How Should a Poem Sound?

In 1982, I saw Denise Levertov read at Santa Rosa Junior College, where I was a student. I had read her poems since I was a child, and I knew what she looked like from the photograph of her on the backs of her books, but nothing prepared me for hearing her voice. On that early Spring day in Northern California, I learned how a poem should sound.

Levertov herself was unassuming: a small woman with short dark hair going gray. She wore glasses and a pink checked dress. She must have been close to sixty then, impossibly old to twenty-two-year-old me. But when she approached the microphone and began to recite her poetry, I was transfixed. Her delicate, British-accented voice rose and fell as she took the audience, a large, packed hall, into that emotional place that only poetry can create. 

When she spoke, it sounded like a friend telling another friend the most profound secrets. She told us about surviving World War II, about her love for her former husband, about how her sister struggled with her mental health, and shared epiphanies acquired on the subways of New York. With a slight lisp resulting from a missing front tooth, she pronounced each word as if it were holy text.

I left the hall a changed being. Now I knew how a poem should sound. 

When I hear poets read out loud, I am often disappointed. Either it sounds flat, as if they were reading an article from the business section of the newspaper, or condescending, or interrupted with asides, as if the audience needed spoon-feeding, or, worst of all, rendered in a breathy sing-song somewhere between a sermon and a singer practicing scales. This is called “the Poetry Voice,” and all poets know immediately what it means.

We spend so much time polishing our work. Shouldn’t we also practice reading it out loud? 

To be clear, I’m not talking about performance, spoken word or slam poetry, specific styles that employ rhythm, alliterative language, and dramatic techniques. What I refer to here is the overly-expressive manner in which so many poets read their work: emotive, singsong, cringe-worthy.

So how do we avoid falling into this trap? By studying the ones who excel at reading aloud, like Denise Levertov. By practicing in front of people we trust to give us honest appraisals. And by trusting the audience.

For some examples of poets who read in widely different styles, watch Staying Human: new poems for Staying Alive, as well as Denise Levertov: Six Poems, from the Lannan Foundation reading 7 December 1993. She was seventy-one at the time, already suffering from the leukemia that would take her life four years later. And check out Poetry NET Outtakes Series: March 20, 1966, an earlier reading. My favorite poem in this video is “A Solitude,” which sounds as if she were describing a painting to someone who hadn’t seen it at the museum, or a dream just fading from memory.

For a different perspective, read In Praise of Poet Voice, LitHub, 7/11/22, by Dan O’Brien.