So what’s going on here? It seems questionable to blame this state of affairs on publishers and audiobook companies. Audible, I’m quite sure, would be delighted to record poetry every day of the week and twice on Sundays, if they could sell it. In an interview, Beth Anderson, executive vice president and publisher at Audible, was enthusiastic about poetry’s possibilities (“We do think there’s a real taste for this”), but acknowledged that the genre faces a few basic obstacles. Poetry books, even Pulitzer winners, generally don’t sell much in print, which makes them a risky bet in audio. Moreover, a nontrivial portion of audiobook listeners buy books for long drives or flights. Audible’s current subscription model allows listeners to pick one or two books a month for a set price, with additional titles costing extra — a disadvantage for poetry collections, which tend to be quite short. (To equal the 32 hours of George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” you might need to buy as many as 15 collections of poems.)

Also, there are already thousands of recordings of poems available free online, mostly because of the reading circuit that sends poets winging through various university auditoriums like perpetually migrating geese. The Poetry Foundation has an enormous trove of recorded poetry, as do UbuWeb, Pennsound and the Academy of American Poets, and YouTube offers clip after clip of taped readings. In April, the Library of Congress posted 50 of their more than 2,000 recordings online, including readings by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop and ­Gwendolyn Brooks. As Jeff Shotts, the highly regarded poetry editor at Graywolf Press, put it in an interview, “The Internet is basically one big poetry audiobook.” Shotts views this state of affairs as “marvelous in some ways,” but also “an impediment” if you happen to be a poet hoping for an audio contract. This is no less a problem for spoken word poets, who are practically ubiquitous on YouTube.

But beyond practical issues like these, there are subtler difficulties when it comes to translating poetry into ­audiobooks. The most obvious is that poems often convey meaning not merely through their words but through ­visual features like line breaks, almost none of which have analogous verbal cues. Consider, for instance, the Philip Larkin poem “An Arundel Tomb,” which describes the carved stone figures of a medieval count and countess who are — to the surprise of the poem’s speaker — depicted holding hands on their monument. Moved by this seemingly romantic image, the speaker reflects on human love and its symbols:

They would not guess how early in

Their supine stationary voyage

The air would change to soundless damage,

Turn the old tenantry away;

How soon succeeding eyes begin

To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths

Of time.

The word “persisted” persists across a stanza break. It’s a conspicuously clever touch, and it serves to remind us that we’re observing an artistic performance — looking at a made thing — as much as we’re experiencing a meditation on eternal devotion. Technique is a check on sentiment. And that check is essential in a poem that deliberately skirts sentimentality (it famously ends, “What will survive of us is love”). Could an accomplished reader come up with an aural equivalent to this visual phenomenon? Possibly, but it would be tricky. (Granted, the problem of translating purely visual techniques is also an issue in poetry readings. But nobody is trying to sell poetry readings.)

Then there is the widespread bias among poetry readers for the voice of the poet, which is by definition not the voice of somebody else. Understanding a person’s poetry feels intimate to many people, and it can therefore seem almost a betrayal — “like an act of treason,” as Shotts put it — to hear someone else saying the words we associate with a living poet. We don’t typically feel this way about novels, which resemble scores, playable by anyone with a piano and sufficient competence. Poems, by contrast, often seem more like acts of specialized witnessing, and this makes the witness himself an essential figure. There are reasons to question this way of thinking about poetry, but where audiobooks are concerned, all that matters is the practical reality. Of course, equating the voice of the poem with the actual, physical voice of the poet will cause few problems for writers who are agile readers. But for the many poets who read as if every line ended in — a — [pause] — question?, this is not a helpful development.