Spoken Word and Victorian Recitation

Poet Paul Vermeersch has sparked off a verbose donnybrook with a post on his blog: “Why I Hate ‘Spoken Word’ Poetry.”

What is interesting about the ensuing dialogue is the degree to which it replicates the terms of the debate about Victorian recitation. Here, Spoken Word’s content and style of delivery is Victorian recitation: for its critics, the delivery is artificial, unnatural and formulaic; the content clichéd and banal.

The critics of Spoken Word poetry (like some turn-of-the-century elocutionists) argue that the inherent excellence of a poem will enable the speaker to deliver it naturally and powerfully; the style of delivery of Spoken Word poetry, therefore, is proof of its inherent lack of quality. However, this logic is belied by the fact that many poets massacre their own poems in delivery with a failure to enunciate and project, by reading in monotone, misplacing emphases and pauses, and being generally uncharismatic in front of an audience, a style of delivery that has become as entrenched, artificial and clichéd as Spoken Word poetry delivery supposedly is. (Reciting does require some skills, after all.) Does this therefore mean their poetry is bad?

No, some say, because they are ‘page poets’ not ‘performance poets,’ writers not bards. (Then why do poetry readings if you’re doing a disservice to your poems by badly reciting them, instead of exhorting people to silently commune over your chapbook in their private sanctums?) This is a problematic distinction, because there are ‘page poets’ who are also great ‘performance poets’ (usually those who are interested in sound poetry): a rawlings, author and performer of her collection Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists (2006), is keenly concerned about how her poetry looks and reads on the page, and about its performative dimension, which she herself tackles compellingly.

Frankly, I would like to attend a poetry reading where poets had to read not their own poems, but the poems of the other poets at the reading. I would be intrigued to see what insights might be gained when poet-reciters had to do justice to the poems of a poet who was a member of the audience, instead of labouring under the delusion that only they can be the conduit of the spirit of their poems in performance.

(Thanks to Carolyn for bringing my attention to Vermeersch’s blog entry)

“In Defense of Memorization”

Mark Bauerlein, in his article on Poetry Out Loud, has a link to an article by Michael Knox Beran, “In Defense of Memorization,” City Journal (Summer 2004), a conservative quarterly.

In the process of giving the reader a broad overview of the antiquity of memorization and its importance for historical figures like Augustine and Shakespeare, Beran makes some grandiose claims about the benefits of memorizing great literary and historical texts, and defends memorization against attacks by “progressive” educators, whose position he sums up in this wise:

Kids, in other words, should be free to do as they please; the teacher, in the role of “guide on the side” rather than “sage on the stage,” should cater to their whims; anything else is galley slavery. For progressive educators, to require students to recite “Daffodils” or memorize the Gettysburg Address is a relic of a “drill and kill” culture that inhibits the development of the self and is the educational equivalent of a chain gang.

In response to these educators, Beran argues that memorization, rather than being enslaving, is, on the contrary, liberating:

But the progressives’ educational philosophy is only superficially a philosophy of liberty. The progressive exercises in “guided fantasy” and “sensitivity training” that have replaced memorization and recitation do little to free kids’ selves. The older techniques, by contrast, are genuinely liberating. They build up in the child a more powerful mental instrument, one that will allow him, in later life, to make good use of his freedom. They cultivate those critical powers that enable an educated adult to question authority intelligently. The older techniques also unlock doors in the interior world of the soul. Classic poetry and rhetoric give kids a language, at once subtle and copious, in which to articulate their own thoughts, perceptions, and inchoate feelings. They help awaken what was previously dormant, actualize what was before only potential, and so enable the young person to fulfill the injunction of Pindar: “Become what you are.”

I think Beran’s view of the merits of memorization is as dogmatic as his depiction of views on memorization held by “progressive” educators. Memorization as a good in and of itself is as simplistic a belief as the belief that memorization per se is pernicious. Memorization combined with recitation is a way of both absorbing the content and interpreting the meaning of a text, by having to determine how it is to be read in order to render its meanings, an act with is both analytical and creative. Memorization alone will not develop critical faculties, just as creative faculties cannot develop in a void, apart from the texts that comprise our cultures and our pasts.

Poetry Out Loud

Mark Bauerlein of Brainstorm, the blogging team of The Chronicle [of Higher Education] Review, has an article about Poetry Out Loud, a national competition of poetry recitation by high-school students in the US. In his article, one can find links to an audio file (on the NPR site) of the performance of the 2008 winning reciter, Shawntay Henry, reading Robert E. Hayden’s “Frederick Douglass.”

Noting the high level of student participation, Bauerlein comments that the “numbers are proof that poetry can become a popular activity for adolescents if educators and organizers cast it right.” One of the keys to Poetry Out Loud’s popularity, according to Bauerlein, is

recitation. Students pick from a list of poems and recite them from memory. They can’t pick their own work (a restriction that earned some criticism in the planning stages), and if they miss a word or forget a line, they lose. “Rote memorization” is a bad term in education circles…, but without it, none of the drama and emotion would follow.

The Poetry Out Loud website has audio files of a modest number of mostly well-known poems, recited by Angela Lansbury, Anthony Hopkins and others (“Audio Guide“) and 5 videos of contestants reciting (“Videos“).

Of particular interest is the “Evaluation Criteria,” which includes Physical Presence, Voice and Articulation, Appropriateness of Dramatization, Level of Difficulty, and Evidence of Understanding. What is interesting is that the advice given about these criteria is almost indistinguishable from the admonitions of elocution manuals at the turn of the last century that were reacting against what they regarded as the highly artificial conventions of Victorian recitation. Especially striking are warnings against histrionics (“Above all, recitation is about conveying a poem’s sense with one’s voice. It is not theatrical enactment”) and the belief that the ideal reciter is merely a conduit of meaning that connects a poet to an audience: “You are the vessel of your poem. Have confidence that your poem is strong enough to communicate its sounds and messages without a physical illustration. In other words, let the words of the poem do the work.”

Mark S. Morrisson (see “The Pure Voice of Poetry” post) discusses the early twentieth-century reaction against Victorian recitation practices: “The prevalent critique of the artificiality of gesture and vocalization of Victorian elocution in favor of something more ‘natural’ developed, in manuals specifically aimed at verse recitation, into the understanding that reading aloud helped to elucidate the true meaning of the poem, allowing a ’surrender’ to the personality of the poet or even to the poem itself” (64).

Curious that we should still be reacting against artificiality in recitation…. But, how does one read ‘naturally’ a poem like “Ode on the Death of Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes,” a bathetic eulogy by Thomas Gray (1716-1771) and one of the poems to be found on the Poetry Out Loud website?:

’Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.

(Click here for the rest of the poem)

(Thanks to Marian Wilson Kimber for informing me about Poetry Out Loud)