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?
One of the ongoing topics of discussion/argument throughout the class has been the issue of gratification — specifically, which is more important for performance poetry/literature? Is it what the writer feels or how the audience responds? Is it only a solitary feeling of pleasure that needs to be derived from a performance/text, or, as Shaun puts it, is mutual masturbation the better path to tread?
It is, of course, a sticky line to walk. Some feel that writing a piece of poetry strictly to evoke a positive response from an audience cheapens the writter to being little more than another player to the pezzonovante (read bourgeoisie/popular masses to those unfamiliar with the term) in an attempt to fit into popular or accepted culture, be it that of the majority or lesser-known slam groups and underground poet societies. Others that feel poetry and performance is intended to be a sharing of minds can be seen in certain lights to be a little too opinionated or egotistical (the Buffalo type — like me). Scholarly rhetoric and stylistics make the text dry or thin, at least that is how it appears. Examining both types, though, and reactions from audiences, I’ve come to the conclusion that we are asking the wrong question. It isn’t so much “Which is better?” as it is “Why can’t they be considered the same thing?”
Is it possible to make a point in a pleasurable way, that the audience can understand and appreciate? Of course. Is the driving need to be entertaining cheapening the position of the text? Not necessarily. Can we derive a lesson in social and/or moral responsibility from something that entertains us? Yes! Can we be entertained by poetry that is tightly structured according to rules and based around ideas and/or experiences that mean relatively nothing to us personally? Duh; of course! So, structured or slam (arguably they can be the same thing, but for the sake of argument, give me a break, alright?), free-verse or an English Sonnet (that follows all thirty some rules for them that exist), value can be found in just about anything — even the worst piece of poetry or prose can serve as a bad example.
So how do we go about judging a performance/text? Ultimately, the creator decides what method to use, and whatever they choose is relavent and correct according to their individual tastes. They can decide to judge for themselves the value of their work (which is a method that I use, leery of outside interference on my creative processes), in which case they themselves are the audience; or, they can transfer that power to an exterior audience, like with slam competitions. Neither way is inherently wrong, except in the case of opinion, to which everyone is entitled at least one. So if we can’t agree on which of these is right, can we at least agree to disagree?
i’m typing this from home cause i’m a bit weak today, but the argument of purpose in poetics and purpose in slam/ performance varied from one to the next and while i tried to emphasise the point that the moment, that singular note of time from the end of the poets entire peice, to the moment of recognition from the audience can make or break intent, while dan might write from the masterbatory point of pleasing himself (though he does please others as well) , some people are just there to spread the message of the poem, and while poems can be shitty and a ventilation process, they can just as often be an informative medium for the uncommon of people to fall into, nobody digs poetry anymore, not like the old days, their still afraid that poetry is like the old days and cringe at the word poet. slam poetry and performance poetry stives to take a new approach to the same creature of literature, utilizing emediacy (i’m an english minor fuck off me spelling grammer snipers). people need to feel and understand right now, or their moving on to the next reality tv show.
or is there another way we can make poetry a viable powerhouse in modern america?
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!
Maria Sabina brings a very big concept to the table, is our culture the only one who shuns different religions the way it would Maria Sabina? Religion to our society is sturctured, balanced, sober and often emotionless. Most people would look at Sabina and say there has to be something wrong with her, she’s chanting and screaming these meaningless non rhyming words. Once anyone where to confirm the fact that she ate a “mushroom” before performing/healing she would surely be dismissed without a second thought. I guess it just makes me wonder what is so different that our culture has become so close minded as opposed to other cultures, what has happened to us?
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.
with the past readings i’ve been thinking, are we a hybrid of an oral and a text culture?, sure we’ve been ‘hearing’ that we’re a literate culture and we’ve been educated to depend on the text, but in that’s on in terms of science, business, formalities, and part of our educational process, the other, (in my opinion the reason society can bear to exist) is still highly focused in the oral, the music, stories, conversation, improvisation, communication. we might have to read stories and write papers in class, but we often have to hear family stories from aging family orally, we hear music across the radio, etc. what is everyones take on this are we a hybrid, or have we essentially given ourselves to the text?, you don’t need to mention that in most things there is an underlying text, that’s obvious, but you could present mabey the benefits of both a purely oral culture and that of the written culture, and what we gain/loose by having a hybrid,
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?
Today our class discussion included a treatment of authenticity when collecting oral literature, with varying viewpoints expressed. I am very interested in the topic, so I’d like to continue that discussion here if anyone has any further thoughts to express.
I mentioned that I feel that no transcription of an oral text, no matter how faithful, can be authentic because an oral text is fundamentally different from a written text–one is fluid and changing, while the other is fixed and unchangeable. The transcription of an oral text creates a script for the creation of a specific instance of the oral text rather than the creation of the text itself (though, to what extent is one performance of a story/etc. the same text as a different performance? What if there is a different performer?).
However, as I ponder more on the subject it strikes me that the same is true of any written text as well–even as I write these words I am making occasional revisions and correcting spelling errors. The version that will eventually be seen is “better” than the version that I am making as I go (in that it conforms more closely to accepted rules of grammar), but it is not an “authentic” version because it overlooks the steps that took place in the creation of these words.
It seems to me that while reading a work like Tedlock’s translation we are extremely aware of the artificial nature of the text in front of us, but that there is a cultural tendency not to look at a “finished” written text as artificial. Where can authenticity be found? In the finished product? In the process? In the mind of the author? Or somewhere else?
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).