On Thu, 22 May 2003 22:40:20 +0100, Patrick McManus <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>surely we have a tradition of oral poetry?
>
>can't performance stand on it's own without any printed word
>esp with videos these days?
>or am I pointing out the obvious
>cheers patrick
I think performance with no text can stand and always stood on its own.
Poetry on the stage and oral poetry has been a long-standing practice. One
should have full awareness of ones local oral traditions to be alive in
one’s modes of speech.
Narratives of whatever kind are better memorized if transformed into
rhyming, rhythmic patters, so poetry is also instrumental, a machinery for
the mental storage delivery. This delivery is most effective when the
physical follows and matches the expression of the psychic. A text can stay
in the brain foe ages, with no need of the paper format.
The first long poem, Giacomo Leopardi’s ‘La Quiete dopo la Tempesta’,
which I learned at the age of 4, I never saw on the paper until my
secondary school years. Yet, at 4, I learned it by heart following its
sound pattern [it is a complicated poem] Primarily I memorized it not
only because its lyric content seemed to me as beautiful as it is, but
because I was exposed (my mother had to take me to her classes for a week
because our nanny was ill ) to the repetition of its cadence which slowly I
assimilated (yet not passively, I must admit). At the time the teaching
technique was that each pupil had to stand and recite the poem in front of
everybody else. So, I heard that poem repeated so many times that it is
still the poem I remember better.
To keep on a personal line, so to stop talking in the abstract: often, I
make up a poem in a slumber, before sleeping. And than I keep the poem in
my mind like that for several hours through the night, until the fear of
forgetfulness forces me to stand up and rely on the paper format.
Yet there are poetries that never leave that mental stage and remain
textless. Poetries of the moments, as when one has poetic epiphanies.
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