Poetry in Performance:

Language

Reading and performing poems in public.

Daniel Nester, The College of Saint Rose, 2006-2015

This is not a comprehensive introduction to the

reading or performance of a poem, nor is it

necessarily an objective one. There are many

ways to read a poem, and many choices that

inform performing a poem. The purpose of these

presentations is to provide an overview of the

basic elements to reading and performing poems.

Adapted from the following:

“Elements of Poetry.” New York: Bedford St. Martins. 1 February 2008

<http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/elements.html>.

Gura, Timothy, and Charlotte Lee. Oral Interpretation. 11th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

Smith, Mark Kelly, and Joe Kraynak. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Slam Poetry. 1st ed. New

York: Alpha Books, 2004.

Turco, Lewis. The Handbook of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. Hanover, NH: University Press of

New England, 2000.

Kenneth Koch, from “Reading Poetry”

“The experience you get from reading poetry is not

exactly like any other. Sometimes poetry gives the

impression of saying more than words can say. This

mysterious-seeming effect is caused by the fact that in

poetry words are used in a way that is different from the

way words are usually used. Poetry is art, and so has a

different purpose from that of the regular way of talking

and writing, and has a different effect.”

A poem doesn’t live in a vacuum. As valuable as it might seem to look at the poem as a stand-alone text or to consider a poem as entirely open to interpretation to the reader, it helps more often than not to find out aspects of the poem.

• Who is the poet? Is there a biography or information you can access?

• Where does this poem figure into the poet’s work?

• What kind of language is being used?

• Any connections to make with traditions, cultures?

• What do critics say about this poem or the poet’s work as a whole?

Look up unfamiliar words in dictionary, for

meaning and pronunciation, as well as a word’s

denotative and connotative meanings.

Denotative meaning, or denotation, refers to the literal meaning of a word, the “dictionary definition.”

For example, if you look up the word snake in a dictionary, you will discover that one of its denotative meanings is “any of numerous scaly, legless, sometimes venomous reptiles having a long, tapering, cylindrical body and found in most tropical and temperate regions.”

For example:

The man drank whiskey quietly.

Connotative meaning, or connotation, on the

other hand, refers to the associations that are

connected to a certain word or the emotional

suggestions related to that word.

The connotative meanings of a word exist

together with the denotative meanings. The

connotations for the word snake could include

evil or danger.

Connotative meanings: think about the

emotional impact, the sounds, and associations

you have with words.

Examples:

The man sipped his whiskey quietly.

The woman nursed her cosmopolitan.

The man sipped his whiskey quietly.

The denotative meaning is simple:

an adult male drank

whiskey (an alcoholic liquor distilled from a fermented mash of grain, as barley, rye, or corn, and usually containing from 43-50% alcohol)

and didn’t make much noise.

Think about the emotional impact, the sounds,

the associations you have with the words:

The man sipped his whiskey quietly.

The woman nursed her cosmopolitan.

Drinking is fun, right? It’s at parties, usually.

The man shipped his whiskey quietly.

The woman nursed her cosmopolitan.

The word “sipped” and “quietly,” with the idea

of booze, maybe makes you think the man is

alone. True?

How about “nursed”? That literally means

“drinks slowly,” but what does it connote?

This implied solitude intensifies the anonymity

of “the man.” Why not dude, bro, holmes, son,

“Shawn”?

And how about woman? Why not: chick, fox,

“Britney,” lady, biddy?

We bring our own cultural and experiential assumptions to every thing we read and hear.

Take the drink choices in these lines, whiskeyand a cosmopolitan, for example. What does it “connote”? Is it different from scotch, rum, Jell-O shots, Jägermeister, Red Bull and vodka?

You could also say that the use of “nursing” a drink in the one example is what’s called a figure of speech, which is a form or expression that uses language in a non-literal way.

There are other figures of speech, such as metaphor, simile, and personification.

A simile is a comparison between two dissimilar objects using a word like or as to connect them.

My mom is like an avenging angel.

I’m as hungry as a bear.

As American as apple pie.

As blind as a bat.

As busy as a bee.

As tight as a bull’s ass in fly season.

As crooked as a dog’s hind leg.

As cute as a bug’s ear.

As difficult as nailing jelly to a tree.

As dull as dishwater.

As long as a month of Sundays.

As loose as a goose.

As nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

Yo mama’s like a birthday cake, everybody gets a piece.

Yo mama’s like a squirrel, she's always got some nuts in her mouth.

Yo mama’s like a streetlamp, you can find her turned on at night on any street corner.

Yo mama’s like a library, open to the public.

Yo mama’s like an ATM, open 24 hours.

Yo mama’s like a microwave, one button and she's hot.

Yo mama’s like a bag of potato chips, “Free-To-Lay.”

Yo mama’s like a bus, guys climb on and off her all day long.

“Playing the dozens, snaps.”

A metaphor is similar to a simile, but it compares two dissimilar objects without using a word like as or like.

He’s a tall drink of water.

It’s raining men.

She’s all that and a bag of chips.

You’re the bomb.

A rollercoaster of a relationship.

Another figure of speech:

Personification: If you present an inanimate object, animal, or abstraction with human qualities and

My new pencil is lonely and wants to go home.

I talk to my car each morning to help it start.

Are there allusions in the poem that you need to

look up?

allusion

An indirect reference to another work of literature or

art. A brief, intentional reference to a historical, mythic,

or literary person, place, event, or movement. “The

Waste Land,” T. S. Eliot’s influential long poem is

dense with allusions. The title of Seamus Heaney’s

autobiographical poem “Singing School” alludes to a

line from W.B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (“Nor is

there singing school but studying /Monuments of its

own magnificence”).

Whole websites are dedicated to figuring out and

annotating allusions and meanings. Rap Genius

is one example. He’s a detail from a page

dedicated to the lyrics to Sir Mix a Lot’s “Baby

Got Back.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the language of any given

poem is unfamiliar to you. Poems do that sometimes.

We’ll get around to interpretation later, but first things

first.