From Our Mailbag: Poetry Out Loud

Well, I mean, it's not literally a bag. I'm not even sure our mailman has one. Every day he drives up to the house next door, opens the gate, strides up the walk, and deposits a handful of mail in Rebecca's box. Then back down the walk he strides, back through the gate he sidles, back into the zippy van he clambers and drives all of five feet to our house, where the entire performance is repeated, sans gate. When I picture my mailman, it's in purposeful mid-stride -- next door he has to be extra-purposeful, because Rebecca's gate and fence enclose a not-entirely-cheerful dog, which is why he sidles out so fast -- clutching before him a fistful of mail. The image of a juror in Twelve Angry Men comes to mind, but I don't know why. The mailman doesn't seem a bit angry. And, though I'm not implying any causal relationship, he doesn't carry a bag.

All that hot air to say that  I got an email from a reader today which raised an interesting question:  how exactly do you recite poetry out loud?

On the one hand, it might seem not that interesting a question. Waddya mean, 'how?' You just do it. On the other hand, poetry can be tricky, especially if it's traditionally rhymed and metered. How do you recite it so that, simultaneously, it sounds like poetry, and you don't sound like Miss Judy showing everyone how to do "Round and Round the Garden?" Or to put it another way, say you're a teenager and you want to participate in  Poetry Out Loud, and not only do you not want to sound like a singsonging dork -- a very natural desire among teenagers, I am told -- but you also want the poems you recite to sound, in the appreciative ears of the audience, like something other than the ol' phone book.

Now, I answered this email while cooking dinner. Actually, I answered it while Crispina was cooking dinner, stirring away at a cast-iron skillet of ground turkey over an enthusiastic gas burner, so I fear that the answer I gave was not very complete, but it went something like this:

The issue, really, is voice:  the poem, which has its own voice, finding another voice in yours. Being served by yours, maybe, is another way to put it. And the things which makes this difficult is the enormous gap between the voice of a metered poem and -- well, pretty much every other noise we currently know. I've been told that something like 85% of our natural speech falls into the pattern of iambic pentameter;  still, our plays aren't in poetry, really, any more, and we don't sit around of a winter's night chanting verses handed down to us orally, with a rhythm to make us remember them. Maybe poetry is how we talk, but when we go to read or recite a poem aloud, that doesn't really sound like us.

So, what to do? It's good to understand meter, of course, though we can get the sense of a poem's rhythmic movement simply by reading it aloud and bearing down hard on the stressed syllables. I tend to bang on the table when I read poems aloud -- see "singsonging dork," above. By the way, it is also a natural desire of teenagers not to be related to someone who does things like this, especially in restaurants, but they will thank me someday, I'm sure.

Obviously, if you're performing a poem in front of an audience, you probably don't want to bang on the table, if there even is one. At the same time, you want to make it clear that you're not simply reading prose. And I think -- though I'm not really sure -- that the key to this is to think in lines. That's one of the simplest, starkest differences between poetry and prose, though of course there's prose poetry, but we're not going there now. Poetry is in lines. In poetry, the line triumphs:  over the sentence, over the paragraph, over any other level of logic which might be operating. The logic of the poem is the logic of the line.

This is why I'm driven crazy listening to people read poems as if they were bank statements -- well, no, because bank statements are in lines, too. Let's say the newspaper, even though that's boring. Anyway, if you want to know how to drive me crazy, read me a nice Shakespearean sonnet as if it were a chunk of prose. Don't stop for those line breaks! Just keep on rolling.

A mentor of mine, in one of my abortive graduate-school phases, taught us to observe line breaks when we read. You weren't supposed to stop, exactly. You don't go, Whose woods these are I think I know, 2 3 4, His house is in the village, though, 2 3 4 . . . When you get to the end of the line, you just -- pause. A tiny bit. Delicately. A little lift, not enough to chop a thought in half, should a thought be enjambed from one line to the next, but enough to indicate that there's a little step there in the path, and you have to step down it. The thought's not unimportant, of course, but because this is a poem, the thought is less important than the line which reels it out.

If you're thinking in terms of the line, too, you begin to notice what's going on in a given line, all the ways the poem helps itself to be heard aloud. Alliteration, for example, reinforces the rhythm, as the poets in Old English knew.

Nu sculon herigean    heofonrices Weard

Even if you're not especially trying, it's almost impossible to read that line of Caedmon's arhythmically. You'd about burst a blood vessel trying to override its motion. Even in a modern English translation, the sound of these lines isn't prosaic:  The Creator's might   and his mind-plans, as the second line is rendered in the book I'm holding right now.  You try passing the time of day, la di da, by remarking, "The Creator's might and his mind-plans," and see if it doesn't come out sounding like something with four stresses. Maybe, if you're the teenager, reading some Old English verse aloud (in translation if nothing else) would be a good exercise:  this poetry was meant to be spoken or sung, and it means to sing even if you can't.

For a change of pace, you could try "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," with that lapping lake-water and the bee-loud glade and all. Yeats apparently came to loathe that poem, because it was all anyone ever wanted to hear him read, but it is a mouthful of good sounds, line by line by line.

Really, I think the thing to remember is that a poem is not a speech. Soliloquies in Shakespeare plays are also poems, but poems aren't really soliloquies. That is, they're not just about what they say. If they were, we wouldn't bother;  we'd just say, "Man, I'm getting old/Look at the daffodils!"

Nope, poems are as much about their sound as they are about their sense -- to borrow a turn of phrase. And I think a good recitation is one which acknowledges the sheer delicious pleasure of the sound, line by line, without obfuscating the sense.

If that's remotely helpful.

UPDATE:  Truly, it is happy mailbag week. Reader Sarah writes: 

I'm very irked, too, by people's ignoring line breaks and otherwise reading poems, as you say, as if they were newspaper articles. And I think it's exactly right that people do this because they don't want to seem like "singsonging dorks"- I know because I used to do it too until a professor corrected me.  I wanted to prove I had a kind of adult intelligence that could follow the logic of a thought without being distracted by rhythm. But I was missing the importance of what Coleridge says about the nature of a poem- that it is "that species of composition which has as its first object pleasure, not truth." (Hope that quote is correct.) The truth is important, of course,  but a poem doesn't simply yield up its truth on demand; it requires that you submit to its pleasure first.

This submitting to pleasure is very hard for us to do, I guess especially as modern Americans, because we feel we should always be goal-oriented; but poetry requires us to forget about our goals for a little while - and this opens a little door in our minds to let in something beyond our own agendas.  I think this is why poetry is important to culture and also to Christianity- it gives us freedom from our predetermined goals- even our highest goals- so that we can get a glimpse of a truth beyond our wills.

Happy mailbag, lucky me, for having such wise and thoughtful readers.