The experience of reading poetry aloud when you don’t fully understand it is a curious and complicated one. It’s suddenly discovering that you can play the organ. Rolling swells and peals of sound, powerful rhythms and rich harmonies are at your command; and as you utter them you begin to realize that the sound you’re releasing from the words as you speak is part of the reason they’re there. The sound is part of the meaning, and that part only comes alive when you speak it. So at this stage it doesn’t matter that you don’t fully understand everything: you’re already far closer to the poem than someone who sits there in silence looking up meanings and references and making assiduous notes. We need to remind ourselves of this, especially if we have anything to do with education. I have come across teachers and student teachers whose job was to teach poetry, but who thought that poetry was only a fancy way of dressing up simple statements to make them look complicated, and that their task was to help their pupils translate the stuff into ordinary English. When they’d translated it, when they’d ‘understood’ it, the job was done. It had the effect of turning the classroom into a torture-chamber, in which everything that made the poem a living thing had been killed and butchered. No one had told such people that poetry is in fact enchantment; that it has the form it does because that very form casts a spell; and that when they thought they were bothered and bewildered, they were in fact being bewitched, and if they let themselves accept the enchantment and enjoy it, they would eventually understand much more about the poem. But if they never learn this truth themselves, they can’t possibly transmit it to anyone else. Instead, in an atmosphere of suspicion, resentment, and hostility, many poems are interrogated until they confess, and what they confess is usually worthless, as the results of torture always are: broken little scraps of information, platitudes, banalities. Never mind! The work has been done according to the instructions, and the result of the interrogation is measured and recorded and tabulated in line with government targets; and this is the process we call education.
...But back to the poet and his big baritone sliding down to bass, like the drunken arm of a trombone player ... Bella Lugosi Canto I call it. I can still hear this voice when I read these words. I have chosen them though, because these words stand up on their own. They stand up for comedy and the right to be ridiuclous, as much as they stand up for dignity and the right to live like a human - Human Rights. They stand up for 'humanness'. The voice cracks'that's how the light gets in'. Bono
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This quote from Pullman's introduction to Milton's Paradise Lost:
The experience of reading poetry aloud when you don’t fully understand it is a curious and complicated one. It’s suddenly discovering that you can play the organ. Rolling swells and peals of sound, powerful rhythms and rich harmonies are at your command; and as you utter them you begin to realize that the sound you’re releasing from the words as you speak is part of the reason they’re there. The sound is part of the meaning, and that part only comes alive when you speak it. So at this stage it doesn’t matter that you don’t fully understand everything: you’re already far closer to the poem than someone who sits there in silence looking up meanings and references and making assiduous notes.
We need to remind ourselves of this, especially if we have anything to do with education. I have come across teachers and student teachers whose job was to teach poetry, but who thought that poetry was only a fancy way of dressing up simple statements to make them look complicated, and that their task was to help their pupils translate the stuff into ordinary English. When they’d translated it, when they’d ‘understood’ it, the job was done. It had the effect of turning the classroom into a torture-chamber, in which everything that made the poem a living thing had been killed and butchered. No one had told such people that poetry is in fact enchantment; that it has the form it does because that very form casts a spell; and that when they thought they were bothered and bewildered, they were in fact being bewitched, and if they let themselves accept the enchantment and enjoy it, they would eventually understand much more about the poem.
But if they never learn this truth themselves, they can’t possibly transmit it to anyone else. Instead, in an atmosphere of suspicion, resentment, and hostility, many poems are interrogated until they confess, and what they confess is usually worthless, as the results of torture always are: broken little scraps of information, platitudes, banalities. Never mind! The work has been done according to the instructions, and the result of the interrogation is measured and recorded and tabulated in line with government targets; and this is the process we call education.
...But back to the poet and his big baritone sliding down to bass, like the drunken arm of a trombone player ... Bella Lugosi Canto I call it. I can still hear this voice when I read these words. I have chosen them though, because these words stand up on their own. They stand up for comedy and the right to be ridiuclous, as much as they stand up for dignity and the right to live like a human - Human Rights. They stand up for 'humanness'. The voice cracks'that's how the light gets in'.
Bono
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