just chances for them to catch their breath.

I was reminded of something I’d heard about Allen Ginsberg. I’m pretty sure it was Alicia Ostriker,who said it in a talk she gave. She’d met Ginsberg and they were talking about breathing and the line of the poem, and the unusually long lines in his poem, “Howl.” He indirectly compared practicing his breathing for that poem to the kind of Lamaze-style breathing one learns for childbirth. Breathing for swimming and singing (especially singing) would seem a natural fit for this, too.