Rethinking Readings: Experience Precedes Analysis

The common complaint with contemporary poetry is that it’s too complicated, and the effort one makes to understand it grossly outweighs the rewards. Given this supposition, attending a poetry reading might seem daunting, even downright absurd. Though I think that this sentiment does hold some real validity, ultimately, I don’t believe it. This week I’ll propose a way of experiencing the poetry readings typically found at Harvard to those of us who have difficulty taking away meaningful experiences from them.

As oversimplified a complaint as it may be, it would be unwise for the poetic community to dismiss the confounding quality of contemporary poetry entirely. It is often quite difficult to divine meaning from poems written today—even for those intimately involved in reading and writing them—particularly on the first go-round. This stems from the myriad ways of experiencing a given poem and each way’s respective degree of appeal. Readings based on analysis—a summary of the narrative thread or a pinpointing of the poem’s speaker, for instance—are as important as emotionally subjective reactions. Both are more difficult (the former to produce, the latter to explain) in contemporary poetry than, say, in a Shakespearean sonnet. This isn’t to say that Shakespeare isn’t complex, or less complex than contemporary lyric poems. It is that the difficulties of poetry have spread from the depth of the emotion expressed into the poem’s literal coherence and project.

Even more, there’s a prevailing sense that much of contemporary poetry is being written to be read more so than to be heard. With the rising popularity of free-verse in the twentieth century, the visual layout of the poem—line breaks, indentations, punctuation, stanza breaks, spaces, etc.—has become increasingly important, replacing emphasis on the auditory landscape of rhyme and alliteration. The disappearance of these poetic devices, which formerly served to aurally delineate the poem, has resulted in an ambiguity as to how the poem’s visual arrangement informs the way it’s to be read aloud. Since the primary sense being used in reciting poems today is sight, the poet has shifted his aims to stimulate the eye, at times privileging it over the ear.

Nevertheless, poetry has an oral component, and though it is underemphasized, there is something awoken in any poem when it is actually spoken out loud. Echoing sounds connect lines that are semantically distinct. An emphasis placed on a key syllable can release meaning in the same way a sound wave can shatter glass. Listening to a poem is to hear language in its most primitive usage: expression of the unapparent. But what happens when no one, save for the most astute listeners, can understand what is being expressed? Does this not defeat the original point of even talking, if you will not succeed at communicating?

My honest opinion? It doesn’t matter. Unless you are a particularly experienced and skillful reader of poetry, I do not think there is much “meaning” to be had at poetry readings. Instead, I propose that this isn’t really the point of poetry readings, and that rather, the environment of the poetry reading paradoxically makes poetry more accessible by making no pretensions to being strictly analytically intelligible.

It starts with the sound of the poet’s voice. That, after all, is really all one gets at such a performance. I’ve found that poets tend to have beautiful reading voices. It makes sense, given that their vocation requires them to be as intimate with words as a carpenter with wood. It is the most immediate pleasure of a reading, the way the sound of an instrument pleases more immediately than the composer’s melody. I remember, when Simon Armitage read in Houghton Library earlier this semester, sitting in rapt attention to a repetitive poem (that I would have probably rushed through had I been reading it) simply by virtue the sound of his voice. I ended up savoring the repetition because he recited it so beautifully. Seamus Heaney’s reading voice seems to be composed of the sounds of nature. His r’s and deep vowels sound like a small stream, and his c’s and k’s sound like the rocks that the water breaks against.

It is through attention to the poet’s voice that you start listening to the words. The voice conveys the emotion and cadence of his expression, and so an interest in the words naturally arises. However oblique the concatenation of lines and images, the voice sustains your attention, and you let the poem to begin to work within you.

And so poetry begins to do what it’s supposed to do. While good poems almost always yield to analysis, no author writes a poem for it to be analyzed. Ironically, a poem written for analysis would most likely be a bad poem, not conducive to any meaningful analysis.

The joy of a poetry reading is that the poet’s voice diffuses the anxiety of not being able to “figure out” the poems, and allows for the poems to begin their emotional work. Sometimes a poem strikes you, but often it will not. It really depends on your emotional state when the poem encounters you. I believe that poetry readings are especially important in contemporary poetry precisely because, in returning to their oral roots, they remove the intellectual anxiety attached to the art form, and allow it to be enjoyed the way music is enjoyed, by the sage and the neophyte alike.