English 766

Dr. Kenneth Sherwood

16 November 2005

Leon Stennis

Performance today: I will do a “full performance” of my original poem, Reminiscence from Marrakech today.

Schwerner, Eshleman: Groundbreakers

The Tablets by Armand Schwerner and Juniper Fuse by Clayton Eshleman are groundbreakers in the field of ethnopoetics, in the sense that these works bring us information, especially through written texts and art that we did not have knowledge of before.

The Tablets’ heavy focus on body functions and it portrayal of unattractive sex notwithstanding, it offers some interesting insights on translations from fragments of fictive Sumero-Akkadian clay tables that as far as we know are more that 4,000 years old. Of the two books, I found The Tablets, somewhat more interesting reading, despite its often ghoulish portrayals. But Juniper Fuse was more interesting in some ways because, with its focus on Eshleman’s exploration of the pre-historic Upper Paleolithic caves of France, ground was broken in providing new information without being repulsive.

Particularly interesting in The Tables, in Tablet VIII is Schwerner’s admission that he is not sure about some of his translations from the ancient clay tables. “The reader who has followed the course of these Tablets to this point may find, upon looking back to Tablet I particularly, that I have been responsible for occasional jocose intervention rather than strict archaeological findings,” he says (31). “In addition I am worried that I may have mistranslated part of the preceding Tablet, a combination of dialogue and narrative.” I think Schwerner’s admission that he has some concern about whether he has always done his best to see that his translations are as accurate as possible gives him a measure of credibility, assuming that he took steps to assure more accuracy thereafter.

Tablet XII was interesting because it provided, according to Schwerner, the “first musically notated chant in written human history” (39). I listened to the chant on the CD that came with the book. It was somewhat haunting, but interesting. “For the interpretation of the notation set to the Hymn I am solely responsible: spurred by the word ‘impossible,’ I have tried to express this ancient music in modern form on reasonable and acknowledged lines,” Schwerner wrote (39).

Tablet XIII is notable for what Schwerner calls a “psychotic rant.” He says the “the author of XIII was very likely a ‘cured’ schizophrenic looking back, intensely directed to assess her past” (45). In reading the Table, I wondered how Schwerner came to the conclusion that the person was female and a ‘cured’ schizophrenic. He does not give us any clues.

Finally, I thought Table XV was the most interesting in the sense that it provided information about a caste system. In the translation, a temple prostitute engages a priestess of the second caste. During their sexual activities the prostitute and the priestess become equals. “…Your hands which graze my field, sentence / and inflection of how I do me, you do me and how wonderful…” one line reads (49).

Interestingly, Eshleman often used characters from Greek mythology in his poetry to portray what he saw in the caves of the Upper Paleolithic, as he did in the very first poem of the book:

Patter, pater, Apkpolo globes, sound

breaking up with silence, coals

I can still hear, entanglement of sense pools,

the way a cave might leak perfume –

in the Cro-Magnons went, along its wet hide walls,

as if a flower in, way in, drew their leggy

panspermatic bodies, spidering over

bottomless hunches, groping toward Persephone’s fate;

to be quicksanded by the fungus pulp of Hades’ purple hair

exploding in their brains (3).

.

By using characters from Greek mythology, especially Persephone, the goddess of the underworld and daughter of Zeus and Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, Eshleman sort of sets the tone for what he tells us throughout the book in the poems and essays. He tells us a lot about the caves, that they are like “winding windows” (19), that it was in the caves that “the instrumental role of semen in conception was discovered” (107), that the caves have “curve rumps(,) vulva zags(,) and dot volleys” (145), and that “some commentators have found incongruous the implied connection between the bird-headed man, the bison, and the rhinoceros” (183)on the fascinating drawings and painting found in the caves.

Eshleman concluded in his introduction, that “I wrote about those caves and images that moved me imaginatively and about which I had something special to say” (xxiv).

