Broken Songs

Arma virumque cano

—Virgil, Aeneid

Begin the Song, and strike the Living Lyre;Lo how the Years to come, a numerous and well-fitted Quire, All hand in hand do decently advance, And to my Song with smooth and equal measures dance.

—Abraham Cowley, “The Resurrection”

Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret topOf OREB, or of SINAI, didst inspireThat Shepherd . . .

—John Milton, Paradise Lost

Sing, to the lower’d coffin there;Sing, with the shovel’d clods that fill the grave—a verse, For the heavy hearts of soldiers.

—Walt Whitman, “Hush’d Be the Camps Today”

Irish poets learn your tradeSing whatever is well made. . . .

—W. B. Yeats, “Under Ben Bulben”

She was the single artificer of the worldIn which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the selfThat was her song, for she was the maker.

—Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”

I

Tin-eared poetry readings, of which there seems an incontinent river, produce physical effects similar to those of altitude sickness—headache, nausea, listlessness—though in one respect the effects are opposite: excessive heights disrupt sleep, while bad verses induce it. The auditor’s response—whether positive or negative—it is important to note, is physical. As Paul Fussell points out in Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (1965), “According to I. A. Richards, the effect of poetic rhythm is distinctly physiological and perhaps sexual.” This effect, Richards believed, “is not due to our perceiving a pattern in something outside us, but to our becoming patterned ourselves. With every beat of the metre a tide of anticipation in us turns and swings.” As Fussell himself adds: “The pattern is a vast cyclic agitation spreading all over the body, a tide of excitement pouring through the channels of the mind.”

The physical sensations of poetry may be equally pronounced when the agitation they arouse is unpleasant. I recently watched a wave of disaffection overtake an older gentleman at a group poetry reading in Manhattan’s East Village. About half an hour into the proceedings, I saw the man—whom I had admired earlier for his intelligent features and elegant dress—slumped over, fast asleep with his forehead balanced on the crook of his cane. I decided in that moment that here was my ideal listener, a belief that was confirmed for me some minutes later, when I noticed him wide-eyed and smiling, hanging on every word of a poem that I, and others, also clearly admired. As the poet and poem changed, so had his entire physical demeanor. In my experience, sleepiness occupies the milder end of the spectrum of responses to lackluster poetry readings, matched on the opposite extreme by acute discomfort.

I used to feel guilty when a poet concluded his or her reading and I realized that I hadn’t heard a single word. Bad manners, a lack of courtesy, I scolded myself, believing that I had failed to perform my basic duty as an audience member, i.e., to listen. I’m no longer so hard on myself. I now believe, in those situations, that it is the poet who has palled in the performance of his job, by failing to wrest my attention from me, regardless of, or even against, my will to grant it. An exchange from King Lear comes to mind: “Dost thou know me, fellow?” asks Lear. “No, sir,” fibs Kent, “but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master.” “What’s that?” “Authority.” A poem should command the attention of the listener (or silent reader) with the authority of what I (following T. S. Eliot) think of as, for lack of a better term, its “music” or what Longinus described as its “melody in words.”

The word music, as applied to the sounds of poetry, is an inadequate and figurative term. In his essay “The Poem in the Ear,” from Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (1975), John Hollander admits that “in the world of the ear, poetry is a kind of music,” yet he...