We know it existed, but we wish it didn’t.
For those of you who are curious about the poetry of preliterate times and how it relates to the poetry of today, I thought it would be useful if I shared my thoughts on these matters in this half of the book. Although one would think there would be a good fund of knowledge about preliterate poetry, there isn’t. Except for some specialized scholarship, there is general ignorance of the subject, especially among poets themselves who find it hard to accept that a valid poetry exists outside the act of writing. The best way to sum up this general attitude is: we know it existed, but we wish it didn’t. For most poets, poetry and writing are viewed as coterminous events. Anything that existed before the act of writing is simply shoved aside as a kind of embarrassment. After all, it’s not literature. Oh, we’ll accept Homer, is the general view, but let’s get on with a poetry that really means something. Who needs a primitive, unsophisticated, spoken poetry?
I knew very little about oral poetry before SOULSPEAK began to unfold itself within me. All I had were rumors. The more involved I became with the art of speaking, however, the more aware I became of the fact that oral poetry was anything but primitive. Not only did I become convinced that it was a poetry of immense power (perhaps even beyond that of written poetry), but that it could help us look at the nature of poetry in a new way. It became increasingly clear to me that it could shed some light on why poetry—the most human and most profound of our arts—has ceased to be a meaningful influence in our lives.
There was very little interest, however, in the insights I had gained from oral poetry. Our poetry culture, which has become hopelessly intertwined with our academic culture, simply wasn’t interested. Forget that poets themselves had problems with a spoken poetry, a more serious problem was that the poetry culture had taken up many of the values of our academies—values that often run counter to the true interests of poetry. After all, academies are scholarly institutions. Poetry is an art. There is an inherent conflict. Scholarship is always looking to the past. Art is, by necessity, on the edge of what is. But that conflict is a problem for all types of poetry—written and spoken. With spoken poetry, however, there is an additional problem. This is because spoken poetry (and especially oral poetry) is not literature, and our academies have no place for poetry outside of literature. It’s a Catch-22. Literature departments function best when they perform their historically accepted role of studying, explicating, and preserving written documents. How can you do that with an oral poetry? It is even difficult to do with performance poetry, as there is often much more to it than words on a page. There would have to be a radical change in the structure of literature departments to accommodate the field of spoken poetry. This change, of course, would be difficult. Our academies preserve better than they innovate.
It’s going to be a long time before our poetry culture begins to open itself to forms other than the written. Whatever spoken poetry has to teach us will have to take place outside our academies. And while I sometimes feel that our poetry culture will eventually catch up, it is just as likely that it never will. This half of the book, an extension of my essay, “A New Call for an Older Poetry” (available on our webswite), documents the insights I gained from my practice and study of ancient and contemporary oral poetry. It has become a point of reference for those who feel, like myself, that poetry has to become increasingly spoken if is to make a difference in our lives.
Language today more and more wants to be spoken and heard, rather than written and read.
I don’t think you’d get much argument today that poetry, as an art, has ceased to influence our lives in any meaningful way. Yet there are some poets who will tell you that poetry is doing very well thank you, as well as it ever has. But the evidence suggests this simply isn’t so. There are other poets, however, who will agree that poetry has lost its way. Some even suggest that poetry had its last high mark in the thirteenth century, or the seventeenth, or the early twentieth. But none can seem to come to any consensus on the matter, let alone suggest a remedy. This is because their time frame is too small to see the true curve of decline. If you extend it back to the emergence of man as an artistic being, say around 30,000 B.C., you can quite easily say that the decline of poetry began with the emergence of writing around 1500 B.C.
Prior to the advent of writing, poetry was everything. Anyone who argues with that is ignorant of history. After the advent of writing and the splintering of the arts, poetry began its slow decline. If you were to graph that decline, with the horizontal X axis indicating time (1500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.) and the vertical Y axis indicating influence on our lives (0% to 100%), you would have a gradually declining line. You might notice, however, a particularly sharp decline setting in around 1500 A.D. and then again around 1920, accelerating rapidly in that same direction after 1950. These little anomalies correspond to the widespread introduction of the printing press (1500); the phone, radio, and movies, (1920); and then, finally, television (1950). These anomalies may seem senseless to some, but the first date (printing press) corresponds to the decline of oral poetry and the subsequent rise of written poetry as the dominant form. The two latter dates correspond to the decline of written poetry as we began our very rapid change into a semi-oral society—a society where speaking began to replace writing as the dominant form of artistic, social and political communication.
