Writen vs. Spoken poetry

[GuiltyPleasure]

Regardless of whether they sound better read aloud or not I invariably read a poem new to me out loud. It helps me to understand the poem better. I'm often put off by others reading their poem out loud because it simply doesn't fit with my interpretation.

This begs another question, should the reader be free to interpret a poem him or herself or should the poet’s angle be sacrosanct?

 

[bflagsst]

There is a very genuine conflict between the written word poets and the slam poets. Reciting your poem is pretty different than something meant for performance. I don't like recitation or performance poetry at all. I've liked certain performances and certain poems read aloud, but as a genre I think it's disingenuous, since the poem is crafted and created in text. It exists in text world before it's torn from the page and presented. It's not natural at all, the point of meter was to aid in remembering the poem, not make it have a cute rhythm. Poems were crafted entirely in heads and performed that way. When I hear Dylan Thomas read: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyWiE1vNSxU

I hear the performance, not the poem. Performance interferes with the universal voice that reads me poems in my head.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

I hear your view, bflagsst, however many poets (often well-respected and published poets) read their poems aloud to audiences. Clearly, some people disagree.

For me, language is meant to be read, spoken, whispered, shouted and sung. Some people prefer silence. Surely there is room for all of us.

 

[Tzara]

Dora articulates my feelings quite well on the subject, but I'm going to blather on about the topic for a bit anyway.

Liar used to talk about there being a kind of continuum between poetry and prose, so that some pieces end up being very "poem-like," some very prosaic, and a whole lot of them somewhere in between. The spoken/written dimension in poetry seems similar to me. Slam poetry is composed with the primary intent (or at least with one of its main intents) of being performed in front of an audience. I think DeepAsleep once said that he even notates his poems intended for performance, much in the way that an actor will make notes in a play, or a pianist might notate a score. At the extreme, it may not be too much to say that the written representation of the poem, by itself, loses some integral part of its experience, much in the same way that reading a play is a very different experience from seeing it performed. That said, I would disagree with Angie's statement that "a script is not meant to be literature" (though I am probably overinterpreting her meaning). We wouldn't say of Hamlet that it only becomes literature/art through performance, nor of Bach's Art of the Fugue that it only becomes music/art through performance. Hamlet is literature regardless of the quality of a particular performance of it, or even in the absence of a performance. The same would be true, I think, of slam poetry or other kinds of poetry intended primarily for performance, if the poem itself merits it.

On the other extreme, there are things that sure look like poems that may not be best experienced in aural form. Shape poetry loses some of its particular experience in an aural-only presentation. Some concrete poetry can't practically be performed at all.

I would also include a lot of the oriental forms as well. I'm not sure that someone reading haiku to me does anything to augment the experience of reading the poem, as the intent seems to be contemplative. I'm sure sure that it hurts the experience, either, but the poems (at least in English) do not seem to be written with regard to aural properties, but rather intellectual ones.

That could very well be just my ignorance of the forms, though.

Other than the extremes, though, I think most poets spend considerable effort on the sound of their poetry. For me, it's one of the things that make poems poems and not epigrams or aphorisms or little diary entries, or flash fiction. I spend a lot of time thinking about the sound of my verse, not only things like alliteration and assonance and rhyme, but also the rhythm of the poem--the meter, where the line and stanza breaks fall, where the intralinear caesura fall. The fact that I may not do this well doesn't mean I'm not thinking about it.

And, like Tess, I almost always read my poems out loud to myself to help their sound.

If you look at the start of, say, Eliot's Waste Land, he certainly has spent a lot of time thinking about how the poem sounds:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.​

There is a lot going on in those four lines that contributes to the wonderful sound the lines make when read, but I doubt that Eliot wrote the poem with the intent of it being performed or even, necessarily, read aloud.

I could be wrong about that, of course. I am often wrong.

 

[The_Fool]

I've been playing around with spoken poetry. As some of you know. I look at it as a different take on the words. In one way, I am enjoying it, and it shows where I am placing the emphasis. Of course, I also want to give the reader a chance to interpret the words the way they wish. I have also found some poems lend themselves more to reading than others.

