ART OF SPEAKING POETRY

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 46, 24 February 1938, Page 4

ART OF SPEAKING POETRY

Poets and Public Differ

*QN the subject of speaking verse, poets and the public are often in different camps,’ said Mr L. A. G. Strong when broadcasting recently. The point at issue between them is usually the acmunt of dramatic emphasis which is allowable, or desirable, in speaking a poem: what, in .the schoolroom, used to be called “expression”. The poets, as a rule, do not like “expression”. iThe public does. The public likes as much variety and emphasis and range of tone and colour as can be got into a poem. To them, the kind of reading which the poets appear to favour seems monotoncus, and lifeless. “Now, no poet objects to expression in reading, as long as it is poetic expression. As long, that is to say as it does not destroy the very effects at which the poet has aimed. The poet get his effects by rhythm, by assonance, b/ the placing of vowels and consonants, by using lines of a certain length and contlining a certain number of beats. To satisfy him, a reader must observe these effects, and bring them out. But a purely dramatic emphasis, a» emphasis which depends on situation, is fatally apt to ignore these effects altogether. Matters are made worse by

the practice of certain actors, who, when they speak verse, do their best to hide the fact that it is verse at all. They run lines together, shout some bits, whisper others, speak two lines very slowly and the next two very fast: In fact, from the poet’s point of view, they ruin everything at which he has aimed. “Naturally, an audience which has become used to these violent effects misses them when they are not there. A man used to a brass band might at first find a string quartet bloodless and unexciting. There is, of course, no one way of speaking verse. Different kinds of verse require different treatment There is no one way to speak and single poem. But there are a great many ways not to speak it. Verse speakers to-day are trying, not to create a new art, but to revive an old one: to restore to poetry the living tongue: to find a way of speaking poetry which will be neither chatty, nor liturgical, but will give back to the poem the rhythm and the music which an over-dramatic emphasis had taken away. The whole thing is in the experimental stage. No one wants to dogmatise about it. If it is to live, it must reach you, the public. But it would be a great help if you could come part of the way to meet it.”