All this may make you think that poetry is indeed in a terminal state. Well, it is, but it can be resurrected quite easily. It simply has to change form from the written to the oral. This may seem impossible, but it’s not. It just takes time. And courage. After all, poetry has changed form before. When writing emerged, poetry changed from oral to written of its own accord. At the time there was probably much debate against that happening, but it happened. Simple as that. And as we change more and more into a semi-oral society, I sense something equally potent is waiting in the wings for poetry today. Because what is slowly emerging from the clubs and cafés and theatres outside our academies is not a new form of written, “speech-like” poetry (although variations will leak out from time to time as they always have), but various forms of lyric, spoken poetry based on the principles of oral (not written) composition.
I should make some distinctions between spoken and oral poetry, as they mean slightly different things. Spoken poetry is a general term I use for any poetry that is created to be spoken and which may be accompanied by music. Such a poetry may be initially created by the act of speaking alone, in which case I would classify it as a true oral poetry, or it could be created by writing, or some combination of writing and speaking, in which case I would classify it as performance poetry. Most rap poetry, slam poetry, and jazz poetry fall into this latter category. From my own point of view, I see them as approximations of a true oral poetry. They are attempts to create an oral poetry without having to give up entirely the act of writing. Oral poetry, on the other hand, is a much rarer bird. It is a term I use specifically for a poetry that is composed without any use of writing or its mental analogues. SOULSPEAK is an example of such a poetry. It is composed (in principle) exactly as preliterate poetry was: by unpremeditated, narrative speaking. Although performance poetry is by far the more widely practiced today, I believe oral poetry is the Galápagos that holds the true key to understanding how poetry can survive as a meaningful art.
We are living in an age where speech is rapidly replacing writing as the major form of artistic communication. If this is so, it makes sense for poets to screw up their courage and take a long, hard look at oral poetry and the oral creation of poems. Just about every poet I have spoken to about this observation has viewed it as the equivalent of a UFO sighting. Just the idea of speaking out a poem at the moment of creation (rather than writing it) seems to them not only deranged but impossible. And horribly backward. And frightening. And yet, having made the transition from a written, to a performance, and (finally) to a truly oral poetry, I can say that, while my own journey was difficult at times, I have found the oral to be one of the most immediate and natural forms for poetry to take.
Oral poetry existed for thousands of years prior to the emergence of a written poetry. What’s more, oral poetry continued to exist side by side with written poetry until the force of the printing press eventually extinguished it in all but the most remote corners of the world. But reading and writing are on a head-on collision course with our electronically connected culture: we are returning to a new form of oral society in which a major portion of social, political, and artistic communication will be accomplished by speaking rather than writing. This change has already effected a corresponding change in the structure of our language and our expectations of it. It is a change that has been taking place since the late twenties, when the effect of the telephone and radio and talking movies first began to be felt by our culture. But it was our old friend television, in the fifties, that accelerated the change to the point where it can no longer be ignored. And because poetry is so intimately connected to language, it took the biggest hit, notably the loss of its natural, non-academic audience, after just a few generations of the telephone and movies and radio and television.
This loss should be no surprise given the force of these new instruments. But it is a surprise the way poets still ignore or deny the possibility of creating a viable, contemporary, spoken poetry while at the same time continuing to solely champion a written poetry that, no matter how magnificent it may be, is increasingly out of touch with the sea of language we are all being forced to
swim in today—a language that more and more wants to be spoken and heard rather than written and read. To ignore this fact is to ignore the obvious, something our poetry culture can be extremely adept at. If there are barbarians at the gates, they will simply do what they have always done when threatened: pull up the drawbridge and settle down to passing manuscripts among themselves.
This is happening today; because even though slams and black rap have already established a vast, nonacademic audience for a poetry more spoken than written, our poetry culture has remained all but blind to their existence. My own experience with the oral creation of poetry, and in particular the contemporary version of antiphonal poetry I call SOULSPEAK, has convinced me that out of this counter-Gutenberg revolution (of which slams and rap are only a very crude beginning) a new generation of poets will eventually emerge who will create a lyric, spoken poetry linked in many ways to the ancient, oral traditions of the preliterate world. How long this will take is anybody's guess, bound as our poetry culture is to the act of writing. Much of it will take place outside of our academies. But there is no doubt that we will eventually see more and more poets choosing to create not only a performance poetry, but a true oral poetry.
