The rich purring followed the rhyme of the poems, and ever since then, when I hear Robert read, I listen, with
the mind's ear, to a feline accompaniment, ranging from the softest of purrs to the lion's roar.
*
The Mind's Ear: Exercises for Improving the Musical Imagination for Performers, Composers, and Listeners, by Bruce Adolphe.
White, Cynthia Ozick--have mastered the technique of making the reader an auditor--mulling over, underlining, and annotating a text on the printed page that is simultaneously heard in
the mind's ear. The best personal essayists--and Lopate is among them--admit the reader into an egalitarian living room--not an elitist salon--where they enjoy a conversation involving the eye, the ear, and the mind.
An inability to tune up one's voice by first imagining music in
the mind's ear can also instigate karaoke catastrophes.
The heavenly tinnitus and the sweet echoes of every anthemic song were present in
the mind's ear of the girl as the dazzling headlights of the approaching taxi hurt her eyeballs.
It's one of those expressions that fix themselves in
the mind's ear."
Certainly Walton's pithy oratorio Belshazzar's Feast has lived with me, both in
the mind's ear and through many performances, ever since I first fell in love with it nearly fifty years ago, when it was still practically contemporary music.
of
the mind's ear at waking, words smaller than lightning
Citing a great quoter like Randall Jarrell, Bromwich emphasizes the line as the unit of modern poetry and, in his quoting of lines that 'have captivated
the mind's ear', he is the equal of critics like Jarrell or David Kalstone.
My grandmother's speech was much less Black Country, but once again
the mind's ear has been imprinted with only one utterance.
'I've got to get off this table,' said the clear voice of the visitor in
the mind's ear of the little girl.
Moreover, singing is the only true test to see if the instrumentalist actually can hear the music being played with
the mind's ear, without an instrument.
Beyond how the poem is a poem, however, there are moments of real beauty and great poetry: lines such as "Betweenpie, I expected the loveliest brainchild ever" (75) and "Character captured/at the hinge of two destinies // While still unhandseled/When water was precise" (53) reward
the mind's ear. The Master Thiefworks at the kind of serious play missing from so many recent books of poetry.
In
the mind's ear, one has an ideal of the perfect performance of a piece.