Annie Finch - Listening to Poetry: On The Free Verse Brain and the Metrical Brain
Our thanks to VN for this link to Annie Finch's article ~~t
After thinking about it for some time, I think I understand what had happened. This group, confronted with my printed book of poetry, read it just the way they read any other kind of language: through thinking, reading, and understanding. They were reading with the left brain, not the right brain; the free verse brain, not the metrical brain. And, earnest readers as they are, they had been trained to approach poems in just this way by a century of free verse.
Since a metrical poem modulates individual phrases against the scaffolding of a mutually expected rhythm and line-length, it indicates exactly (if skillfully done), even in the absence of a physical performance of the poem, the timber, tempo, and other physical characteristics the reading-aloud process should take at each point in the poem. This is the right-brain, musical kind of reading on which the experience of reading a poem aloud in your head is based.
Much of the best free verse, at least in the first half of the twentieth century, was also designed to be read by listening, based as it was in an implied familiarity with meter on the part of both poet and reader. To read free verse aloud in your head with the right brain requires this familiarity. It also requires a significant degree of conscious skill and effort, since it is up to the individual reader to determine how a free verse poem should be read aloud and heard. After all, isn’t that one of the main points, if not the main point, of free verse?.
But the truth is that, while trained poets may find reading free verse aloud inside their heads a stimulating challenge, most contemporary general readers have not cultivated the subtle poetic skills to decide on a free verse poem’s physical tempo, momentum, variations, and so on from scratch on their own behalf. That is a poet's job, after all, not a reader's. So, without meter to guide them towards listening, general readers of free verse seem instead to have learned (this is how my hypothesis goes) to read poetry with their left brains—as they read prose—privileging ideas, images, and rhetorical shape over line, rhythm, and physical vibrancy.
After thinking about it for some time, I think I understand what had happened. This group, confronted with my printed book of poetry, read it just the way they read any other kind of language: through thinking, reading, and understanding. They were reading with the left brain, not the right brain; the free verse brain, not the metrical brain. And, earnest readers as they are, they had been trained to approach poems in just this way by a century of free verse.
Since a metrical poem modulates individual phrases against the scaffolding of a mutually expected rhythm and line-length, it indicates exactly (if skillfully done), even in the absence of a physical performance of the poem, the timber, tempo, and other physical characteristics the reading-aloud process should take at each point in the poem. This is the right-brain, musical kind of reading on which the experience of reading a poem aloud in your head is based.
Much of the best free verse, at least in the first half of the twentieth century, was also designed to be read by listening, based as it was in an implied familiarity with meter on the part of both poet and reader. To read free verse aloud in your head with the right brain requires this familiarity. It also requires a significant degree of conscious skill and effort, since it is up to the individual reader to determine how a free verse poem should be read aloud and heard. After all, isn’t that one of the main points, if not the main point, of free verse?.
But the truth is that, while trained poets may find reading free verse aloud inside their heads a stimulating challenge, most contemporary general readers have not cultivated the subtle poetic skills to decide on a free verse poem’s physical tempo, momentum, variations, and so on from scratch on their own behalf. That is a poet's job, after all, not a reader's. So, without meter to guide them towards listening, general readers of free verse seem instead to have learned (this is how my hypothesis goes) to read poetry with their left brains—as they read prose—privileging ideas, images, and rhetorical shape over line, rhythm, and physical vibrancy.
posted by temporal at 3/15/2009
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