That Poetic Voice We Sometimes Use

The premise of a New York Times piece titled "What's With That Voice People Use When Reciting Poetry?" is that there’s a distinctive, stylized way many poets read their work aloud.

This is often called “Poet Voice,” and the article digs into what it is and why it’s so common. If you attend poetry readings and if you yourself read poetry aloud, you probably have encountered this Poet Voice.

It can be a slow cadence, with dramatic pauses, a lilting or monotone delivery, or a sing-songy inflection. It is not that person's natural speaking voice. Poet Voice is not meant as a compliment.  

On the page, poetry is quiet, private, and intimate. There is some "voice" in our head when we read silently. Is that the voice we use when we read aloud?

Do you hear this different way of reading as comforting and familiar, or as awkward?

We know there are poets who turn reading into a performance rather than language meant to connect.

Poets aren’t generally "performers," but still can fall into this same vocal pattern.

That article isn’t arguing for or against Poet Voice. It’s asking: what is this “weird poetic monotone rhythmic thing,” why does it persist, and how does voice change what a poem means when it moves from page to performance. The general takeaway from the article is that Poet Voice isn’t tied to one generation or school of poetry. It shows up at “the open mic and the Pulitzer podium alike,” and many poets admit they dislike it even while using it.

Here are a few poets who get mentioned as examples of “Poet Voice,” either in the *NYT* piece’s broader conversation or in the related analysis it draws on:

Louise Glück reads her poem "The Wild Iris." The Nobel laureate’s readings are frequently described as having that “precious, lilting cadence” with down-slurring line endings

Robert Bly is a poet who certainly reads his poem in an interesting way. I've heard him at reading read the same poem several times in a row, as if he thought we missed something the first time. Bly’s readings are faster, more emphatic, and less singsong. It's unusual but probably not what is meant as Poet Voice.

Robert Pinsky also has a distinctive way of reading. Is it Poet Voice? Here he reads "The Forgetting."

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Poetry As Medicine

Photo: griffert | Pixabay

There’s a growing body of evidence in the medical scientific literature to support the use of poetry and the arts in clinical practice – to enhance empathy, communication skills, and both patient and clinician wellbeing. I saw this in an article from the Irish Times by a doctor (unfortunately, the article requires a subscription) who admits that "As a medic, it took me a while to appreciate this." There's a special relationship between poetry and medicine, and great value that physicians, other healthcare professionals, and patients could derive from making better use of this art form.

I have been doing some research into this and considering it for a future writing prompt.It is not just writing poetry that can heal.  I have seen studies that show that patients who read poetry together experience decreased pain and symptoms of depression.

Other studies found that poetry can sharpen listening, attentiveness, observation, and analytical skills. It can refine the artistic side of medicine: Poetry allows us to express ourselves, fosters creativity, and accepts ambiguity. It enhances empathy, self-awareness, and introspection.

There is a National Association for Poetry Therapy which is about the use of language, symbol, and story in therapeutic, educational, growth, and community-building capacities. It relies upon the use of poems, stories, song lyrics, imagery, and metaphor to facilitate personal growth, healing, and greater self-awareness.

I would not claim that poetry can heal physical ailments but writing and reading poetry can be healing and transformative because poems reflect the voice of the soul. Writing - poetry, journaling, memoir etc. -  is a way to nurture a mindfulness practice because when writing (maybe especially with poems), we have the chance to unleash the unconscious mind.

Studies using MRIs show that poetry causes the part of the brain that activates during daydreaming to light up while reading or listening to poetry. It can "brighten" the brain and improve memory. Poetry often sticks with the reader, causing them to re-read and even memorize the words.

I ran a workshop for healthcare professionals a few years ago and found several books that were useful in preparing for the sessions.

  

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Reading Poetry Like a Professor

I had Billy Collin's warning about some classes in "Introduction to Poetry" when I encountered an article titled "How to read poetry like a professor."

It turns out that the author of the piece, Thomas Foster, is a retired professor of literature who has made a side career by writing instructive books about how we ought to read. (He's not the old professor illustrated above.)

He has published How to Read Literature Like a Professor, How to Read Novels Like a Professor, Twenty-five Books that Shaped America, Reading the Silver Screen and now How to Read Poetry Like a Professor.

Foster, like many of us, couldn't quite get a "handle” on poetry in elementary school. But, as a teenager, he encountered with the poems of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and it turned around how he read poems.

Billy Collins shares that Ferlinghetti connection. In Collins' poem "The Trouble with Poetry," he says that reading poetry makes him want to write poetry and fills him with a "longing to steal."

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti --
to be perfectly honest for a moment --

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.

