Elaborative Versionings: Characteristics of
Emergent Performance in Three Print/Oral/Aural Poets
The significant influence of oral literature, song, and vernacular speech forms on nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature is generally recognized by scholars, teachers, and editors. The authoritative, four-volume American Poetry series published by the Library of America serves as an index of this consensus, with sections on anonymous ballads, blues lyrics, popular song, Native American poetry (song, narrative), folk songs, and spirituals.[1] These and other popular teaching anthologies that do represent poems from oral contexts effectively subsume them within an economy in which they are appreciated, taught, and analyzed as though they were originally written, literary texts--according minimal attention to the mechanisms of transposition (from performance to print).[2] Given the general lack of appreciation, within literary criticism, of the oral/textual dynamics relevant to orally produced poetries, it should come as no surprise that little attention has been paid to the analysis of the oral delivery of poems composed on paper. Should a "poetry reading" be classified as a dramatic reading, a recitation, or a performance? Can the oral delivery of a written poem constitute a significant or primary means of publication and reception? These have not often seemed like fundamental questions or meaningful distinctions for literary criticism.
The very phrase "poetry reading" shows how criticism marginalizes performance, tending to see it as subsidiary, a secondary mode of presentation .[3] The reluctance of literary criticism to conceive of orality as a medium for modern poetry is at least partly a reflection of the success, over a half-century ago, of New Criticism in casting a focus upon the autonomous text. Scholars of oral poetry have derived useful interpretive guidance from focussing on "performance as the enabling event" (Foley 1995: 27), with a consequent emphasis on the "radical integration, or situatedness, of verbal art in cultural context" (Foley 1995: 30); New Criticism moved literary study in the opposite direction: towards an approach to analysis as an interaction between reader and text, with a minimization of cultural, intertextual, or authorial context.[4]
This essay considers the implications of situating literate, postmodern poetry in terms of a performance context. Using recordings/ transcriptions of "poetry readings" by Amiri Baraka, Kamau Brathwaite, and Cecilia Vicuña, it aims to: 1) demonstrate that each event constitutes an emergent performance; 2) explore how the performativity draws upon classically oral dynamics[5]; and 3) show how the emergent qualities of the performances are achieved through the specific means of "elaboration" and "versioning". By means of elaboration and versioning, these poems break through into performativity; literary criticism cannot be content to receive them as conventional texts but must consider their emergent dimensions.
Looking at print
poetry within a performance context implicitly creates a friction with the
lingering, teleological narrative (of the passage from orality to literacy),
but it explicitly challenges the habitual privileging of the written text in
literary studies. Scholars of both written and oral traditional literature have
often operated, perhaps under the guidance of the ruling paradigms of their
fields, as if boundary questions belonged properly to the other's domain. The
literary critic who ventures into the terrain of oral tradition and orality
will frequently find such exploration discouraged. Beginning with a classic
text in the scholarship, she or he finds Albert Lord claiming that "once
the oral technique is lost, it is never regained" (1960: 129). Reflective
as it may be of the situation of the oral epic in
Of course, as any discipline must when isolated, literary criticism suffers when it respects the absolute divide between the oral and the literate. Among scholars and theorists of orality, interest in the "interface of oral and written literature" has recently grown, leading as far as the questioning "if in fact these are still viable opposite categories" (Foley 1998: 107). This readiness to draw on oral theory to explore intermediate texts opens a door for literary critics, though they have not been universally ready to follow.[7] For instance, slam poetry—a primary instance of contemporary "voiced texts," poetry which is composed in print but performed orally and received aurally (Foley 2002 39)—is often discounted as non-literary by critics, according to Maria Damon. She critiques as retrograde the perspective common in literary study that the theatrical qualities of delivery and appeal to audience in performance based poetries are irreconcilable with aesthetic quality (326-330).
