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.
2009/6/29 Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]>
> Point taken, dave.
>
> I didn't quite mean to suggest that extempore poetry doesn't exist, more
> that it's not part of the English (language) *tradition.
>
> One problem is that it's ephemeral -- if you extemporise a poem, unless
> it's promptly written down afterwards (or tape-recorded), it's lost.
>
> This would apply even, I'd guess, to orally composed poetry, which would
> have to be repeated by the composer several times, so no longer extemporary,
> before it was "fixed".
>
> In contrast, it seems to be, or at least is presented in literary texts as,
> part of both the Old Irish/Welsh and Norse/Scandinavian literary traditions.
>
> Perhaps it's a case that the more demanding and constrained the poetic
> norms are, the more there's a counter-movement towards extemporisation, or
> at least celebrating extemporisation.
>
> Dunno.
>
> Robin
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Bircumshaw" <
> [log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Monday, June 29, 2009 9:14 PM
> Subject: Re: Apology for swords
>
>
> Rob
>> When I was young in Brum there was a mentally and physically disabled chap
>> called Mark who used to wander about the streets talking to anyone who'd
>> listen in rhyming couplets. They were certainly his own and extemporised.
>> He was a near dwarf with discoloured looking skin and a huge
>> disproportionate head. It was hard to say whether he was consciously
>> making
>> the rhymes, the patter seemed to be his verbal consciousness, I got the
>> impression he was his own automatic voice.The verses were often about a
>> person who was strange and suffered. But this person, himself, was quite
>> clearly someone else to his narratives. Unlike rappers, they weren't
>> ego-centred, the unpleasantness of much rap is possibly uncomfortably
>> close
>> to a truth about the origins of poetry, but one can travel far from a
>> starting point, yes?
>>
>
--
David Bircumshaw
"Nothing can be done in the face
of ordinary unhappiness" - PP
Website and A Chide's Alphabet
http://www.staplednapkin.org.uk
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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