Balancing the written and spoken forms of a poem.
Media coverage of this week's US presidential inauguration has reminded me how some recent presidents have chosen to include poetry in their celebrations. It's also reminded me that I first became aware of this when Elizabeth Alexander read her poem at Barack Obama's first inauguration in 2009. I remember being intrigued by what she read, which didn't come across as very poetic to me.
I’ve often thought that the poems that are most appropriate to read aloud to an audience are often not the most profound and well-crafted as they need to be readily understood at first hearing. Pieces with clear structure, rhyme and repetition are more easily followed by the listeners, but these techniques are all too often the techniques that seem to trivialise the content, so it requires great skill to achieve the right balance.
With this in mind, back in 2009 I took a closer look at the start of Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day" and wrote a brief essay, which I think it might be interesting to revisit now. Here it is, with some very minor adjustments:
Poets use layout and linebreaks to help readers understand their intentions of pausing and pace. This look at the first stanza of Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem emphasises the importance of balancing the needs of the written and oral forms of a poem.
"Occasional poetry" - poetry composed to be read or performed at special events and ceremonies - is primarily a spoken form, with the author himself usually doing the reading. Because of this, the poet may be tempted to not pay very much attention to written formatting because he already knows how he wants the piece to sound.
However, someone is certain to want to record the piece in print, and so, like other poetry, it really does need to work both on and off the page. And that's where careful formatting (punctuation plus stanza and line-breaks) is needed to guide readers and help them understand the pacing and pausing the writer envisaged.
Let's look at Elizabeth Alexander's poem written for Obama's inauguration. The delivery was fairly prosy, with deliberate - although not always very natural - pauses. Once the ceremony was over, people started looking for the text so they could read the poem for themselves, and it was soon available on-line. At this stage, though, no-one knew where the line-breaks should be: it's relatively easy to transcribe words, but how could anyone be sure of punctuation and formatting?
Despite this, seeing it on the page, even as a simple text split into paragraphs, I found it began to make better sense as a poem. With the text in front of me, and reading it at my own pace, I could focus on the sounds and the rhythm of the words and begin to explore how they work together.
Once the poem became available in the layout Elizabeth Alexander intended, we learned that it was written in unrhyming, three-line stanzas, which appear as regular blocks on the page.
One problem with choosing a visual structure like this, however, is that there's a temptation to make the poem look more regular than meaning, grammar and phrasing demand; instead of using the format to help the reader, the poet may waste the potential of one of the most important of the poet's tools.
The first complete sentence – "Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each other's eyes or not, about to speak or speaking." – corresponds to the first stanza of the formatted poem:
Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other's
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.
The desire to have a neat little rectangle on the page seems to have resulted in an awkward second line-break that really doesn't help the reader.
Note how the first line is end-stopped - a complete phrase with a pause at the end - and how there's a comma to emphasise that end pause. Sometimes, a line-break can serve instead of punctuation, so when you find punctuation at the end of a line, it's worth looking to see if it's really necessary.
Here, the comma may not be essential but it certainly helps to separate off that first phrase. This seems to be a good thing to do as this first line pretty much defines the theme of the whole poem.
When we get to the second line, though, it's not a complete phrase.
In general, as a reader approaches a line-break, expectations are being built of what will come next. Those expectations are then either contradicted or reinforced when he proceeds to the next line, allowing the poet to create interesting effects in the reader's mind by manipulating the breaks.
In the inaugural poem, the phrase "catching each other's" doesn't leave many possible options for the reader: there aren't very many things that we can catch like this, other than "eyes" or "attention". The line-break encourages a slight mental pause for the reader but doesn't allow him to do much within that pause.
If, instead, the phrase had continued one word further - "catching each other's eyes" - the reader would have ended the line with a strong image of a positive connection between people going about their business. When he reached the next line, the "or not," would have been a powerful contradiction, which would have also helped reinforce the hit-and-miss, unpredictable nature of jostling with strangers each day.
Of course, on the page, this would have created a very unbalanced – and much less visually-satisfying – triplet, with a far longer second line.
Layout and linebreaks allow poets to help readers understand their intentions of pausing and pace. It is vital, though, to balance the written and oral needs of a poem, especially one which is likely to be printed and re-printed for years to come.
Of course, the fact that no poet was invited to perform at Trump's inauguration won’t stop people writing poems. I’m sure uncountable amateurs – both in favour of and against the new president – wrote their own pieces for the occasion, and no doubt more than a few professionals did, too. But the fact is, only Democratic Party presidents have had poets read at their inaugurations, and there have been rather fewer than might be thought. You can find out more and read all the poems – all six of them – on the Lit Hub website.
You can also watch Alexander reading her poem at the Inauguration or watch Reverend Lowery read the benediction at the same ceremony. The latter has rhyme and rhythm patterns, and – in my opinion – is delivered with far more apparent sincerity and enthusiasm as well as having enough cliché, homeliness and predicability to make it accessible.
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