The poems I consider are all products of written composition; their composers are established authors, each credited with tens of books. Because their publication (performance) and reception are both written and oral, these poems are not identical to what Foley calls "voiced texts" (such as the slam poem, which is a written composition performed and received orally/aurally).[8] But poems that may be encountered both in print by readers and in performance by audiences are located upon a curious threshold. Does the poem of a writer become a voiced text whenever it is read? When its initial publication is oral? When its maker claims to have prioritized the voiced over the printed form? When its audience receives the voiced text as the authoritative one? As tangled as these questions may become, some means of figuring when performance becomes constitutive is necessary if literary criticism is to be capable of responding to print/oral/aural poetry.
II. Three Performances
Do we enter a performance each time and in whatever context a poem is spoken aloud? If we want to mobilize some of the concerns of orality more selectively, perhaps we can adopt the notion that performances can be distinguished from non-performances by a set of features which "key" performances (framing or marking them for an audience). According to Richard Bauman in Verbal Art as Performance, these keying features may include "special codes; figurative language; parallelism; special paralinguistic features (e.g. speaking tone, volume, style); special formulae; appeal to tradition; disclaimer of performance" (16). Of the keys in this catalogue, paralinguistic features have special bearing for this study. The contemporary poet Amiri Baraka has a reputation for giving performances in which he uses his voice to skillfully and dramatically work with paralinguistic features hilighted by Bauman, such as: "rate, length, pause duration, pitch contour, tone of voice, loudness, and stress" (20).[9]
Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones) began to earn renown as a writer within the context of the Beat and then the Black Arts movements, working with other Black Nationalists to produce plays and poetry performances that were both political and populist. Importantly, this reading scene meant that for many writers, oral performance became a significant (usually the initial and sometimes the sole) means of publication. Lorenzo Thomas observes that in the Black Arts period, "the poetry reading as a characteristic mode of publication reinforced poets' tendency to employ 'dramatic' structures and direct first-person address" (310). In explaining Baraka's poetics, Thomas emphasizes a further pair of touchstones: projective verse, [10] a post-war avant-garde movement, which emphasized that "poetry is an act of speech, that its element is breath, and that writing it down is a skill" (308); and the black vernacular, which he accessed by exploiting the "time-honored techniques of street corner orators" and "rhetorical conventions of the black church" (309). The speeches and sermons become like traditional models, so that, in the poetry, "what you hear is the speaking voice that trespasses into song; and an antiphonal interaction with the congregation that reveals the same structures that inform the early 'collective improvisation' of New Orleans jazz, bebop, and the avant-garde jazz of the 1960s" (310).
Amiri Baraka's
poem titled "In the Funk World" is collected in his 1996 volume Funk
Lore. A diminutive, four-line poem
in the mode of a sardonic riddle (72), it immediately precedes a sequence of
similarly short, pithy and direct poems Baraka ironically names Lowcoup. [11]
If Elvis Presley / is
King
Who is James Brown,
God?
The analysis of the performativity
of the poem is based on Baraka's delivery of it in an October 1996 event in
to the language and marks variations in rate, tone, loudness, and stress [FIGURE 1].[12]
|
FIGURE
1 In the Funk
World Well you know, we created ah, you know, small band
music, in [audience
laughter] and then they told us that, uh, Paul White Man, was the King
of Swing and no , he
was the king of jazz, that's right, Benny Good
Man was the king of swing What I want to kno___w In the Funk World If El_vis Presley is King Who is Ja__mes Brown? God? |
With the announcement of the title—a framing gesture—Baraka introduces the poem in a strong voice. The pace and tone with which the next lines are delivered give them the feel of an improvisation, perhaps even an aside. This quickly, quietly delivered historical catalogue of the misrepresentations and appropriations of African American musical forms is marked with the modulation of such paralinguistic features as rate, pause, pitch, tone, loudness and stress. As the listeners lean forward to audit the rapid, soft stream of words, they are brought up short by the final phrase of the second line, which is shouted and followed with a pause. The short lines making up the second half of the poem are delivered forcefully, with a definite, rhythmic timing that establishes a contrast and leads to a close that arrives with the force of a comic punchline.
