POETS Day! The Dreaded Poet Voice

Illustration by Rene Sears

My social media is full of election talk. People hate the results. People love the results. People hate their aunt who loves the result. It’s the dawn of a new freedom. It’s the beginning of an authoritarian nightmare.

I don’t think I’ve seen any of the people calling Trump a dictator refer to him as “Orange Julius.” I’d have thought someone would have.

Anyway, Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. You’re probably just scrolling through your timeline anyway. Quit pretending you’re working and get down to the business of wasting time.

First: verse.

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I went to a 5th through 12th grade preparatory school. For the most part the lower school, 8th and below, and the upper school, all the rest, kept to themselves, but there were a few events meant to draw us all together as a single student body.

Homecoming was a great opportunity for juniors and seniors to pass out kazoos to the lower school and get them semi-organized into a homecoming game bleacher section semi-orchestra for the seniors to conduct at the basketball game. A big brother/big sister program made sure everybody had a few names put to faces despite the age gap. Varsity players helped coach peewee league teams and such.

One of the all-school events was the annual poetry reading contest. Note the “reading.” We weren’t writing our own. It’s what it sounds like. Every student picked a poem and practiced reciting. We’d all give our choice a go in front of our class, the teacher would pick the best two and that pair would represent the class in competition against the rest of the finalists at an all-school assembly. There was a lower school and upper school winner but we all watched everybody and applauded even when someone broke down and cried or otherwise made a spectacle of themselves. It was, at least in the sense that we were all required to attend, a whole school event. It was as terrible as it sounds. My son now goes to the same school as I did, and he tells me it persists. That’s a shame.

Navigating the process was tough. Performance was graded. You wanted to do well enough to get an A, but not so well that you advanced beyond the classroom stage of the tournament. Go with something short and recognizable but full of rhyming sing-song traps you can’t be blamed for falling into and you were done. Sonnets were good. A solid sonnet reading shows work put in but with no chance of showing up a spirited beat poet reading from one of the blue jean jacket kids. One year Allison read a poem by “James Douglas Morrison” and none of the teachers realized that she snuck in something by Jim Morrison. Or they did and didn’t care. Allison was so cool.

In the classroom prelims, we got notes. “Slow down.” “Enunciate.” “You need a pause there.” “Slow down.” We were taught to read in Poet Voice. If you aren’t familiar with the terms, Cara Giaimo has a great article, “An Algorithmic Investigation of the Highfalutin ‘Poet Voice’”, in Atlas Obscura. From the article:

“And then there’s Poet Voice, scourge of the open mic and the Pulitzer podium alike. Unsurprisingly, poets are the best at describing Poet Voice: Rich Smith, in CityArts, calls it ‘a precious, lilting cadence,’ in which ‘every other line [ends] on a down note,’ and there are ‘pauses, within sentences, where pauses, need not go.’”

It’s measured, lifeless, and apathetic towards what is described. Giaimo offers a link to a reading by Louise Glück. Glück is a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a Poet Laureate of the United States. She’s admired for her “plain speaking,” if I may borrow a phrase from A.E. Stalling’s description. In The New York Times, Dwight Garner calls her “ruthless,” her mind “supple,” and her verse populated with “abject majesty.”

Here’s a snippet of a poem from her Pulitzer winning collection A Village Life.

from Crossroads
Louise Glück (1943-2023)

My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young—

love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities.
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised—

It’s wistful. The persona is wise. She recognizes errors but as errors she’s tied to and accepts. She appreciates where and how and there’s no tentativeness in her assessment. It’s a moving piece.

Here is the video Giaimo links to at Atlas Obscura.

It’s an awful reading. I don’t get “tenderness” or “raw” from that. She sounds like a Thermian from Galaxy Quest reading the Important Warnings off the back a Zoloft bottle for the benefit of Princess Amadala. Why this has become an accepted – and even encouraged per my high school – performative posture is beyond me; the path from wandering minstrels and disreputable troubadours has grown over and brambled beyond want for retracing. But here we are.

Another recitation method is sometimes seen at slams and spoken word fests. This is a beat recitation where jerky movements of the head and neck, arms and hands, move words in space. The right hand crossed over and a foot forward from the chest at the start of a sentence waits and cuts up and to the right as if holding a mirror up to a stage light on the last stress of the line, head turns left with the first of the next and so on. No transitions. It’s all beat to new beat and place. It can be effective when done well, comical when not.

