Asymmetrical Information

The lyrics to many operas can be a bit on the banal side, which in fact was one objection raised when supertitles were under development.

See, there is no way I ever would have watched a video of you reading that.

banal lyrics are "outstanding" in the pop sense because the target audience (read: teenagers) can read meaning into them appropriate to a wide variety of their experiences. they are banal in the sense that they don't say anything, which means they can say everything.

some of my favorite songs work quite well as poems, but that's because I prefer people who can't sing all that well but are outstanding lyricists and good composers. that makes me sound like more of a Dylan fan than I am in reality; what I mean is that I place a low value on technical competence in singing, freeing up my attention for the other two talents listed above.

The lyrics of great hymns stand on their own.

In fact, your epigram is a pretty decent test for whether a hymn is great or not. (The problem of a bad melody can always be fixed by replacing it with a better one.) Thanks!

Perhaps I'm a freak, but I feel like poetry almost always loses something when it's read aloud. I suppose there are mediocre poems that could be vastly improved by a great reading, but the good stuff usually sounds more stilted and/or pretentious to me when it's spoken. Even good poets seem to speak in a strange cadence that they must feel is appropriate to the form, but that ends up making them sound like James Lipton. Take this reading by Sylvia Plath, which does nothing for me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM

Back when I was an English major (before I was married and felt a need to worry about being able to get a job upon graduation), one of my professors told us to read a poem out loud before judging it. Much of what makes something a poem is the meter, which few are able to feel if we simply read a poem silently. Reading out load, it's far easier to hear the poem's true beauty -- or to hear that it's nothing more than a bunch of words strung together. Some people read better than others, so I would suspect that a really good reader can make even a poor poem sound better than it really is. (Don't they say that some actors are so good that they can make a reading of the phone book captivating?) However, I don't think that spoken poetry is more forgiving than the written form. I think that poetry's true medium is the spoken, not the written, word. Just like music needs to be played to be judged, poems need to be read aloud. Written words are merely the notes poets use to convey the sounds of their art. The natural language of poetry is the voice, not the printed page.

Dylan Thomas was famous for his recitations -- both of his own poetry and others.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIoXV-HXobo

Unfortunately many poets come from the "Every. Word. Is. Genius. And. Must. Be. Articulated." school of recitation, which is unbearable.

Then there's Leonard Cohen, who cleverly marketed his poetry readings as extremely monotone songs.

"But that's also true of a sonnet, and yet these {Shakespeare's sonnets} still hold up pretty well."

In my (completely unrespected) opinion, they don't.

I love Shakespeare's plays. While I am not a big poetry aficianado, I do like some poems, but I have never enjoyed reading a sonnet. I wonder how much poetry I could have enjoyed from Shakespeare had it not been ruined by that ridiculous format.

lyrics are not poems
reading is different than listening and even more different than watching..there are happy accidents but on the whole poetry readings are terrible ( imho )

btw,

why can't poets memorize their words? As a singer I know upwards of 30 songs worth of lyrics, which really frees up the performance.

Because the human voice adds more dimension, more depth, more tone, more personality, has more control over the listener's breathe, their rhythm, their pulse, than mere words-on-paper ever could.

And, of course, listening to poetry read at a recital, or slam, is an entirely different experience than alone, or off an iPod. One is part of a group, of a mass being greater than the individual souls. It is like church, it is like live music, like dance, like a political rally, one feels that they are sharing emotions with others around them, no matter how trite those emotions may be. And the sharing of emotions, of heartbeats, the synchronization of sympathies itself confers meaning.

The quote that I've seen is attributed to Pierre du Beaumarchais:

"If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it."

Njori, I wouldn't try to persuade you that Shakespeare's Sonnets are wonderful, but I do offer sympathy for what you are missing.
I'm on the side of preferring to read poems silently to myself, mostly because it's so rare to hear poetry read well. I once heard a recording of Philip Larkin reading a couple of his own poems, and he was very good, he let the words speak for themselves the way they do when you read them. Much like his poem 'Modesties'.

Words as plain as hen-birds' wings
Do not lie,
Do not over-broider things -
Are too shy.

Thoughts that shuffle round like pence
Through each reign,
Wear down to their simplest sense,
Yet remain.

Weeds are not supposed to grow,
But by degrees
Some achieve a flower, although
No one sees.

One other thought that seems obvious now I think of it, some poems are made to be read and some are not.

PS. I meant to say of course 'made to be read aloud', but what I wrote holds true as well, an awful lot of what its authors claim is poetry shouldn't be read at all.

Remember Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. That's probably an underestimate when it comes to modern literature and art. As Jane said, the first great advantage of the classics is that the crap was allowed to rot away, leaving us only with what people have repeatedly considered worth preserving, copying, and reprinting.

I'm not much of a poetry fan, but IMO, if it's not written to be read aloud, it's not poetry. Or possibly I'm not a poetry fan because I much, much prefer the higher speed of reading and the higher bandwidth of visual inputs in general to audio. But it's quite clear that a Shakespeare play must be performed on stage for the full effect that the author intended; the frills of onstage sword fights, etc., can be dispensed with, but reading it silently is like pureeing $8/pound steaks and sucking them through a straw.

I just realized that there are exceptions to my statement that "the crap was allowed to rot away". Bulwer-Lytton has been preserved simply because his writing was so awesomely bad...

2 countervailing trends against the poems of the day being worse than the poems of literate days that I can think of:

1. Precisely because the Poet's audience was smaller and more intimate retibution for a bad performance could be rough. Think the roughest crowd that you've ever seen and multiply by 10 and you've got the idea. In the case of one Norse poet named Egil we know that he actually ransomed his life with a praise song for the king who had captured him and since the poem was written down for his saga we are in a position to judge its quality. We also know from the Edda that the Norse poetry developed a level of complexity not unworthy of Joyce's "FInnegan's Wake" to the extent that I wonder how much they sacrificed storytelling ability for technical dazzle the way our modern poets do. Then again, intimate audience, gold for liked poetry with physical retribution for lousy performances, I doubt Norse poetry would have gotten that technical if there hadn't been a discriminating performance that could support that sort of thing.

2. If you're good at performance then you don't hve to be a good poet in order to be a good plagiarist and the Classical poets, Greek and Roman alike, did often take a more casual view of plagiarism than we do today. This meant that a certain amount of "borrowing" could be taken for granted. Also of note is that verse repetition could be used to stretch a performance. As an exercise go into the Illiad and see how many stock phrases and repeating of earlier verses you can find. ^_~

why can't poets memorize their words? As a singer I know upwards of 30 songs worth of lyrics, which really frees up the performance.

Possibly because most poets are not in the regular habit of setting their prose to music.

This is why Bob Dylan is so good. Many of his songs really could be spoken as poetry and still be impressive.