November 4, 5, 6

(An abridged version of this article appeared in the August issue of Mosaic.)

No, this isn’t Words Aloud Spoken Word and Storytelling Festival’s version of a recruiting poster, but now that I’ve got your attention, let’s talk poetry. ..and I mean literally. Because that is what spoken word is all about, poetry and stories coming to you not just by the printed page, but via the bodies and voices of their creators, onstage and in person, immediate, visceral, and fresh. Before the printed word became ubiquitous, this is the way it had always been, a dynamic, embodied relationship between bard and listener.

To give you an idea of this dynamism and embodiment, we need to get a little audience participation going, and this is where the talking comes in. Several of the remarkable spoken word artists who will be joining Words Aloud in November have provided us with some choice pieces of work as festival “spoilers”, and that makes a great opportunity to begin to get some idea of the vitality of spoken word. As we take a look at the pieces, you need to do only one thing: read them aloud. Roll the words around on your tongue, listen for the rhymes, feel the rhythms and syllabic stresses like tides surging and ebbing, experience the way your lips and tongue navigate their way around consonant repetitions. Read the work to others, by all means, or read them when you are alone, with only your dog sitting at your feet thinking you’re talking to her.

Let’s start with Anne Simpson, a poet who comes from the Maritimes, a part of the world where music, storytelling and poetry aren’t just on the page or the concert hall, but also in the family room, local pub and park bandshell. Here is her prose poem, “Swallow”.

Let’s say a woman stood in her kitchen, studying a stripe of moon across the tiles. The world’s sweetness going out of her, as the oncologist had said. Imagine how hard she worked at forgetting each thing. The ghosts of potted cyclamen, hibiscus. Shine of faucets. She sipped water, paying attention to moonlight passing through the glass, passing over the skin of her hand. That time in Bécherel, when the hotel window was open and a bird flew inside. The swallow beating its frantic wings until the concierge captured it, shook his jacket out the window. Released, released. She watched it dipping over the red-tiled roofs. No bringing it back.
 

Do you feel this poem slipping by gently with the help of soft sibilants, shushing like small waves on a pebble beach? Tenderly sad, it is yet pierced with sharper shards, “worked”, “forgetting”, “oncologist”, “beating”, “frantic”, and that final, flat “back”. I also sense the flight of a swallow in the poem; rapid bursts of shallow wingbeats followed by longer glides as it darts after small insects, the final long coast into the shadow of a cliff or a barn. I suspect this is because of Simpson’s structure, where she arranges words to produce clusters of weak syllables punctuated by stronger ones. Simply reading the poem silently allows access to this melancholy world, but reading it aloud or hearing it read adds this extra sensory dimension which makes the experience that much fuller.

Here are other examples. As you read the following three poems by Ronna Bloom aloud, think about what happens to the visual white space in the middle of each poem. (All poems from Permiso, Pedlar Press, 2009.)
 

The Burning Room

You are leaving the burning room of your life
to go next door where it’s cool.

Come back.
We are not done.
  

Want

The grey cat came and lay down on my chest
like a fifteen pound bag of warm sugar.

Soft. Heavy on my heart
like the hands of a master.

83%

My old love comes to my door
and my heart doesn’t pound.
Though I am happy.

83% happy.

Like the Mona Lisa.

Bloom uses visual white space and punctuation to very specific effect in these poems. Because the poems are very spare, the spaces and periods have much greater weight than they typically do in prose sentences and paragraphs, or even in longer poems. What they result in, and I think you can feel this when you read them aloud, are very significant pauses, the kind that make you think that the concluding lines are second thoughts, revelations, or decisions. While not necessarily funny in subject matter, the poems end up being witty in the sense that the weight of the pauses emphasize the unexpectedness of the poems’ closures, a key ingredient of humour.

When we read to ourselves, we process the words and meaning so rapidly that these nuances of white space often escape us. Sometimes they only resonate when the poems are given voice.

Humour is also an ingredient in Ariel Gordon’s poetry, especially in her first book of poems, Hump (Palimpsest Press), which details her unsentimental experiences with pregnancy. This poem is called “Seven Months: ultrasound introductions”.

I am the fork-scarred sink, the water table
you are the warming goldfish
your father is the big eye anxious on your domestic bulge
the wet magnification of dorsal flicker
ventral thrum.

I am the dip & dunk tank, the basin overflowing
but they should have known better –
you might circle my drain
fin & bony ripple on every grainy pass
but I’m the only one likely to go belly up.

Again, it is in the saying it aloud that certain things about this poem become apparent. The insistent first beat of many of sentences and the repetition of the words “I” and “you(r)” lend the poem a solemn incantatory quality. And yet, this gravity is belied by the playful use of water/plumbing/fish imagery which works so well in the context of bodily pregnancy fluids. The solemnity and the wit then merge seamlessly in the last line, where the first strongly stressed beat is again the word “I”, and the rest of the sentence is a humorous reference to the birthing position, with a touch of menace thrown in by other connotations of the term “belly up”.

This short little piece, in its content and its structure, gives us a glimpse of the simultaneous seriousness and silliness inherent in pregnancy and birth. We see again that reading a poem aloud reveals not just semantic meaning, but can also offer a sensory counterpoint to the content which deepens our understanding of the work.

Reading Marilyn Dumont’s work aloud is like tasting words, the tongue twists around the words as if they were marbles or ice cubes or sour gummy bears. And just as the tongue moves to manipulate the words, everything moves in this poem: ice, seasons, moon, water, run-off, flies, sunlight.

The river-ice has split her heart and resigned to water     in the seasonal pull from      the moon and her sisters      who swirl fluent with memory     of their once liquid selves       while at the raw-split edge of ice             jammed against itself, it splinters      pulled by the force of the aged, glacial run-off below     to say that the river glistened, instead of how sunlight spills silver beads along its dissolving edges   and filament flies ignite the air above it      loses sight of the language of water:
trickle      seep       swirl      surge

Just for fun, I counted all the times the sounds “s”, “l”, “t”, and “r” appeared in this short work, called “thaw”. The count was 34, 27, 20, and 22, respectively. Many words contain three of the four sounds, and words like “splinters” and “raw-split” contain all four. Think about it: the sounds that Dumont uses so effectively in her poem are the gurgling, hissing, splashing, roaring and murmuring sounds of fast and high water moving in ditches, creeks, and rivers as the ice breaks up. These sounds are made more apparent when the poem is read aloud, thus reinforcing the theme of the work. The meanings of the words allow you to picture the scene in your mind, but it is the sounds of the words that place you on the shore next to the restless turbulence.

All of the poems we have looked at can, of course, be read silently and still enjoyed for their feeling, elegance, wit, and subtle meaning. But as we have seen, the aural nature of a poem can bring extra dimensions to that enjoyment, dimensions which expand even further when the opportunity arises to hear the poets themselves reading their own work.

Anne Simpson, Ronna Bloom, Ariel Gordon, and Marilyn Dumont will all be at the Words Aloud Spoken Word and Storytelling Festival this November 4, 5, and 6 in Durham, along with singer-songwriter James Gordon, spoken word legend John Giorno, novelist and poet Steven Heighton, and dub poet and activist Lillian Allen. Other Words Aloud-affiliated events include children’s puppet theatre production The Wind in the Willows at Jubilee Victoria Hall in Walkerton, and the International Festival of Authors event in Owen Sound. We encourage you to keep up with the news at www.wordsaloud.ca, and we hope to see you in November!

(All poems in this article reprinted with the permission of the authors.)