About The Voice Off the Page
Every performance of a poem is an interpretative act. Translating the poem from the silent page to an audial human voice is what occurs during a reading and the poem is filtered through the psyche of the reader, either consciously or not.
Listening to someone read poetry can be a painful bore or a surprisingly fulfilling pleasure. If the poem is any good, the responsibility for the pleasure of an audience is always on the reader. If the reader loves the poem, which he must learn to do or else not attempt to read it, he should make the audience love it too. Loving means ‘getting it’, essentially. Poetry, like any beauty, requires attentiveness.
Silence is the basis of speech and, together with all the other prosodic elements, contributes to the musical rhythmic words that are a poem. Language is transformed from the practical to the musical when it moves from its use in life to the unpractical, seemingly useless act of poetry. Art is always useless. It is not supposed to be useful. It’s supposed to be beautiful by some category of beauty and to open up new channels of attention in a reader or listener.
The talent of a good reader, in addition to a good voice, good command of language and good diction, is their interpretation, because every reading aloud is an interpretative act. The more complex and interesting the interpretation, the better the reading. The interpreter’s point of view is also heard in the reading and it colors it quite effectively, even making the experience of two readings sound like two entirely different poems.
This book offers a structured set of exercises, none of which are technical, all dealing with meaning, to open up the wealth of meanings which is a poem.
In a poem someone (a speaker) is talking to someone (an addressee).
In a poem everything on the page is there for a reason, every word, pause, line break, sentence, graphic change – like musical notes for a musician, are to be realized and materialized by the human voice. A poem is a potential waiting to be sung, to be spoken.
The act of speaking expresses a need to communicate something. There is this inner action in the speech, which is the poem, and as readers we need to bring it to life and activate it for an audience.
As readers we must justify everything that is on the page.
In a poem the speaker wants something from his addressee. This is the source of energy in the reading of a poem, whether in our own heads or aloud.
In this book I shall illustrate on a dozen poems the various stages of preparing a poem for public reading, from the shape of the poem on the page, through what the poem itself tells us about the speaker and the addressee, through interpretative to rhetorical stages, including the poetic speaker’s point of view on the things he is saying in the poem, to the poet’s point of view in the poem (is it serious, ironic or humoristic?), through to the reader’s point of view at the particular time and place in history where the reading occurs.
This book will be useful to anyone who reads poetry professionally, as a performer, researcher, teacher or translator and will improve the quality of speaking poetry.