I’ve been getting annoyed with reading poetry theory. There’s only so many times you can be told the rule of a sestina or be reminded the difference between an iamb and a trochee. The reading I’ve been doing about poetry… forced rhymes, feminine endings, consonant rhymes, etc, lists of sounds the cultured reader is aware of, classifications of the different types of rhymes… had made my teeth hurt. But I realize I actually love this kind of analysis, it’s just no good on paper. It only works aloud.
I came to poetry through acting Shakespeare. I used to love getting my mouth into Shakespeare. I still do, sometimes reciting my favourite lines to myself walking down the street. For me, the full on acting of it didn’t last in the same way beyond university, and didn’t get much better than certain teachers who had a particular understanding of the way to understand words through your body and act the language through the sounds.
I vividly remember Aldo encouraging us to whisper Sonnet 29 in his acting class so that we could hear the clicking away of the t’s and s’s. Louis told us to sigh our monologues (with relief) making only the vowel sounds in his Linklater Method voice class so we could experience the effect the extremes of the phonetic scale pulling on our throats and lungs. The punctuation in the folio versions tell you where to breathe. Cicely Berry talks about how finding the metre teaches you where to pause and where to drive the meaning. Anna Devere Smith talked about reading a speech over and over again because everything we need to know can be found in a character’s words.
This makes sense to me in acting, even in contemporary prose. I think this is where I learned to write poems, by remembering what it feels like to recite great poetry. I’ll try to remember that. Instead of writing down the lists of t’s used, I’ll whisper it to myself. Instead of counting up all the oo’s and ah’s, I’ll sigh the poem with relief.
Just like blocking on stage should serve as a dumbshow for the subtext, the symphony of clicks and tones in a poem should drawn on the undercurrent of the emotion. But if either of these are done overtly, it ruins everything. Subtlety isn’t enough either. It must be done intuitively.
Smith also said that we all become poets under, often extreme, certain circumstances. Perhaps that is because it focuses us. Maybe I’ll be able to find a deeper fulfillment in writing poems if I see it as an acting exercise.
I came to poetry through acting Shakespeare. I used to love getting my mouth into Shakespeare. I still do, sometimes reciting my favourite lines to myself walking down the street. For me, the full on acting of it didn’t last in the same way beyond university, and didn’t get much better than certain teachers who had a particular understanding of the way to understand words through your body and act the language through the sounds.
I vividly remember Aldo encouraging us to whisper Sonnet 29 in his acting class so that we could hear the clicking away of the t’s and s’s. Louis told us to sigh our monologues (with relief) making only the vowel sounds in his Linklater Method voice class so we could experience the effect the extremes of the phonetic scale pulling on our throats and lungs. The punctuation in the folio versions tell you where to breathe. Cicely Berry talks about how finding the metre teaches you where to pause and where to drive the meaning. Anna Devere Smith talked about reading a speech over and over again because everything we need to know can be found in a character’s words.
This makes sense to me in acting, even in contemporary prose. I think this is where I learned to write poems, by remembering what it feels like to recite great poetry. I’ll try to remember that. Instead of writing down the lists of t’s used, I’ll whisper it to myself. Instead of counting up all the oo’s and ah’s, I’ll sigh the poem with relief.
Just like blocking on stage should serve as a dumbshow for the subtext, the symphony of clicks and tones in a poem should drawn on the undercurrent of the emotion. But if either of these are done overtly, it ruins everything. Subtlety isn’t enough either. It must be done intuitively.
Smith also said that we all become poets under, often extreme, certain circumstances. Perhaps that is because it focuses us. Maybe I’ll be able to find a deeper fulfillment in writing poems if I see it as an acting exercise.
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