In my second to last year of high school, my English teacher introduced me to the power of
reading poetry aloud. She began with Hopkins, pacing up and down the classroom, her voice
rising and falling. Rather than asking us to study the poems, she invited us to enter them.
“Just listen,” she would say. At home, I read Kenneth Slessor’s poem Five Bells aloud to my
empty room. To this day I can’t board a night-time Sydney ferry without feeling a sad shiver
as I recall the line, “I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in, the night you died”.
Like music, poetry can fill me with melancholy, with terror, with longing, with delight.
Sometimes, we find ourselves stuck on the same track with our language, with our thoughts.
We forget that language is also about rhythm, and about delight.
Sometimes I find myself (usually mid-draft) stuck in what I think of as ‘getting there’
writing. I’m moving people about getting them here and there… but I’ve lost rhythm, joy,
delight.
Language is music. It’s our first tool as writers, whether we’re creating poetry, memoir, self-
help books or company reports. Rhythm can lead us deeper to the heart of our writing.
Poetry is the written form which comes closest to working with rhythm. And for me, poetry is
best spoken out loud, whether proclaimed or whispered.
Today, for delight and to remember rhythm, I invite you to find a poem and speak a few lines
out. Speak softly or loud. Take a walk and mutter the words to yourself as you walk. Pace
your house or garden speaking the stanzas.
Roll the words about, enjoy the sound and feel of them. Notice the way the words feel in your
mouth. (Seriously – I’ve spent the last few years learning Spanish and one of the things I
adore about it is the feel of the words in my mouth. This, I realise, is partly because I’ve long
ago stopped noticing how words feel in my native tongue. The physicality of language is one
of its pleasures. (In my early twenties, I performed poetry throughout the UK. It was the
nineties, and so I am sorry to say that there was frequent ‘softening into the floor’.)
Speak. Proclaim. Whisper. Mutter. Move if it pleases you.
If you want to take the rhythm further, write the line down at the top of a page and let it lead
you to another line of your own. Let the rhythm and musicality of the line inform the
temperature of your own writing. Write another line and another, speaking the lines out loud,
revelling in the poetry of your own words, your own new rhythm.
The idea is not to interpret but simply to listen. No judgement, just contemplation.
Some poems I love to speak out loud:
Ghazal for Staying Safe, Munira Tabassum Ahmed
The Windhover, Gerard Manley Hopkins
Play with the words, find the lines that make you sing, that lead you to your own music.
Writing isn’t just about meaning, about character, about story. It’s also music. Find the
rhythm in your words.
You might prefer to speak the words of a song (which is, after all, poetry set to music).
Remember Kylie Minogue deadpanning the lyrics to ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ with Nick
Cave? Anything can become this sort of play.
And when you’ve played with the sound of someone else’s words, speak your own. Proclaim
them. Celebrate the rhythm of your language. When you speak your words aloud, as though
they are poetry, you’ll start to notice your own rhythms.
Your prompt for today:
The rush of words…
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