POETICKS

The following is from Geof Huth’s ongoing “Poetics”:

84. Lie

Does the voice make a lie of the poem? Because a good voice can make a weak poem seem strong and a poor voice can ruin a great poem. Is the poem isolated on the page (the screen) the most accurate version of the poem, true to itself, or does the voice we use to read it in our heads also ruin great poems and resurrect the dead ones?

It comprised his blog entry for Friday.  Here’s my reply:

Interesting question.  I lean toward considering any poem on paper to its completion as the printed score of a musical composition is to its completion.

I can’t see a bad reading spoiling a good poem or good reading rescuing a bad poem, for me, but that’s because the conceptual area of my brain is much stronger than its auditory area.  So, for me, what a poem is on paper is something like 95% of what it is, completed.  For others the percentage will be lower or higher.

Since I can’t read music very well, a musical composition on paper is likely less than 15% of what it is, completed, for me.  For Beethoven, in his final years, it would have been 100%.

Similar thinking applies to the font-shape and color of a poem’s print, and the color and texture of the paper.

All this is out the window for sound poetry and visual poetry–well, not all of it for those of us for whom poetry is a verbal art requiring completion by being spoken, whether internally by the poem’s engagent or externally by either the engagent or someone else.  No more than half out the window, I would say.  For me, a verbally effective visual or sound poem can be neither completely spoiled nor completely rescued by its extra-verbal visual or auditory components–but it could be one or the other by its verbal content–as a poem.

Hey, thanks, Geof.  I’ve just written my blog entry for Sunday.

–Bob

Still later comment: I wonder if it’s possible for a bad poem to be read so well it becomes, or seems, a good poem. It seems to me that if it can be read in such a way that its sounds good, it must be good–it had whatever is needed to be beautifully voiced.

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