To begin with the methodological questions raised by what we might call the new material: Do we consider the additional material as an intervening 'commentary'? Or is it a part of the poem? It follows the announcement of the title but has not, as far as I know, been published in any of Baraka's books. Does the second articulation of the title render the prior one a false start? Would an audience member encountering the poem for the first time and listening with closed eyes respond like the reader following along with Funk Lore in his lap? Whether improvised or prepared, the off-script catalogue establishes the poem's theme and so increases the pointedness of the punch-line, even as it sets up the aural contrast with the published closing, which is delivered in an exhortative style.
Evidencing some of the characteristic "keys" proposed by Bauman, this Baraka clip exemplifies how such keys can frame a given event as a performance. Regarding it as a potential performance allows for thinking about what significance the distinction between performance and recitation holds. Baraka's approach to the occasion reflects what Bauman identifies as a central element of a true performance—an emergent dimension. As an emergent event, the performance must be dynamic, in flux at some level:
The point is that completely novel and completely fixed texts represent the poles of an ideal continuum, and that between the poles lies the range of emergent text structures to be found in empirical performance. The study of the factors contributing to the emergent quality of the oral literary text promises to bring about a major reconceptualization of the nature of the text, freeing it from the apparent fixity it assumes when abstracted from performance and placed on the written page . . . . (Bauman 40)
The augmentation of Baraka's "In the Funk World" in performance marks its affinity with oral composition-in-performance, in which, according to Ruth Finnegan, "there [is] no concept of a correct version. Each performance [is] unique in its own right" (Finnegan 120). Aspects of composition in performance have been identified in most oral traditions, and characteristically, it is expected of performers to demonstrate their skill by incorporating current events, audience response, even an accident in the midst of the performance itself, into the piece. And while Baraka has composed the poem in writing, upon a notebook or with a typewriter, he draws on particular African-American oral forms such as blues lyrics, the dozens, and jazz improvisation in his performances, which do indeed vary from event to event.[13]
The cluster of generative or improvisational moves that distinguish an emergent performance from a poetry recitation can be indicated by the term "elaboration."
While very commonly practiced, elaboration has not always been reflected in the transcription of a traditional oral performances; in some cases, extended performances are reduced to minimal texts (even sometimes made to resemble haiku) and then celebrated for the spare aesthetic (Sherwood 2001). In literary study, the published print version of a poem may occupy a similar space. But when recognized, elaboration, as an emergent technique, gives a powerful new weight to the particulars of the event, specifically "keying" it as a poetry performance, and distinguishing it from a recitation or reading.
Where Baraka,
operating with text in hand, enacts an elaboration of the source text that
augments it through the addition of new material and vocal shaping, Cecilia
Vicuña gives a demonstration of another way a minimal text might be elaborated,
through a repetition and variation of patterns already implicit in the source
text. The Chilean-born poet and artist,
who now works out of New York, explores the themes of sound, voice, writing,
and weaving in all her major volumes of English and bilingual poetry (Unravelling
Words, The Precarious, El Templo, InStan). Recognized as an installation artist as well
as a poet, Vicuña frequently prepares the site for a poetry performance in
advance by weaving threads throughout a space.[14] Her
Coming early in
the performance, the poem "Adiano y
Azumbar" was published in El Templo, as a text that consists of
thirteen lines, (only one of which contains a repetition). Exemplifying elaboration through performance,
the sung performance of the poem that Vicuña gave (in March of 2002, in
|
Published Version: El
Templo (np 16) |
[FIGURE 2] Performance Transcription |
||
|
Adiano y Azumbar Adiano y azumbar se huaca el purpur Temblando siempre su pobre arenal Con qué celo se adumbra su manantial Con qué celo bebe Su seco caudal El manque y el hue apurpurándose están. [np 16] |
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 |
Adiano y Azumbar Adia___no Adia___no Adia___no Adia___no adiano y azumbar adiano y azumbar se huaca el purpur se huaca el purpur Temblando siempre Temblando siempre su pobre arenal su pobre arenal Con qué celo se adumbra Con qué celo adumbra su manantial su manantial Con qué celo Con qué celo bebe Su seco cau /
dal El manque y el hue El manque y el hue apur___/ pur___/
ándose apurpurándose están. |
1a 1a 1a 1a 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 6 5 6a/7 7 8 8 9 10 11 12 12 13a 13 |
Elaboration through the repetition of lines, stanzas, and whole songs is common in the songs of traditional oral cultures (Evers and Molina; Densmore) and Vicuña's study of Andean song influences her performance style. Without being mechanical, Vicuña patterns her performance repetitions in a delicately proportioned manner, extending or elaborating the material in the print-text.[16] The first stanza consists in the four-fold repetition of the first word in the print-text, "adiano," which is itself drawn out. The second and third stanzas each double the lines in the first two print-text stanzas (lines 1-4). Stanza four begins a series of partial repetitions that, with the insertion of pauses at variance with the print-text, effectively present a new, syncopated lineation. The penultimate stanzas of both versions are nearly identical, with a slight pause interrupting the performed "cau/dal" (perf.-tran., ln. 11). The final stanza returns to the pattern of absolute doubling with a repetition (ln. 12, 12) then a partial repetition with the single word "apurpurándose" elongated before the poem concludes with the final line, "apurpurándose están." Review of several of Vicuña's performances suggests that the patterning is neither fixed nor predetermined; the unit and frequency of repetition varies to suit the expressive emphasis of the poem.