If you get a chance, listen to Lanston Hughes read his stuff on "Weary Blues." To me that is the shit.

 

[Epmd607]

I have all these poets on cassette tapes that I borrowed from college and never returned(oops). The poems are contemplative, from Yeats, Langston, Eliot, to Frost, Thomas, and Sylvia, most were written with the intention of printing in newspapers. They read their poems as an afterthought. They grew up in the written word reading the originators of poetry as contemplative, expository. Donne, Shakes Sonnets, Constable, Landor, Blake, Keats etc. sent their poems in letters.

I'm on the side of poetry being distinctly different as written compared to the performance of ancestors. Whenever you write something down it's already taken on the quality of being written down and formed on paper, no matter your intention for it. Shakespeare had to write down his verse to be performed, which gives it a less genuine quality than the storyline of the poets who only had the memory of the culture to pass on their work.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

Are some of you meaning to say that work such as that by Billy Collins and Simon Armitage that is easily and delightfully read aloud is in fact less worthwhile than work which cannot be read out loud? Is that the mark of good poetry, that it is anti-aural?

That seems counterintuitive to me. I write my work for the page but read it often and enjoy hearing poetry read. Almost all poetry that I love to read I also love to hear. Perhaps it is a sensuality thing.

 

[butters]

Are some of you meaning to say that work such as that by Billy Collins and Simon Armitage that is easily and delightfully read aloud is in fact less worthwhile than work which cannot be read out loud? Is that the mark of good poetry, that it is anti-aural?

That seems counterintuitive to me. I write my work for the page but read it often and enjoy hearing poetry read. Almost all poetry that I love to read I also love to hear. Perhaps it is a sensuality thing.

well, it's not what i'm saying, at any rate.

and you can take the same poem and have it bomb if read poorly, and fly when read by the right person.

i DO think the majority of poets are not the best people to 'perform' their own poetry, though.

 

[The_Fool]

What is poetry?


I have yet to find a definitive answer from anyone. Not all poetry can be read aloud, not all poetry can be written down. Some poetry defies structure, other poetry requires structure.

Perhaps poetry is like H2O. It is defined chemically rather rigidly, but encompasses different states depending on its environment. Solid, Liquid, Gas. It can be a life saver in the desert. It can be a life taker in excess. It is considered to the universal solvent, but is acidically neutral.

In a way we are the blind men groping the elephant.

 

[butters]

What is poetry?


...



In a way we are the blind men groping the elephant.

it is that ineffable sense of itself, a purity that moves one, and can appear in a musical phrase, the perfect jetté of a dancer, the silent power of a sunset, the sublime meal, a shared look ...

to even attempt to capture that event with a net of words and a cage of meter is pretty daunting, and possibly a disservice. so, maybe instead of capturing something, we have to - instead - release something ... .

i ain't groping no elephant. it's not right.

 

[CharleyH]

Palba Noruda said:

In all the books on how to write poetry, they act as if all poems will be read out loud...

And note I was inspired by Bflag when he said:

There's a reason why song lyrics are simpleton/stupid. It's easier reading complex language/symbol than listening to it.

Funny you should mention, Palba ... I was just out on the patio talking to Lauren about this same subject. (Hopefully, Lauren will enter the discussion and articulate ideas surrounding the convo.) In any case, your post tweaks my curiosity even more.

At one point in time, before TV, before radio or the printing press, poetry, spoken-poetry, must have been one of the main sources of entertainment aside from ghoulish campfire tales and dramatic tragedies. I don't know the history of rhyming, but would be fascinated to know the beginnings of it. On the one hand, rhyme has a greater potential for adding comedy to story and I wonder if it (rhyme) was added to the story telling wheel in order to do just that. On the other hand, I think back, way back into history and a time when most were illiterate, hard-working and without much leisure time and I wonder if rhyme might have been created for the simple reason that a story with rhyme was just easier to memorize and re-tell. Anyhow, just some thoughts and now back to reading all the other responses.

