The Oral Interpretation

Your task for this assignment is to read a poem or a section of a poem aloud, as expressively as possible, prefacing your reading with a discussion of why you read the poem the way you do. Please follow these guidelines:

• The poem you choose should be at least 10 lines long. There is no upper length limit, but your oral interpretation and your discussion combined should fit comfortably within 10 minutes or less.
• You may choose a short poem in its entirety or a section of a longer poem that you believe can stand as a separate unit within the larger poem. If you choose a section of a longer poem, explain in your discussion why that section can be treated as a unified entity and what role the section plays within the larger poem.
• The poem you choose should be by an poet of the United States. You are not confined to poems or poets we have read for this class, although if you choose a poem that is not in our anthology, please make photocopies for me and the other students in the class. The poem should be primarily in English, although it is OK for the poem to contain brief passages in other languages. (If you choose a poem which contains languages other than English, please translate the lines in your discussion.) There are many poets for whom it's hard to say whether they are "of the United States" or not--if in doubt, ask me in advance.
• Your discussion should be anchored in an interpretation of what the poem means. What else you talk about will depend on the poem--who the speaker is, what emotions he or she is likely to be feeling in the circumstances, what the poet seems to be trying to accomplish with formal elements of the poem such as rhymes or meters or line breaks, and so on.
• To read a poem "expressively" is to read it in such a way as to bring out the meaning of the poem as fully as possible. This can mean many different things, depending on the poem.
  • In all cases, it means inhabiting the thought of the poem rather than merely reciting it. You should sound like a person who has a point to get across, not like a child reciting the pledge of allegiance or a witness taking the oath in court. The tone, inflection, rhythm, pacing, and pauses in your speech should vary to fit what you're trying to say. (The first requirement for ensuring that you inhabit the thoughtof the poem is to make sure that you fully understand it, as a whole and in every word and phrase.)
  • In some poems, the speaker is a definite character, speaking in a particular situation, sometimes even to a specific fictional person. In such cases, you should try to imagine how the speaker feels about the situation, and act out that emotion. A certain amount of oral interpretation is always acting in the theatrical sense.
  • Some poems play with language more than other poems do; in some poems, the sound of the language (as opposed to what the language says) is a significant component of the effect the poet is trying to accomplish. While not losing sight of other considerations, you should read such poems in a way as to emphasize that verbal play.
  • Although as I have said in class it is usually best to read enjambed lines without a pause between the lines, there are poems in which the line breaks are intended to mean something or have an effect ("The Red Wheelbarrow" is one example). In some poems, the syntax is different enough from ordinary speech that it is difficult to say whether or not the end of a line coincides with the end of a thought. In poems like this, you'll need to find some way to represent orally whatever you take the line breaks to be intended to do.
• By the time you perform, you should have practiced your discussion at least once (not least to ensure that you don't exceed your 10 minutes) and your poem many times. I recommend that you try reading your poem in several different ways before settling upon one particular way--often, a more or less accidental verbal rendition can bring out new aspects of the poem that just thinking about it has not uncovered.
• After your performance, hand in whatever you have used for your discussion and oral interpretation. If you read your poem from the book and you want me to see how you have marked the poem, you may hand in a photocopy of the marked-up version. It is not necessary for you to memorize the poem, although you're welcome to do so if that will help you read expressively.

I will grade this assignment on the expressiveness of your reading, the subtlety and thoughtfulness of your interpretation of the poem, the ambitiousness of what you are trying to do, and the clarity of your opening discussion, more or less in that order of importance.