Dror Burstein on The Voice Off the Page
In 1996 I participated in a writing workshop of Helicon Poetry Journal. It took place in Mishkenot Shaananim in Jerusalem throughout six weekends. One of my most powerful memories from that workshop is the following picture: Fifteen young poets, men and women, on a Saturday morning, running through the alleys of an old Jerusalem neighborhood. Anyone who knows the world of poetry and poets knows that such running is not a common sight.
Responsible for the run was the writer of this book, Irit Sela. The running was intended “to open our voice” before exercises in reading poetry out loud, first thing in the morning. This was a lesson in itself: there is a connection between poetry and our body. Between poetry and breathing. More symbolically, I thought to myself, running to poetry – is a good habit. It does, indeed tend to flee and slip away.
This book suggests reading poetry aloud, which is a daring proposition, despite being obvious, since almost nobody reads poetry out loud today. I wonder whether the silence which has befallen poetry hasn’t in fact harmed the writing itself in the sense that it damaged the musicality of poetry and poets’ ears and eventually led to deafening and silencing poetry in the public and cultural spheres.
Whoever responds to this book’s invitation will learn how to turn the words on the page into something alive, multi-dimensional, present, moving, physical. This requires practice but the benefit is great, especially if the reader is offering his own poems, but even if reading someone else’s poem. In the end, turning reading aloud into a habitual practice will influence the writing of the poem on the page, the inner hearing of the voice written on the page.
This book has an additional side to it, the other side of the coin of reading aloud. Poetry interpretation without reading the poem aloud is almost impossible, and certainly limited. In this respect this book will contribute to lecturers and teachers of poetry at university, at schools and elsewhere. One can almost dare say that a good reading of a poem is half the understanding of it. Poetry is speech, speaking, and its’ understanding requires audible expression. Anyone who has tried to read a poem knows that saying it aloud is often its best explanation.
This book, then, can contribute a lot to writers (poets), readers (to themselves or to an audience) and to interpreters of poetry (teachers and researchers).
And perhaps, who knows, this book can bring new readers and writers into poetry. Perhaps this book is designated not just for poets and practiced poetry readers, but to people who’ve never read poetry because it seemed to them something incomprehensible and bland?
After that morning run, I remember, I read aloud Dan Pagis’ poem “Europe, Late”, which is included in this book. I knew the poem before that Saturday, I mean I thought I knew it, but something in the breathing, which hadn’t fully calmed down from running, entered this troubled poem, and it was re-born in my mouth. There is a voice speaking in that poem, and this speech mingled for the first time with my own breathing. A voice within a voice. This is no big mystery. Or perhaps it is.
-Dror Burstein