Walking the lines ... A London man walks to work in the snow. Photograph: Martin Godwin
I feel like a total failure. Actually, make that a partial failure. On New Year's Day, I said I was going to venture into a diet of audio books, novice that I was. Said diet involved cancelling my gym membership (a resolution I have kept so far without any difficulty) and walking to work - which takes more than an hour depending on the route - while listening to audio books.
The idea came about following a successful engagement with Joyce's Ulysses via audio a few years back, having faced the usual obstacles with the written work. I thought doing the same with other titles, while staying fit and healthy by walking into work, would be as successful. I was wrong. I concede to those whose mutterings of concern went unheeded at the time I mentioned it, that this might have something to do with the fact that the first book I chose to listen to was John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, with which this audio pilgrim made very little. I miserably reached the second part of book one over two days.
Never mind, I thought, it's all a process, and I moved on to good old Charles Dickens, himself an early flaneur, well-known for traipsing around our capital city. But, alas, I found that enjoying him on the page did not equate to enjoying him on the iPod. Then I remembered what someone suggested on my original audiobook diet post - that perhaps I should give poetry a go.
And go I did. Last week I walked into work for three out of five mornings - succumbing to the bus on the bus the other two, while listening to Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work, 1888-2006, Volume One (of four). And my, how different the poetry sounds in different voices. Robert Frost reading The Road Not Taken was particularly apt considering I have the choice of about three different routes to walk. Frost's reading conveyed a weary vulnerability that endeared him to me, and I was intent on listening to every tiny broken utterance from a voice that sounded like half-set jelly moving over gravel on a windy day.
There were other favourites I'd never heard spoken aloud - Yeats's The Lake Isle of Innisfree, William Carlos Williams's image-rich, vibrant The Red Wheelbarrow and Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues. The latter transported me from the throng of passing traffic on the Finchley Road to Harlem in the 30s, bringing the opposite of the Weary Blues - even though the prospect of a day at the office loomed ahead of me. There were also poems I hadn't even heard of - such as Wallace Stevens' So and So Reclining on a Couch.
The complete volume is 72 minutes long, which made it a perfect fit for my walk and left me wanting more. The whole experience has me thinking that maybe, for this audio pilgrim, it is poetry and not prose that suits walking and listening - a happy fact that goes some way to restoring a balance to my literary landscape, usually so tuned to fiction.
Now I'm looking forward to the second volume, which includes a contemporary favourite, Sharon Olds. I'm already wondering whether her work will be inflected with a hint of New York or whether it will readily and all too willingly betray her San Franciscan roots - and whether she will sound as feisty as I think she must be in life.
I'm also looking forward to exploring lots of other poetry that I may have considered a bit dry on the page, such as Rilke, whose A Walk may be an appropriate starting point as I go "far ahead of the road I have begun".
