Reading poems aloud (11.21.18)

Good Monday morning all!  What a beautiful weekend we’ve had . . . inspiring!

I wanted to share some thoughts about our project for Wednesday, which, as a reminder, is simply to read poems “with effect.”  Meaning?  What I have in mind is to try getting outside our individual voices, to hear ourselves literally, and to recite poems quite literally in a different voice or different voices.  So I guess this challenge calls for a little more explanation . . .

What is “voice”?
When we speak of voice in a poem, do we mean the “speaker”?  Do we mean “persona”?  Or do we mean the breath that forms sounds (varying air pressures) that enter the acoustic meatus, vibrate the drum, then circle the cochlea, igniting electrical impulses that send signals to the brain, which then converts the sounds to intelligence and emotion?  Ha!  I think “voice” means all these things.  And each one—speaker, persona, breath—is changeable, just like a line ending or an image in a poem; that is, voice is a choice.  When we write poems, we adopt (or try) to adopt a certain voice—the “authentic” voice we think of as our true selves, the dramatic voice, the comic voice, the “poetic” voice, the lyrical voice, and so on.

Reading vs. reciting vs. singing
When poets read aloud, that is, when we “breathe out” a poem, we adopt either a stentorian voice (what I am about to impart is Wisdom) or a kind of neutral voice.  That neutral tone is our “reading” as opposed to our declaiming or recitative voice.  Even less do we sing a poem.  And when you stop to think about it, since poems originally were songs and made to be sung (lyre is the root of lyric), it’s oddly prosaic that we merely “speak” poems.  Recitation, in opera, is an intoned speaking part.  That is, it is language or lines issued not in song but also not merely as the drone of standard speech.  It’s something in between these extremes.  And this may be what we’re after on Wednesday, a kind of operatic delivery that observes or even accentuates pauses, silences, consonantal sounds, nasals, labials and so forth that are present in a line of poetry.  Still, it’s possible to sing a poem, even one that isn’t necessarily set to an identifiable melody.  To me, the difference between singing a line of poetry and reciting it operatically is just one of degree.

Voice, sound and meaning
I believe that reading a poem aloud affects not just how it sounds but how it means.  When I read a poem silently, I use a voice, to be sure, but it is my Reader’s Voice, which as I say, is relatively neutral sonically and emotionally.  One thing I’ve learned or re-learned when working on poems for Program for Jazz is how giving voice to a poem—literally—can influence my understanding of it.  I often try different voices, rhythms, timbers, resonances, articulations when reciting or singing a poem, just to experience the different ways the content can be understood.

For Wednesday
I recommend the following for this Wednesday’s session . . .

• Go through a number of your own AND others’ poems and try reading them aloud, just to get a feeling for how they each might be “mouthed.”
• Select the ones that seem most receptive to different styles rhythmically, tonally, etc. and try different tempos with these examples.
• Choose two poems that seem to you to call for different styles of delivery aloud and spend some time with each . . . Varying tempo, pitch, intonation, “force,” articulation (even mumbling a line can be an option!); in front of a mirror, watch yourself as you recite/sing.
• If you’re especially brave or curious, try recording yourself.  You will find how much recording affects delivery, how much more conscientious you are about how you say the poem!
• Bring two poems to the session prepared to deliver them outside your normal style.  (Let’s limit them to one page, if possible, please.)

See you on Wednesday!

Just call me a rhymer (11.17.18)

Well, is it about time for some rhyme?  We’ve met for poetry for a year now, but not a word about rhyme.

Doug argues that sonnets that don’t rhyme aren’t really sonnets.  I won’t argue that point.  Many of the best sonnets in several languages—some of the best poems in several languages—are built on a strict rhyme scheme: abba abba cdc cdc is one; abab abab cde cde is another; and there is always abab cdcd eded ff, and abab bcbc cdcd ee no less!

But a rhyme scheme isn’t much of an adequate definition of the figure.  What is rhyme?  Repetition, for one (obvious) thing.  And pattern, as in the sonnet examples above.  Rhyme is sound—vowels and consonants, diphthongs too.  Rhyme is like to like. 

A rhyme works by contrast, by asserting difference.  And difference, in this sense, works only if there is a basis for or an expectation of similarity.  For a rhyme to work, difference within similarity must pertain, somewhere, somehow. Two or more words must be the same in one key aspect, but different in others:  Bow / now; bow / bough. 

I think what I’m trying to get around to is this: rhyme is various.  Here are some examples of the many kinds of rhyme you can deploy in a poem:

Exact or perfect rhyme: Now / cow / how / wow

Close or near rhyme: Now / brow / chow / prow / plow

Off rhyme: Now / know / new / nigh

The above are variations of “whole” or “masculine” or “simple” rhyme.[1]  The term “simple” just means a rhyming structure consisting of a single syllable or phoneme.  You might ask, Why is the pairing now / now not a rhyme?  The answer is that now / now is mere repetition or duplication.  Now / cow is rhyme because a change has been inserted orthographically: a c for an n. 

