Next week, we're returning to a project we tried pre-pandemic: reading poems aloud with new voices. (See my blog post for 11.21.18: Reading Poems Aloud) I've noted lately how all of us at Wednesdays@One, me included, read aloud in virtually the same voice, week in and week out. Let me first describe what I've been hearing. Please, do not think that I am criticizing voice tones that you may recognize as your own--each of our reading voices is distinct, unique, and personal, and to be valued for all that.
There is the relatively toneless voice, in all its glorious monotony. It's often also a clipped speech pattern, speeding across a phrase or a line, rarely pausing for breath, not even at a convenient spot, like a comma or, sometimes, even a period!
There is the stentorian voice, often the toneless voice's opposite. It treats every syllable as either a hill or a valley to be climbed or descended. A period often gets more beats in rest than it deserves, and line endings are invitations to pause, take a breath, and gather the lips and the tongue before plunging forward.
Some voices come haltingly, move slowly through a line, stumble over a piece of innovative syntax or an unfamiliar set of syllables, back up, try again, and pause where no pause should occur.
And some voices drive through a poem in erroneous abandon, supplying words that are not there, deleting words that are, correcting others, mispronouncing still others.
There are even some voices (mine can be one of them from time to time) that bring more drama to the show than is really there, that treat every line like it's being declaimed by Richard Burbage, Sir Richard Burton, Dame Judith Anderson: you get my point. This voice treads the boards.
Well, my friends. For our next project, I want each of us to spend time with a single poem that is not our own (I will send you the poem). I want us to get to know this poem inside and out:
- Its content
- Its form and structure
- Its line endings and enjambments
- Its repetitive sounds
- Its stressed and non-stressed syllables
- Its juxtaposed consonants and vowels, labials, glottal stops, aspirants, dentals and nasals
- And its possible meanings and how these are reinforced by the sounds of the spoken words
A case in point. Years ago I worked with my poetry-jazz band on the great "To be or not to be" soliloquy. I practiced it endlessly in private in my home studio, emphasizing different phrases and lines, lifting my voice here, dropping it to a whisper there, bring it to full stops at important stages of the passage, letting it flow forward in other stages. Then I tried it with my band, individually at first, then as a group. Working with the drummer was especially revealing, as you might imagine. I learned so much about this "tone poem" as we developed (I won't say perfected) the version we would eventually bring to the stage. I learned how its content actually sorts itself into major sections, like fields of thought within the soliloquy, beyond what my college lecture courses told me about how the piece organizes meaning. I learned how some lines are meant to move fast, others ponderously. Musical direction got to be an important consideration: piano, mezzo, forte, crescendo, diminuendo, adagio, andante, allegro, etc. There seemed to be no end to the possibilities for voicing this great piece of dramatic poetry.
Now, you likely won't have a drummer to work with for this project, much less a band (much less an interpretive jazz band!), nor will you have the time to put into it that I put into Hamlet's monologue. The good thing is that you won't need that. What you will need, however, is a week spent in the company of a good poem, a quiet and, if you must have it, private place to read the poem aloud. Not just once before the session we'll have on June 29, but many times until then.
Read it to yourself as much as you like in silence, just to get in your mind's ear the flow, pitch, and pacing of the language. Read it enough to parse out the possible meanings of various phrases, lines, word orders, stanzas, and their relations to one another. (Try not to over interpret what you are reading, to read "into" the poem what can't be supported poetically, logically rhetorically or any other way.)
Then try reading it aloud in your normal reading voice, that is, the way you usually approach a poem when you read it aloud. Next, try something different tonally, sonically, rhythmically, and in terms of pace. Try speeding through it once or twice if you're a notoriously slow reader, or plodding through it if you normally read a a faster clip. Try this (it often works wonders for me in practice): read as much of the poem in a single breath as you can.
Do these exercises until you begin to see the poem differently. I guarantee you that this will happen. You'll start to see and hear relationships between parts of the poem that weren't evident when you first read it. You'll begin to see pitch-ups and pitch-downs, clatter-y phrases and "ponder parts."
This is all to the good because it will make you more aware of your own voice as you write your next poem, and of your fellow writers' voices as you read or listen to their poems.
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