The Way We Read Poetry Now
Anna is away tending to family. While we wait for her and Katia to record a new conversation for Episode 2, Anna wrote this piece about one of the devices Lorca uses in “Romance sonámbulo,” the poem she and Katia discuss in Episodes 1 and 2.
I have many friends who cringe when I suggest that they read a certain book of poems, whose jaws drop when I mention that I love reading poetry, even when I don't understand it.
They say, "ugh, I hate poetry." And they tell me tales of overly ambitious high school English teachers giving them T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" to read at age 15. Or of being quizzed on the form of Shakespearean sonnets in preparation for AP exams. Or of having to listen to odious exes lengthy, fraught attempts to capture the finer points of teenage angst.
When I hear these tales, which I also later heard from students of mine, I suggest that maybe it's not poetry's fault that they hate it so much. Maybe the way that they were forced to digest poetry didn't agree with them, like an hours-old hot dog eaten at a rest stop off the Interstate out of sheer desperation. After the awful experience of eating such a hot dog, who would ever want to touch another? Same with poetry. If your first encounter with poetry was something that gave you intellectual indigestion, why would you give it another chance?
Poetry is a genre of literature -- one that is ancient; the oldest genre of literature by far. Poetry -- the act of giving musical form to language -- is a part of our human instinct. Poetry, for millennia, was a sung genre, the words memorized and performed for audiences to entertain them with the heroic feats of gods and goddesses: this is called epic poetry, and it was passed down from generation to generation, from bard to bard, from mouth to mouth, sung, not read.
The musical aspect of poetry is not just there for beauty's sake; rather, it's a mnemonic device. Do you know how you can remember all the words to the worst pop songs from your childhood, but can't remember important things like the Krebs cycle, or your best friend's phone number (not that we need to any more)? Well, I would bet dollars to donuts that if you created a jingle to go with photosynthesis, or if you sung your bestie's number to a little ditty, you would have no trouble remembering it. (Think of poor Jenny: 867-5309. Tommy Tutone knew how to remember a number.)
The idea of *reading* poetry would be completely mystifying to the Ancients if they were to look at us today. They would immediately ask us, "How does it go, though?" And imagine their surprise when we would tell them, it has no tune, we just read it, to ourselves, in our heads. "You don't even read it aloud?" they would exclaim at us, aghast. And we would shake our heads and say, no, not very often. "We just read it. Silently." They would shake their heads at us sadly and say: "You have missed the whole point of poetry." And they would be right.
We have been missing the point of poetry since the printing press came along and poetry passed from being recorded within the mind of the Collective to being an artifact on paper, safe for eternity, no fear of loss, but also static... and mute. When poetry passed from the mouth to the page, a lot was lost. However, you can still see traces of the old sung epics, lyrics, and ballads in the formal elements of poetry: rhythm, rhyme and meter. Rhythm (accentuation of syllables in a verse), meter (the number of syllables in a verse) and rhyme (the pairings of sounds at the end of verses) are what is left of sung poetry.
That, and actual songs, of course. Our recorded music is today's "poetry of the Ancients." But that is a topic for another day.
In Episode 01, we start our discussion with some talk about rhyme, specifically "assonant" rhyme.