Invisible Cities: The Arts and Renewable Community

Oral poetry

With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. ⁵³

Travel stories, as products of memory, can conjure up deep emotions. Poetry is the true language of emotion. Poetry succeeds where ordinary speech fails to communicate those urgent and elusive feelings that are most essentially human. ⁵⁴ In their book The Heath Guide to Poetry, Bergman and Epstein suggest that poetry communicates the emotion of discovering thought. The poet writes what is most important at a given moment yet, if he or she writes with intensity and clarity years later the verse can still seem important to the reader. Thus great poetry is eternally fresh. How does the poet do this? The poet writes by suiting the words and the rhythm of the language perfectly to the experience in such a way that we cannot imagine it being said any better. ⁵⁵

Our time to read literature is often limited therefore we look to poets to grab our attention. The look of a poem does this. There is ususally more white space around poems that other types of literature. Poems somehow say they are special. They earn their space on the page and in our attention. ⁵⁶ How does a poem come to us? The poem comes to us because the poet wishes to share the expereince of his or her discovery. ⁵⁷ Travel stories are an effective motivation for poetry because in the delight of recounting the memory, the vision, the sensate expereinces of the journey, the poet is discovering something about him or her self. The collage writing excercsie will provide students with bits of narrative prose that can easily segue into the writing of a narative poem.

The first narrative and storytelling poems recounted the adventures of great heroes and their relationships with gods and forces of the underworld. Often these stories would convey a nation's origin and history sometimes in a very entertaining fashion. Poet-reciters were called bards and, much like Marco Polo before Khan in Invisible Cities, they regaled at courts with long heroic tales. ⁵⁸ Narrative poems rely on rhythms, or stock phrases, used over and over again. Using rhythmic phrases allowed the illiterate bards, to recite their epics long into the night. This is the same technique that helps parents tell bedtime stories with phrases that are recounted and reworked over and over again. Each night the story is told using roughly the samewords but with each retelling it becomes a different oration. ⁵⁹

Another technique of the narative poem is that there are rarely transitions from one scene to another. A narative poem works in a manner similar to a film often shifting instantaneously from one scene to another. We do not necessarily begin at the beginning of the story but rather in medias res, Latin for in the middle of things. ⁶⁰ The shorter the poem, the more concentrated will be the action. In very concentrated poems sometimes only the pinnacle is presented. Additionally, a feature of narative poems is the ommision of certain scenes. Sometimes scenes are entirely missing, yet the rhythm and music of the poem provide the continuity we might have missed if it were a prose account. Poetry allows us to switch the camera, as it were, to another moment, another view allowing us to discern or feel what happened without it being shown.

Today's narrative poets tell personal or family histories that are more likely to be forgotten in the future. ⁶¹ Narrative poems can be about what is noticed along a journey, as in Lawrence Ferlighetti's poem Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes ⁶² or they can reflect familial, political or cultural history as in Luci Tapahonso's A Birthday Poem ⁶³. In the traditional prose story the writer wants to make the scene so vivid that we look beyond the words and feel that we are actually present in the scene. In contrast, at crucial moments the poet draws our attention to the language. Many of Luci Tapahoso's poems include the paralleling of her phrases in her native Dine` language. The rhythms of the language, even in its printed form, communicate the Dine` Nation's honor and reverence for their native tongue and convey that certain emotions can only be felt in the language itself. Like short stories, narrative poems may contain characters, a setting, conflict and dialog amid a single significant action but these elements are more condensed and the plot concerns are less important. ⁶⁴ The story is secondary to the action of the language. It is this concern with language that makes a poetic narrative for both the intended audience and the contemporary reader. ⁶⁵

It is the goal of this unit that students reflect on explicit journeys and communicate them as art that renews a community. Students will write a poetic response to their travel story then work in small groups to record their poem in digital video through an oral poetry reading. In her book Oral Poetry Ruth Finnegan writes that though oral poetry, as any written literature has a verbal text, a piece of oral literature must be performed. The circumstances of the performance of a piece of poetry are a primary consideration necessary for the actualization of the piece and integral to its identity. ⁶⁶ Similar to the reworked phrases of the bedtime story, an oral poem differently performed or performed at a different time or to a different audience is, in fact, a different poem. In essence an oral poem is an ephemeral work of art and has no existence or continuity apart from its performance. The personality and skill of the performer, the nature of the audience and its reaction, the context and purpose of the verbal text-these are the critical aspects of the artistry of the oral poem that define its meaning. ⁶⁷

Inherent to both the reading and oration of poetry in the notion of the rhythm that gives form to a poem. We tend to think of this mainly in terms of meter which comes from the ancient Greek and Roman models. ⁶⁸ Metermeans "measurement," and in poetry, it refers to the repeating pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in the lines of a poem. The unit of measurement in poetry is called a metrical foot, which is a set of syllables, usually two or three, with only one receiving a strong stress. A metrical "foot" in poetry comes from the ancient Greek, when poetry, as in the tragic choruses, was danced, and the meter was embodied in the footwork. ⁶⁹ When stresses occur at regular intervals, the poetry is said to have meter. ⁷⁰ In manyWesternclassical poetic traditions, the metre of a verse can be described as a sequence offeet each foot being a specific sequence of syllable types-such as relatively unstressed/stressed (the norm forEnglishpoetry) or long/short (as in most classicalLatinandGreekpoetry). ⁷¹ This is an interesting consideration for this unit in keeping with Michel de Certeau's idea that footsteps tell stories.

Finnegan goes on to describe other prosidic elements found in the oral poem that contribute to rhythm such as alliteration, assonance, rhyme, tonal repetition and paralleism. Rhythm is not a physical concept, but a cultural and relevant one. ⁷² Much oral poetry is directly associated with rhythmic movements. Cultural aspects of rhythm are naturally aparent in oral poetry and help to decorate the physical movements. This is clear in sung lyrics such as revivalist hymns and many popular songs where the singers make movements in time to the rhythm of the song: swaying, twisting, clapping, or beating time. Oral performance of any piece tends to produce some movements that chime in with the rhythm, yet there is an intrinsic rhythm in the verbal utterance of the sound patterns of the piece itself. ⁷³

Parallelism is a type of repetition in oral poetry in which one element of pattern is changed while the other-usually the syntactic frame-remains constant. Paralleism occurs in Navaho poetry where there is no meter in a strict sense but the stanzas into which the songs are divided are based on this idea of parallels. Luci Tapahonso writes,

    She is adorned with turquoise.
    She is adorned with lakes that sparkle in the sunlight. 74
  

Repetition is some from is a defining characteristic of oral poetic style through repetition of phrases, lines or verses or the use of paralleism. Oral poetry, like anything transmitted through an oral medium is ephemeral. Once said, it cannot be recaptured in the same way again. In consideration of the audience, an oral creator or performer has a certain obligation to use expression which is immediately understandable to the listeners. For this reason the use of recurring phrases, refrains, and choruses allows the listening audience to more effectively participate by helping them to hold onto what has just happened and what is coming next. ⁷⁵