Styling a voice, voicing a style

The Wall Street Journal has an article by Terry Teachout about the British Library Sound Archives’ “Spoken Word” series of CD releases, “Hearing is Believing: The Vanished Glories of Spoken-Word Recordings” (2 August 2008: W14). Teachout argues that to talk about an author’s ‘voice’ is not the same as talking about an author’s ‘style,’ although the two are often confused. The implicit point he is making is that readers, in their heads, often imagine an authorial voice, an aural voice, that seems appropriate for the writing style, but that there is no necessary connection between this imagined authorial voice and the actual voice of the author.

Teachout uses the example of hard-boiled detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler, whose voice sounds nothing like what one might imagine his character Sam Spade would sound like: less like Humphrey Bogart and more like Elmer Fudd (although here, Teachout conflates a character’s style of speaking with the narrative voice, which aren’t the same).

Teachout theorizes that Sam Spade was a form of wish-fulfillment for the Fuddesque Chandler, but there is a simpler explanation: Chandler was writing within a genre that had a certain style, and the fact that he is one of the defining masters of the hard-boiled detective genre shows Chandler’s greatness as a writer, in that he was able to imaginatively project himself into a milieu that was far removed from his everyday experience.

Regarding performative speaking, Chandler’s writing career contrasts interestingly with two other writers mentioned by Teachout: George Bernard Shaw and Max Beerbohm. Teachout finds that their actual voices do meet expectations of what they should sound like, based on their writing.

Spoken Word and Victorian Recitation

Poet Paul Vermeersch has sparked off a verbose donnybrook with a post on his blog: “Why I Hate ‘Spoken Word’ Poetry.”

What is interesting about the ensuing dialogue is the degree to which it replicates the terms of the debate about Victorian recitation. Here, Spoken Word’s content and style of delivery is Victorian recitation: for its critics, the delivery is artificial, unnatural and formulaic; the content clichéd and banal.

The critics of Spoken Word poetry (like some turn-of-the-century elocutionists) argue that the inherent excellence of a poem will enable the speaker to deliver it naturally and powerfully; the style of delivery of Spoken Word poetry, therefore, is proof of its inherent lack of quality. However, this logic is belied by the fact that many poets massacre their own poems in delivery with a failure to enunciate and project, by reading in monotone, misplacing emphases and pauses, and being generally uncharismatic in front of an audience, a style of delivery that has become as entrenched, artificial and clichéd as Spoken Word poetry delivery supposedly is. (Reciting does require some skills, after all.) Does this therefore mean their poetry is bad?

No, some say, because they are ‘page poets’ not ‘performance poets,’ writers not bards. (Then why do poetry readings if you’re doing a disservice to your poems by badly reciting them, instead of exhorting people to silently commune over your chapbook in their private sanctums?) This is a problematic distinction, because there are ‘page poets’ who are also great ‘performance poets’ (usually those who are interested in sound poetry): a rawlings, author and performer of her collection Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists (2006), is keenly concerned about how her poetry looks and reads on the page, and about its performative dimension, which she herself tackles compellingly.

Frankly, I would like to attend a poetry reading where poets had to read not their own poems, but the poems of the other poets at the reading. I would be intrigued to see what insights might be gained when poet-reciters had to do justice to the poems of a poet who was a member of the audience, instead of labouring under the delusion that only they can be the conduit of the spirit of their poems in performance.

(Thanks to Carolyn for bringing my attention to Vermeersch’s blog entry)