Tentatively)----
Poems read aloud become prose.
P.Riley
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P.S.
Not only has Charles Bernstein written a book about this, so has Douglas
Oliver, POETRY AND NARRATIVE IN PERFORMANCE, Macmillan 1989. That was
before Performance Poetry became such a success, so it's only concerned
with the reading of poetry, viewed as a performance, aloud or not, in
public or not. It's a book I could never quite get my head round, but it
goes into the subject very thoroughly, with spectographic analyses of
spoken poetry and careful consideration of intonation, stress and voicing
patterns etc. It seems silly to discuss topics without going to the trouble
of reading the work that has been done on them, but a typical poets'
short-cut. Similarly there have been some good books about English
prosody. I can't give references at present; I'm not an academic and don't
keep such notes ready to hand, I could look for them if anyone's
interested. But my impression is that the terms under which prosody is
being discussed here are 19th Century, and that no one has read any of the
recent writers on the subject, some of which view poetical metre in quite
different ways and have a better historical take on it. I don't think, for
instance, that the concept of the poetical foot is taken seriously by most
modern writers on prosody.
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