English 766

Dr. Kenneth Sherwood

9 November 2005

Leon Stennis

Final Project to Focus on Cultural Blending

What has been the cultural impact, over the course of time, of interracial marriages and close relations in general among some African Americans and Native Americans, Hispanic Americans and African Americans, and former African slaves, Indians, and people of Spanish descent in the Caribbean and South America?

That question seems like a complicated one and most likely that is true. Nevertheless, I will take at lease one case from the three situations and explore them in depth to give the reader some idea of the kind of cultural blending that takes place when families have two or three cultural traditions in their it heritage and they make conscious efforts to honor those traditions.

My tentative plans call for a look at the culture blending of families with a Puerto Rican-African American heritage, a an African American-Native American heritage, and a Spanish-Indian-African heritage (from Cuba). The research for my 15-20 page paper will also look at other situations in the United States, the Caribbean, and South America.

Specifically, I will be looking at cultural forms such as language, religion, dance, music, rituals, etc. I will explore how the families’ multicultural backgrounds have affected their lives in general, but also how it has affected their educational experiences, socialization, relationships with other family members, etc. In exploring the experiences of these families and writing my paper I will apply some of the knowledge and use some of the resources from our class on ethnopoetics.

Readings Drive Home the Importance

Of Points of Total Performance

The reading assignments for today do a pretty good job of driving home the importance of total performance in ethnopoetics, something that Dr. Sherwood and some

of the other authors have been stressing all along.

For example, the “Breakthrough into Performance” essay by Dell Hymes notes that, “The notion of performance is central to the study of communication” (1). The writer not only believes this but (he or she) goes on to prove this doing a through analysis of three performances in the essay.

In his essay “By ear, he sd’: Audio-Tapes and Contemporary Criticism” Michael Davidson makes some strong points about why he believes “the authority of the detached literary artifact” and the “critic of postmodern poetry” should be challenged (1). Some of the reasons are Charles Olson’s demand for language as the “act of the instant,” Robert Duncan’s emphasis on registering the physiological energies in the poem, the emergence of ethnopoetics and “sound” poetry, the growth of varying forms of confessionalism, and the continued significant of poetry readings. All of this sounds to me like another way of emphasizing the importance of analyzing a performance in its totally.

Likewise, Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock’s “Alcheringa Ethnopoetic Selections” and Tedlock’s “Learning to Listen: Oral History as Poetry” call, not literally but in actuality, for the reader to read carefully and analyze, not the performances, but the texts of the performances presented. Otherwise, there can be no comprehension. For example, the “Alcheringa Ethnopoetics Selections” piece is loaded with poetry with varying forms and titles, like the Aztec poem titled “Poem to be Read Every 8 Years While Eating Unleavened Tamales.” One has to get totally enmeshed or absorbed in the reading to draw any meaning from it.

Another example where total absorption of the text performed is necessary on the part of the reader is the “From Anthropologist to Informant: A Field Record of Gary Snyder.” Apparently this is a transcription by an anthropologist. In order to get the gist of the anthropologist’s findings the reader has to do a complete analysis of his performance. The same follows for what Tedlock is advocating in “Learning to Listen: Oral History and Poetry.” He translates everything that he picks up from listening and writes it in sort of a free verse form, or the way that he thinks it would be most accurately interpreted by the reader.

English 766

Dr. Kenneth Sherwood

2 November 2005

Leon Stennis

Studing Dialect Be Cool?

Hey, I guess I could have passed on the blog today since I am doing a 10-minute presentation on the performance of one of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s African American dialect poems, “When Malindy Sings,” which will be performed via video by Dr. Woodward Martin, retired professor of English at the University of Dayton. But since Kamau Brathwaite’s “History of the Voice” focuses on “nation language” (another name for dialect) in the Caribbean and dialect is such a hot, juicy, controversial topic among people in the African diaspora, I could not resist doing a blog – being the discussion kind of guy that I am. My presentation will include the video clip (hope the technology is up to par) and my interpretation. So, stay tuned.

Hey Kamau! Been There, Done That!

