Hi Doug,
You know, since I am a few days behind in replying to email and all, I am
going to quote most of your post in response to mine about the mushairra,
just to reestablish the context a little bit:
>>I recall a scholar of the Ghazal telling us at the U of A years ago
about this kind of audience participation, & complaining about the
failure of North American audiences to interact with poets in such a
way. I think you're right about the embarrassment factor, but also it's
a factor of learned politeness. That, even as against concerts, where
we applaud every song, we expect & are expected to sit politely through
the whole reading & applaud at the end. It takes a special reading or
performance (I've seen it for a sound poem) to get applause for a
single poem in the middle of a reading.<<
I am not sure that the comparison to a concert is apt, though I think I did
to allude to it in my original post, or at least your focus on applause at
the end is not so much what I was talking about, though I do think you are
right that, ultimately, this all comes down to a question of culture and
socialization. What moved me so much about the mushairra was the willingness
of the audience to be moved by the poetry they were hearing while they were
hearing it, which is very different, or is at least potentially very
different, from the question of applause, which can of course signify that
an audience has been moved, but can also--and, I would argue, as often as
not, is also--simply an acknowledgment of the fact that someone has
performed. To me, the analogy to a musical concert is when the audience
starts spontaneously to clap along with, or to dance to, what they are
hearing. I do not want to argue against your point that the relative
stoicism of audiences in the US (and Canada? Which is where you are,
correct?) is not a result of "learned politeness," but it's worth asking
about how that politeness is deployed (to use a theory-rich term) throughout
the "world" of poetry readings. For example, it is less strict a value in
poetry slams, which makes me wonder about the analogy to music even more.
People at a classical music concert would never dream of getting up and
dancing to that music, though we do at rock concerts and those of other
popular music genres. So is the issue here one of the difference between
high and low art? And is that why the value of politeness become important?
And this connects in my mind to something that goes on in the literature
classes I teach, and even in some creative writing classes. Students come
into these classes having been taught that the texts they read, because they
are in books, because cultural mavens have put their stamps of approval on
the works, etc. and so on--the students come in thinking they are not
allowed to have their own opinions about the texts, much less a response to
them. They know they are supposed to take the works seriously as cultural
and literary artifacts, and I agree with them about that, but they are
frightened to say about any of the things we read, "I think it sucks!" And
this is disappointing because it is often when students allow themselves to
have that kind of emotional reaction--good, bad or otherwise--that the best
learning takes place. This semester, for example, I was doing in a class the
poetry of Arab Andalusia, and in the anthology we are using, there is a two
line poem by a guy named Ibn Ammar. It's called "Reading."
My pupil ransoms what the page traps:
the white white and the black black.
This short poem made my students furious. They couldn't imagine that it was
a poem; that someone would bother to write something so incomprehensible,
something so utterly void of meaning, and so on. And they were very
surprised when I allowed them to say all these things without telling them
that they had no right to feel the way they felt. Then we began to pick the
poem apart, and the more they saw how complex it is and how compressed that
complexity is, the more they appreciated it. Not that all of them ended up
"liking" it, though some did, but they could acknowledge not only that they
were wrong about the poem, but also that they had something to learn about
reading...anyway, I don't need to go on about the teaching points I found
through this exercise. My point is that my students' anger was in some way
analogous to the responses of the audience at the mushairra, and I believe
there is something to be made of that analogy, though I am going to stop
here and think more about it, since this post has already gone on long
enough.
Richard
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