A Quote by Tony Harrison
A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it.
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If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet's voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.
Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.
I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.
Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself.
I believe that poems are a score for performance by the reader, and that you become the speaking voice. You don't read or overhear the voice in the poem - you are the voice in the poem.
If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.
I read once that the voice is a mirror of our inner being. I can very much relate to that because, when you sing, you feel very exposed. You feel like you can’t hide anything. But then it also works the other way round and, when we work on our voice, our inner being also changes.
You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.
I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written a poem that is a kind of parody of a garrulous poet at a poetry reading who spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the poem before reading it, I've written a number of satirical poems about other poets.
ONCE WHEN I WAS ninth grade i had to write a paper on a poem. One of the lines was"If your eyes weren't open you wouldn't know the difference between dreaming and waking' It hadn't meant meant much to me at the time. After all there'd been a guy in the class that i liked so how could i be expected to pay attention to literary analysis? Now three year later i understand the poem perfectly.
Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.
Dialogue in fiction is always written to be read in silence. The page is the limit. Dialogue on stage and on the screen is meant to be spoken. The voice is the limit.
You can't read to yourself. It's your inner ear that hears a poem. If you hear a poet read his own work, it becomes very exciting. The melody is a great part of it.
I may be the person who put "dieselpunk" into the conversation. I have always been a reader who reads in a really broad way. I read genre writers and I read literary fiction and I read books by dead people.
The poetry I love is written with someone's voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone's voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified.
What is a barrier to one person to creativity is a springboard for another. And the thing that makes the difference from one person or another is how they deal with and are affected by their inner voice of blame and criticism, so-called the VOJ or Voice of Judgment.
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