Sonnet L’Abbé is the author of A Strange Relief, Killarnoe, and Sonnet’s Shakespeare. Their styles range from lyric to concrete and experimental, and their themes include racial, national and settler identity, relationship to land, surviving sexual assault, plant knowledge, physiology of music and love. They were the editor of Best Canadian Poetry 2014, and their chapbook, Anima Canadensis, won the 2017 bpNichol Chapbook Award. L’Abbé now lives in Nanaimo BC and is a professor at Vancouver Island University.
Interviewed by Brianna Bock.
Brianna Bock (BB): When creating a new piece, what is the deciding factor between making a song or a poem?
Sonnet L’Abbé (SL’A): For most of my career I didn’t create poems intended as spoken word. I wrote for the page, with a strong attention for sound. Sound is important in poems, in any creative writing, really, because voice is the vehicle for whatever it is you’re saying. An intimate, interesting, authentic sounding voice, even on the page, is a sonic project. So whether I’m writing a song or a poem, there’s always that lyric, “singing” quality to the shaping of the voice.
So I guess the difference between a song and a poem is one’s intended audience, and one’s intended form of presentation. If I publish a poem in The Malahat Review, people are likely to only “hear” it in their heads, and they can reread a line as much they like. Subject matter also influences my decision to write a song or a poem. I have a song I’ve performed a couple times, that isn’t written down yet, called Cougar in the Club. It’s just a fun song about a woman of a certain age with her own money who’s not looking for anything serious … and I don’t think I need to put that one out on paper, though I am interested in recording it. A song travels differently. A poem can be so detailed; one can dig into complex topics like identities or competing histories, for a page or for a whole book if you want. I’m still learning how much depth or complexity can be achieved with a song. At least in terms of concepts.
BB: What are the differences and similarities between performing a song vs an oral presentation of a poem?
SL’A: In order to present poems for the page at literary readings, I hadn’t needed to study any kind of “literary reading technique.” Everything I learned about vocalizing was from watching other people read their own work aloud. I just wanted to read my work in a way that made sure people heard and understood the poem.
When I still thought of myself as basically a lyric poet, I didn’t ever worry if read something one way one time and read it a different way another time, if I changed the rhythm or changed the pitch between readings; the experience could be fluid. I would just try to ride my emotion of the time. If I was feeling low, and I felt like reading my poem in a low, slow delivery because that’s where I was at, I would just do that.
Singing, particularly jazz, has a bit of space to let your current emotion dictate your choices, but it’s a very different space, especially if you have a band. One thing I love about singing is how particular singers are about phrasing, that is, where your breath starts and ends as you speak. It’s such an important dimension of the storytelling. Often singers are taught physical technique first and start thinking about storytelling as they mature. Poets who write for the page who decide they want to write songs and perform them may find that they already have great strengths in terms of writing phrases that naturally fit the breath.
And singing has so much more technique involved: to sustain your breath, to stay true to pitch, how you shape a vowel or dynamics. I think my early exposures to dub poetries and sound poetries, and my sense of poetry as a yoga practice (of breath/spirit), informed my attention to sound and my understanding of a reading as a performance. But singing has a whole other bandwidth of creativity that’s happening in the moment as you breathe, that I was only intuitively intentional about when reading page poetry.
BB: When writing a song, what comes first for you? The lyrics or the music, or do they both come to you at once?
SL’A: I think it can happen in all three ways. Because I’m a language person, I get interested in phrases. Somebody will say something or I’ll have a thought that shows up in metaphor, and the sound of the words will be interesting to me and the rhythm of that phrase will suggest the melody. Then I can play around with notes and hear what notes suggest how that phrase wants to be voiced. Once you’ve got a little chunk that you’re like ‘oh, yeah, I want that melodic phrase in there’, then you can build from there and create the song architecture that supports the phrase you love.
BB: I’ve heard some people claim that songs are essentially poetry, which rings a little overly simplistic to me. There’s definitely overlap, but in your opinion, what makes a song a song and a poem a poem?
SL’A: I also thought that when I started writing songs! I thought the transition would be quite easy, because many closed form poems have very strong rhythm in each stanza. Refrains, some text that’s repeated like a chorus, take a text into song territory. I think of ballads, which are a name for both a kind of song and a kind of poem. But many of those closed forms, many of which emerged from song forms, also have a more conservative, formal or antiquated sound on the page. I’ve written poems that had the title “Song for ______”. Poems that I titled “Songs” usually had very deliberately rhythmic stanzas, and then that rhythm gets repeated in subsequent stanzas.
