Poetry Out Loud

            I went to Poetry Out Loud entirely ignorant of what I was in for.  For some reason, I thought I was going to a slam poetry contest, that the speakers had written their own poems.  I was prepared to be exposed to new poetry. 

And, in a sense, I was.  Although I am very familiar with much of the poetry that was read on Thursday night, hearing the poems read aloud changed my view of them; sometimes because the reader had a unique take on the work, sometimes because simply hearing things spoken made me catch nuances of phrasing and rhyme that I hadn’t picked up on before.

Perhaps the biggest example of this was the reading of “The Walrus and the Carpenter.”  (I lost my program in my sprint back to my dorm to hold my RWT hours on time, so I sadly cannot name the readers and give credit where credit is due.)  I was initially skeptical; after readings of “Song of Myself” and “Persimmons” that drew out all the emotional complexities of the work, a Lewis Caroll poem seemed, frankly, shallow.  However, I was proven wrong; the reader used voices that perfectly brought out both the hilarity and the underlying darkness of the poem.  I had not caught the repetition of the phrase “it was odd” before last night, and the emphasis on it bookended the poem nicely.  I was particularly fond of the voice used for the Carpenter, a slow drawl that is initially quite funny but slowly turns cold and sardonic as he and the Walrus begin consuming the oysters.  I ended the poem both with the usual sense of mirth that I get from the poem and with an underlying unease, almost guilt, about having laughed at all.

The reading of “The Raven” also deserves special mention.  While the frenetic speed that the reader used throughout the poem made it almost impossible to understand at points, it also emphasized the very auditory nature of the poem, with its repeated syllables and steady rhythm.  The shift of tone from comical to dark at the end also emphasized a change in the narrator that I hadn’t noticed in just reading the poem.  Really, the only problem I had was entirely beyond the reader’s control: after hearing the fantastic and hilarious rapped version of the poem, it’s very hard for me to take any other reading entirely seriously.

I had to leave early, so I didn’t find out who won.  However, any of the fantastic readers would have deserved the prize.  Additionally, I walked out of the contest thinking about how different poetry is to each person and that, perhaps, reading poetry is better as a communal activity.  Hearing others read the poems certainly opened my eyes to different tools and tones in the poems, and I walked out with a renewed appreciation for the works.