The mode of elaboration Vicuña adopts varies from poem to poem and performance to performance. In most performances, one also hears Vicuña move into a purely improvisational mode, relating a narrative or spontaneously composing a song. She will also sometimes perform an occasion-specific poem, composed on paper for the event but not previously published. The poem above, while published in facing Spanish and English, was performed in Spanish alone, perhaps in acknowledgement of the large number of Spanish speakers in the audience. The Texas performance from which the last poem was drawn allows me to sketch out a second way in which print-texts may be inserted into an oral/aural performance context.
In performing "Tentenelaire Zun Zun" (Zit Zit, Hummingbird), Vicuña offered a more characteristically bilingual performance of a text published years prior in the familiar, facing-page format of the bilingual edition. However, Vicuña chooses not simply voice the piece as published, beginning on the left in Spanish and following with the right-hand English. Rather, the performance dances deliberately back and forth between Spanish and English, creating a new arrangement—a poem in two languages that does not fully correspond to either of the two published versions.[17]
Vicuña's performance cannot be called oral-composition in the usual sense; it begins with a text, and with the exception of the improvised "death" in two lines and an additional "the," little new material is added. Yet the virtuosic oscillation between Spanish and English along with selective omissions and repetitions present a poem that is quite unlike the print-text [Figure 3].[18]
|
|
|
|
Figure 3 |
|
|
|
Tentenelaire
Zun Zun La
luz en ti goza Traga
néctar lumbrón Espejo que
vuela Oro
tornasol Cáliz
corola bicho
fulgor Vence
a
la muerte Altarcito licor Niño lenguando Chupá
[chupá chupá] picaflor! Nadie
es lo
frágil Lo pálpita fuerte Pico en
perfume Prismá volador Limina tu lumen Ven
a trabajar Viso y
derrumbe Cálamo zúm Sueña zumbando ¡No pares aún! |
Zit
Zit, Hummingbird Light plays upon
you [you] sip nectar [nectar in death] bird-fly
[fly in death] Mirror in
flight Iridescent
gold Chalice
of petals shin[e]ing critter [shine shine in] beat
death nectarine liquor shrine Child
licking Sip
sip hummingbird Nobody g so fragile Quicker
than quick heartbeats Beak in perfume Flying
prism light
of the edge I'm
off to work Gleam and crumble Humming
[the] feather Dream
whirring don't
stop! |
Without even considering the expressive contributions of the stylized vocal qualities (paralinguistic features keying performance), it seems clear that in the active arrangement of the poem's elements a new work has been constructed—a version.
Versioning—creating a radically new arrangement of a poem during performance—shifts the literary critic's orientation with respect to "the" poem even more dramatically than elaboration, particularly when the aesthetic impact of the version is comparable to that of the print text. In writing about the effects of performance, Henry Sayre observes: "The concept of the 'original,' the self-contained and transcendent masterwork, containing certain discernible intentions, has been undermined, and a plurality of possible performative gestures has supplanted it" (94). This seems an apt characterization of the effect of Vicuña's versioning with, perhaps, one qualification. Sayre's description of pluralization recalls the indeterminacy that deconstruction proposes as an ineluctable aspect of textuality. As deployed by Vicuña, at least, the performance does not call meaning into question so much as it invites a sensual, creative engagement in the continuation of meaning making (by virtue of the metaphors of song, flight, weaving, etc.)