Reading Kamau Brathwaite’s “History of the Voice” prompted me to think back to my seventh grade English class at Dunbar Junior High School 50-plus years ago in Little Rock, Ark. The class was doing an oral reading exercise. The sentence, or passage, that I read made a reference to one of our best-know presidents, whom I in my stiff Arkansas drawl referred to as “Abraham Lankon.” My teacher, Mrs. Childs, stopped me immediately and the class roared with laughter. I did not get it right away, but Mrs. Childs said, “Leon, it’s Abraham Lincoln.”

This epiphany about the woes of African American dialect has remained with me all of these years, even to the point that I mentioned it in a poetic tribute to my mom when she died in 2001. Here’s the stanza from the poem, “Mama, I’m looking at this Kerosene Lamp”:

and at the first flicker of the light

I see the cotton fields at Mt. Nebo

in Lank-on Countee, Ark-and-saw. Oh, excuse me President Abe

and Mrs. Childs (seventh grade English).

But Paul Laurence Dunbar – this dialect stuff, he’ll understand.

Over the years, I have had to unlearn or at least suppress, the Arkansas African American dialect that I grew up speaking because of a reality that dwells with all of us – the need for acceptance. For me, growing up in an undereducated (my mom received only a third grade education), single-parent, impoverished household, African American dialect seemed so natural as a child. But as I matriculated through the educational system and the professional work world I had to unlearn it or suppress it. For the most part, I think it has been a process of unlearning. But I can’t say that is completely true, because every once-in-a-blue-moon, when I am talking, something dialectal pops into my head and out of my mouth via the subconscious. So, I would say my process has been a combination of unlearning and suppressing.

Now, back to Kamau Bratwaite and today’s readings. I found Bratwaite’s promotion of a “nation language” (he does not want to call it dialect because of the negative connotations, unhuh, unhuh) for the multicultural and multi-liguistic people of the Caribbean, many of whom are part of the African Diaspora. He cites the many efforts of poets from the Caribbean who have dabbled in “nation language,” dating back to Claude McKay of the Harlem Renaissance era (whom a lot of people, including myself, thought was American). That history, I think, is particularly useful, because it shows that people of color, or people of the African Diaspora if you will, have in shaping a cultural identity in societies where the educational, political, and economic systems are controlled by others who are interested in maintaining the dominance of their values.

Should we study the works Brathwaite, who often blends “nation language” with so-called standard English, or the works of Cecilia Vicuna, who often blends Spanish with English? You bet we should. I am just not so sure how hard we should push in an attempt to get them accepted by everyone.

I remember having to read the 700-plus page Middle English version of Mallory Works (the story of King Author and the Knights of the Roundtable) for an Arthurian literature class. My professor said the purpose for the reading was for the class to get the feel for translation and what the English language was like during the Medieval period.

If the case can be made for a need to read 700 plus pages of Mallory Works in Middle English, certainly the case can be made for the study of Brathwaite’s “nation language.” But, let’s just study it for its usefulness in understanding oral cultures. We don’t have to try to make it into a shoe that fits all of the people of the Caribbean. After all they are a very diverse people. Kamau, take a lesson from the dialect experiences of African Americans!

English 766

Dr. Kenneth Sherwood

26 October 2005

Sherwood Demonstrates What Bauman Means

Upon reading “Elaborative Versioning’s: Characteristics of Emergent Performance in Three Print/Oral/Aural Poets” by Kenneth Sherwood, I thought: Dr. Sherwood is showing us exactly what Richard Bauman means when he talks about “versionings” and “emergent performances” in his book, “Verbal Art As Performance.”

In his book, Bauman constructs the “framework for performance-centered

approach to verbal art” (2). He starts from the position of the folklorist but draws from a wide range of disciplines, chiefly anthropology, linguistics, and criticism.

In Chapter 5 of his book, Bauman says, “The concept of emergence is necessary to the study of performance as a means toward comprehending the uniqueness of particular performances as a generalized cultural system in a community (37). In his essay, Dr. Sherwood uses this concept to explain the what some critics and scholars would call the out-of-the-ordinary oral performances of poets Amiri Baraka, an African American; Kamau Brathwaite, a native of Bridgetown, Barbados; and Chilean-born Cecilia Vicuna.