 

[CharleyH]

I'm no spoken word poet, but I do read everything I write aloud, over and over, as part of my editing process. I feel anything I write should sound good as well as look good on paper. And of course some poems have certain rhymes or instances of assonance or alliteration, repetition, chanting--all things that can lend themself to sounding really good in a poem. Well, when one can make them work, that is.

Everyone who is not familiar with the sound files at UBU should check them out. There's tons of poetry recorded there, everyone from Yeats and Dylan Thomas to Patti Smith.

And Charley, I believe Lauren still has copies of some of my spoken poetry. If she wants to post links here, feel free--or not.

I'll ask, as our patio discussion did include you and a certain spoken-word poetry circle you once told us about off-site. (lol - - were your ears ringing? All good talk, I assure you!) Lauren was also referring to a spoken-word that Smith Peter posted on Lit, but took down. Lauren referred to one of his works as the best audio poetry ever heard. Unfortunately, I didn't know him that well and Lauren doesn't think that the poem exists anymore.

 

[CharleyH]

an interesting question, Charley. I was about to go to bed but checked in here and you made me take stock

sound and rhythm, i would say, hold a greater share of making a spoken-word poem "work" than a written. your images need to have impact, because it's such an immediate medium you're using to try and convey all you want to show. with the spoken-word performance or simple reading, you don't have the same luxury to savour phrases over and over for their elegance, wit, intellectual pretensions et al as you do with the written piece. SO, what you do have to do is use language in a way that either a) is quirky or attractive enough to the reader for it to catch their attention (and that doesn't even mean the poem has to be any good, audiences are fickle creatures ) or b) make the words disappear. To do that, you need to be able to take the listener into the world of visions, flights of fancy, that your work inhabits. It becomes not about the words they're hearing, but about the images, the sensations they are experiencing because of the words/sounds/pacing. For me the very best might leave entire phrases resonating in my mind but the bulk of what i'm left with is the sense of having seen/felt/experienced sensations that were conjured by the poet's words.

so many poems fail when it comes to being read aloud; these are often very good poems, both as written and as 'out louders', the fault lying with the reader. like anything else, there are those with a natural flair for doing voice-work. most people don't have that, though there are those who can learn to make some sort of fist of things; the person with the natural flair, however, will make it all seem so easy, and can even make poor poetry sound good!

i don't know about you guys, though, but while i can admire the spoken word, and even envy the abilities of some out there when it comes to performing, i still would say i prefer the luxuries afforded by the time we have to peruse the written word and all its nuances.

I can't tell you enough how engaging your thoughts are on this subject, but I can, without doubt, proudly confess that I like keeping you up after your self-imposed bedtime curfew!

You raise some interesting points, which I agree with. I've always adored written poetry because of the complexities, the need to read and read again to find layers of words, semiotics (a film term, which means to include all symbols, metaphors, indexes, word plays, rhythm, rhyme etc) excite me. Spoken word is immediate - well, unless recorded. Spoken word is immediate, and like a play, a one-time only experience. I really can't say more about your post other than I love it, but, I must return to something that Palba said, and to which I commented ... isn't all poetry meant to be heard?

 

[butters]

I can't tell you enough how engaging your thoughts are on this subject, but I can, without doubt, proudly confess that I like keeping you up after your self-imposed bedtime curfew!

You raise some interesting points, which I agree with. I've always adored written poetry because of the complexities, the need to read and read again to find layers of words, semiotics (a film term, which means to include all symbols, metaphors, indexes, word plays, rhythm, rhyme etc) excite me. Spoken word is immediate - well, unless recorded. Spoken word is immediate, and like a play, a one-time only experience. I really can't say more about your post other than I love it, but, I must return to something that Palba said, and to which I commented ... isn't all poetry meant to be heard?

i think it is.
but there's a marked difference in the way we hear a poem in our head that we read, or even that we read aloud, and the hearing of that same poem being read aloud by someone else. maybe more so when it's our own poems!

