Chapter 5

Reading Poetry Aloud

When I was 16, my English teacher at East Side High School in Paterson, NJ, was Miss Durbin, the same English teacher who taught Allen Ginsberg. I was horribly shy and introverted, but Miss Durbin encouraged me to read poetry out loud to the class, indicating to me that she loved the way I read poetry. In reading those poems aloud, the poems of Tennyson and Blake and Keats, I learned that words had shape and texture; that reading poems aloud was a sensual experience, as sensual an experience as eating a sweet peach. In those moments when I was reading those poems, I forgot how shy I was, forgot myself and let the sound and music of those poems carry me away from everything gray and ordinary in my life.

I have never stopped loving the sound of poetry. I encourage you to buy poetry CDs to listen to in the car as you drive, so you can develop your ear for poetry. There is something exquisite about being in that enclosed, secret, safe world of the car while a poet’s voice fills the space with the sound of poetry. I remember once driving an inner-city student home from poetry workshops, and when I put on a poetry tape for her, her face turned luminous and she cried. “I didn’t know it could sound like that,” she kept saying. “I didn’t know.”

Another way to help you develop your ear for poetry is to read your own poems out loud to yourself and to other people. Sometimes, it’s possible to hear when a line doesn’t work when you read a poem to an audience. Is there something flat in the line? Do you trip over a particular word? Is it possible another word would be better?

Writing poetry is not, after all, an intellectual exercise. It is rooted in the body and the body learns its lessons well. As a singer must listen to music, a poet needs to bathe in language, needs to let it enter through all the pores of the skin. You cannot write in a vacuum. You need to listen to poetry, to hear the beauty of the language.

But it isn’t enough only to listen to poetry. It’s important to read everything – novels, poems, cereal boxes, newspapers – and to listen to the way people talk, the cadence of the language you hear spoken by people in the diner or the symphony or the school. All of these things are part of the American voice and language, which you need to absorb through your eye and ear into your body. It will then always be there for you when you are writing, when you finally let go and let your pen move across that page, faster and faster as you go down inside yourself to the place where all poems hide.

The following poem, “Daddy, We Called You” from What We Pass On, speaks to language and cadence, shows the way we spoke – my brother, sister and I – inside and outside of our close-knit Italian-American family.

Daddy, We Called You

“Daddy,” we called you. “Daddy,”

when we talked to each other in the street,

pulling on our American faces,

shaping our lives in Paterson slang.

Inside our house, we spoke

a Southern Italian dialect

mixed with English

and we called you Papa

but outside again, you became Daddy

and we spoke of you to our friends

as “my father”

imagining we were speaking

of that Father Knows Best

T.V. character

in his dark business suit,

carrying his briefcase into his house,

retreating to his paneled den,

his big living room and dining room,

his frilly-aproned wife

who greeted him at the door

with a kiss. Such space

and silence in that house.

We lived in one big room –

living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom,

all in one, dominated by the gray oak dining table

around which we sat, talking and laughing,

listening to your stories,

your political arguments with your friends,

Papa, how you glowed in company light,

happy when the other immigrants

came to you for help with their taxes

or legal papers.

It was only outside that glowing circle

that I denied you, denied your long hours

as night watchman in Royal Machine Shop.

One night, riding home from a date,

my middle class, American boyfriend

kissed me at the light; I looked up

and met your eyes as you stood at the corner

near Royal Machine. It was nearly midnight.

January. Cold and windy. You were waiting

for the bus, the streetlight illuminating

your face. I pretended I did not see you,

let my boyfriend pull away, leaving you

on the empty corner waiting for the bus

to take you home. You never mentioned it,

never said that you knew

how often I lied about what you did for a living

or that I was ashamed to have my boyfriend see you,

find out about your second shift work, your broken English.

Today, remembering that moment,

still illuminated in my mind

by the streetlamp’s gray light,

I think of my own son

and the distance between us, greater than miles.

Papa,

silk worker,

janitor,

night watchman,

immigrant Italian,

I honor the years you spent in menial work

slipping down the ladder

as your body failed you

while your mind, so quick and sharp,

longed to escape,

honor the times you got out of bed

after sleeping only an hour,

to take me to school or pick me up;

the warm bakery rolls you bought for me

on the way home from the night shift.

The letters

you wrote

to the editors

of local newspapers.

Papa,

silk worker, janitor,

night watchman,

immigrant Italian,

better than any Father Knows Best father,

bland as white rice,

with your wine press in the cellar,

with the newspapers you collected

out of garbage piles to turn into money

you banked for us,

with your mouse traps,

with your cracked and calloused hands,

with your yellowed teeth.

Papa,

dragging your dead leg

through the factories of Paterson,

I am outside the house now,

shouting your name.