Reading Aloud While Drafting: Just Do It

83º ~ feels like 91º ~ a looming brown-gray sky, yet the storms hover northward, gusts torment the trees from time to time, breaking out of gentle breezes


Today, rather than give a detailed account of my drafting process, I want to talk about the importance of reading aloud during drafting. I've said it before, and I'll say it again; poetry is oral / aural. In the best case, we would hear each poem via the poet's own voice, either in person or on a recording. The next best case is to read poems aloud as we encounter them on our own. In the worst case, when we read poems silently, we still should "hear" them in our heads, which means a slight difference from reading prose to ourselves. After all, the poet has taken pains to represent how a poem should sound based on word choice, line breaks, stanza breaks, and other typographical choices.

In terms of my own work, I always begin with pen and paper (my journal), jotting down in a rush the first lines that suggest themselves to me. At this stage, I'm not usually focused on sound yet; instead, I'm letting the poem find its center and coalesce. (And, of course, after all these years of reading and writing poems, I've absorbed ideas of sound that find their way to the page unconsciously.) Once the poem has gathered weight, I move to the computer and the drafting process begins to look much more like conscious craft. Here, I begin to read and re-read aloud as I add lines, shift clauses around, play with white space, etc. Often, I'm still searching for the poem's destination at this stage. In this way, the poem grows into its own body and takes on its sonic charge.

Here are two examples of how reading aloud played a part in today's draft.

In my journal, the draft contained the phrase "hides in the shadowed alleys." Once I moved to the computer and started reading aloud, I kept saying "hides in the shadowed valley." After the third time of getting frustrated because I thought I was reading it "wrong," I realized that, no, in fact the poem needed "shadowed valley" not "shadowed alley."

Later, I had written "a dozen bright-plumaged birds," and a similar stumbling kept occurring. In this case, it was caused by there being too many syllables in that phrase, even though I wasn't working on a formal poem. (In other words, meter still matters in free verse.) So, I eventually had a light bulb moment as a result of my tongue getting twisted and revised this to "a dozen bright-plumed birds."

Until the next session...