 

[CharleyH]

I respect the opinions expressed in the thread, however I think people make more of a distinction here than really exists. Many of my favorite writers on paper are wonderful read aloud, as well. Sylvia Plath, Simon Armitage, Billy Collins, BJ Ward, Sharon Olds, all of these poets sound great aloud as do many poems by AnnaSwirls, Tzara, Angeline and Patrick Carrington. Not every poem every poet writes is going to be appreciated aloud as much as on the page but I find that people often DO love to hear, say, ee cummings read aloud and that this can add a different dimension of appreciation for the work.

Poetry has its roots in sound and I believe language that is written can never fully be divorced from the spoken as a reader will "hear" the language in some way even when it is read silently. If this were not the case, poets would not care about sonics, meter, rhythm, or even delicate differences in diction where connotation is less the issue than the feel of a word on the tongue.

Some of my poems work better aloud than others (for example, a sestina will not carry its full weight in the ear) but I would not make the great distinction between spoken word and written word in poetry that some make, even given the different goals of slam poets. I worry that people sometimes use these distinctions as a way to sneer at young, urban poets. Example: at the 2008 Dodge Festival an older white poet following such a poet sneered "well I'm not going to get up here and do the dozens." It was a very uncomfortable moment that somewhat unraveled the lovely mood of shared community.

I hope that any poetry community would be able to appreciate the benefits of diversity afforded by multiple expressions of the art without having to slot poets into strict categories that may ignore the vast gray area between, say, shape poetry and slam poetry. Most language is meant to be read and heard. Poetry is no different.

You are a force to be reckoned with Pandora. I adore you and it's hard for me to weigh commenting on this or that part, for now. :rowr:

 

[butters]

If you look at the start of, say, Eliot's Waste Land, he certainly has spent a lot of time thinking about how the poem sounds:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.​

There is a lot going on in those four lines that contributes to the wonderful sound the lines make when read, but I doubt that Eliot wrote the poem with the intent of it being performed or even, necessarily, read aloud.

I could be wrong about that, of course. I am often wrong.

i cannot begin to guess at his intent with any degree of authority, but these lines (for me) actually work better read aloud than in their more passive form on page.

wasn't Eliot one of a group of poets who'd meet and read their works aloud to eachother? i don't know, but something's itching at the back of my head saying he was

 

[CharleyH]

Dora articulates my feelings quite well on the subject, but I'm going to blather on about the topic for a bit anyway.

Liar used to talk about there being a kind of continuum between poetry and prose, so that some pieces end up being very "poem-like," some very prosaic, and a whole lot of them somewhere in between. The spoken/written dimension in poetry seems similar to me. Slam poetry is composed with the primary intent (or at least with one of its main intents) of being performed in front of an audience. I think DeepAsleep once said that he even notates his poems intended for performance, much in the way that an actor will make notes in a play, or a pianist might notate a score. At the extreme, it may not be too much to say that the written representation of the poem, by itself, loses some integral part of its experience, much in the same way that reading a play is a very different experience from seeing it performed. That said, I would disagree with Angie's statement that "a script is not meant to be literature" (though I am probably overinterpreting her meaning). We wouldn't say of Hamlet that it only becomes literature/art through performance, nor of Bach's Art of the Fugue that it only becomes music/art through performance. Hamlet is literature regardless of the quality of a particular performance of it, or even in the absence of a performance. The same would be true, I think, of slam poetry or other kinds of poetry intended primarily for performance, if the poem itself merits it.

On the other extreme, there are things that sure look like poems that may not be best experienced in aural form. Shape poetry loses some of its particular experience in an aural-only presentation. Some concrete poetry can't practically be performed at all.

I would also include a lot of the oriental forms as well. I'm not sure that someone reading haiku to me does anything to augment the experience of reading the poem, as the intent seems to be contemplative. I'm sure sure that it hurts the experience, either, but the poems (at least in English) do not seem to be written with regard to aural properties, but rather intellectual ones.

That could very well be just my ignorance of the forms, though.

Other than the extremes, though, I think most poets spend considerable effort on the sound of their poetry. For me, it's one of the things that make poems poems and not epigrams or aphorisms or little diary entries, or flash fiction. I spend a lot of time thinking about the sound of my verse, not only things like alliteration and assonance and rhyme, but also the rhythm of the poem--the meter, where the line and stanza breaks fall, where the intralinear caesura fall. The fact that I may not do this well doesn't mean I'm not thinking about it.

