Radio Sweethearts

This is the post wherein I declare my triumphant return from finals and my less triumphant, but no less hard-earned, exit from undergraduate studies–If I passed German.But I’ll save it for later, because I must urgently report a crime taking place among the poetry section of your local bookstore, however meager an existence it claims.

That crime? Overdramatic high school girls memorizing poems and reciting them as though they were all–even the funny poems–death scenes from Greek tragedies. Part of the Poetry Foundation’s National Poetry Month celebrations includes a nationwide recitation contest for high schoolers called Poetry Out Loud.

It’s funny, sure, that these kids are misguidedly dramatic. But it’s also a little offensive to my sensibilities.

I have to worry that maybe leaving my craft in the hands and throats of people like this maybe isn’t the best idea ever. When I write poetry, which is a lot, I don’t want it to be read in “the Poetry Voice.” I–and most writers I dig–just try to catch the ordinary flow of speech.

So adding these stentorian tones that these kids, like so many young Dylan Thomases, seem to think is automatically a part of poetry just creates this ridiculous spectacle of even the most ordinary poems. They’d make William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Tell You,” which, while richly layered, is JUST A LETTER AND SHOULD BE READ OUT LOUD AS SUCH, into some vast King Lear victory soliloquy.

Take New Jersey finalist, Alison Strong, who chose to read Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 103.” In this story from All Things Considered, where she says that “It’s very easy to get a little overdramatic with that poem.” No kidding. I imagine her dressed up as Annette Benning’s character in “American Beauty,” holding her hand precisely three inches in front of her face and perfectly vertical to stifle an ‘oh GOD I am SO NAUGHTY’ giggle when she says:

I flailed my arms around and I was screaming and it was RIDICULOUS.

Ridiculous? Really? I’m sure that’s a little harsh, Ms. Strong. Your faulty parallelism was a bit ridiculous, but I’ll let it slide. I wasn’t much better on the radio.

Elizabeth Blair reports that Strong also read Allen Ginsberg’s “Supermarket.” Which, I have to say, she didn’t. There is no way. There is no Ginsberg poem called “Supermarket.” She read Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California.”

I’m just not sure poetry should be taught like drama rather than, oh I don’t know, poetry?

Never mind the fact that I only started reading and writing poetry to impress a girl in my high school theatre class. Or that it totally worked.

Read like speech. Not like Dylan Thomas, drunk and rocking back and forth in front of the gramophone’s recording mechanism, pleading “do NOT go GEN tle into THAT GOOD NIGHT.”

Or do, if you’re reading that poem. Leave it to Dylan Thomas to turn one of his own poems, which happens to be the most affecting father-son poem ever, into sheer overdramatic hilarity. And then collapse to drown in the gutter.

The declared the winner last night, and All Things Considered reported it this afternoon. But I don’t have the heart to listen. Please, stop the madness.