Open Mic and Sound Reading

I'm looking forward to Sunday's open mic in Detroit organized by Sean Kilpatrick. This will be my first time reading/performing a poem outside of a classroom, which is an excellent opportunity to discuss Peter Quartermain's Sound Reading essay. How should we read a poem, how is a poem heard?

Despite conventional wisdom that a poem is best read by its writer, Quartermain argues this is not the case.

Wordsworth's Cumberland dialect -- which was provincial and specific to a limited group of people -- rhymed water with chatter, July with duly, according to Quartermain. Audience expectation also determines the success and nature of a performance. But should a poem be read in the dialect of the audience? What audience is so homogenic as to share a single dialect?

"Most of us manage our vowels with consistency and precision (or we suppose) but each of us manages them differently, and if we move into an unfamiliar dialect region we may find (as a result of our listening) that our vowels begin to slide all over the place," Quartermain writes.

Pronunciations are inconsistent -- even to a single reader. Since living in Michigan -- going on 10 months now -- I've notice my a's taking a provincial turn from their audible iteration in San Diego. Like many people, I've moved around so much my original accent -- central Louisiana -- is so over-layed with other influences it doesn't recognize itself. I don't sound like my childhood friends who stayed there.

These days, I'm picking up a Michigander intonation. Words such as that and fat -- I now catch myself stretching out my a's -- that becomes thyatt and fat becomes fyatt. My o's have taken on a high stretch. Words like Pop sound like phhhaaaap. The effect might be lost in translation here, and I don't meant to make fun. My point is that pronunciation is always slippery.

Now that poetry is printed on the page, there are other variables in play. The poem may have a visual rhyme scheme in similar spellings, where July and duly could work even if we don't hear them as rhyming.

"There is a wide and inevitable disparity between how we hear the poem when we read it silently, and how we sound it, saying it aloud; the poem performed in the head is an imagined poem int he world of sound," Quartermain says. "This may be why, when we voice the poem, we can never match what we breathe to what we think we hear."

I am notoriously poor at performing my poems in class -- and prefer them to be read by a competent reader who might bring his own and different interpretation of meter and annunciation. That to me is the best treat. When you work becomes new to even you!