ENGLISH 338 - Oral Literature

http://humphreysfiles.nfshost.com/FinalProject.mp3

In thinking about how to bring it all to a close — this is just in from Pentland, an audio improvisation on Oral Literature. Give it a listen!
http://www.chss.iup.edu/sherwood/audio/student/OralLitFinal.mp3

Soul Nouveaux http://www.sherwoodweb.org/PoetryAudio/dana-soul-nouveaux.mp3

Dana Pulliam

Soul Nouveau

I # was a blank canvas

Empty, innocent and naive, and begging to experience Life-#

In its fullest, in its rawest, in the truest form of its Art#
I’ve been splattered with hues- Blues of sorrow, covered red with anger and slopped green with envy#

Veneers have faded and chipped with time and toil##
I’ve seen terrible things

I’ve felt even worse

I’ve been tainted, painted, and used

admired, hated, abused

stripped and beaten,##

defeated.
layered with affection#, cheated by intention#, relentlessly question my apprehension to trust

andtolove

to feel, to acknowledge my ##

Pain?
There# I said it.

E n a m e l c a n b e p e n e t r a t e d

I hurt, too

YOU MADE THESE COLORS BLEED
Thispain, Mypain

product of years of False Hope, Disappointment, Betrayel and

Lies##
It’s trapped by repression#

It’s squandered obsessions#

A motley collection of Life’s Learned Lessons, Egotist Ideals and Fear##
Fear this aesthetic facade may fade##
No, no, no, it WON’T

It can’t

I will rise,# I will learn,# I am the Renoir of my soul##

Ya see, I’ve discovered that What you see, is what I want you to see

And I hold the palette and I choose the shades
I will paint my future with the colors of my past

IwillexperienceLife- Help me ##
Help me scrape away all that hinders#

Scrape the greed, scrape the envy and mistrust, scrape the doubt, scrape the fear

Now layer me ##
Layer me with love

Speckle me with respect and admiration

Splatter me with insight, Cover me with hope

Smooth me over with integrity-reSTORE me, enSURE me

Implore that what I am is genuine

For I am the painter of my Soul

——————————

Poetry, what is it? (Dana’s Statement on Poetry and Performance)

Last class meeting: Monday, 12/11

Project Due: Wednesday, 12/13 (Leo 110)

Exam/Perf.: Friday, 12/15, 11:15am (Commonplace)

Possibilities for Final Projects

* Synthesis piece - what is oral literature, what are it’s formal characteristics, how would you explain the audience elements, what is the relationship between voice and text in literature today? etc. (Write an 8-10pp. piece that begins with a set of simulated exam questions, and then answers them, drawing widely on course readings.

* Critical Performance Essay, 8-10 pp (discussing a performance, issue, or concept relevant to the class. E.g. “Slam Ritual: Identifying Continuities Between Performance Poetry and Traditional Healing Chants of Maria Sabina”; or “Fronting the Self: Toast Performance and the Fashioning of Ethnic Identity”

* Critical Text Essay 8-10pp. (drawing on course readings) that identifies oral /performance features in a text/voice from the past.

* Creative Work and Commentary: produce a performance score and recording, framing it with an in-depth (min 4 pp) explanation of characteristic oral elements/ performance keys, discussion of scoring and performance choices, and statement of self-reflection.

* Audio Essay - carefully select and edit a thoughtful cluster of spoken word pieces; intercut with your voice, as narrator, explaining, commenting, and analyzing.

The latest remix, taken from the audio recorded at Tuesday’s Uncommon Words.  Enjoy.

http://humphreyspodcast.nfshost.com/PoetryReading.mp3

Please bring a one-page “thick description” of a performance, time-slice of a performance, or selected aspect of a performance for Friday. We’ll read them aloud.

Your model is Beech. Your aim is to isolate and make evident, palpable some dimension of the performance (audience response, delivery style, framing, etc.) through an analytical description. Aim to replicate the temporal experience on the page (you can be creative).

Use any live or documented performance. There are clips below from Tuesday, and from other sources.

Next week we’ll jointly develop synthesis essays to close out the semester.