You can see in the other two kinds of simple rhyme a veering away from the exact: much remains in each grouping that is similar—the terminal ow’s, for instance—but difference becomes more and more evident. New vowels are introduced, and initial consonants are inserted; but the rhyme pattern remains monosyllabic.  Also note in the third example a purely visual differentiation in the “k” of know, and the “gh” of nigh.  In the latter case, the rhyme is auditory though not typographical: “gh” is pronounced similarly to “ow.”

But what about more complex rhyme patterns, the multisyllabic, or “feminine” forms?  Here are examples:

Exact rhyme: insight / inflight; unkind / unwind; interleave / interweave

Close rhyme: oral / aural / aureole; inferior / interior; instance / insistence

Off rhyme: energetic / panegyric; industry / ancestry;  oral / aerial

You can see in the above the progressions away from exactness to likeness toward mere resemblance.  If you look closer, you’ll also note other aspects of rhyme that don’t get much attention.  Look, for example, at the similarities of stressed and unstressed syllables in some of the pairs, where the stressed parts occur at the same position within the words and occur with similar force and duration.  Or again, look at the insertion of “sis” in the middle of instance, which both preserves and violates the rhyme at the same time!

Here’s an interesting definition or description of rhyme: Rhyme is not only possible in a language, but inevitable, because “the number of sounds available for any language is limited and its many words must be combinations and permutations of its few sounds.”[2]

Some questions to think about as you work on a rhyming poem for next Wednesday . . .

• Why DON’T we rhyme exclusively today, as poets once did?  In other words, why isn’t rhyme a requirement today?
• Why do so many poets apologize and make excuses for rhyme in their poems?
• Why isn’t rhyme coupled more often with “numbers,” that is, with regular meter and rhythm?
• Why is rhyme so often associated with light verse and other forms a non-serious poetry?  In fact, why is it so hard to use rhyme in dramatic or “heightened” poetry?
• Why is rhyme now considered inauthentic?

Of course, one answer to all these questions is that you can take rhyme too far.  The British (and certain slavish American poetasters) used to rhyme “again” with “pain.”  I lived and worked in the UK for four years; never heard any native do that!  Not even a poet.  Another might be that we no longer think of poetry as separate from ordinary speech and breath (thank you, William Carlos Williams).  Authentic poetry—that is, an authentic voice in a poem—speaks ordinary, maybe even extraordinary, but not pretty.

Following are some examples of poems using different kinds of rhyme.

Horticulture

On Her First Semester

at the University of Georgia – Athens

Auden (W. H.)

Once made a strong case

That universities not pardon

Graduates who don’t learn to garden.

Diplomas and plaudits

Should be as subject to audits

By horticulturists

As by multiculturalists,

Or so he believed.

Now, some are relieved

That today’s formal schooling

Requires no such fooling

Around.

That is, the capped-and-gowned

Set learn a curricula

Of nothing so particular

As gardening

Which, though it prevents the hardening

Of the soul and mind

And encourages our kind

To make an alloy

Of work and joy,

Is meticulous and slow,

A too deliberate way to know.

But consider, you

Are a kind of garden, too,

Where careful tilling

Can produce, if not thrilling

Results,

Then at least a mulch

Of humanity I’m

Convinced is sublime.

Thus in Athens, be fertile

With the myrtle,

So to speak.

It’s as good as learning Greek.

A Place Named Nome

(Poem to May Sarton on Anne’s Birthday, August 8, 1995)

Poems, some say, must rhyme,

But as for me, well, not all the time,

Which is to say, assertively, I’m

A person, a poet, a puttering enzyme

Of the type who frequently seem

To be lost, lazily, as in a dream

Upon a gurgling, wordful stream

Whose wordy wavelets gleam

Brightly, like liquid flame.

It’s not important, always, to frame

Your thoughts, or make them sound the same

At the end of each line, and no shame

Either, if you make room

Occasionally for the half-rhyme

Which, in poetry, is the rim

Of expectation, where to roam

Too long and too far from home

Leads to strange places with strange names like Nome,

Alaska, which to any worldly genome

Like you, like me, are poem, sweet poem.

“Clear Water in a Brilliant Bowl”

The Draycott, you know, is all that’s left of today.

Cadogan Gardens is pedestrianless.

In London all is surveilled, all surveilling.

The hotel staff slip farther and farther away.

From the earpiece: “I don’t feel so safe.”

Outside, a sycamore offers a lurker shade.

Through an open window someone’s shouting

Something ugly.  Things begin to chafe.

Your voice, lodged in my ear, feels the ocean

Away it is.  I couldn’t possibly help you, nor you me,

Not from here.  Here, where I see on a table

Clear water in a brilliant bowl — a notion

Somebody had an hour ago but forgot

To fulfill with flower heads from some pot.

Rondeau Saint Martin

We were so furious

when we heard the curious

news about Saint

Martin & his glorious

old paint,

we issued a joint

communiqué, a point-by-point

rebuttal of the serious

plot to anoint

a horse, of all creatures, in that delirious

rite.  It does worry us,

the shirt off his back.  It’s injurious,

anent:

the weariness

of the world. It’s never spent.

---

[1] I am going to set aside the obviously gendered implication here, except to say that men have defined the terms of poetry, as they have so much else in civilization.  There are workarounds: whole rhyme, for instance, or mono-syllabic rhyme.

[2] Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1974.