Reading One's Poems

One of the books I rescued from a pile on the back porch today, destined for the used-book-dealer, was Quite Early One Morning, by Dylan Thomas. It's a late collection of essays, with some poems scattered through, and I sat with it on the back steps in the late afternoon sunlight and quickly became engrossed. One of the most moving essays is a tribute to Wilfred Owen - more on that,  perhaps, later. But since I am giving a reading from my own book (thankfully in prose) tomorrow night, and a friend has mentioned recently that he's been invited to give a reading of his poems, I was interested to see what Thomas said in a chapter titled, "On Reading One's Own Poems."

At first he quotes someone, maybe himself:

"All that a reader-aloud of his own poems can hope to do is to try to put across his own memory of the original impulses behind his poems, deepening, maybe, and if only for a moment, the inner meaning of the words on the printed page."

And then exclaims:

How I wish I could agree wholeheartedly with that, let alone hope to achieve it! But, oh, the danger! For what a reader-aloud of his own poems so often does, is to mawken or melodramatise them, making a single simple phrase break with the fears or throb with the terrors from which he deludes himself the phrase has been born.

There is the other reader, of course, who manages by studious flatness, semidetachment, and an almost condescending undersaying of his poems, to give the impression that what he really means is: great things, but my own.

That I belong to the very dangerous first group of readers will be only too clear...

...Reading one's own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet's tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain. How he slows up a line to savour it, remembering what trouble it took, once upon a time, to make it just so, at the very moment, you may think, when the poem needs crispness and speed. Does the cat snarl or mew the better when its original owner - or father, even, the tom poet - lets it out of the bag, than when another does, who never put it in?

Well - a word to the wise and the foolish (but, oh, how I must stop and appreciate Dylan Thomas' wonderful use of the English language!) I'll be reading, and talking with Bishop Gene Robinson, tomorrow night at Gibson's Bookstore on Main Street in Concord, NH at 7:00 pm. Come on by if you're in the area; I'd love to see you!

Comments

[Teju]

The fifth of Seamus Heaney's "Ten Glosses" reads (in its entirety) as follows:

"Overheard at the party, like wet snow
That slumps down off a roof, the unexpected
Softly powerful name of Wilfred Owen.
Mud in your eye. Artillery in heaven."

In his own way, Owen is a Lorca-figure (or prefiguration): a youn poet, the voice of a generation, remarkable in life and even more so in death.

All the best at the reading.

[dale]

Ooh. Sobering warnings! :-) Now someone must get hold of the Hat, or at least of the OED, and tell me, did "mawken" exist before this essay was written?

[Natalie]

Good luck with the reading, Beth, wish I could be there. Hope there will be photos. How about an MP3 sound file we can all listen to?

[Dave]

Good quote from Thomas -- I'll have to re-read that essay (I have the book). Personally, I feel you have to read your poems with passion, but as if you were encountering them for the first time (as most in the audience will be doing). Also, if time permits, I like to begin with a poem by someone else, and then try to read my own poems as if they, too, were by someone else.
***
I hope you get a good audience tonight, Beth. I happen to know that the material you're reading is terrific, and I imagine you have a warm reading voice, so I dare say anyone who's able to attend will be richly rewarded.

[Beth]

Thanks for the good wishes. They're appreciated.

Dale - I wondered about "mawken" too! Will try to ask the Hat if he doesn't come by on his own soon!

[rr]

I have an OED and I know how to use it.... "mawken" isn't in it. The shorter edition, anyway. But "mawk" is - it's a maggot. And "mawkin", a variant of malkin.

You learn something obsolete every day!

[MB]

Have you read Leonard Cohen's "How to Speak Poetry" (a different vein)? Wish I could be there. Break a leg!

[Natalie]

"Mawkish" means boringly sentimental, at least over here in the UK but I haven't heard it or seen it in print for some time so maybe it's gone out of fashion. And I never heard it used as a verb - to mawken - that was probably Dylan's apt invention.

[language hat]

Yes, mawken as a verb meaning 'to make mawkish' is his invention (and is not in the OED -- I guess they've finally realized the foolishness of including nonce creations just because they happen to be by famous writers).

But mawken does occur as a dialect spelling of malkin "A typical name (usu. derogatory) for: a lower-class, untidy, or sluttish woman, esp. a servant or country girl. In Scotland: an awkward or ungainly young girl." It can also mean "An impotent or effeminate man; a weakling," "A mop; a bundle of rags fastened to the end of a stick, esp. for cleaning out a baker's oven," "A scarecrow; a ragged puppet or grotesque effigy," and "a designation for certain animals (sometimes as if a proper name)." But my favorite definition is 1b:

Sc. The female genitals. Cf. MERKIN n. Obs. rare.

1602 (1554) D. LINDSAY Satyre (Charteris) in Wks. (1931) II. 191 Gif that our mawkine cryis quhisch. 1800 R. BURNS Merry Muses 68 When maukin bucks, at early f-ks, in dewy glens are seen, sir.

[Beth]

Thanks!! and especially for that last bit...

[Teju]

Thank you, Venerable Hat.

Me, I just love noncing. Sometimes the word you want is simply not there. Either there's no synonym, or the available ones have the wrong specific gravity. In such cases, I just slip in an invention of my own, something with the right shape and sound, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The shorter and more Anglo-Saxon-seeming the word is, the less likely that an eyebrow will be raised.

But I'm careful not to overdo it. I don't want my poetic license suspended.