Photo: Bernard Gotfryd via Wikimedia.
I’m picking on the wonderful Seamus Heaney because it was at one of his readings decades ago that I first noticed the ubiquitous but annoying “poet voice.”
I enjoy going to poetry readings and I love all my poet friends, but I have to say I have come to hate the singsong voice that many poets use when reading aloud. I’ve complained so often to my husband that now he routinely asks when I return from a reading, “Did they use the ‘voice’?”
So I was thrilled to see that Gregory Cowles, senior editor of the New York Times Book Review, answered the burning question: Why do poets read their work aloud in that awful in that tone of voice?
“Would it surprise you to know,” he begins, “that poets themselves are also vexed by this (very real) phenomenon? A database search going back decades finds complaints about the so-called poet voice — using adjectives like ‘dreaded’ or ’embarrassing’ or ‘soporific’ — with nobody rushing to its breathy, singsong defense. …
“More than prose, poetry is inherently about the musicality of language: its sound and rhythm and rhymes, its capacity to please the ear even as it evokes an image or conveys its desired meaning. Good poets exploit that musicality the same way good rappers do, favoring one word over another for the way it interacts with the words around it.
“But poets, unlike rappers, are not generally performers, and it shows when they recite their work for an audience. Rather than trusting the music of their language to sing for itself, they try to impose an outside music on it, as if they were performing Handel’s ‘Messiah’ to the tune of ‘Old MacDonald.’
“ ‘You could think about it almost as the same melody over and over,’ the English professor Marit MacArthur told Atlas Obscura in 2018 after she published a study analyzing the components of poet voice. …
“Not all poets fall into this trap. The last two readings I attended —by Ada Limón at the Texas Book Festival, and by readers reciting Seamus Heaney’s poetry at the 92nd Street Y — were satisfyingly natural performances, free of poet voice’s lilting cadences and long pauses. But enough of them do embrace it that poet voice has become a pop culture cliché: Witness Mike Myers’s turn as a modern-day Beat poet in the underrated 1993 movie So I Married an Axe Murderer.
“The Beats, in fact, may be close to ground zero of what the poet and Harvard professor Stephanie Burt identifies as two distinct strains of poet voice. The first, she told me, ‘takes everything at the same adagio pace and treats every line as equally portentous.’ … The second stems from poetry slams and other performance spaces: ‘It’s dramatic or melodramatic, seeks to engage the audience by almost any means, varies its pace and volume (sometimes to extremes), and emphasizes anger, outrage or trauma.’
“Burt is more annoyed by the first kind and sees its possible roots in a bid to be perceived as serious … or from ‘individual poets’ desire to act out the dignity of their art.’
“The poet and critic Daisy Fried agrees that something like this is at play when poets intone their work. ‘Often it’s an attempt to make a thought or a feeling that’s dull and quotidian into something feeling, something interesting,’ she told me, ‘or to try to imbue something with music that hasn’t any. But I’ve also heard good poems read this way, which is a shame.’
“Now, if you picture a whole class of young poets listening to their professor read in peak poet voice, and internalizing the message that this is how a poem is ‘meant’ to be heard, it’s not hard to see how the individual is passed on to the collective. That’s a point that the Times Book Review’s poetry columnist, Elisa Gabbert, made when I asked her about poet voice. ‘It’s a style poets learn from each other,’ she said, ‘a set of intonations and vocal patterns that go with the role, and some of us pick it up more or less unconsciously while attending readings.’
“Having a distinct performance style isn’t necessarily a problem, Gabbert notes. … ‘It’s not that poets should read a poem in their usual speaking voice — poetry isn’t speech.’ The problem comes when the performer veers too close to the clichéd poet voice rather than finding ‘an authentic voice that arises through the writing of the poem.’
“In other words, poets should let the music of their language dictate the music of their performance. That’s just what David Yezzi prescribed in a 2014 essay for the New Criterion, where he served as poetry editor. ‘The truth is that the music of speech — rising and falling intonations, etc. — carries a semantic charge,’ Yezzi told me. ‘Overlaying an artificial music on top of a poem removes the “sense” of what’s being said to a great extent.’
“Yezzi himself is in a good position to change things for the better. The rare poet who is also a professional performer (his acting roles in recent years have included both King Lear and Hamlet’s ghost), he teaches a popular graduate and undergraduate course at Johns Hopkins University called Performing Poetry and Fiction, which is devoted entirely to eliminating the dreaded, embarrassing, soporific poet voice. ‘We work to root out this unhelpful singsong and arrive at a clear and powerful spoken expression that best serves the poem,’ he said.” More at the Times, here.
I’m so glad to know that even poetry experts have been annoyed by the “voice” and that poets aim to do something about it!
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