A motorist is pulled over by a policeman, “You ignored that stop sign.” “But I slowed down!”, the driver protests. Hearing this, the cop starts whacking the driver with a night stick while intoning, “Do you want me to stop, or do you want me to slow down?”
Poems are like musical scores, their notations to be read the same way each time by each reader, with each linebreak acknowledged with a pause. Is that too much to ask?
William Carlos Williams read his “Between Walls” three different ways on Pennsound, here, here and here (MP3s). Yusef Komunyakaa is another habitual offender of the linebreak injunction. Enjamb, yes, but don’t slur, OK?
Yusef K’s readings are phenomenal, I don’t care how he reads his line breaks, he’s amazing. He’s the poet, he can read his poems the way he wants to! Plus, I’d rather a reader enjamb than bore the audience to death with twenty-second pauses between every…single…line…
Oh is THAT how you pronounce a line break? I thought it was a more subtle and polyvalent element than that. After all, most people don’t pause at the line breaks in, say, a Shakespeare sonnet, because it would be redundant with the meter and rhyme. The line breaks are perhaps there to mark the structure rather than as a performance cue (which certainly is how I use them, although certainly those structural marks also call for a pause). And sometimes a long stretch of short lines might slow your reading of those lines down, and sometimes they might quicken it, depending on, well, depending on a lot of other things going on. I don’t think the line break is as normative as you want it to be.
Hey Linh–I agree with you to some extent but there are poets who take their line break pauses too far, making more of them than actually matters to the poem. Thylias Moss read at Drexel last year and she did a very funny parody of a poet (unnamed) that she heard emphasizing his line breaks
on
every
freaking
line
to the
point of
monotony.
Daisy
Subtle and polyvalent–yes! A line break is so useful to the poet, in part, because it ISN”T a full stop, or even a comma. It’s more flexible and ambiguous than that. Sometimes, it doesn’t indicate a pause at all. A stanza that seeks to create propulsive narrative momentum will have the very life drained out of it by artificial pauses at the end of every line.
As one of my favorite poets, John Rezmerski, says, “The poem-as-spoken and the poem-on-the-page are two different poems.” When one encounters a poem on the page, one has direct access to line breaks, stanza breaks, spacing, . . . all sorts of typographical cues that aren’t available to the listener. On the other hand, the poet who reads aloud can take advantage of intonation, body language, pacing, and other verbal cues. To slavishly adhere, when reading, to the conventions of the poem-as-written is to sacrifice the wide range of expressive possibilities that are uniquely available to the human voice. Some poems do, indeed, call for a “transparent” reading that conveys, as simply as possible, the words as they have been arranged on the page. Other poems call for a much different performative approach.
20(pause)
se(pause)
conds are(pause)
too much but won’t you(pause)
give me, give me, give me(pause)
a na(pause)
no?(pause)
I do think it varies from poem to poem, and I even think it’s ok to read the same poem differently each time, depending on how you happen to feel about it at the moment, or depending on whether Sagittarius is ascending or whatever. But a general rule seems to be that poems with really short lines are begging for big pauses, whereas long meditative lines seem better when you just let them flow seamlessly into each other. Medium-size lines? Your guess is as good as mine.
this makes too much of line breaks, & one can also hear dozens of great poets who make far less of them (Ashbery for one). one of the reasons I avoid poetry readings if at all possible is that. way. too. many. poets. think. the. poem. has. to. be. readinanoverlyandbreathily. affected. style. as if they. were r e a d i n g fr o m a h y m n a l o r i n t o n i n g a l i tu r g y.
please. nothing worse than someone whose own verse moves them to some Stanislavskian overreaching of emotion. it’s just a poem, & I happen to think that the oral & paginated experiences of poetry need not have much to do with each other.
When poets hand out copies of the poems to be read, the problem is solved. Listeners can experience the pleasure, pain or boredom of both the visual and the aural.
Perfect, perfect exchange from Richard Price’s great new novel Lush Life (read it if you love the American language — or The Wire):
“What was he reading?”
“I guess it was poetry because it had that pronouncement thing, you know, where you say each word like you’re angry at it?”