Mark Doty Reflection

I have always hated it when my teachers said, "Read your essay out loud. It'll help you catch mistakes." A written work is meant to be read, not spoken. It's possible that something, when spoken aloud, might sound strange, but if on the page it looks perfectly good, why should you change it? After all, the reader won't be speaking the story aloud. How many good written lines, I wonder, would be lost if their authors had decided to read aloud their works beforehand?

This was more prevalent in Mark Doty's reading than in all the readings before that. Prose writers, at least, have the advantage that there is not too large a discrepancy between what they write and what people normally say; prose, after all, is written in the common language of the people. Poetry does not have such a luxury. Its very form elevates it above common prose, to be seen and not heard. In a work where even white space is important, reading aloud a poem destroys its very essence.

This is further complicated by the fact that Doty's poems uses uncommon and foreign words generously. "Lumina, aurora, aureole?" "For a forest by Faberge, all cloisonné and enamel". When spoken, these words lose much of their impact. If we see the word on the page, we can be certain that it is exactly what it is: an uncommon word, deftly chosen for its purpose. But if we hear it spoken, suddenly we are not so sure. Does he pronounce it differently than we do? Did he say another word, but a trick of the ears made us hear something different? Am I supposed to understand what that word means?

"(dis?)guises; poetry" - and how does one even begin to speak aloud the parenthesis, the question mark mid-word, the semi-colon?

Nonetheless, despite the fact that his poetry was ruined by narration, I understood that his works were top-quality. The mark of a great work is that lines just pop out at you, sticking in your memory even long after the author himself is forgotten. The fact that his works are free verse yet still managed to make me like them is an even greater feat. "Brass buttons tumbling to the floor. Who's it for?" "plain prose, exquisite (dis?)guises; poetry, music, clothes." The rhyme is wonderful. It comes at the most unexpected times, yet the syllables fit perfectly together as a key in a lock. This is yet another problem with reading aloud poetry - much of the rhyme is lost when the words are subject to the reader's murky and imperfect speech.