And, like Tess, I almost always read my poems out loud to myself to help their sound.

If you look at the start of, say, Eliot's Waste Land, he certainly has spent a lot of time thinking about how the poem sounds:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.​

There is a lot going on in those four lines that contributes to the wonderful sound the lines make when read, but I doubt that Eliot wrote the poem with the intent of it being performed or even, necessarily, read aloud.

I could be wrong about that, of course. I am often wrong.

Not sure why I missed your post, it's just showing up now. Apologies.

 

[bflagsst]

i cannot begin to guess at his intent with any degree of authority, but these lines (for me) actually work better read aloud than in their more passive form on page.

wasn't Elliot one of a group of poets who'd meet and read their works aloud to eachother? i don't know, but something's itching at the back of my head saying he was

There's a reason why Ezra Pound read Eliot's Wasteland as opposed to listen to it recited when he was critiquing. Poets are first and foremost writers, at least since Dante.

It's romantic thinking poetry is meant to be heard, but all I see are people writing poems and exchanging them via text. Once a month there's an event at a college or somewhere in town where people exchange poems via recitation, or there's a lecture where a poet reads from their BOOK. The book and magazine come before the performance. Poets write for the magazine, for each other to read, not for the pop charts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry

On Wikipedia the first line defines poetry as a literary art. It hasn't had the quality of a performance art since at least Aristotle's time. If Henrik Ibsen's plays are no longer performed, his work is literary. I've never seen an Ibsen play, I only know the text.

 

[bflagsst]

i cannot begin to guess at his intent with any degree of authority, but these lines (for me) actually work better read aloud than in their more passive form on page.

wasn't Elliot one of a group of poets who'd meet and read their works aloud to eachother? i don't know, but something's itching at the back of my head saying he was

Oh my Jihad. Here's Eliot reading his masterwork: http://town.hall.org/radio/HarperAudio/011894_harp_01_ITH.au

It's buffoonery. Totally devoid of the youth and energy of Spring.

 

[butters]

oh my. you have strong feelings about this, then. your jihad? good 'evans.

but thankyou for providing that link, though i am unable to listen to it till i get new earphones and i've heard some bad performances before, maybe enough to make me not even want to go there and be disillusioned.

have you ever heard Walt Whitman read? is he any good? i love his writing and wouldn't want to be left with a bad taste in my mouth ...

 

[butters]

i wish I could read my stuff aloud the way i hear it in my head

 

[bflagsst]

oh my. you have strong feelings about this, then. your jihad? good 'evans.

but thankyou for providing that link, though i am unable to listen to it till i get new earphones and i've heard some bad performances before, maybe enough to make me not even want to go there and be disillusioned.

have you ever heard Walt Whitman read? is he any good? i love his writing and wouldn't want to be left with a bad taste in my mouth ...

This is a 36-second wax cylinder recording of what is thought to be Whitman's voice reading four lines from the poem "America." For more information on this recording, see Ed Folsom, "The Whitman Recording," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 9 (Spring 1992), 214-16.

http://www.whitmanarchive.org/multimedia/index.html

He was older than dirt. His voice has the quality of many ancient American poets, weirdly pervy.

 

[butters]

This is a 36-second wax cylinder recording of what is thought to be Whitman's voice reading four lines from the poem "America." For more information on this recording, see Ed Folsom, "The Whitman Recording," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 9 (Spring 1992), 214-16.

http://www.whitmanarchive.org/multimedia/index.html

He was older than dirt.

much appreciated.

sigh. i'd so love to hear him read his long pieces, especially Song of Myself, but only if he sounded as good as i want him to

 

[butters]

omg i LOVE this picture of him!

 

[CharleyH]

i wish I could read my stuff aloud the way i hear it in my head

THIS IS YOUR LUCKY DAY! Make your wish come true! Post a poem you want read and lets see how many of us (willing folks) will read it. I'm betting loads of different interpretations!