Some poems are nearly impossible to read properly. I wrote about fourteeners, properly known as iambic heptameter, in this space a year ago. “Casey at the Bat” is an example. The theme from Gilligan’s Island another. It’s a nightmare to read aloud without sounding like a doofus.

Ezra Pound offers advice in ABC of Reading:

“It should be read as natural spoken language. The metre is, I admit, susceptible to bad reading. A bad reader of fourteeners is almost certain to tub-thump. The reader will be well advised to read according to sense and syntax, keep from thumping, observe the syntactical pause, and not stop for the line ends save where sense requires or a comma indicates. That is the way to get the most out of it, and come nearest to a sense of the time-element in the metrical plan.”

He makes it sound like a decent reading is there for grasping if you take reasonable precautions and pay attention. Give it a try.

Casey at the Bat
Ernest Lawrence Thayer (1863-1940)

The sneer is gone from Casey’s lip, his teeth are clenched in hate,
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate;
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow.

How’d it go? I tub-thump the hell out of it every time.

The trick to a good reading of most poetry seems to be in courting but not abusing suspension of disbelief. English lends itself to iambs and you can find instances of iambic speech in conversation all the time, but phrases here and there. No one speaks in entirely in verse. In particular, no one measures out their piques with “Heaven make thee free of it! I follow thee. / I am dead Horatio. Wretched Queen, adieu!” But we want them too in art sometimes, and we tailor expectations greedily. When reading poetry you shouldn’t hide from the audience that you’re reading verse. That’s why they’re there. At the same time, you might do well to act like you’re hiding it from them. It’s very confusing.

The sentiment is not the poetry, nor is the music. Both are required and a shade of disbelief is needed to allow for something infusive. I’m not an instructor. Telling people how to read poetry isn’t my intent, but I’ve gotten mileage out of playing a character, imagining as much as I can about the persona and taking on the role. I manage it without overacting (I hope), over emoting (again), or leaving the scent of patchouli in my wake. A poetry performance needs substance and rhythm to affect people.

From T.S. Eliot’s “The Music of Poetry”:

“The history of blank verse illustrates two interesting and related points: the dependence upon speech and the striking difference, in what is prosodically the same form, between dramatic blank verse and blank verse employed for epical, philosophical , meditative and idyllic purposes. The dependence of verse upon speech is much more direct in dramatic poetry than in any other.”

But is epical, philosophical, etc. verse dramatic in that it’s written to be expressed by a persona? A poet writing confessionally is speaking as a known and existing character. A playwright is using words to flesh out an imagined character. The meditative and idyllic poem is written from a point of view, but a great deal is left to the reader. For whatever reason, fashion suggests we adopt Glück’s medicated alien. Why? We don’t have to pause so long nor narrow our register and tone.

All of these musings arose from a memory of reciting from Julius Caesar in 7th grade. It was at the same school with the poetry contest, but this was a recitation for a different assignment. Everybody had to give Antony’s speech from Act III, Scene ii; “Friends, Romans, countrymen, etc.” It was my first year there and I had made a few friends and had the lay of the land, more or less, but it was a bigger school than I came from. I still felt like the new kid and was self-conscious, especially in front of girls. There were so many cute girls and people had steadies. I came from a small Catholic school where the hint of a romantic relationship was squashed by all seeing nuns. Kids dated at this new school. They called it “going together.” “Blake goes with Jennifer,” they’d say.

I wanted to go with Cecily. I had no idea how to bring such a thing about but was certain that not looking like an idiot was key.

My time came to give the speech. I walked to the front of the class, got a nod from the teacher, and began, speaking with purpose and resolve. “Friends, Romans.” Things went well up to that point. The first syllable of “countrymen” was a disaster. The voice-changing hormones hadn’t consulted with the girl-liking hormones and the result was a seismic voice crack with a piercing falsetto note causing horrified surprise to take to the woodshed whatever confidence my face expressed. The class exploded in mean kid laughter. It went on forever. Mr. Wygul was laughing. Everyone was laughing (“Et tu, Cecily?”).

With an intact and functional voice, this speech is a hell of a dramatic toy. There’s rage, sarcasm, loss, intent, love, pleading, and consequence all wrapped up in vengeance. Dramatic poetry is fun; an antidote to Poet Voice.

Give it a whirl.

Julius Caesar Act III, Scene ii
William Shakespeare (alternate spellings: Shakespear, Shakspere, Marlowe, Shakspeare) (1564–1616)

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.