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
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:
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.
Last night, I went to see Doug Bradley, known best as Pinhead from the Hellraiser films, perform his one man horror show. The show was composed of telling part of a Ray Bradbury story, reciting Shakespearean solilpquys, and telling scary stories like “The Monkey’s Paw.” I would like to share with the class one of his stories, and I’ll tell it as accurately as I can remember. Afterwards, I will discuss its relevance to the class:
One October morning, an IUP college girl was walking across campus. When in the Oak Grove, she saw the figure of Death. It was a typical figure, donning a black robe, a long scythe, and an hourglass in its opposite hand. She was scared, for a moment, but then remembered that it was close to Halloween, and figured that it was probably a frat boy, drunk and trying to scare people. Moments later, however, the figure was coming closer to her. She looked to her friends for support, but they had vanished. In fact, she was totally alone in the Oak Grove. Now the figure was right in front of her, and it raised its scythe high above her in a threatening gesture.
She had enough of this, and fled in the opposite direction. She didn’t stop running until she reached the office of one of her professors. When she got there, she was crying and screaming, still frightened. Her professor calmed her down, and then she told him of the figure of Death and how it raised its scythe in a threatening gesture. He assured her that it was probably just a Halloween prank, but she wouldn’t listen. She told him that she must get to New York City right away to see one of her friends. He said that its too far away to go there, and not worry about the situation any longer. But the girl wouldn’t listen, so she stormed out of the office, packed her bags, and was on the freeway speeding off to New York City.
An hour or two later, the Professor was walking across campus. He too saw the figure of Death. He decided he was going to get to the bottom of the situation and marched right up to the figure. “What are you doing walking around like this, using your scythe in a terrifying and threatening way to my students?” he asked. “I wasn’t doing it in a bad way,” the figure said, “but in a way of surprise.” “Surprise?” the professor asked. “Yes,” Death said, “I was surprised to see her here in Indiana, because I have an appointment with her tonight in New York”
So, that’s the story he told. Now, what is interesting, is that he also told us that the story originated in Iraq several thousand years ago. He also told us about how he evolved the story so that it would fit where he was more appropriately. This was interesting, because I got to experience storytelling being handed down to me in a way that we discuss in class. Now that I had that oral experience, I was able to recount it to the class. I also evolved it for the class more appropriately, by typing it here rather than performing it. This seems to me to fall in with our talks about Proverbs, and how they are passed down and then modified in some situations to give advice or to help someone learn a quick lesson.
These and many other audio recordings can be found at Ubu.com and writing.upenn.edu/pennsound
Homework: for Wednesday, choose one of these, listen to it, and then write a comment in which discuss its oral dimensions. Bonus points if you can cite a Foley “proverb” in the course of your discussion!
David Antin, War - SUNY Buffalo, March 2003.
Christian Bok - Performing a Hugo Ball Poem,
Christian Bok - Performing Kurt Schwitters
Lee Ann Browne - Ballad of Susan Smith
Lee Ann Browne - Singing Blake’s Sunflower
Vachel Lindsey - The Congo 1, 2, and 3
Jerry Rothenberg - from Poland(?) performed with the Klezmatics
Paul Blackburn - The Once Over from the BMT
Helen Adam - Cheerless Junkie SOng
Emmet Williams - The Duet
Robert Duncan - To Speak My Mind
John Cage - From Mureau
Patti Smith - Poem for Jim Morrison
Philip Glass - from Einstein on the Beach
BP Nichol - Dada Lama
Charles Dodge - Speech Songs
Liam O’Gallagher: Border Dissolve in Audiospace
Jack Kerouac - Old Angel Midnight, 1, 2, and 3
Kenneth Gaburo - Lingua II Maldetto
Abbie Hoffman - Our National Anthem, Flush for Nixon, The Drug Company, Malachy’s Bar and Grill, Washington at Valley Forge
Sabina’s poetic performance differ from some of what we’ve come to know in several ways:
She practices composition through performance, rather than reciting or singing texts composed in the past
Her words are not primarily narrative or expressive, nor are they oriented towards a group
The spiritual dimension is heightened, as her words are taken to be efficacious (i.e. they make things happen, they heal)
What are some other features of her art or its reception that seem notable to you?
You can read a bit more about her at the Ethnopoetics exhibit on UBU web
http://www.ubu.com/ethno/soundings/sabina.html
This site also features an audio file:
As a reader and fan of Sabina, I have little trouble appreciating her work as aesthetic — as its groundedness in myth and sounding resonate with what I would call poetries origins. But it does not surprise that especially in hearing her for the first time, the music might seem primitive or its spiritual sensibility unsophisticated.
The first hurdle might be in suspending one’s disbelief with regard to Shamanism works towards at least a relativistic appreciation of a world-view in which derranged states of mind are worthy of respect as potential sources of wisdom. We lock such folks up….
I find Hereberto Yepez’s two essays really striking in their insistence on the poetic genius of Sabina and the obstacles her work must face, in terms of an ideology that opposes mind and body, sky and earth, spirit and dirt.
An multi-lingual Anthroplogist and poet, Dennis Tedlock introduced an influential method of transcription to the study of oral poetry. Unsatisfied with representations of content alone, Tedlock began to concentrate on working with recordings (at a time when these were often discarded after being transcribed). Modeling his method on the poet Charles Olson’s ideas about “projective verse” (using space on the page as a score for performance), Tedlock began to try to create performative scores.
Important in this process is the fact that many elements of speech performance (paralinguistic features like pace, tone, intonation…) mean the same in Zuni and English. One important consequence is that stories suddenly seemed much more like poetry (measured language) than they ever before had to outside audiences! Thus there’s a cultural-political dimension to this 1960s/1970s work–the legitimation, in the eyes of some, of oral practice as a literary art.
This is from a radio show that might be of interest; it includes the “hearing exercise” I mentioned in class, and which we simulated:
In his program Dennis talks about more sensative ways of conducting anthropology and performs a translation of the Zuni story “Coyote and Junco.” He also plays tapes from various oral traditions. His program was recorded in the Music Department at SUNY Buffalo in 1995.