The Voice Off the Page
About the book
Every performance is an interpretative act. Translating the poem from the silent page to an audial human voice.
Silence is the basis of speech.
Art is not supposed to be useful....
Every reading aloud is an interpretive act. The interpreter's point of view colors it.
This book offers a structured set of exercises, all dealing with meaning, to open up the complexity of meanings which is a poem.
In a poem someone is talking to someone.
Everything on the page is there for a reason – like musical notes for a musician they are to be realized and materialized by the human voice. A poem is a potential waiting to be sung, to be spoken.
As readers we must justify everything that is on the page.
I shall illustrate stages of preparing a poem for public reading, from the shape on the page, through what we know about the speaker and the addressee from the poem itself, interpretative to rhetorical stages, including the poetic speaker’s point of view, to the poet’s point of view on the poem and to the reader’s point of view.
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.
The Voice off the Page was published in Hebrew in 2016; a new, updated version in English, with a dozen poems in English, is forthcoming.
In Praise of The Voice Off the Page
"Young poets, men and women, on a Saturday morning, running through the alleys of old Jerusalem…. Anyone who knows the world of poetry and poets knows that such running is not a common sight.…
There is a connection between poetry and our body. Between poetry and breathing.…
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.… Reading aloud … will influence the writing….
This book will contribute to lecturers and teachers of poetry at university, at schools and elsewhere. …
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)."
- Dror Burstein
"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… 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….
Sela’s work systematically makes poetry audible and vocal, in motion, true…and meaningful."
- Vivian Eden
"When listening to poets reading their poems, some read fast, as though running away from their own poem, others are full of pathos or disregarding punctuation marks or lines, ignoring their own musical score. But anyone who’s participated in Irit’s workshops (and I have had the pleasure of working together with her at Helicon Masterclasses for poets), is unlike any of the above, due to the conscious reading which Irit Sela has developed which has finally been published in a book, The Voice Off the Page, in which she demonstrates on several poems how to take the poem apart from the moment it was conceived until it became a word, a sentence, a written poem, all the way through to reading it aloud, which is an overall psychophysical experience which includes the body, the voice, breathing, intonation, music and especially – talking to people. This book is extremely important for poets but also for actors and poetry lovers."
- Agi Mishol