Some Perspective for Reading Poetry & Some Better Advice

With our reading at Coffee Klatch right around the corner, I thought it would be fitting to post a blog about reading poetry. Don't get me wrong; our last reading was wonderful, and I have absolutely no complaints. I hope that all of our guests from the last reading will meet with us again this Friday – including our “occupationally challenged” friend, Phishfoot (a homeless man who contributed a great reading last time). My inspiration for this blog on reading poetry definitely did not come from our last reading. My inspiration comes from nearly every time that a teacher of mine has asked the class for a brave volunteer to read a poem aloud; it comes from nearly every time that that brave student has propped up their book, cleared their throat, and let spill a monotonous stream of words from their mouth, not even stopping, just plowing through the page as if line breaks meant nothing and as if punctuation were only for grammar's sake. I understand that it is extremely difficult to perform a poem unrehearsed and that it truly is courageous to attempt to tackle a performance in front of peers, and I respect those individuals who try, but I still wish that students who don’t know how to pronounce the word, “bough,” would refrain from raising their hands to read.

This blog isn’t really about those students though… It’s about poetry in general. Please remember, I’m no professional, and I won’t be teaching a lesson on performance today. What I’d like to offer instead is a bit of perspective:

A poem, once removed from its author and placed on paper, dies. The poet doesn’t shadow his/her poem, following it where ever it falls; the poem is left alone as its own lifeless entity. The dead poem drifts around the world, attached to paper as ink blot symbols. Its lifeless body is left to the whims of its readers.

To a poem, a reader is a god. The reader breathes into the dead poem and brings it to life with his/her performance. Whether that performance is silent, existing within the mind of the reader, or aloud to an audience, the poem lives for a brief moment as an expression of thought. The reader controls what a poem will become.

Please, for the sake of Walt, show poetry respect. If you are to give life to a poem, then give it a respectable life. Take notice of what it wants to be, of what signals it has left for you. Be a loving god, and breathe into it with compassion for its author and its message, and if you happen to think that the author and the message can suck eggs, then give it a life you see more fitting for it. And never never never read a poem as a monotonous string of sound – unless, of course, you can argue why you gave it that life.

So there it is. That’s my perspective and a little bit of advice. If you’ve read all of that, and realized that you want something other than a college kid’s opinion, then I hope you enjoy this:

I think the bard said it best.