ENGLISH 338 - Oral Literature

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