I am dismayed when I hear questions about the utility of poetry. How do you use poetry, and what is it good for? This is odd. Poetry is song. No one asks, What use is song? What use are birds? Poetry has no use. It matters because of its inutility. [...]
“By failing to read or listen to poets,” Brodsky wrote in “An Immodest Proposal,” “a society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation—of the politician, or the salesman, or the charlatan—in short, to its own.”
Maybe Brodsky had this right, and this is the highest purpose of poetry, or song: It keeps us from listening to fools.
-- my comments - love this excerpt
What bothers me about the traditional formats of poetry (on the page or read/spoken) is that neither medium encompasses or allows both the words and the sounds automatically. I feel like a lot of people are turned off from seeking out and enjoying books of poetry because they have not had the opportunity or have not taken the time to learn how to read poetry for themselves. I think in part, it's because a lot of people aren't so great at reading. I don't mean that they are lacking in the skill of receiving texts, but through teaching I've noticed that most people, when tasked to read out loud are more focused on producing words or sentences rather than producing them in the way that they would be spoken by a person. To put it another way, when most people read out loud, they do not read with expression, inflection and emphasis in the way that people naturally speak. I recognize that a lot of writing is constructed in a way that is very different from the way that people speak naturally, but even so, it doesn't seem to me to be too much of a stretch most of the time. I have often wondered what the results would be if poems were given dynamic markings and other trappings of musical notation, but I feel like without prior experience and exposure to that, it would only alienate people more.
> I have often wondered what the results would be if poems were given dynamic markings and other trappings of musical notation But doesn't that already exist, and don't we call it - punctuation? I was reading your post and immediately I thought, oh, what about the Spanish inverted question mark that goes at the beginning of questions - so that the reader knows immediately it's a question and knows to lilt their voice accordingly. In English, we don't have that, and maybe it would help us. I wonder if part of the problem is that people reading out loud have to concentrate on what they're reading in the immediate moment, and aren't able to look ahead to see where the sentence is going, to anticipate what they need to do with their voice. This of course wouldn't matter for a text one is familiar with. > I feel like without prior experience and exposure to that, it would only alienate people more. If we introduced a whole new language of symbols, yes, definitely :) Although - it makes one wonder, what are emoticons as well, if not a kind of subflavor that allows us to realize the intent of written words?
This is one of the reasons music theory entered into it for me. When reading music, one of the essential skills is being able to read ahead. Punctuation addresses dynamics in terms of emphasis and intonation to a degree, but not in the same way that musical dynamics do. The reader must infer the general tone and delivery from the overall mood and emotion running through the piece. In prose, one has the luxury of exposition, for example vs. both indicate an increase in volume, the the quality is different which would affect how the sonics work in a piece. But in poetry, there's no real indication at first glance. The title can help, but only a bit. By contrast, in a performance, the audience can see the performer's body language, face and hear the performer's voice and so has a lot of information from which to draw context. The problem with this, to me, is that the writer is then part of the focus rather than the words, the ideas and the line breaks. This is a particular problem because I really think that part of enjoying and experiencing poetry is the work that the reader has to do to get inside the experience that the writer has built and then stepped away from. For example, motorcycles are built for consumers to ride, not to be given rides on. The difference is, it's easy to get on a motorcycle and figure out how it works, which is not something I'm convinced is true for casual readers of poetry. So essentially, I'm struggling with how to convey the sonic qualities of poetry while maintaining the visual elements like lines/breaks and shape while ensuring that I'm doing everything I can to set the reader up to engage with the poem as easily as possible. I certainly think that emoticons are a step toward a more comprehensive visual notation, but I'm curious to see what emoticons will develop into.I wonder if part of the problem is that people reading out loud have to concentrate on what they're reading in the immediate moment, and aren't able to look ahead to see where the sentence is going
"hello!" he said brightly
"hello!" he said nervously