When you read free verse out loud, you don’t necessarily hear a strong rhythmic pattern. It can sound kind of prose-y. The writing may have very deliberate musicality, but not be very repetitive. First-year students will often be like, ‘Why is this even a poem? It just sounds like somebody wrote something down and broke the lines.’
What songs have that poems do not is deliberate relationships between pitches, and between lengths of breath. Even when one signs a cappella, there is a harmonic structure there.
BB: I’ve heard the claim that poetry is best read out loud. Do you feel that that’s the case? What do oral performances add to poetry?
SL’A: When I’m reading another writer’s poetry book for my own pleasure, I don’t usually read it out loud. But when I am writing my own poetry or teaching others to write poetry, I think it’s essential that you read the work out loud as you compose. Because what you are doing is creating a score for the mind.
In order for speech or verse to land as art, the ear wants an experience of language that doesn’t have all the ramble-yness and digression that we’re used to in speech. Readers want that craft and creativity. You as the writer have to read your words out loud to understand what is going to be going on in your reader’s head when they are silently reading it.
The way that people perform their poem, to me, is like a window into their theory of poetry. When the poet speaks, does it sound as though they’re imposing a cadence onto the language, or do the words and their cadence seem completely integrated? Does their voice sound like A Poetic Voice, with a formality they reserve for reading, or does their voice sound casual, or intimate, or “natural” but yet move in incredibly complex ways? Just like one’s singing voice and speaking voice are different, one’s poetic voice is also heightened form of one’s speaking voice. I love hearing the various sounds of people’s poetic voices.
BB: Building off the previous question, having published poetry, what does the format of text add to poetry that an oral performance can’t?
SL’A: First,there’s an opportunity for the reader to reread. Even in the middle of the poem, they can stop and start over. Second, the poet can use space of the page as a dimension of the creative act. People’s eye movement connects to their emotional responses. You need the page for line breaks and any kind of visual stuff you want to do with the poem. If a reader is used to reading left to right, that becomes your norm, then they will have a tiny emotional response if they are forced to right to left. If your eye has to jump down to the bottom of the page, you feel it, physically. So those kind of effects can only happen on a page.
BB: I’m a playwright, and while I can’t speak to poetry, I know that when writing dialogue, it does feel distinctly different to write from writing prose. There’s a sense of writing something that feels good to say/hear out loud vs. writing something that feels good to read. When writing poetry to be performed, is that something you keep in mind?
SL’A: When you’re writing for a dramatic play, you somewhat have in mind that the audience, as they watch, will not get closeups like they would in film storytelling. Because you are writing for actors speaking to each other across a stage, the physical constraints of the form shape how you craft your text. Similarly, if I know I’m writing to be heard, not read, I write it differently. I keep in mind that I only have one shot to reach the reader. They’re not going to get the chance to look up my subtle allusions to, say, Sappho. I write in a more accessible tone; I’ll repeat myself more; I might foreground sound play more. If I’m going to allude to Sappho for an audience who can’t go buy the book, I am going to be blunt about it.
BB: What is it like to perform a poem? What draws you to public performance of poetry?
SL’A: Good question! Why do people sing? Why do people make plays? Why do we even do it? Some writers, I would imagine, never want to read their stuff in public. They’re like, ‘There’s a reason why I wrote a book. I never want to go and interact with people at all!’ That we as human animals ever want to express ourselves lyrically is somewhat of a magical phenomenon to me. And singing really is the most bizarre thing to want to do. I tell myself birds do it, and not to overthink it! Singing literally physically feels good, when it’s working. It’s literal physical fun, like dancing.
I guess with both reading and singing, I like the opportunity to connect with people, and the opportunity to gain some sense of how what I have written lands with others. When you write something in a book, it might be satisfying to you, but you often don’t get to see it landing with someone else. It’s a lovely, really gratifying experience to be in the room as someone else takes in my writing.
In the context of all the different kinds of people there are in the world, such a small audience reads poetry books. Even among people who consider themselves literary, or bookish, only a segment of that small slice of society reads poetry regularly. I live in Nanaimo, and if I could only connect with people by getting up and reading a poem, my opportunities would be very limited. But when I offer songs, I have many, many more opportunities to get up and connect with people. In fact, I often get to share more poems, because people who wouldn’t go out of their way to read poems or go to readings don’t seem to mind a poem or two dropped in between some songs!