[Mary Meriam]

I’ve been thinking about the difference between song and poetry. Then I read this article in The New Yorker, Twilight of the Books , which discusses pre-literate culture or “primary orality.”

The scholar Walter J. Ong once speculated that television and similar media are taking us into an era of "secondary orality," akin to the primary orality that existed before the emergence of text. If so, it is worth trying to understand how different primary orality must have been from our own mind-set. Havelock theorized that, in ancient Greece, the effort required to preserve knowledge colored everything. In Plato's day, the word mimesis referred to an actor's performance of his role, an audience's identification with a performance, a pupil's recitation of his lesson, and an apprentice's emulation of his master. Plato, who was literate, worried about the kind of trance or emotional enthrallment that came over people in all these situations, and Havelock inferred from this that the idea of distinguishing the knower from the known was then still a novelty. In a society that had only recently learned to take notes, learning something still meant abandoning yourself to it. "Enormous powers of poetic memorization could be purchased only at the cost of total loss of objectivity," he wrote.

It doesn’t sound good, that total loss of objectivity. Now I’m wondering, should poems be memorable? Should poems be memorized? If poems should not be memorized, does it matter if poems are memorable?

According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.”

[Janet Kenny]

Mary,
I think "should" is a word to avoid when thinking. I recently played a youtube recording of the great Arthur Rubinstein playing complex piano music by Debussy, entirely from memory. The music was unclassifiable and unpredictable. Debussy didn't bother trying to be easily remembered. There were few mnemonics for a conventional musician but this great man sailed through it all faultlessly. The gift of memory is formidable and precious but not the only gift. Many of profound musicians need a score from which to perform but their performances have depth. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbsiFwYNeFM
In poetry, some will fall easily from the lips or haunt the mind but other poetry—like Nemo's—will leave a sense of place and colour and a general aesthetic impression that makes the reader return. I don't think we need worry about how it is we walk. We should just do what we feel impelled to do and leave the rest to the erosion of life.

I think many ambitious noses are out of joint now because their mother's dreams of my son/daughter the famous poet is less important. Not that poetry is less important but the lumpen masses can now read and write and want to write their own poems.

Now I'll read the whole article.
Janet

[Janet Kenny]

I quoted part of the article in General Talk in the thread about Hillary Clinton. The writer does have a good point when he says that people become habituated to less subtle messages. That is what worries me as an onlooker as I see the US presidential primaries on TV.

I grew up without TV and reading was my escape and relaxation. Nobody sees reading quite in the old way now. We don't wait for the next serialised chapter. But it does seem that computers are improving literacy after a period of lower literacy. I realised recently that I rarely read for escape any more. I was introduced to the detective novels of Donna Leon and while I was reading her I suddenly remembered reading when I was a child. Now I usually go to TV for that sort of experience.
Janet

[Maryann Corbett]

It strikes me that the bad features of the literature of primary orality--its graphic violence, its black-and-white us-against-themness--were needed because actual graphics in those cultures were rare and costly. In our time, graphics are everywhere. We simply don't need to make poems that grind themselves into our minds in battles and name-calling. We can do that on YouTube.

Although I've rarely worked to memorize poems, I have a lot of them, or at least parts of them, in memory, and that's primarily because they're metrical and rhymed.

The uses of rhetoric--the old tools of primary orality--in political speech should make us think hard, but they're not new.

[Tim Love]

Some aspects of this issue particularly interest me. I think the journey from song to text went through a phrase when the text was little more than a score (like a musical score) to be performed. Only later did the written word come into its own, with visual patterning an alternative to sound patterns.

According to "The Poetics of the Mind's Eye", (C Collins) "The change of the recording medium from human memory to scroll then book has 1) reduced impersonality of tone (no longer is there much collective re-editing) 2) increased imagery and descriptive passages (no longer is there a need to hold a crowd's attention) 3) increased the amount of the work that's immediately available - Short Term Memory (STM) can rapidly be topped up."

And Milan Kundera wrote that "each art has a different relation to forgetting. From that standpoint, poetry is privileged. A person reading a Baudelaire sonnet cannot skip a single word. If he loves it he will read it several times and perhaps aloud. If he adores it, he will learn it by heart. Lyric poetry is a fortress of memory."

[Mary Meriam]

Thanks y'all for plunging into this discussion. I admit, I'm not sure what I'm asking, exactly. (I agree with Rose, who told me by email she's not sure what the question is.)

I agree with you, too, Janet, when you say "I don't think we need worry about how it is we walk. We should just do what we feel impelled to do and leave the rest to the erosion of life."

On the other hand, perhaps trying to think through this muddle may lead to something.

Still thinking,
Mary