With a tip of the hat to John Crowley.
"Nestor, from Greek Asia Minor, was a man who enjoyed a wide following in the early third century AD. He wrote erudite poems on curious stories, odd facts about farming and habits of hyenas. He rewrote the entire Iliad, avoiding in each "book" the particular letter by which it was numbered. The statue of Nestor has been found, but unfortunately lacks its head."
--Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians
"The common end of all narrative, nay, of all, poems is to convert a series into a whole: to make those events, which in real or imagined History, move in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion -- the snake with it's tail in it's mouth."
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Starnino fails to realize, however, that even if we deign to ignore the anachronism of such an appeal to the antiquary[sic] authority of Coleridge (thereby conceding that forms must both reflect and perform the ideas within their poems, rather than simply force these ideas into an unnatural container), then I might respond with my own appeal to Rousseau (an important influence upon Coleridge, and a no less anachronistic philosophizer), who argues that, because vowels express our most primeval emotions, 'vowels are the first, the most vital things, the hinges of language'..." --Christian Bok, on the Harriet Blog
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Is poetry a spoken art or a written art?
Steeped in fuddy-duddyism, I lean heavily towards the former, but recognize that a reasonable argument can be made for the latter. And, given poets’ inclination to want to have their cake and eat it at exactly the same time and in the same manner (third way!), there could be a “it’s both” axiom put forward.
I wonder if anyone has seriously tried to argue that poetry is neither?
Anyway, here are some dichotomies of the ear and eye:
Spoken word Written word
aural visual
impermanence permanence
fluid fixed
rhythmic ordered
subjective objective
inaccurate quantifying
resonant abstract
time space
present timeless
participatory detached
communal individual
(Sources: McLuhan 1962, 19; Ong 1967, 34, 73, 92; Postman 1979, 35).
Empirically, there is more poetry written than poetry spoken. Projects such as Poetry Out Loud, and anthologies of the Poems-To-Read-Aloud sort only point out the dwindling space for spoken poems. Another sign is the falling away of memorization. The written word, being permanent, does not need to be memorized. The spoken word’s impermanence means it must be.
The ever increasing hegemony of writing as technology over spoken media is no doubt one of the root causes for the evaporation of poetry as spoken word. If poetry is essentially an aural art, then attempts at revival and promulgation are only signs of poetry’s ultimate quiescence. No species is more visible than when it is about to disappear (from Siberian tigers to snail darters).
Other arts, not being language based, have different problems. How ephemeral dance is, and how hard it is to recreate great dances from the past because of the inadequacies of recording and notation. Maybe video is the solution, or has it own deficiencies in preserving works of dance art. I don’t know.
I have my doubts about Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (there’s something anachronistic about his argument for a work’s “aura”), but one small section points out that even paintings, sculpture and other museum-able works have been affected by the dominance of the written word:
“For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which captions give to those looking at illustrated pictures in magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.”
I’ve noticed that museum goers tend to spend as much time reading the captions and commentary as looking at the art objects.
Back to writing vs. speaking. A counter to what I’ve said above would be “but nobody is reading. Reading is on it’s way to obsolescence.”
But everyone is texting, twittering, facebooking, blogging. I don’t think the attrition in reading can be taken to mean that poetry as a spoken art is in no longer in the ascendance.
Maybe poetry is evolving. It was a spoken form, primarily, for most of its existence, but is now adapting to a changed and changing environment, and reflecting the concurrent changes taking place in other areas, such as the loci of public and private spaces.
If that’s true it might explain why we are treated to alarms about the death of poetry on the one hand, and it’s health and resurgence on the other. Or maybe that’s just one of those perennial antimonies, like the old complaining about the young’s loose morals, and the young complaining about the old’s….everything.
File this under Ramblings of a Middle Brow