The emergent dimensions in the oral performance of Kamau Brathwaite are somewhat more subtle than those identified in the analyzes of Baraka and Vicuña above. Deeply and notably committed to the forging of what he calls Nation Language—an English reflective of the socio-historical richness of Afro-Caribbean vernacular speech—Brathwaite also draws on observation of oral performance in Ghana, where he worked for some years. The way in which aspects of traditional orality serve an emergent function in Brathwaite's work can perhaps be understood in light of comments by Henry Sayre, about literary performance:
A good way to think of performance is to realize that in it the potentially disruptive forces of the 'outside' (what is 'outside' the text—the physical space in which it is presented, the other media it might engage or find itself among, the various frames of mind the diverse members of a given audience might bring to it, and, over time, the changing forces of history itself) are encouraged to assert themselves (94).
For Brathwaite, the spoken language and the lived culture of Caribbean peoples have been historically relegated to a space outside the literary realm. His project involves opening up poetry to history, to excluded registers of language and, in particular, to forms of language that sustain diasporic memory or the sounds and physical rhythms of island life.
Music and song have had a place in all three poets' work. In several poems from the same event discussed above, Baraka quite explicitly bring his poems into relation with music by humming or scatting recognizable jazz melodies to frame a poem or to establish a syncopation between word and song. Vicuña delivered one of the poems analyzed above by singing it, introducing a melody; she also often frames a performance with chants. Kamau Brathwaite's poem, "Angel/Engine," published most recently in the revised Ancestors (2001), opens itself up to dance, drumming, and the interactive space of ritual. The poem loosely narrates a woman's spiritual possession by Shango, whom he explains is the "Yoruba and Black New World god of lightning and thunder;" Shango is also closely related to Ogun, his complement "in the 'destructive-creative principle'. . . One of their (technological) apotheoses is the train. The jazz rhythms of John Coltrane ... and the forward gospel impetus of Aretha Franklin ... are other aspects of this" (Sun Poem 101).
Brathwaite performed a portion of the poem in the context of a combined talk and poetry reading at the University of Minnesota in October of 1997. He framed the event with a warm, introductory speech establishing his deep allegiance to the theme of the gathering—cross cultural poetics. More emphatic than the usual acknowledgement given by the public speaker at the outset of a talk, the gesture established a reciprocal relationship with the audience—emphasizing aural reception, in a specific space, for a determined occasion.
A theme of this poem is the spiritual force of sound and rhythm, which, without venturing into the territory of high drama, Brathwaite nonetheless manages to convey performatively. His voicing displays how parallelism and the oral vocables, which are also present on the page, are themselves performance keys. The two sustaining motifs of the poem— "praaaze be to / praaaze be to / paaaze be to gg" and "bub-a-dups / bub-a-dups / bub-a-dups / /hah" —establish a rhythm that opens the poem into a spatial dimension, articulate the presence of a speaking body, and even imply an associated dance. The rhythms set in play and the viscerally physical articulation of paralinguistic vocables and grunts do not simply ornament or enrich the text; they mark it as a temporal experience.
