A couple offshoots, Dave, then a couple new shoots for this lovely lengthy
thread that no one's renamed, thankfully:
1] Yup, agreed re improvising impressively with lotsa practice of intricate
formulae.
2] Your theory of wooing/warding extempore rhyming like dirbies seems
reasonable. After all, rhyming and rhythming's soothness and their
aggressive opposites have a strong root in us all.
New Judy theories:
A) In some ways like the play we did as children, pre-literate groups
spoke/sang stories of what they did, saw, heard and invented. Their 'files'
for [rote] storage and recall likely extravagantly exceeded ours because
speaking, singing and miming were their ways to communicate. Hence, most
folk would've been able to recite much more than most of us would. They
would've had to create their texts in their heads only, recreating
continuously and remembering, probably, early as well as later versions of
their stories. Their inability to write meant, then, that their practice
and recall trumps ours, and therefore that their extemporising trumped ours
as well.
B) It seems reasonable that the best poets, those who most effectively
reeled off their stories, would've been chosen by the chief/leader/lord to
create/recite the chief's adventures and conquests for the community to
hear. My feeling is that the community folk would've been invited [or
coerced] to hear the Chief Poet detailing stories about the leader, but that
it was a separate operation/event/situation from the community folk's
"mouth-newspaper" accounts of their own adventures. Hence I'm not sure
whether the Best Poet would've been an awesome extemporiser ["Chief really
f----d up that last foray into Bilkton, dudes!"], kinda similar to our
current poet scene. [For one example, an Oxford Professor of Poetry as
distinct from distinguished listmembers of POETRYETC]. Or the Best Poet
may've been the Best Extemporiser and extremely good at resisting
temptations to truthtell.
Best,
Judy
2009/6/30 David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>
> Oh yes, Rob, I wasn't trying to make a refutation of what you said, it's
> that I'm interested in by-ways and crooked alleys that lead off this route.
> I'd guess that learning sets of intricate pattern formulae over the years
> would result in an ability to improvise impressively, how much this would
> be
> improvised, and how much learnt is debatable. In music a comparable ability
> at the high end is well attested: Bach or Mozart's abilities to improvise
> composition for instance.
>
> I think though that there's a level of extempore rhyming that's very
> primitive and akin in a way to bird-song, in that's not a product of
> high-level cognition, that it's orientation towards the universe is on an
> axis of aggression/acquisition: from the acquisitiveness of wooing to the
> aggression of warding off potential opponents by silencing them.
>
> I notice on this too that so much current interest in poetry is about
> 'becoming a poet' rather than in poetry itself.
>
>
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