I spent the weekend with two poet friends from out of town, one of whom is a gifted mimic and 4th grade teacher. As it often happens, I’m mulling over her tales of what happens when poetry and 4th graders meet.
When we were roommates and in college and graduate school we used to listen to the In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry box set. (A complete track list is available here). One thing that’s apparent when you listen to a century of (mostly) American poetry is the heterogeneity of accent and reading style over time and distance. My friend became known for her imitation of Edna St. Vincent Millay nearly singing “Recuerdo”: We were VEDDY tied, we were VEDDY meddy…
This weekend my friend reported that she’d had played for her class James Wright reading “A Blessing.”
“How did it go?” I asked.
Apparently not very well. “They laughed,” she said.
“Laughed at or laughed with?”
“Definitely at!” She was, she said, surprised, but also fascinated by “the purity of their reaction.” Surprised because this is a group that likes to hear her read poetry aloud–especially if it rhymes. Writing acrostic poems, she reports, is one of their favorite activities.
I asked what was so funny to them, and this is what she reported: “They said, ‘That person sounds like a fake person'” and started walking around with robot arms and droning in imitation of the unnaturally flat tone in which poetry is often read, with an equal emphasis on each word.
An example of James Wright’s reading style is available here. (And a “search for James Wright’s ghost”, tangentially, here. And montage from a fan of both horses and James Wright, here.) To me, the reading style not especially strange, and for the record, I am fond of James Wright’s poetry as one is fond of the standards of one’s education. And maybe it’s natural that the kids would be less receptive to a recorded voice with little context attached than to the voice of a known, present person.
At the same time I can see where the kids are coming from. I have wished to avoid sounding like “a fake person” when I read, but it’s hard to balance that impulse with a style of reading in which the musicality of language comes through.
My friend’s story also brings to mind Robert Frost’s “sound of sense,” an idea that William Wenthe explains better than anyone in the Spring 2008 KR. It’s the idea that “the rhythmical qualities” of the spoken sentence convey something “beyond words.” This “pattern of felt sense” is what’s overheard by someone listening to a conversation behind a closed door (Frost’s example) or what’s perceived by the fetus in the womb (Wenthe’s example). I share Wenthe’s belief that poets, including myself, would do well to pay more attention to the sound of sense in poems. Maybe if more of us did, the music we achieve would be more congruous with a human sound.