09-12-2016, 08:56 AM
(This post was last modified: 09-12-2016, 08:57 AM by RiverNotch.)
(09-12-2016, 08:26 AM)AndreyGaganov Wrote: Also, before I forget: rayheinrich mentioned the sound and the rhythm, the musical aspect of reading poetry aloud. Well, as someone who's been listening to music half his life, to me singing is musical; reciting a poem with a speaking tone isn't. You never see/hear someone telling a poet: "Jesus Christ, that was a horrible voice. Let this guy/girl do the reading." or someone telling a singer "Your voice stinks, but that was a great song. Here's your fifty bucks." I think I get the 'rhythm' part, but the 'sound' part ... not really. I suppose the logic here is: anyone can read poetry, no matter how good or bad the voice is. Well, where's the music in that?If you don't find any music and sound in poetry, then yes, poetry is not for you. Fortunately, unlike in music, poetical tone-deafness has a cure: study.
Rhythm seems obvious focusing on typical prosody, but then there are other rhythms, too -- stress timed meter, for example, where you COUNT all the PUNCHy TERMS the AUthor USes, or syllabic meter, where you count the syllables. Getting used to those (I suggest starting with stress timed, since that's classic to English -- see Beowulf), you'll eventually learn how simply extending or shortening either can have certain, universal effects (see all the free verse shite of, well, I'll start with TS Eliot, actually) -- just like how Bob Dylan's songs get the point across better than most pop drivel nowadays, with the number of words he packs per line (I think he was inspired by Ginsberg).
Then sound. Music has the "advantage" of melody, tone, etc., and in fact, most of the oldest lyric (perhaps even epic) poetry were meant to be sung. Eventually, though, people learned how juicy rhyme, alliteration, assonance, etc. was -- and then the more abstract, at least to the layman, forms of sounding, the ways the words "slip off the tongue" and so, slant-rhymes and shit (my favorite examples for this are Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes), etc, etc. Thus, sound. Again, good to start with the old ones -- get a solid translation of, say, Beowulf, and start rifing through it, reading it aloud (in fact, emphasis and emotion really don't matter when reading poetry aloud, if the poem's any good, as long as the pronunciation of the reader follows how the word is typically pronounced -- which, even with the separation of accents, is universal, unless dictionaries really are that useless), then moving on to the classics, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton and the Romantics and the Modernists and the postmodernists and you get the picture. By solid translation, I mean not the prose ones, duh -- I actually like the Gummere version, although its wordings are super old, but I suppose Heaneywulf could work, too.
Although to say that poetry to you seems like self-indulgent white tower bullshit in a forum that's explicitly all about poetry is like shouting "but this makes 0 sense" in a church/evolutionary scientists convention.