Poetry Out Loud

Mark Bauerlein of Brainstorm, the blogging team of The Chronicle [of Higher Education] Review, has an article about Poetry Out Loud, a national competition of poetry recitation by high-school students in the US. In his article, one can find links to an audio file (on the NPR site) of the performance of the 2008 winning reciter, Shawntay Henry, reading Robert E. Hayden’s “Frederick Douglass.”

Noting the high level of student participation, Bauerlein comments that the “numbers are proof that poetry can become a popular activity for adolescents if educators and organizers cast it right.” One of the keys to Poetry Out Loud’s popularity, according to Bauerlein, is

recitation. Students pick from a list of poems and recite them from memory. They can’t pick their own work (a restriction that earned some criticism in the planning stages), and if they miss a word or forget a line, they lose. “Rote memorization” is a bad term in education circles…, but without it, none of the drama and emotion would follow.

The Poetry Out Loud website has audio files of a modest number of mostly well-known poems, recited by Angela Lansbury, Anthony Hopkins and others (“Audio Guide“) and 5 videos of contestants reciting (“Videos“).

Of particular interest is the “Evaluation Criteria,” which includes Physical Presence, Voice and Articulation, Appropriateness of Dramatization, Level of Difficulty, and Evidence of Understanding. What is interesting is that the advice given about these criteria is almost indistinguishable from the admonitions of elocution manuals at the turn of the last century that were reacting against what they regarded as the highly artificial conventions of Victorian recitation. Especially striking are warnings against histrionics (“Above all, recitation is about conveying a poem’s sense with one’s voice. It is not theatrical enactment”) and the belief that the ideal reciter is merely a conduit of meaning that connects a poet to an audience: “You are the vessel of your poem. Have confidence that your poem is strong enough to communicate its sounds and messages without a physical illustration. In other words, let the words of the poem do the work.”

Mark S. Morrisson (see “The Pure Voice of Poetry” post) discusses the early twentieth-century reaction against Victorian recitation practices: “The prevalent critique of the artificiality of gesture and vocalization of Victorian elocution in favor of something more ‘natural’ developed, in manuals specifically aimed at verse recitation, into the understanding that reading aloud helped to elucidate the true meaning of the poem, allowing a ’surrender’ to the personality of the poet or even to the poem itself” (64).

Curious that we should still be reacting against artificiality in recitation…. But, how does one read ‘naturally’ a poem like “Ode on the Death of Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes,” a bathetic eulogy by Thomas Gray (1716-1771) and one of the poems to be found on the Poetry Out Loud website?:

’Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.

(Click here for the rest of the poem)

(Thanks to Marian Wilson Kimber for informing me about Poetry Out Loud)

Creating the ‘pure voice’ of poetry

Here’s a recent piece of scholarship concerning recitation:

“Performing the Pure Voice: Poetry and Drama, Elocution, Verse Recitation, and Modernist Poetry in Prewar London.”

It forms Chapter 2 (pages 54-83, notes 223-9) of:

Morrison, Mark S. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2001.

Morrison’s chapter focuses on how proponents of Georgian/modernist poetry adopted the ideas of the late Victorian and Edwardian verse recitation movement concerning the recitation and dissemination of poetry.

Organizations like the Poetry Recital Society (later the Poetry Society), founded in London in February 1909 by Galloway Kyle, as well as offshoots like the Poetic Drama Society, attempted to naturalize ‘proper’ (i.e. middle/upper class) patterns of speaking, or what Morrison terms the “pure voice” (58-9). Morrison points to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914) (also known, in its musical version, as My Fair Lady), as an example of this naturalization, where Professor Henry Higgins transforms the Cockney parlance of flower-girl Eliza Doolittle into the exacting pronunciation and diction befitting a duchess:

“As do the voice handbooks I have discussed, Higgins naturalizes an abstracted ideal of middle-class diction as ‘the divine gift of articulate speech’ — the pure voice, and thereby portrays lower class dialects as a sort of blight on the language” (62)

The Poetry Society (still in existence) not only contributed to the professionalization of elocution by certifying teachers of elocution (67) and advocating for the recitation of poetry in schools (it formed a “Junior Order” to “introduc[e] the work of the Society in public and private secondary schools” [68]), but it distanced itself from the theatre, advocating a repression of theatricality and of the reciter’s personality so that the reciter could direct all his or her powers to becoming a conduit for the poem’s meaning (rather than the poem becoming subjected to the performance).

It was this emphasis on the poem that encouraged people like Harold Munro, editor of the Poetry Review (1912-13) and of Poetry and Drama (1913-14), to open the Poetry Bookshop in January 1913, a place to buy and hear Georgian/modernist poets reciting their poetry (he called them “poetry squashes” [77]), thus formalizing the author-led readings we know today. Morrison writes:

“Munro saw the oral presence of the poet himself or herself…as necessary to the public reception of modernist poetry” (76)

“It was his historical vision of the movement of poetry from oral public reception to print-based private reception and aesthetic autonomy that lead many writers of the period to see oral performance as reinvesting poetry with contemporary social significance” (79).