A quick energy fix
If you feel lacking in energy, try reading a poem!
No doubt that sounds odd, so I should add that you have to read it in a way that releases the energy that’s locked up in it. You absorb that energy even as you express it. This means reading it aloud, of course – as if to an audience (though maybe just a small one). It also has to be the right kind of poem (I’ll give examples later).
Poetry is more rhythmical than prose and rhythm is a kind of energy. But a regular dumpty-dumpty-dum type rhythm isn’t energetic in the way we want (it’s too mechanical, like marching). True poetic energy comes from the interplay of regularity and irregularity.
In reading the poem aloud, all the muscles used in full breathing and expressive voice production become ‘involved’ with its poetic energy (hence the need for at least an imaginary audience). At the end, you feel more energized, more ‘fired up’ and more alive.
It’s a curious thing about energy – you can ‘use it up’ and find you’ve still got it, at least up to a point. You can do something very energetic and lively, to the point of feeling tired when you stop, but having stopped you continue to feel a kind of buzz of energy inside you. It’s as though you’re more awake – in a qualitative sense. But if you do such a thing to the point of feeling drained, it’s very different.
Playing Shakespeare is not my theme here so I don’t want to go into the fraught question of how to play Shakespearean verse, except to say that the fundamentalist idea that you should pause, however briefly, or even take a breath, at the end of each line is wrong. It’s far better to give the end of each line a little ‘kick,’ which is a very different technique and allows a run-on of the sentence wherever necessary. This kick is a slight extra stress on the last accented syllable of the line. I mention this because it’s a useful starting point for speaking any sort of poem.
Many people speak lazily. Among other things, they commonly let the end of the sentence or phrase ‘die’. When speaking verse, such habitually lazy speakers tend to do the same at the end of each line. But so too do others, who are less lazy in ordinary speech. It’s as though they think that the poem’s words as they exist on a page are enough in themselves, so these just need to be ‘read out’. Giving a little kick to the last accented syllable of each line corrects this very effectively, because it keeps the energy-level high. (Think of how competitive swimmers turn at the end of a length.) Note also that pauses should carry energy just as much as uttered syllables, because pauses should always be part of the meaning of the poem. There needs to be a kind of tension in a pause, never slackness.
While it’s vital to keep the rhythm alive, it’s also essential to find the organic rather than the mechanical in that rhythm. Here, it’s the departures from strict regularity of stress within the line that matter most. To fully understand this, we need to take a step back from a stress on stress. True, English is a stressed language – rhythm primarily arises in the pattern of (naturally) stressed and unstressed syllables. But rhythm in English is also partly determined by syllable length. Why does this matter? Because syllable length is only partly a consequence of the physical qualities of the sound produced (whether a vowel is long or short, or how ‘chunky’ a consonantal cluster is). It’s also something you have partial control over. This partial control involves the relationship between consonants and vowels.
Vowels carry emotion while consonants carry meaning. You can (partly) see this in relation to writing. If you write out only the consonants of a sentence it will very likely still be understandable, but if you write out only the vowels it won’t. This isn’t because there are more consonants than vowels – (there are far more vowels, in fact, than the well-known five (which are really letters)) – it’s because of their different physical character. A vowel is an outflow of air, with the character of the vowel determined by the shape of the open mouth and the position of the tongue. A consonant is a ‘cutting’ or a constriction or some other kind of transformation of that outflow.
Good diction depends on fully expressing the consonants, so here’s a simple ‘whispering’ exercise to help with this. Imagine you have to communicate a text to someone standing ten or twenty metres away. You can’t use a breathy whisper for this, it won’t carry far enough. Instead, you need to reduce the outflow of air to a minimum (which ‘drains’ the vowels of all colour) and to make the movement of your mouth in shaping the syllables as big as you can – as if you are expecting to be lip-read from a great distance. As you do so, pay attention to the complex and necessarily vigorous work of the muscles of your mouth.
Many people speak lazily not just by letting their phrases and sentences die away, but also by minimizing the muscular work required in forming consonants. You need to form the consonants much more fully, as in the whispering exercise, to realize how complex the requisite muscular movements are. Vigour and awareness of complexity are two sides of a coin here, or two aspects of the energy required to perform the exercise. This energy is focused in the mouth, though it doesn’t originate there – if you’re sensitive enough you’ll feel or sense it arising from deeper down (crucially, from below the throat).
The energy required for fully forming consonants is not the same as the energy required for fully forming vowels. Since vowels involve the outflow of air, their energy is intimately bound up with breathing out, or expiration, much more than with the shaping of the mouth. Sometimes we expire simply by letting gravity collapse the ribcage (as we do in an exaggerated way when sighing, which is a kind of 'little death' (we expire)). But the breath can be ‘forced’ out instead, more vitally, primarily by means of upward pressure from the diaphragm. This requires work, hence energy. The energy of the vowels, then, depends on how deeply into the lower lungs we breathe and how well we can control the muscles around the diaphragm.
The energy of the consonants is focused in the mouth and jaw while the energy of the vowels is focused in the abdomen and chest.
What’s the relationship between these two kinds of energy? Earlier, I said you have some choice as to syllable length, or partial control over it. This is because you can speak any text by emphasizing the consonants or by emphasizing the vowels. If you emphasize the consonants the text will become more ‘clipped’ and its tempo will increase, but in a jerky rather than a smooth way, and the quality or ‘colour’ of the vowels will be reduced. The effect may be of emotion being suppressed – at the extreme, a kind of irritability. If, instead, you emphasize the vowels, the text will become more drawn out, even languid, and the language will have a more sensuous feel. In general, of course, your aim will be some kind of appropriate balance between consonants and vowels. But it’s crucial to understand that you have a choice whether to ‘let the vowel fully live’ or whether to ‘rein it in’. Ultimately, of course, this is a matter of what exactly you are trying to communicate.
Where you ‘let the vowel live,’ the syllable becomes longer. A good sense of rhythm is rooted in such decisions. Why? Because if your sense of rhythm is restricted to the role of stress, then any attempt to foreground that rhythm will seem aggressive, like punching a punch bag. But if you understand the role of syllable length and its subtle relation to stress, it will seem like a verbal dance.
If you’ve come this far with me, you must be interested in the topic, so click HERE to open a file in which I discuss in detail some examples of the right kind of poems for this exercise, or ‘energy fix’. It's fairly technical, as it has to be, being writing about speaking. But that's preferable, I think, to me providing a lot of audio recordings, because you need to experiment with the possibilities and to discover for yourself what works.