Track 01 -

http://www.chss.iup.edu/sherwood/uw/audio/01UnWords-20061120-farrin.mp3

Track 02 -

http://www.chss.iup.edu/sherwood/uw/audio/02UnWords-20061120-sherwood.mp3

Track 03 -

http://www.chss.iup.edu/sherwood/uw/audio/03UnWords-20061120-group.mp3

Sung to rhythm - (Plain-spoken) - (Spoken with emphasis)

I. Struggle and Spectacle
Get up, stand up,
            (I said I would leave!)
Or you’ll be tased again.
            (Oh my God!)
Get up, stand up,
            (I want your badge numbers!)
Don’t fight, just give in!
            (Abuse of authority!)
Stop resisting,
            (Get off of me!)
Get up on your feet.
            (This is so wrong!)
Get up, stand up,
            (I want your information!)
Stop resisting me!
            (I said I would leave!)
II. Withhold Judgment Pending Review
(Since the incident I have been in close contact with the chief of police and have asked that the investigation into the actions of all involve move at the quickest pace possible without sacrificing fairness.

I am committed to our country’s system of judgment regarding the matter from the videos alone.

This incident arose out of a university policy that is designed to ensure student safety, which requires persons to be prepared to identify themselves.

There are conflicting reports of what transpired in this matter.

We must let the fact-finding process take its course.)

Get up, stand up,
            (I said I would leave!)
Or you’ll be tased again.
            (I want your badge numbers!)
Get up, stand up,
            (I want your information!)
Don’t fight, just give in!
            (I’m not fighting you!)
-static…-

Let me know what you think.  I’ll check this again later in the evening for any comments.

Best Regards;

Bill.

Please write a 1-2 page “thick description” of a poetry performance. You may take a whole performance or one piece as your object. Try to observe and articulate a full description that takes in the text, its delivery, and audience response. (Passages in Chris Beech’s article are a good model, as his description manages not only to evoke the moment but maps the relationships and dynamics amongst the players for us.)

You may choose any oral performance to describe: live or documented. Here are a few starting places for documented performances that you might use –

1. Say it Loud (Black Arts Movement clips)
2. Favorite Poems Pinsky project: non-authors read
3. Slam Nation 2000
4. Bernstein’s Talk To Me
5. Somebody Blew Up America - Baraka
6. Ginsberg Sings to Buckley
7. Kerouac on Steve Allen
   

Please add anything else you find of interest as a comment.

As we close this week, I want to encourage you all to continue working on your transcriptions — which you’ll present this coming Wednesday and Friday. It will be your choice to show, play audio, or even reperform the transcription.  For Monday, please dial up the e-reserve of Chris Beech’s “Poetic Screams of …”, which along with some further screening of Def Poetry, will close our slam section.

Next week there are a few live poetry events near campus, which I’ll recommend to you as occasions for doing some “observation” for your thick description. (You can choose another event, or write about one that’s been recorded):

?What’s thick description?

How do those involved in contemporary “spoken word” characterize the movement and distinguish it from writing styles, purposes, or performance of the past? Let’s discuss poems from the first part of the Smith anthology : Troupe’s “Chicago” (14), Hirsch’s “Song” , Quickly (p. 43: track 10) and Saul Williams’ “Amethyst Rocks” (55; track 13).

Assignments:  This week - choose a prior poem from our listening, prepare a transcription / score. Next week, prepare a “thick description” of a poetry performance (live or recorded).

Vachel Lindsay, from The Poet as Performer:

In 1899, at the age of twenty, he broke off formal schooling and set out to be a poet. Lindsay had one hundred copies printed of two of his poems and, inspired by the example of the troubadours of old who took their songs to the people, went out at 11 at night on March 23, 1905 in the streets of New York and recited his poems to various peolpe he saw in stores and on the street, offering them for sale for two cents each . . . “people like poetry as well as the scholars, or better” . . . Discussing the history of “The Congo,” Lindsay, in his Collected Poems states:

“Elegant ladies ask me hundres of times as I come to their towns as a reciter: ‘How did you get your knowledge of the ‘neegro’?” They put e in the word three times over. After a profound meditation I now give my answer to them all. My father had a musical voice, and he used to read us Uncle Remus, and he could sing every scrap of song therein and revise every story why what some old slave had told him. He used to sing the littler children to sleep with negro melodies which he loved, and which negroes used to sing to him, when they rocked him to sleep in his infancy. . . . My father took us to jubilee singer concerts at Fisk or Hampton . . . ‘

