The Sonnets of Christopher Whitby

Many of my poems are intended for oral delivery as much as for reading – an issue which sometimes causes controversy. The poems that are essentially little character monologues, presenting a persona’s situation or problem as well as attitude, can be acted as miniscule dramas, either directly towards an audience or towards a mute fellow actor (the sonnets in Exfoliation are fully fledged examples of this). Many of them have been acted on stage in an entertainment that intermingles the short character pieces with live music (violin, keyboard, guitar and soprano voice to date), reviving poetry’s age-old affinity with music without turning the poetry into song lyric or rap – a connection that in modern times we seem to have all but lost.

The poems do not have to be acted, but it is one expression they lean towards, and it would give me great pleasure to think that they sometimes lived in this way, whether on stage or simply as an individual’s ‘party piece’ (see bottom of this page for information on permissions).  At the very least I hope that they are voices in the head.  

I also hope that the selection here tests the wonderful variety and elasticity of the sonnet that can, to my mind, present ‘infinite riches in a little room’. The contemporary sonnet is alive and well, as any glance through a major modern poet’s work will testify, and one of the delights of any set of rules (if rules there are, as opposed to just custom and fashion) is to be found in bending and occasionally breaking them, so playing with expectations. 

I would like to think that the poems, being short, can be read anywhere: on a short bus or tube journey, in a school break, between the milk and the eggs in a supermarket, in the brief ‘if only I had time to read something’ minutes between getting into bed after midnight yet again, despite one’s best efforts, and turning out the light. Two minutes will suffice for a sonnet; a few seconds for a sentiment. I have no dislike of long poems (unless they are dull), but as life seems to pattern itself into ever smaller fragments both for writing and reading, I have moved inexorably towards the short. Besides, you can work on a sonnet in your head while doing other things, although I sometimes wonder whether mentally composing sonnets while behind the wheel of a car may one day become a traffic offence.

Poetry, Verbal Delivery and Acting

Some people loathe hearing actors speak verse, arguing that there is too much expression and emphasis given to certain words and that the subtlety of poetry gets mangled. For my part, I loathe hearing poets (or anyone) speak verse in absolute or near monotones, supposedly ‘letting the words do the work by themselves’ but to my ear and mind too often presenting the lines as if they were just items on a shopping list. Lifeless reading is so disappointing, yet so many even well established poets seem to indulge, as if it’s all too much effort to try and communicate at a personal level with the audience. We wouldn’t countenance it in a musician!

The nub of the matter is the relationship of poetry to drama. In a review of a television programme on John Donne, the critic A. A. Gill neatly summed up one side of the debate by writing that ‘poetry isn’t drama: the imposition of character, the inflection of emotion and opinion, diminishes it. Nobody will ever read you Donne or Shakespeare’s sonnets or Eliot with more poignancy and meaning, more beautifully, than the voice in your head’ (Culture, The Sunday Times, 31 May 2009).

In many ways I agree, but I have to reply that very frequently plays are also more poignant and meaningful in the head. Nearly all writing is: poetry has no special rights here. I’ve seen some very good productions of King Lear as well as some mediocre ones, but nothing betters my imagined Lear – though constantly informed of course by the performances I watch. This is partly because when we read, ambiguities of tone and of character do not need to be resolved in the mind and we can keep contradictions and variations in suspension; on stage, however, a decision needs to be made about ‘how to play it’. A prime example is Macbeth’s reaction to the news of his wife’s death: ‘She should have died hereafter.’ In reading it silently, I can keep all the shades between rampant rage and dulled sterility up in the air, not because I have some neutral tone in my mind’s ear, but because I can imagine all the possible dramatic tones simultaneously. Neutral mechanistic delivery does not keep these options open; it simply speaks of mechanistic neutrality. Absence of expression orally is an expression.

But that’s why I still go to the theatre and see new productions of plays I already know well. That’s the glory of it: the text is the seed from which my imagination and a theatre company can grow and harvest new ideas and responses. Each production is a new rendition.

I believe the same is true of poetry. Some poems lend themselves more to a spoken or acted realisation than others, and many of mine are written with the voice in mind. To say that poetry should not be given to actors, however, is to conceive that there is somehow a near-definitive silent version, that ‘the voice in your head’ has little to learn from anyone else’s rendition and that a poem cannot or should not be realised differently over and over and over again. Like a play. Try this example, my Ophelia sonnet (not in Exfoliation). The problem is not acting, but bad acting: stealing the show. Perhaps because actors are used to inhabiting characters, they may sometimes over-invent when there is barely any character to be.

Furthermore, when reading poetry aloud in words and music events which I have helped organise, I have frequently found that this activity has revealed new and different aspects that I had not appreciated in silent reading: the ‘stage directions’ lurking in Gawain and the Green Knight, the sheer vitality bursting out of some of Donne’s phrases, how Ode to a Nightingale is grounded in pain, and the desperate poignancy in Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur as the dying King Arthur’s barge disappears into the mist and ‘on the mere the wailing died away’ (cue violin drone and melancholy ‘folk’ tune such as The Birds have Gone ).

And before it was placed on an esoteric pedestal, poetry – even short non-narrative poetry – was an oral tradition, reinterpreted with each delivery. I’d like to put some of that potential back into circulation.

I trust both readers and actors will find something worthwhile, not least some characters, in these pages and the linked collections. And to be frank, even an overblown rendition is arguably a better fate for a fair poem (if it is) than silence.

Permissions

All the poems on these pages and those in the collections Exfoliation and 12 Elizabethan Sonnets can be performed, broadcast or printed by anyone without breach of copyright providing three simple conditions are observed:

• There is no alteration to the words
• The poems are not used in connection with any illegal, pornographic or otherwise exploitative material or context
• Christopher Whitby’s authorship is acknowledged in the chosen media

It would nonetheless be a courtesy to let me know what you are using, how and where, simply so that I can bask in the glow of thinking I’ve written some stuff that is worthwhile rather than it being cast to the four winds. You can notify me at christopherwhitby1@outlook.com.

Thank you.