[New-Poetry] Poetry Aloud 1

[Anny Ballardini]

This is a coincidence that confirms what Annie Finch writes. I have been
following privately a young student who is treated with the Tomatis Method:
http://www.henryspink.org/the_tomatis_method.htm

I must say that he does not like it at all, the opposite, he seems disturbed
by it, and he is looking forward to his free time (first 3/5 weeks off).



On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 8:43 PM, David Graham <grahamd at ripon.edu> wrote:

>  Annie Finch's  essay "Listening to Poetry" is up at Harriet:
>
>
> http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/03/listening_to_poetry_on_the_fre.html#105
>
> Well worth reading.  Here are the opening paragraphs:
>
> "Listening—openly taking in the words of another being, while allowing the
> words to remain in the other being's voice—is a simple and powerful secret,
> one that life reminds me of in ubiquitous ways. Parenting, for example.
> Listening to my children, I am amazed at the insights and solutions they
> have to offer, steadily ignored or discounted as this wisdom usually is by
> well-meaning teachers, not to mention by myself. As director of an MFA
> program, I am also constantly reminded of the power of listening. Every
> problem I've encountered can be seen as the result of barriers (external
> ones—technological and logistical, social ones--hierarchical and political,
> or internal ones—interpersonal and psychological) to listening. And every
> problem that has been solved has been solved, eventually, through listening.
>
> In this context, an art that opens us to the words of another person while
> keeping the words in the other person's voice is an art worth heeding. Do
> you ever hear poems aloud in your mind—maybe poems by others, or poems you
> are composing as you hear them? Judith Weissman's book Of Two Minds: Poets
> Who Hear Voices traces this common phenomenon through centuries of poets.
>
> Such internalized poetic voices seem akin to the internalized voices of the
> tribe leaders, goddesses, and gods that Julian Jaynes' cult classic The
> Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind describes as
> the first source of all civilization and religious tradition. Internalized
> voices, according to Jaynes, are not heard in the left side of the brain,
> where we hear speech and prose. They are heard in right side of the brain,
> where we hear music and metrical poetry—poetry which our brain processes the
> same way we process music. Whatever one thinks of Jaynes' theories about the
> brain, i find this distinction between the two brains useful for talking
> about my own experience of reading poetic language in two different ways:
> one primarily by understanding it like prose, and one primarily by hearing
> it like music.
>
> Poetry’s connection with the musical way of hearing language may be its
> basic identifying use and distinction as an art form, the reason it has
> survived through the millennia. And perhaps this essential connection is the
> reason that, after a century dominated so hugely by free verse, the
> caricature of poetry in the popular mind still remains, against all apparent
> reason and the weight of a century’s lived experience, inherently associated
> with meter (for a current example, note the role of meter and its aural
> companion, rhyme, in this news story:
> http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-03-11/sully-is-a-poet/Essentially, poetry is distinguished as an art not by its basis in thinking,
> reading, and understanding—all the processes we use to encounter other kinds
> of language—but in something both more humble and more refined than any of
> these: listening to the physical resonance of the words of the poem within
> the internal space of our own minds. The majority of poems in the English
> and American historical tradition, as in poetic traditions worldwide, are so
> much designed for listening and reading aloud—like little reading-aloud
> machines—that even when reading silently, it seems right to "read them
> aloud" inside one’s head, hearing the words physically as we go along."
>
> --Annie Finch
>
> --
>
>
> ====================================================
> David Graham
> grahamd at ripon.edu
> Home Page:
> http://web.mac.com/drjazz/
>
> Poetry Library:
> http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
> ====================================================
>
>
>
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-- 
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
star!
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