Vivian Eden on The Voice Off the Page
Somewhere between the invention of the printing press and the invention of artificial intelligence, many interesting, wise – or at least clever -- and gifted people lost sight of the fact that poetry started out as the spoken word and can and “should” remain so. (More about “should” anon.) Reading poetry is more than what happens in the air inaudibly between the page and the eye or, even worse, is mediated by the carefully enunciated but affectless and nearly universal singsong so prevalent in classrooms and at poetry readings – be that reader the poet who wrote the lines, or an actor with a particularly resonant voice but without the “play” part of acting, or a teacher in a classroom. Too much of the poetry read aloud nowadays is as dismal as prayers recited dutifully in Latin, say, or Hebrew, by someone who may or may not even understand the language – every word at the same pace, the same pitch, the same volume. This, incidentally, is why many adults as well as schoolchildren find poetry boring and don’t even try to experience it.
Coming from work in theater and music, Irit Sela knows how to make poetry come alive again. I have had the pleasure of watching her teach the reading of poetry aloud to young Israeli poets –writers of both Hebrew and of Arabic -- with astounding results. Even many years later, it is possible to tell which poets in their prime today learned from Irit – and which have never even thought about reading poetry aloud beyond the pleasure they take in the sound of their own voices. Freeing and enabling the reader, her method is based on making clear choices about every word, punctuation mark and line, as in the writing process itself – and in the translation process, as I can attest.
The method benefits everyone. Poets hearing someone else read their work aloud suddenly discover resonances in the work of which they had not been consciously aware as they nailed down their thoughts on a page or screen. A poem becomes bigger each time the poet reads a work aloud not by rote but anew with the wonder, excitement and confidence of that moment when the poem was clearly “finished,” ready to be sent out into the world: The poem is never dead and is always capable of change and more amplitude within words that were ostensibly final.
Any writer, reader, listener, teacher or student of poetry, contemporaneously or years later, becomes aware of an explored, justified, unique and legitimate rendition by a specific reader, the poet or another person – and the poem expands every time there is a different reading. This is the same magic as many sopranos giving varied renditions of Bizet’s “Habanera” or many actors rendering Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be...” – and with subtle differences on the Friday evening and at the Saturday matinee.
In his “Ars Poetica” (1926), Archibald MacLeish famously (and to my mind fatuously) wrote: “A poem should be palpable and mute ...Dumb ... motionless in time ... equal to / Not true ... A poem should not mean / But be.” I fear that the “should” in MacLeish’s poem, now part of the canon, has had a pernicious effect– at least in the English language and its orbit – on the transition from poetry on the page to poetry in the mouth and the ear. Sela’s work systematically makes poetry audible and vocal, in motion, true – though the truth may and must vary – and meaningful.
-Vivian Eden
Jerusalem, August 2023