As Bauman notes, “The emergent quality of performance resides in the interplay between communicative resources, individual competence, and the goal of the participants, within the context of particular situations. In the case of Baraka, Vicuna and Braithwaite, they are all well-established and published poets and all three used, for lack of a better term out-of-the-ordinary methods in their oral performances. For example, in describing Baraka’s performance of his poem, “Funk Lore,” Dr. Sherwood wrote:

With the announcement of the title – framing gesture – Baraka

introduces the poem in a strong voice. The pace and tone with

which the next lines are delivered give them the feel of an

improvisation, perhaps even an aside. This quickly, quietly

delivered historical catalogue of the misrepresentations and

appropriations of African American music forms is marked with

the modulations of such paralinguistic features as rate, pause,

pitch, tone, loudness and stress (10).

As Dr. Sherwood notes, “Baraka’s approach to the occasion reflects what Bauman identifies as a central element of true performance – an emergent dimension” (11). “As an emergent event, the performance must be dynamic, in flux at some level,” Dr. Sherwood adds (11). He used another example to show how Vicuna’s performance falls into the emergent performance venue. He wrote:

Recognized as an installation artist as well as poet, Vicuna

frequently prepares the site for a poetry performance in

advance by weaving thread throughout a space. Her Texas

performance began with the silent screening of her video

featuring dancers weaving on a Hudson River pier at twilight.

As the video closed, Vicuna began singing from her seat

at the rear of the audience. Rising, she slowly moved to the

podium, still singing and using a hand-held light to cast

thread-like lines upon the walls, ceiling and audience (13).

To fit the mould of an emergent performance the actual performance usually varies in some kind of unusual way from the way it would seem to be carried just by an ordinary reading of the text. “The point is that completely novel and completely fixed texts represent the poles of an ideal continuum, and that between the poles lies the range of emergent text structures to be found in empirical performance,” says Bauman (40). Using quotes from the book or magazine Song Poem, Dr. Sherwood used yet another example to show how Brathwaite’s performance of his poem “Angel/Engine” meets the emerging performance criteria:

(It) opens itself up to dance, drumming, and the interactive

space of ritual. The poem loosely narrates a woman’s

spiritual possession by Shango, whom she explain is the

‘‘Yoruba and Black New World god of lighting and thunder;”

Shango is also closely related to Ogun, his complement “in the

‘destructive creative principle’…One of their (technological)

apotheoses is the train. The jazz rhythms of John Coltrane…

and the forward gospel impetus of Aretha Franklin are other

aspects of this” (20)

I think Dr. Sherwood’s examples and illustrations are demonstrated well and Bauman’s concept of emergent performance will be useful when I write my long paper for this class. Also, both writers articulated well the need for literary critics to take more notes on the concept of emergent peformancee as the field of ethnopoetics continue to blossom.

Come Prepared Tonight to Say "Amen," "Oh, Yeah!"

Hi class. I will not be doing a blog today. I will be doing my first class project instead. It will be a performance, translation, an interpretation of the text of a song by the Original Five Blind Boy Quartet of Alabama. We will begin with class participation in the performance of the text the way we think the quartet would perform its song, "Let's Have Church." I will help with this (by trying to sing. I emphasize trying). There will be some call and response, so come with your "amen" vocies and you might even bring your dancing shoes. You will gain insight on the African American religious and cultural experience from the 1950s and 60s. It should be fun. You can even "get happy," as we say in the African American church venacular, if you want to. I'll explain that in my interpretaion.

Leon

English 766

Dr. Kenneth Sherwood

11 October 2005

Leon Stennis

Leslie Marmon Silko Is Quite a Storyteller

Before today’s readings, I was thinking about the fact that, with the exception of Maria Sabina, we really have not heard, at least in a full-fledged way, Native American stories from Native American authors. Even Maria Sabina’s story was told to someone else who transcribed it for publication.