Whether we like it or not, we are all being pulled back to a poetry that wants to resemble speech (because that has always been a reoccurring eddy in the river of written poetry), but also to something entirely new to our times: a true oral poetry. Not a performance poetry, but a lyric, oral poetry that uses rhythmic music and the matrix of speech to realize itself—an unpremeditated, narrative speech, the kind of speech that takes place spontaneously between friends (and enemies) when matters of the heart are discussed. This is because unpremeditated, narrative speech is the only engine that can drive a true oral poetry. It is the very engine that drove the oral poetry of the past and gave it such power. While such a poetry can be approximated by writing it (or writing and then performing it), the result is never quite satisfactory because the act of speaking is fundamentally different from the act of writing. For poetry to regain its audience, it must become more spoken. That is the only face of poetry that our new, continually distracted, orally tuned culture is going to pay any attention to.
If the Psalms, orally composed narratives chanted to rhythmic music, still appeal to us today in their desiccated, written form, imagine how powerful they were when originally spoken!
There are ways that written poetry can profit from the inherent attractiveness of spoken (and oral) poetry in this semi-oral age of ours. Some significant part of written poetry will become more speakeable and hearable as a result of honoring the principles of oral composition. And yet, having created a good number of poems in both forms, I can say that I have almost lost my taste for writing poems. Compared to oral creation, it's like making love by remote control. I feel the same way when I listen to or read written poetry, including my own.
This personal experience with oral creation has lead me to believe that only poems that are orally composed can fulfill the potential of a language that increasingly wants to be spoken (and heard). This may be a difficult apple for many poets to swallow, but it is what the gods have placed on a low-hanging branch for us. When poems are truly orally composed (i.e., when the poet completely surrenders to the act of unpremeditated narrative speech), the whole structure of the poem changes. It begins to have those qualities that have defined oral poetry since time immemorial. The poem is more direct in structure and tone, driven by narrative, more married to music, less elaborate in imagery, more immediate, and finally and most importantly, intimately linked to the changing structure of our language.
Oral poetry brings something else—something unexpected—to poets lost all their lives in the silent, private world of writing. Oral poetry brings something immensely spiritual, both to speakers and listeners. It brings the sound of the soul speaking. This may seem a bit over the top for many, especially those who are more at home with the silent, printed word. But it is the only way to describe the peculiar effect of a true oral poetry when it hits the mark— especially multi-voiced oral poetry, which is the true, essential form of oral poetry. It is a sound both human and divine. It is the sound of beauty and the sound of truth, with a pacing and authority that come from a deeper source than the self. We can begin to see why oral poetry had such power for our ancestors. Great written poetry also brings us this sense of authentic speech, but not as a physical sound. Rather it brings it about through a corresponding, or analogue, interior sense inherent in the act of writing. It is not quite the same sound, however. Even when great, speechlike poets (like Frost) speak their poems, something of the sound of oral poetry is produced, but not all of it.
Whether spoken poetry is welcomed and allowed to enlarge and nourish our poetry culture will depend on whether it is viewed as an alien or familiar form. To understand spoken poetry (and oral poetry in particular) it is important to take a look at the history and nature of written poetry, and not just accept it as a given since the beginning of time. After all, it is just one form of poetry, not the only one. (And in the grand scheme of things, a relatively new one at that.) Written poetry's genius is that it produces the unique moment of awareness we call poetry, a moment both impossibly beautiful and impossibly true, solely through the arrangement of alphabetic symbols on the page. Written poetry answers the question: how do you make a poetry when you're denied the structural elements that gave ancient oral poetry its peculiar power? The answer is that you do it by approximating those elements through the "forms" of written poetry: meter, rhyme, line, stanza, and all their restless and endless permutations. It is sometimes difficult for us to imagine that our transcribed and translated versions of the Psalms and The Iliad were, at one time, orally composed narratives chanted to rhythmic music. And if they still appeal to us today in their desiccated, written form, imagine how powerful they were when originally spoken.
One measure of how powerful they were lies in the fact that they were orally maintained for hundreds of years before being written down as sacred texts. By way of comparison, Shakespeare's plays weren't treated with even half that kind of devotion by his contemporaries. Indeed, if it weren't for the belated efforts of a few of Shakespeare's fellow players, the plays would have been completely lost to us. So we shouldn't be so ready to dismiss oral poetry as simplistic and not worthy of our attention. After all, at one time, it caught everybody's attention. I realize this slight rearrangement of written poetry's place in the scheme of things runs directly counter to the beliefs of our poetry culture, which sees the only poetry being a written poetry. It is a position that it holds with all the tenacity of revealed truth. But having started out on the written side of poetry a lifetime ago only to end up on the oral side for reasons I still don't fully comprehend, I can say that although their surfaces are different, the unique moment of awareness that only poetry brings is present in both forms.
