Why Every Poet Uses "Poet Voice"

If there is a style of reading that is widely held to ridicule it is the Poet Voice – a highly affected stye of reading that signifies "I AM READING A POEM". While practioners of live literature may have their differences, they are united by their disdain for it. At least that is what I thought.

Firstly, not everyone means the same thing when they speak of Poet Voice. Those from a literary background often refer to poetry voice in the sense that is explained in this article by Rich Smith and satirised here by the comedian Andy Hamilton. It is a soft, breathy, rendering of the line that gradually desends in pitch wirth each stress before inflecting upward to mark the end of each line or sentence. If you need a real example, here's Louise Gluck.

I noticed that Spoken Word poets were also refering to Poet Voice, but this one was different in many ways to the literary poet voice. This one is perhaps best illustrated by Switch, the spoof Spoken Word poet from the Cardnal Burns series.

It's similar to the other poet voice in the sense that the speaker is heavily emphasising each word, especially the word at the end of the line. But where the literary Poet Voice is distinct by its lack of passion, Spoken Word poet voice seems to emulate passion wtihout eliciting it. So there we go, two kinds of poery voice. How quaint.

But it doesn't end there. At a recent reading I noticed that a lot of the readers, younger literary poets, were delivering their work in a similar fashion. This wasn't the dispassionate, slightly robotic Poet Voice of Gluck, this was different. The poems were declaimed in a sense of restrained urgency. As if they were trying to catch someone's attention while trying not to cause too much of a scene.

With these different ideas of poetry voice running through my head, I ended up confering with Tim Wells, who just happened to be working on an article about Poet Voice for his Morning Star column. "There's more than one kind of Poet Voice" he confided in me and a little light bulb pinged to life above my banana curtains.

Case closed? Not quite. Now I was listening to every poet I could and taxonomising different kinds of Poet Voice. And that's when it dawned on me: Every poet uses Poet Voice

Listen to any poet introducing a poem and then listen to them reading the poem. In every case you will notice a change in their voice. This gives you a sense of their speaking voice and their poet voice. Sometimes the shift is subtle – poets that aim for a more natural or conversational aspect of their work such as Billy Collins or Spoken Word poets like Polar Bear. But the shift is there. In a sense they sound even more conversational when speaking the poem than they do when introducing it.

The difference between the poet's natural speaking voice and their poetry voice often says something about their ideas of poetry and how it contrasts or compliments natural speech. Billy Collins once said that Yeats spoke from an inflated idea of poetry, hence his own stylised conversationalism/naturalism when reading the poem. Other poets, Yeats included, saw poetry as a heightened speech and read out their work in a way that distinguished this difference.

Writing is not the same as talking. Anyone that has transcribed natural human speech knows this. Writing tends to flow from one idea to the next, it follows along a measured line of argument (though not always!).

Speech is a series of jittery expulsions of half formed ideas and abandoned trains of thought. As the talking poet David Antin demonstrated, talking is far more reflective of human thought, of what really goes on inside our heads. Writing is a wishful act in which we fashion images of how we would like to think and how we would like to make those thoughts known to others. A spur of the moment, spoken rebuttal will never match a carefully written response.

This is why a different voice is needed when reading a poem. This is why trained actors, accustomed to scriptwriters' simulations of talk, often get it wrong when they try to inject a conversational tone into the reading of a poem that is not written in a conversational style.

I'm not defending the familiar, derided strains of "Poet Voice." I am pointing out that it is not their artifice that renders them so ineffective or infuraiating. The problem is that the voice has been adopted as a way of reading out any poem in order to signify that it is a poem. Rather than think about how they will read out a particlular poem, they fall back on an old technique and stick to it. It is a sign that the reader is in autopilot mode.

Here's some practical adice. When you read out or recite a pre-written text there will always be a change in your voice. This is your poet voice and you're pretty much stuck with it. That said, you should always beware of becoming too comfortable with that voice, especialy in the sense that it signifies that you are now sharing the recieved text. Know your work before you share it.

When I know my work and can sneak in all kinds of modulations that keep the audience engaged. I quicken the tempo or slow down, I make little shifts in pitch and volume. I throw in a little gesture, or even better, become stock still.

When I don't know my poem I take refuge in my poet voice and dial it up a notch. I frown and glare and every line I utter sounds like a threat. There's nothing less engaging than a threat that's repeated several times and leads to nothing. The reading ends with an exhausted poet and an underwhelmed audience.

Your Poet Voice may differ. But if you don't know become aware of it and if you don't know your work, the results will always be the same.

This is the latest in an ongoing series of posts that work towards a criticism of the Spoken Word. I will be looking at all forms of Spoken Word — not just poetry readings and spoken word/poetry performances but stand up comedy, confessional monologues, academic lectures, speeches, wrestling promos and any other act of public speech that rings my bell. All posts will appear under the Toward a Criticism of the Spoken Word category. Click to see if new posts have been added and for any you may have missed.