A few months ago, a friend lent me Lawrence Ferlinghetti's second book of poetry, A Coney Island of the Mind, and I've been reading it sporadically in bits and pieces. It sits right next to my laptop, tucked into a cubby hole on my desk. Reading it fills in the odd spaces in my day: if a webpage is taking too long to load, I'm on hold, or I'm waiting for a phone call, I reach for Coney Island and skim it casually.
Earlier this week, I started over. I suddenly realized that I was stifling his momentum every time I read a poem -- or worse, half a poem -- and put it back down again. Without planning it, I started reading him aloud. Then I started pacing while reading, my arm conducting an imaginary poem orchestra, dancing on Ferlinghetti's clever rhythms and quieting down to a sort of prayer between verses. Poetry is meant to be read, I kept thinking. It's meant to be physical. Seeing, hearing, feeling.
And then I wondered, is it always? Are there poems only meant for the page (concrete poems, for example), poems that visually speak their meaning more than they do aurally? Are there poems only meant for the ears? Song lyrics, for example, can be written in paragraph form, even when the music indicates line breaks.
All I know is that speaking Ferlinghetti is wild. Who to speak next?
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4 comments:
How would you like your poetry to be experienced?
I think the aural experience is more important to me than the visual one, though I care quite a bit about both!
I would struggle with placing emphasis on one over the other. One of the things I like about Ferlinghetti is the placement of his words. Reading it in my mind allows me to see the words visually and the poem as a whole. When I read aloud, I am concentrating too much on meter and pronunciation to see the image on the page.
As much as I love listening to others read their own poetry, I miss seeing how the poet breaks up a line or uses punctuation.
Perhaps every book of poetry should come with a CD of the poet reading their work. That way I would listen along as I read the poetry. What an experience that would be!
That's such a good idea, and I agree completely. Lately I've been listening to Mary Oliver's At Blackwater Pond in my car, and I enjoy just taking it in. I don't know all of the poems well enough to see their shape in my mind, though, and I do wonder how she places them on the page.
You know what? Nathasha Trethewey's latest book, Native Guard, comes with a CD. It's awesome because her poems have such interesting symmetry and visual cues -- but they also have such music in her voice. The best of both worlds.
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