Most poets have given up the ear for the eye.
It is a sad fact that poetry has closed itself off from all but its academic audience. There are those who will tell you that poetry's audience has always been more or less academic (or elitist), just as poetry itself has always been (in large part) private, dense, elaborate, and un-speechlike. To some degree they're correct, because the very act of writing allows (and often encourages) such tendencies. But we shouldn't mistake writing's tendencies for poetry's true north, because the poetry we have valued over the centuries clearly proves poetry's desire to speak clearly and to communicate on the most human of levels.
Shakespeare is proof of this, as are Homer, Donne, Marvell, Herrick, Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Yeats, Hardy, and, to name a few contemporaries, Sharon Olds, Philip Levine, Stephen Dunn, and Gerald Stern. It is only in an age where poetry has become so confused by the scholarly needs of the academies that house it that such an exclusionist argument would even be considered. Or that poet after poet could seriously tell you that poetry doesn't need an audience. Or that they write only for other poets. Or that the act of poetry is enough by itself.
While all these positions have validity, we shouldn’t forget that poetry is our most human and most profound form of communication. It is the way the soul speaks. Poetry is an act of communication—the real news, as Pound once said. If it’s not, why bother to show it to others? Or even write it down. Why not let it just run through our heads like smoke?
There is nothing more dangerous for poetry, or any art, than its current isolation. It bespeaks a selfishness and lack of generosity that no art can endure for long. Oral poetry is one path to take to remedy that situation—if we have the courage and heart. Similarly, by honoring the inherent nature of oral composition (in the same way as much of the great written poetry of the past), we can substantially alter the course of some part of written poetry so that it will be more responsive to the audience struggling to find it.
We have truly begun to mistake the totem for the god—mistaking literature for poetry. We are becoming more writers than poets, and all this at a time when exactly the opposite is being called for. If poetry is to thrive, we must become more poets than writers. We must return to poetry's ancient, spoken, songlike roots, if not to practice that form of poetry, then, at the very least, to honor its principles in our writing. To see just how far we have strayed, we merely have to look at the bête noir of contemporary poetry: the line break. Once we do, we should realize we have become more concerned with poetry's effect on the eye than the ear, because that is always the direction writing takes us.
A cursory examination of the line breaks being used today (and the rationales behind them) should convince us we are losing our sense of song—of true, musical cadence. Some of these rationales, if they can be called that, can be found in A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (Longman Press, 1980). Today, in place of the traditional line break, we have (both consciously and unconsciously) taken up a kind of typographical scan/beat line break that works on the eye rather than the ear, bumping the eye from one line to the next in a rhythmic way. And it can work quite well if done correctly. The line breaks of Sharon Olds’ poems often fall into this modern format. The following is an example from a wonderful poem,
I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror:
Backwards and upside down in the twilight, that
woman on all fours, her head
dangling and confused, her lean
haunches, the area of darkness, the flanks and
ass narrow and pale as a deer’s and those
breasts hanging down toward the center of the earth
like plummets, when I
swayed from side to side they swayed, it was
so dark I couldn’t tell if they were gold or
plum or rose. I cannot get over her . . .
When the poem is spoken, however, and her line breaks observed as true rests, with the speaking of the line itself culminating in a slight rise in pitch, or tone, the result is awkward music at best. And poets know it. At many readings poets mercifully ignore their own line breaks. But you can't have it both ways. Either the line break is the equivalent of a rest, and is to be observed as such, or it isn't. If composers scored their works the way our poets do, we'd have chaos in the orchestra pit. If you write the break one way, you should read it that way: silently or aloud. Or else give up the pretense that contemporary poetry is meant to be spoken out loud, or have any relation to its spoken roots.
Poets experienced a similar problem, but in reverse, in the late fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. They were trying to accommodate the speech-cadenced rhythms still bumping around in their heads from the semi-oral age that preceded the introduction of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century. Skelton's (b.1460) sometimes uneven, odd, three-stress line has always bedeviled scholars because it has none of the ease of the ballad measure or the majesty of pentameter, but anyone who has worked orally knows it speaks quite well, and especially to rhythmic music. And Skelton, if anything, was a talker.
