I'm not sure how this got started, but I notice that a lot of poets when they read deliver their lines with an upward lift at the end of the line.
deliver their LINES
with an upward LIFT
at the END
of the LINE.
It's a fairly unnatural method of reading or speaking and can often distract from the substance of a very good poem. I remember attending poetry readings when I was an undergrad, and no one ever read that way. It seems to have arisen with the ascent of the workshop culture wherein most of the students (now the instructors) are mostly familiar with the works of their contemporaries or the contemporaries of their teachers. I'm not saying I want to hear someone declaiming like Wallace Stevens or chanting like Pound or Yeats, but a good delivery that doesn't lose the prose sense of what's being said would be nice.
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2 comments:
Ah, so you've noticed this, too!
It always amazed me in the course of hosting the readings how...bad...some writers were in presenting their work. The ones who were best at it really communicated their poem's intent; the ones who were worst obliterated it...
I think there's a fine balance between "performing" the work, which can have as much of an alienating effect as a simply poor performance, and simply "reading" it. In the few readings I've done, I've tried to find as natural a voice as possible, but still, I often find myself slipping into a "poetry" voice--thankfully not with the issue you mention, but, still...
It's a trend. I've seen it more than twenty years. Why someone doesn't walk up to these people and shake them and say, "Hey, read this was real written language!"--well, I guess I know why no one's ever done it.
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