The physicality of words

Verlyn Klinkenborg seems to have struck a hidden nerve with his Times piece on reading aloud: it was one of the week-end's most emailed articles.

He doesn't just mean listening to audio books and podcasts and other spoken-word transmissions, which I do a lot of while commuting to school and locomoting wherever. He's all for that, as a general boon to literacy and multiplier of ever-scarcer "reading" time.

But listening aloud, valuable as it is, isn’t the same as reading aloud. Both require a great deal of attention. Both are good ways to learn something important about the rhythms of language...

Reading aloud recaptures the physicality of words. To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips, is very different than reading with your eyes alone. The language becomes a part of the body, which is why there is always a curious tenderness, almost an erotic quality, in those 18th- and 19th-century literary scenes where a book is being read aloud in mixed company. The words are not mere words. They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading.

I don't disagree at all, having already seconded former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's observation that "poetry calls upon both intellectual and bodily skills," that "the medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth," and that the chief skill of poetic interpretation is one's own embodied awareness. Good poetry and literary prose are not airy-fairy wisps of aesthetic preciousness, they're concrete bits of experience transposed into a more portable and transferable form that can be easily shared.

I simply wonder who's doing all the article-sharing. Are there enough closet-poets in the country to create such a boomlet of interest in the physicality of language? Where have they been? What will they do with this newly-revealed passion for elocution?