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Foley suggests that “reading” poetry aloud is one way to recover an orality immanent in print texts, and the selections I’ve collected for us to discuss this week all have some implicit or explicit oral dimension.
As a starting point, we should think about the fact that most “print” poetry in the 19th-century would still have been experienced by ear — in some situation of collective listening. What would it mean to hear this recited by a family member or friend? What style would they have brought to the performance? What cues does the text hold?
Please have a listen to the audio I recovered from our last recording session.
Today we’ll discuss two of the three most widely recited of all toasts–both of which also share central characters who are fictive. I’d like to frame our discussion today by thinking about context, and Foley’s contention that we cannot “read” an oral text as though it were detachable from context. (59-60) ?What is the implied context of toasts in general, or specifically these two? What might we bear in mind as “academic” literary readers?
Signifying Monkey: Let’s discuss the teller’s attitude towards the character, style of delivery, and the importance of “signifying.”
Titanic: Consider the context of race (in a poem apparently “never” recited by whites) and as the recording of a historical “hero” who did not exist. Discuss the projection of qualities in this and other versions, and the complex portrait resulting from attention to those who would “tempt” Shine.
For Wednesday, please look at Foley’s “Third Word” (79-94), paying special attention to the features which “key” performance according to Bauman. We’ll test them against a few pieces from United States of Poetry. Prepare an “oralized” text for Friday.
Our in-class performances and the slam from earlier in the week led to the start of a very interesting discussion. At play, suddenly, were fundamental questions about the judgement of a poem, the role of the writer and audience. Before unfolding a position, I think it’s important that we’ve come upon this connundrum — reading and listening to literature from outside the canon or mainstream now has us wondering about the basic workings of literature — what makes a good poem, who decides?– which is brilliant.
So as we work through some of the variations, I do want to try to keep this multiplicity or pluralism in mind; it’s a good thing if we can entertain several even conflicting views at once.
1. Slam - as Shaun was presenting it - emphasizes audience response as the measure of a good poem. One cannot know, as a maker/writer, if the poem is any good until it is performed. This is a seemingly democratic approach.
2. Traditional orality - we now know is too broad to summarize in two sentences. But taking the Zuni and Yaqui examples, we can probably safely say that fidelity or fluency in past texts is the key to the value of a new performance, right? There’s little sense that Peynetsa or Molina are looking for props or worrying about rejection, though one could say that’s because the “public” has already underwritten the works’ value over the years.
3. Print authorship - tends to assume an external standard (beauty, aesthetics), which may not be appreciated or judged by the public, though sometimes by the specialist or critic. In this picture, the creators may think of themselves as being either responsible to their art itself (i.e. true to the poem) or their own standards of judgement.
I see some constraints or problems with each. In #1, we risk the same problems of democracy (vision displaced by polling; premise of an informed public). In #2, there’s a coherence and stability, which in times of change may mean it’s inflexible–or may simply be rejected by individualists. In #3, there’s the risk of insularity and egoism — writing for oneself alone.
Another question raised on friday seems worth discussing — the maker’s conception of his or her own purpose. What’s the difference between a writer or performer who defines what they are doing as a form of communication versus emphasizing the making of texts? Do Foley’s ideas about composition, medium, and reception have any relevance?
I’ll leave off now and hope this, Friday’s beginning, or this week’s readings provoke some further comment!
Don’t forget, class will meet at the Commonplace Coffeehouse during the regular time Friday. Bring a “re-oralized” piece to perform.
If you have forgotten where it is, head down the hill between dining and the garage. Behind the tall building under construction, you’ll see a building with a Platterz and Dominoes sign; enter this and in the back of the atrium, you’ll see the commonplace.
There are many resources on the web that give context to our reading of the Night Chant translation / transcription. I found this recent news article from Gallup, NM interesting. Robhenberg has a brief exhibit with sand art images related to a bead chant. Here’s an informal web exhibit that includes images of sand artists at work.
Along with the introduction, these intertexts have me think about oral literature and the idea of a total art: dance, song, visuals. Imagining these other dimensions may be even more important in the case of this Night Chant text since we don’t have as much attention to the “performance qualities” (voice, rhythm, etc.) and so can’t hear it on the page in the same way as some others.
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.
I’m interested in moving beyond the binary oral/literate, as Sean suggests. A friend of Ong’s, Marshall McLuhan famously proposed that the technology of modern culture has brought us back around to oral elements — he called it secondary orality.
Let’s think about our own oral/literate orientations, and have this set of tensions in mind as we finish discussing the Yaqui and begin Maria Sabina for next week. Both of these deal with just this tension or balance in my mind.
Walter Ong’s writing on orality and literacy has had a tremendous impact in terms of helping the imagining not only of the dynamics of oral literature (how it is made, preserved, and transmitted) but also in sketching the framework of an oral culture (and consciousness) from which it emerges.
Let’s discuss primary orality, and the habits of mind and word that Ong attributes to it. What does it help us to look for or tune in to in oral texts? What does it help us to understand in traditional oral texts? Where does it seem problematic?
What are some of the key features of the literate mind and its word art for Ong? Do these seem right? Does it make sense to associate them with writing as a technology?
Last week we discussed “Songs of Ritual License” with respect to an important contemporary issue for oral literature — the agenda (or paradigm) informing its collection and presentation. Where the composition, editing, presentation and circulation of print literature are typically controlled in some measure by authors — this is seldom the case with oral literature.
We discussed how the frame a “collector” brings to the activity might inform the poems, stories, songs that we experience.
Here are three zones we described, along with their respective emphases:
Literary (aesthetics)
Anthropology (specific cultural information)
Myth/Archetypes (generalizing of human universals)
As we look and listen further to collected texts, let’s continue to reflect on implied relations between teller and audience. Is this text shaped for internal or external audiences? Is it embedded within or detached from a historical and cultural context?
How are the dynamics of collection, presentation, and internal/external audiences relevant to the Zuni stories Tedlock presents?
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.
These traditional Nigerian poems interest me on a number of levels: as ensemble performance, as social occasion, and as instance of the power of ritual. I find it interesting that transgressive language (used ironically?) has a sanctioned place, that it is the function of the songs to speak the unspeakable–it seems the songs, not any individuals. As I picture the performance context with the aid of the introduction, I wonder how it is for readers who have not yet heard this … that is, who come to it as a text rather than an event. Finally, I’m thinking about it as a demonstration of the idea that language has power … since these poems are not only about sexuality, power, social roles and the like … but their saying is felt to have a consequence (like a marriage vow, a curse).