While Literary Laundry is a publication that reveres the written word and, I believe, values the age-old tradition of verse in all its forms, LL is also a hub of dynamic and continuous conversation about the state of literature today (as evidenced by the below blogs). When it comes to the tradition of poetry, we generally agree that it began in an oral form as with Homer's famous ancient greek epics, spoken before written, sounds sung to express emotion, to tell a story, to be remembered. Even the word "language" comes from the word for tongue. While people often say poetry comes from the heart, the soul, the mind, etc, it is also undeniably physical: the rhythms, rhymes, alliterations, meter or line breaks, the cadences in general. Maybe poetry is indeed born in the mouth. This brings me to my question...what has happened to the oral tradition today? Maybe our lack of attention to this aspect of poetry is the reason poetry seems to live behind the great shadows of popular music, film, even plays and novels. What happened to the times when musicians named themselves after poets, like Bob Dylan with Dylan Thomas?

Of course, today, maybe more than ever audio readings of poems are available because of technological advancements. Often when searching for poems, I come across the chance to click a link and hear a poem in the poet's voice...reading series abound at universities and community centers, and yet...for a medium that values voice the most, there's seems to be some sort of dilution in the way be people read. On the one hand spoken word poetry has taken off, and can be quite exhilarating, but it can also fall into its own monotony, not only with familiar rhythms but also with content. Lyric poets on the other hand seem to retreat into either deadpan breathiness or unnatural lilts that try to hard to jerk the audience awake as if pausing at strange points will somehow clarify the sense of an obscure stanza.

I personally love reading poems aloud, my own and others. I also happen to love attending readings but whenever I bring along a friend who is not as into contemporary poetry, he or she remarks on one of the above. While I am not always impressed by the trends in contemporary reading, when done right, I certainly get a better sense of the poem and the poet. I think reading aloud may bring a poem to life, may flesh out the text with that which drama and fiction often have that poetry lacks: character.

But maybe it was better when we couldn't hear poets read their own work: What did Dickinson's voice sound like? Who knows, but it certainly sounds wrong whenever I or anyone I have heard reads it. What would her great lines, "Soundless as dots on a disc of snow" sound like with a lisp? What were Keats' intonations? If his voice was squeaky or creepy or nasal would we think less of him? Did Shakespeare have a stutter? I am not by any means saying that speech impediments would impede the quality of their poetry. In fact, such characteristics might make them more unique and memorable. Take Ilya Kaminsky, whose readings can be found online. He is a stunning poet who made it fairly young. His first language is not English and he lost his hearing...and yet, his poetry may be one of the most lyrically (musically) impressive of the contemporaries I read. Check out Dancing in Odessa. The modernists, around when recording first became available, read with passion and vigor. (Check out Pound, Yeats, and Eliot.) So much so, it can seem over-the-top today!

I am curious if people are satisfied or confused about the oral aspect of poetry today. I also wonder whether we value it as much as we used to. Maybe the oral aspect of poetry is being replaced with a more visually stimulating, high-tech future. 

Lastly, how much of a poem's musicality can be contributed by the voice reading it and how much must already exist in the poem on the page (must being a rather subjective word)? At a talk last year, the former poet laureate WS Merwin was speaking about the decrease in attention to sound he finds in more recent poetry. Perhaps our general cultural replacement of in-person conversation and even phone calls with texts and emails is making us less tuned into our own inner ear. Has language become more visual than aural?  Is the eye replacing the ear or are we losing without gaining?

If you believe sound is as vital to poetry as I do, should Literary Laundry have an oral element?