According to Eleanor Ruggles, Linday had practiced the poem for some friends before his performance, and “had introduced into some passages a nasal but musical chanting like the Gregorian chant he used to hear at the Paulist Fathers’ church” with the result that “The Congo” eventually became his “greatest hit”. When Lindsay performed “the Congo” at a small banquet in Chicago, the audience at this gathering “burst into applause” and biographer Ruggles notes that “It was his first overwhelming public experience, the end of the longey struggle of years to communicate. ”
The Congo:

Text and links to other parts, and other Lindsay poems, at Penn Sound: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lindsay.html

Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill - at the BBC.

Direct audio link:

Langston Hughes: Weary Blues, Negro Speaks to Rivers, Mother to Son, and Harlem

Weary Blues    Weary Blues

Negro Speaks of Rivers   Negro Speaks of Rivers

Here’s an excerpt from H. G. Wells’ “The Red Room”, just in time for Halloween.  The accompaniment is Prelude no. 2 in G Minor by Jan Hanford.  It’s available from magnatune.com, which I recommend if you’re looking for podsafe music.

http://humphreyspodcast.nfshost.com/RedRoom.mp3

One of the project options for this class is the production of podcasts. These may be original performances recorded and produced by students or legal remixes. (Please familiarize yourself with the reach of copyright law and the use of podsafe and Creative Commons licensed music before you upload an mp3.)

Click on the PODCAST category link to see all those generated by our class.

The files below are offered for educational, non-commerical use only. Please do not redistribute.

To add a file, link it in a post and select the category podcast
To subscribe, add the following feed to your podcatcher software:

http://www.sherwoodweb.org/blogengl338/cast/general/podcast/feed

To associate with I-Tunes, select: Advanced/ Subscribe to Podcast. Then paste in the url above and click ok.

Let’s continue our discussion of what if anything makes these published “voices of the past” oral. Do they invite an oral performance? What’s the difference in reading them silently and privately, versus aloud and socially?

When we read a poem, we see it on the page. Where is the poem when we listen? Should we look? Where is the poem when we lock it in memory?

Over the weekend and Monday,  please spend an hour or so listening to poetry audio (see ubu.com , Pennsound,  BBCs Poetry Out Loud , AAP Listening Room) and develop a performance for Wednesday:

1.) Imitate a noted poet reading his/her own poem in a recognizable style
2.)  Mash-it-up live, by performing one text in the style of another (e.g. Ginbsberg does Stein)

3.) Memorize the poem of a “voice from the past” but deliver it in a style suitable for the present.

I thought that I would be the first to post a remixed class audio project. It can be accessed at http://www.people.iup.edu/fzbk/Project.mp3 . Let me know what you guys think of it.

I noticed something interesting in class today while Dr. Sherwood read “The Wreck of the Hesperus”. He stressed a few times that the class members should not read along in the text while he performed (as difficult as the habit is for us to break–I read subtitles in movies even if I can hear the audio clearly). We dutifully put our packets away, but it seemed like nobody knew what to do with his or her eyes during the performance. A few of us let our eyes wander around the room, but for the most part we seemed to choose fixed points and stare vacantly into them while we listened (this is what I did at first, but then I got curious and looked at everyone else). Nobody seemed to watch the performance for more than several seconds at a time before looking elsewhere (though I may have missed a face or two).

I wonder how much this is a product of our focus on study (a literate practice) as the preferred activity in the classroom rather than reception/appreciation of performance. I haven’t paid a great deal of attention to this specifically, but I doubt that the same performer/audience dynamic is present during our meetings in the Commonplace.

I wonder if this is a product of the technologizing of oral performance that we touched on today. As we listen to the news on a TV or a song on a cd/mp3 player we are not required to be active or even to engage with the performer; in fact, she or he has no means to get immediate feedback from us whatsoever. Orality can lose its audience/performer dynamic for a reader/text dynamic if it is technologized and mediated (though it may not have to).

How does listening to the recordings of our performances compare with listening to the performances themselves? Do we use different strategies for each to enter into the experience?