Foster's article is taken from his latest how-to-read book which, thankfully, does not suggest (as Collins warned):

tie the poem to a chair with rope 
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Foster's suggestions include some good basic advice:

• Read what’s actually in front of you. Make a quite literal first reading.
• Read all the words. Each word. No skimming. He feels students often whiz past a keyword.
• On a second reading, get into the way things are assembled on the page. He advises to read the sentences, not the lines. That means you should also 
• obey all punctuation, including its absence. No punctuation at the end of the line? Keep that very brief pause but don't drop the voice as if the sentence is over. A comma, acts as all commas - pause - and a period, semicolon, a question mark and even a dash is meant as a stop.
• I agree with him that at least one time you should read the poem aloud. This may not work in the library or coffee shop, but when alone or with an open group, do so. Even poems  "written for the page" reveal things when heard. That's one reason why I like audiobooks.
• Do multiple readings of the poem. Unlike reading a novel, it is easy and to reread a poem right after the first cold reading.
• Look up the odd words or allusions. Some poetry, especially the older classics, contain references and vocabulary that was challenging back in their own time for the less educated and is challenging today for even the educated. Even the more accessible modern poetry sometimes makes reference to a person or place that would be helpful to know a bit more about to understand the poem fully.

I am not so sure that this is so much how to read "like a professor" as much as it is simply how to read a poem. But it is instructive in correcting some of the ways that some students might misread a poem.




Painting via Wikimedia & the Brooklyn Museum of Professor William H. Goodyear by Wilford S. Conrow

Poems Read Aloud

This spring, I am the "poet in residence" at a middle school. It is fun to be back in a classroom, especially since I am only there once a week and only for an hour. The students have sessions where we write, revise, and listen to each other's poems.

There are three "events" where they can read their best poem aloud. One is performance-oriented, but the other two are just readings and it is quite a thing to be that age and be able to stand in front of a crowd and read aloud. Some will memorize. Some will add some performance, but I'm impressed with any of them reading something they wrote aloud at that age.

My own first reading at an open mic in a bookstore happened in high school and before I read my knees were very literally shaking and I had to hold onto the podium to keep my hands still.

Having heard actors and poets read some poems on recordings, my idea of "how to read a poem aloud" was rather distorted. I knew I couldn't read like Richard Burton, but I thought that kind of reading should be my model.

Of course, you don't need celebrities to have a good reading of a poem, but actor John Lithgow put together The Poets' Corner  a collection of well-known poems and had them read by a group of celebrities. The readings are online.

I listened to the collection and it brought back memories of poems read or heard when I was a young student discovering poetry. It includes Wallace Stevens's poem "The Emperor of Ice Cream" (read by Kathy Bates) which was a poem that grabbed me in high school with its title and language.

There are many collections of poets and others reading online. You could spend days going from one to another on YouTube alone. I share some of these with students because hearing poetry read aloud is not a commonplace event for most people. young or old.

The students read their poems too quickly. They try to memorize rather than "learn by heart" their poems - a difference that is not easy to understand or learn. Some over-dramatize. They use their "poet voice" in the way that novice Shakespearean actors drift into British accents - even when Romeo is Italian or Twelfth Night takes place in Illyria (Yugoslavia) and Hamlet and his friends are from Denmark.

It is rare to see a poet (or any writer, though non-fiction writers and novelists get more airplay) interviewed on TV - even rarer to hear poetry read. I was happily surprised when actress Helen Mirren was asked by Stephen Colbert to read the end of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” on his show. (read "Ulysses")  It is an old poem and apparently, one Colbert has great affection for.

“Death closes all: but something ere the end

Some work of noble note, may yet be done…”

That section of Tennyson's poem - hopeful that some work might still be done - reminds me of the Epilogue to Shakespeare's The Tempest. Prospero, a wizard and an old man, gives this final speech and I have always thought of it as Shakespeare's own farewell/retirement speech. He asks that the audience "release me from my bands, with the help of your good hands." The two times I have seen the play performed, after that line the audience did, with its applause, free him. Shakespeare's "project" - "which was to please" is finished.

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint. Now, ’tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell,
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

I think that many of my young poets, like Prospero and Shakespeare, want "spirits to enforce, art to enchant."  I hope they get that, if only for a few minutes when they read and are freed by the audience's hands.

Getting the Daily News from Poems

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

   —  William Carlos Williams


I am still writing my poem a day for 2014, and some people have taken on a poem a day for National Poetry Month. But if you don't feel you can write every day, you can certainly read a poem a day. And reading poetry is an important part of becoming a poet too.

Some people use the daily poem at The Writers Almanac or at Poetry Daily.

The Academy of American Poets is another source. They have a new design for their Poem-a-Day and they will now be syndicating Poem-a-Day. This means that the new, previously unpublished poems we are publishing during the week will be available to editors at a wide range of newspapers, news websites, and magazines.

Get out the news in poems!

You might also want to celebrate the month with a donation to Poem-A-Day or help support Poetry Daily or support the Writers Almanac.