To Mistress Isabel Pennel
By Saint Mary, my lady,
Your mammy and your daddy
Brought forth a goodly baby.
My maiden Isabel,
Reflaring Rosabel,
The flagrant camomel,
The ruddy rosary,
The sovereign rosemary,
The pretty strawberry,
The columbine, the mept,
The jelafen well set
The proper violet;
To hear this nightingale
Among the birdes small
Was bling in the vale,
Ding, ding Jing, jing
Good year and good luck!
With chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck.
A hundred years later, those oral rhythms were still bothering John Donne, who scored his poems with special accent and slur marks in an attempt to introduce a speech-like quality to his iambic pentameter line. After all, how things sounded was important to men like Donne and Shakespeare. The oral arts were still very much in the air all around them. Donne’s markings, of course, have gone the way of the typesetter's wastebasket. We don’t care what it sounds like. We want our poems to be composed in a written language, not some crazy oral/written hybrid. This pursuit of a solely written aesthetic has gone so far in our times that we are now unconsciously hell-bent on removing any reference to the oral tradition. And the one major oral reference still left in written poetry is the spoken pause created and inferred by the line break. Line breaks, of course, came about as a way of written poetry imitating the inherent cadence and rests of oral poetry. Today, however, it bedevils our poets to no end because they no longer truly see poetry as an oral/aural art. They may pay lip service to the act of speaking poetry, but in reality, most poets have given up the ear for the eye.
It is the task of each generation to recast its songs in a language unique to that generation.
This is not the first alarm sounded that something has gone wrong with our art. Other bells are being sounded all the time. Some time ago Dana Gioia received somewhat of a drubbing for doing so. And yet his observations on the state of written poetry (in the May, 1991 Atlantic Monthly) are on the mark, as are most of his suggestions on how to correct the situation. But no matter how much you adjust, as he suggests, the way written poetry is criticized and brought to the public, or how many different ways you vary the format of poetry readings and deal with the phenomenon of MFA programs that produce hundreds (if not thousands) of very good writers we are accepting as poets but are often not (they are simply just very good poetic writers), the problem still remains: we are producing a written poetry today that is simply out of touch with a culture that is becoming increasingly oral.
It is the task of each generation to recast its songs in a language unique to that generation—a language that speaks both of, and to, that generation. But even putting the question of oral poetry aside (focusing only on written poetry and its ability to accommodate an increasingly oral culture), it is clear that not only are we failing at the task of recasting our songs, but we are also abominably slow in recognizing it. Even if we take the school of poetry we have today which sees itself as immediate and speechlike (and indeed it has some of these qualities), it is the exquisite end result of a tradition which calls for the writing and silent reading of a poem as its way of creation and appreciation. It is also a tradition which is directly opposed to the type of spoken poetry our times are calling for. The poetry coming from our more "immediate" and "speech-like" school (for example, Godine's New American Poets of the 90s) is just as “written” as its formalist counterpart. When spoken, these poems are so dense and unlike speech as to be almost incomprehensible after a few minutes. The ear simply refuses to work. Here are a few examples from that anthology to illustrate this point. If you have any doubts about being able to hear these poems easily, read the selections (the opening lines of each poem) out loud to some friends and see how long they sit still.
Brother of the Mount of Olives (Paul Monette)
Combing the attic for anything extra missed
or missing evidence of us I sift your oldest letters
on onionskin soft-covered Gallimard novels
from graduate school brown at the edges
like pound cake and turn up
an undeveloped film race it to
SUNSET PLAZA ONE-HOUR
wait out the hour wacko as a spy
smuggling a chip that might decode
World War III then sit on the curb
poring over prints of Christmas ’83 till I hit paydirt
Three shots of the hermit abbey on the moors . . .
Place Where Things Got (Heather McHugh)
I always thought if I could just
Remember where I started
I could understand the end.
The cat upon my lap infolds itself,
intends itself; it makes itself
a compact package, perfectly adapted
to the transient circumstance of my repose,
and chooses out of life adjacency best balance,
fewest gestures, all intelligence, no thought.
Monsoon (Beckian Fritz Goldberg)
The heaviness of twilight at noon.
Stillness like a thug in the wings.
The sky thinks over glass.
A man stares at the telephone.
There is a moment that waiting
becomes luminous, the roundness of the air
visible as he had always guessed.
He hangs in the dome with a few green leaves.
Then darkness clinches the house up in its sack . . .
These poems were picked by simply opening the book at random.