All this is perfectly true, if but ONLY if, you're wedded to Reception Theory as your critical paradigm.  I'm not.

More on this later, Tim, but I think part of where this conversation is going weirdly skew is because we're all of us working from, stated or unstated, conscious or unconscious, different assumptions about, god help us, What Is A Poem?  Text?  Thingy?

Now that these are coming more to the foreground, as part of the argument, it's becoming easier (for me, at least) to make sense of it.

But really, till soon -- I nearly pitched in behind Peter's point, which he didn't couch this way, but that's how I read it, that the basic patterning (although there are other things obviously involved as well) behind music is time, but the basis of "spoken" poetry is stress.  And one doesn't easily map onto the other. I'm leaving that till later too.

As Jonson said about his mate John Donne (in the by-now notorious Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden), "Donne, for not keeping of the accent, deserved hanging."  I have a horrible feeling he was serious, and that there are a lot of musicians who would agree with him.

For now, I must go eat ...

Robin

On 26 October 2016 at 11:36 Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

No, I'm not saying that they are the same thing, that would be ridiculous - the different combinations present different experiences, obviously. Talking about the effect of the combination does not nullify the existence of the originals which make it up. Perhaps you have misunderstood me, I am not saying that the addition of music doesn't change the reception of the words, because of course it does, but multiple things change the reception of the words. There is no such thing as pure words - there is no such thing as the unmediated, the unaccompanied poem - the words act within contexts of the accompanying world. To cut the words away from one particular form of accompaniment (music performance) in the belief that what is left is somehow cleaner or closer to an imagined 'real thing' presupposes a notion of autonomy which is impossible. It was jamie who used the word and as i tried to say in another post my notion of 'autonomy', as I practise it by writing poems for the page, is an artificial one, a choice.

Cheers

Tim

On 25 Oct 2016, at 17:53, Robin Hamilton wrote:

Now, as far as I can make out as to what you're getting at, you seem to be telling me that there's no difference between watching a blind black blues pianist and a white folk guitarist play, and sing, for the first time, a song [sic] that they composed together, that, and the bare experience of reading a set of words on the page.

That I'm simply experiencing the same thing ...  That the two things, in this case, don't interact ... That the medium doesn't matter ... That it's just "playing with words" (and whose playing would that be referring to -- mine, or Ray Charles and Willie Nelson's?)  ...

All I can say is, Who am I supposed to believe -- you or my lying eyes?