Poetry

Poetry as the Heard Word

Does hearing a poem change its meaning?

Three days after the Boston Marathon bombings last April, a grieving campus and city largely ignored a BU poetry reading by Pulitzer winner Paul Muldoon. Simon Mendes did attend, and he listened as Muldoon read “Comeback,” his poem about a rock band, its stanzas punctuated by a music-style chorus. Muldoon began:

We were introduced by Bruce
At the Stony Pony
All that concentrated Juice
Standing room only
You were with some suit
From EMI or Sony
Who was so full of toot
He called for “Mony Mony”

Muldoon’s reading changed Mendes’ understanding of the poem. He drew out all the poem’s “a” sounds, as if to audibly puncture the numbness that engulfed Bostonians after the bombings, says Mendes (CGS’11, CAS’13). When he got to the chorus, Muldoon altered it from the written work, saying,

To make a comeback
A comeback don’t you see
It’s time to come back
Come back to me.

On the page, this plea is made to a nameless baby; Muldoon dropped that word, leaving Mendes free to fill in the blank: was the poet talking to his band-mate, or a woman—or to his bombing-traumatized listeners? Mendes believes Muldoon was trying “to bring the audience back to language and feeling, after a week with so much shock and awe.…Didn’t we all need a comeback?

“I felt transfixed,” he says. “I was lost in the language. I couldn’t re-create this atmosphere reading it to myself.”

That transformation of a poem, as it moves from written to spoken word, was an experience that Mendes would relive as his own guinea pig in an admittedly subjective study last spring through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. If Emily Dickinson was right that there is no frigate like a book/to take us lands away, does a book of poems need to be heard, not read, to convey us to those distant shores of imagination? Mendes sought an answer by reading and then listening to more than a half dozen poets, plugging into their online recitations of their work—an experience that BU Today has replicated with three student poets in our studio. You can simulate Mendes’ experiment by following the steps below.

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The notion of using the eyes and ears to appreciate poetry is nothing new. Mendes’ UROP advisor, Meg Tyler, notes that early Western poetry was oral performance, with the ancient Greeks strumming lyres as they recited. Tyler (UNI’04), a College of General Studies associate professor of humanities, directs BU’s Poetry Reading Series, and she has seen for herself how hearing can enrich understanding.

The UROP project was informed by Tyler’s teaching last year in Austria, where she wondered if her Austrian students would grasp the English-language poems they read. “For the most part, they got it, and I think it’s a result of having grown up with the internet, video recordings, audio recordings, watching American telly, watching American movies. They have a sense of the language…that surprised me.” And not just students: when Irish poet Ciaran Carson read at BU this year while performing on the tin whistle, “he just brought Belfast into the room with his accent,” Tyler says. “And I had a deeper understanding of his poems than I’d had from years of reading them.”

One advocate for the idea that the words you see here (the poetic ones, anyway) are best heard rather than read is a former US poet laureate. In that role, Robert Pinsky, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of English, launched the Favorite Poem Project in 1997, which archived videos of Americans reading their favorite poems. The site cites Pinsky’s conviction that poetry should be read aloud: “If a poem is written well, it was written with a poet’s voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music or actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.”

Still, Tyler does put in a word for the written word. “I’m a textual scholar,” she says. “My commitment throughout my professional life has been to the text. I don’t want it to be entirely divorced from the text that you see on the page, because to me, it was that intimate, solitary adventure of going through a poem on my own, and understanding just the music of the words, in my own voice, that was very special.”

Elizabeth Loizeaux, a CAS English professor and an associate provost, teaches poetry and believes that listening to, speaking, and reading poems all have their merit. The first “concentrates the experience on the music of poetry—the rhythms, sounds, the interpretation of the performer. It reminds us of poetry’s origin in music.” Reciting poetry aloud, she says, forces you to conform your reading to the meaning you get from the poem: “where to put the emphasis, where to pause, where the voice should rise and fall.

“Of course, you can read poetry silently to yourself,” she says, “where you can hear and feel the music of the poem in your head, if you slow down and listen.”

As for Mendes, his project left him rendering a mixed verdict. “Sometimes I may just want to read a poem from the page, and sometimes I might prefer to listen to it read. It depends on how much I need to escape this Earth and myself…”

That, as the poet said, can make all the difference.

We want to know what you think. Do you experience a poem differently when reading it versus hearing it read aloud? Which do you prefer? Leave your thoughts in the Comments section below.

This story was originally published on October 10, 2013.