praaaze be to
praaaze be to
praaaze be to gg
praaaze be to
praaaze be to
praaaze be to gg
& uh holdin my hands up high in dis place
& de palms turn to
praaaze be to
praaaze be to
praaaze be to gg
an the fingers flutter and flyin away
an uh crying out
praaaze be to
praaaze be to
praaaze be to
While the implied temporal dimension is not specifically a performance key enumerated by Bauman, the dramatic way in which words transform into purely percussive vocables, constitutes a kind of special code—a metonym for the dance and drum beat that activate the language in and through performance. The use of irregular line breaks and visual spacing to indicate stanzas suggests possibilities for oral delivery. A kind of visual rhythm also appears, which graphically establishes some of the repetitions (in a way not unlike Dell Hymes' transcription preferences). As a score for performance, the printed poem is radically underdetermined. In performance, Brathwaite renders the lines with such emphatic rhythmic patterning as to evoke percussion. The use of a [technical term?] guttural /g/, nearly unpronounceable in English by itself, emphasizes this blending of articulate speech and purely rhythmic sound.[19]
A curious dimension of this performance is the commentary Brathwaite interjects, which is transcribed in the appendix. Unlike Vicuña's versioning, here the performance transcript of the poem itself varies only minimally from the published print version. The context and mode of delivery leads me to distinguish this from the elaboration in the Baraka poem above; a shift in tone and pace seems to frame the comments as non-performative asides.
hah
is a hearse
is a horse
is a horseman
is a trip
is a trick
is a seemless hiss
that does rattle these i:ron tracks
bub-a-dups
bub-a-dups
bub-a-dups
huh
bub-a-dups
bub-a-dups
bub-a-dups
hah
is
a scissors gone shhhaaaaa
[For the moment, for the first time, the sibilant song comes in and release is started. When she's been going now to become that sound that the engine makes when it ... whoo... she becomes at last the sibilance of sea and Shango. And the gutturals begin to disappear in her performance and in the poem.]
under de rattle an pain
i de go
huh
i de go
shhhaaaaa
an a black curl calling my name
praaaze be to
praaaze be to
praaaze be to
Brathwaite frames the comments that punctuate the performance of this poem by altering pace and volume. Each also enacts a shift in address (speaking to a scholarly audience, making demonstrative observations), directly commenting on the poem, and is further marked by an alteration in the register of diction. The significance of these moves can be best understood in contrast to conventions of the contemporary poetry reading. Poets giving such readings, particularly in academic or high-cultural contexts (such as conferences or festivals, as opposed to the slam or open-mic night) often provide commentary. However, that commentary is usually of a biographical or anecdotal nature, often narrating the context which inspired the work, naming relevant persons or clarifying potentially obscure references and allusions. Almost always introductory, such commentaries rarely intrude into the body of the poem. More rarely does the commentary comment on the space created by the poem--its activation of language--as Brathwaite's performance does.
Each of the three
poets discussed creates performance events by drawing on different aspects of
orality, with related but distinct motives. For Baraka, a vernacular
consciousness of "how you sound" and a jazz-derived interplay with
audience shape his practice; for Vicuña, the spiritual symbolism of sound and
the way its deployment can spatially weave listeners into an event leads to her
emphasis on voice; for Brathwaite, vernacular expressivity and
traditional/sacred notions of efficacious language are equally informing. Each begins with published texts and
transforms them into emergent events through the use of elaboration and versioning. Bringing these concepts to the poetry of
Baraka, Vicuña, and Brathwaite allows for a fuller appreciation of the oral and
performative dimensions of their work, rendering their performances as
significant instances of the poems rather than as imperfect and secondary
re-presentations of prior texts. The
full measure of these and other contemporary written poetries cannot be taken
if they are considered only in relation to the conventional, text-oriented
terms of literary analysis. Scholarly
consideration of how these performative poetries are positioned with respect to
the speakers' mouths and listeners' ears should lead to transcription,
performance analysis, and the development of new critical practices which adapt
and extend the best practices of oral and literary studies.
III. Representing the
Emergent
Treating
elaboration, versioning and other emergent dimensions of print poetries in
performance involves literary critics in some of the practices and issues
familiar to scholars of oral tradition. I have made use of audio tape and
transcription as a way to begin attending to emergent dimensions of the
poems. Readers may have puzzled over
the variation in the means by which the poems were transcribed. The first of
several transcriptions follows the ethnopoetic method exemplified by Tedlock
and further theorized by Fine, preferring some simplification with the aim of
approaching a performable script. Type size represents perceived volume and
emphasis, internal and interlinear spacing indicates pace and pausing, with
additional comments and descriptors placed in brackets.
