The Poem You See Isn't the Poem You Hear

Thirty to forty years ago, I taught a number of college courses in Missouri's prisons. One night, in a college composition course, I read a poem aloud to the class. I've forgotten the name of the poet and the title of the poem, but I know it was written in rhyming quatrains. (Right now, I'd guess it was Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz.")

When I finished reading, one inmate commented, that he didn't like poetry that doesn't rhyme. The poem I'd read rhymed; he just didn't hear them. I read the poem again, stressing the rhyming words and showed him the text.

Those who read poems silently miss the heart of the poem, no matter how sophisticated the poem's language or subtle its form. (Some poems are an exception to this rule, mostly concrete poetry.) Poets have long used typography and lay-out as components of a poems form. Ezra Pound's Cantos and many of E.E. Cummings' poems are well-known examples. Here's a sonnet by Cummings. as is Charles Olson's "projective verse," which relied on tab settings on a typewriter to compose poetry on the page as a "field."

The immediate occasion for this posting is the ghazal by Initially NO in the April 2010 issue of The Ghazal Page. Her "The Silence" uses the radif (repeated phrase) of the traditional Persian ghazal but lays the poem out visual in broken lines of different length. David Jalajel does the same thing in his ghazal, "A Frog" (scroll down to see this poem), although he is using the Arabic form of rhyme rather than a radif.

My intention in this post is to call your attention to the importance of the sound of poems. Your appreciation of the ghazals by Initially NO and David Jalajel will be much increased by reading them aloud.

Comments

[Abgrund]

True, we remember only the best from the past and forget the dreck (mostly). But free verse, good or bad, didn't exist before the modern era. Poetry, in the West at least, was sung or spoken long before it was written. Phonic structure was an essential part of it. Even with free verse, as you say, the sound is often important.

[David Jalajel]

Some of the most aurally beautiful poetry I have read is free verse. Most good poetry exhibits great care towards the way it sounds. The sound possibilities of free verse are different than those of metered verse (rhyme has nothing to do, by the way, with the free verse/metrical verse dichotomy - It can appear in or be absent from both). The fact that much free verse written does not sound good is simply because the majority of poetry of any kind written in any age does not sound good. Most metrical verse sounds banal and silly, both that which is written today and that which was written in the past. It seems otherwise, since what is widely remembered and preserved of the metrical verse of the past is the best of the best. Not everyone was a Milton, a Blake, or a Keats.

[Abgrund]

This is something that has long bothered me about poetry, or rather about the way it is delivered in our post-verbal society. Free verse can be good, but most of the best poetry - and all of it, for thousands of years - has audible components of rhythm and repetition. Even free verse would, I think, inevitably loses some of the intended expression when the author's tone and strength of voice are gone. It is sometimes said that only 50% (or 20%, or 10%, whichever you like) of the content of communication can be found in the semantics. Much of the rest is conveyed by intonation, and in poetry the rhyme, alliteration, and meter carry an additional content - not information, perhaps, but something indispensable, an element of music. Printed poetry, silently read, is "flat". No wonder there are huge markets for both music and fiction but none for poetry, which is more akin to music but is distributed in the same form as fiction.