This
approach reflects something of the skepticism towards the ideal of maximizing
data through ever thicker transcription practices voiced by Eric L. Montenyohl
in his "Strategies for the Presentation of Oral Tradition in
Performance."
The alternative method of narrative
embedding he proposes produces an interesting result, though it may best serve the kind of minimal,
quotidian materials that interest Montenyohl, i.e. jokes, proverbs. The objections to the Tedlock variant on
total translation presented in Finding the Center and developed by
various authors in Alcheringa seem to me misplaced, since it is not at
all difficult for readers to develop the skills to give passable renderings of
score-like transcriptions. Whether the reader chooses to reperform the texts
or, as digital technology makes increasingly possible, read along with an audio
recording: a graphic transcription helps the critic draw out relevant
paralinguistic features.[20]
Attractive
though it would be to posit the modified form of total transcription as an
authoritative method for the analysis of print/oral/aural poets, I have varied
the format for each of the subsequent examples. The second transcription,
(figure 2, Cecilia Vicuña's "Adiano y Azumbar") appears in a
comparative, two-column format, juxtaposing the print version and performance
transcription with line numbering to emphasize repetitions, partial repetitions
and the general elaboration. The third
transcription (figure 3, Vicuña's "Tentenelaire Zun Zun") uses
graphic symbols to simulate the reading path taken by the performer as she
composed a new version, through performance, by mixing elements of the
print-published poems in Spanish and English. The rhythmic effect of the fourth
poem, Brathwaite's "Angel/Engine," is conveyed through descriptive
prose rather than graphical rendering. In practice, this flexibility
facilitates concentration on specific elements of elaboration and versioning in
each of the poems. Use of a variety of
methods also underscores the necessary insufficiency of transcription, which
can only render selected elements, in the face of multidimensional oral
performance. Finally, it avoids the
false impression that performance practices are largely homogenous, an
impression which would be conveyed by presenting non-heterogeneous texts. Following this argument, it might be
advisable to develop particularized transcription methods adequate to each
genre, performance tradition, customized even to each individual
performer.
In the
cases of the three poets dealt with in this study, all have extensive grounding
in their respective literary traditions as well as significant life experience
and study of some oral traditions. As
publishing poets, all three are also familiar with the various engagements with
issues of performance and textualization that have been formative of
twentieth-century poetries on several continents—from the experimentalism of
Mallarme in France, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara's collection and translation of
African traditional poetry, to concrete poetry in Brazil, and the Pound/Black
Mountain tradition in the United States.
These literary traditions include experiments with suggestive visual and
typographical design as well as texts formatted to be employed as scores for
oral performance. Literary
criticism adequate to the multiple dimensions of their work will need to become
fluent in these same multiple traditions and, stepping outside of current
disciplinary conventions, learn from the insights and errors of allied fields.
Works Cited
Bakker 1993 Egbert J. Bakker. "Activation and Preservation: The Interdependence of Text and Performance in an Oral Tradition." Oral Tradition 8: 5-20.
Baraka 1996 Amiri Baraka. Funk Lore. Los Angeles: Littoral Books.
Baraka 1996b. Amiri Baraka. Poetry Reading. 23 October 1996. Audiotape. Robert Creeley Birthday Celebration, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Buffalo, NY.
Bauman 1977 Richard Bauman. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press (reprint 1984)
Brathwaite 2001 Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Ancestors (A Reinvention of Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self. NY: New Directions.
Brathwaite 1997 Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Lecture/Poetry Reading. 19 October 1997. XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics Conference, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN.
Damon 1988 Maria Damon. "Was That 'Different,' 'Dissident,' or 'Dissonant'?: Poetry n the Public Spear; Slams, Open Readings, and Dissident Traditions," Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Ed. Charles Bernstein. NY: Oxford U P. 324-342.
Densmore 1910 Francis Densmore. Chippewa Music. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 45, 1910.
deZegher 1997 M. Catherine deZegher, ed. The Precarious: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña. Kortrijk, Belgium: Kanaal Art Foundation/ Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U P.
Evers 1990 Larry Evers and Felipe Molina. Yaqui Deer Songs / Maso Bwikam: A Native American Poetry. Tucson: U Arizona P.
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