That changed with Leslie Marmon Silko: Storyteller. As it turns out, Silko, a mixture of Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, white and possibly Cherokee is quite a storyteller.

In the book she draws upon the collective memory of Great Grandma Amooh, Grandpa Hank, Aunt Susie, and Aunt Susie’s daughter, Bessie, to tell stories about her family.

Although the Native American stories that Silko tells in the book are interesting, especially with them coming from a Native American, Silko sometimes wonders if even she does them justice:

Saturday morning I was walking past Nora’s

house

and she was standing out side building a fire in

her oven.

I stopped to say hello and we were talking and

she said her grandchildren had brought home

a library book that had my “Laguna Coyote”

poem in it.

We all enjoyed it so much,

but I was telling the children

the way my grandpa used to tell it

is longer,” Yes, that’s the trouble.

with writing,” I said,

“You can’t go on and on the way we do

when we tell stories around here.

People who aren’t used to it get tired” (110)

Silko’s comments reveal some of the difficulties that writers translating, transcribing and interpreting literature from oral cultures have, including Silko when telling stories about her own Native American culture and heritage. Nevertheless, Silko did a remarkable job with the eight short stories, original poems, anecdotes, and excerpts from letters, personal reminiscences, notes of family history, photographs by her father, and retelling of traditions.

One of Silko’s stories that I think is particularly interesting is “Yellow Woman.” Based on traditional abduction tales, “Yellow Woman” involves a kachina, or mountain spirit, kidnapping and seducing a young Pueblo woman on her way to get water. The woman realizes that her liaison with the man, a cattle rustler, is in fact a reenactment of the “yellow woman legend.” Eventually the young woman becomes aware of her active role in the community and returns to her family where she hopes that the story of her relationship with man will be passed on or repeated as a new saga among the stories in the oral tradition. “I decided to tell them that some Navajo had kidnapped me, but I was sorry that old Grandpa wasn’t alive to hear my story because it was the Yellow Woman stories that he like to hear best,” the woman says (33).

As Jerome Rothenberg said in the preface to his writings in the Seneca Journal,

“When the book first came out, America was going through a spell of Indianisomo. Not for the first time & likely not the last.” That statement resounded as I read through “Shaking the Pumpkin: Songs and Other Circumstances from the Society of the Mystical Animals,” “Salamanca a Prophecy” and “Total Translation: An Experiment in the Presentation of American Indian Poetry.” I thought that if he is speaking a proliferation of literature about Native Americans he is certainly correct. And it is true that that was not always so.

When I read “Shaking the Pumpkin: Songs & Other Circumstances from the Society of the Mystical Animals” I was struck by the title and the importance of animals in early Native American culture. Sometimes we forget how close the Native American was to nature, of which animals are a part. The sounds of the songs and language here seem to reflect that closeness to nature, the high regard for animals, etc. Then I wondered if any of today’s anthologies are willing to step down from their ivory towers to carry pieces like this.

In “Total Translation: An Experiment in Presentation of American Indian Poetry” Rothenberg said he still has a problem with the word “tribal” when it comes to referring to Native Americans, even though he mostly substitutes the word “primitive.” If Rothenberg is sensitive to American Indian cultures, values, music, languages, and traditions after working in the field of ethnopoetics for over 30 years certainly caution should be the watch word for newcomers to field, be they scholars or students. On translations, he advises:

“The more the translator can perceive of the original

- not only the language but, more basically perhaps,

the living situation from which it comes &, very much

so, the living voice of the singer – the more of it he

should be able to deliver” (92).

Rothenberg offers other good points too, like how to handle elements in the original works that are not translatable literally, how to deal with the problem of not knowing the language, and when and when not to stick with the translation as given.

The “A Poem of Beaver” poem in “Salamanca a Prophecy” was quite interesting because, again, it showed how much animals were a part of early American tradition and beliefs. For example, the speaker in the poem recites what he thinks it is like to be a beaver. He says:

The beaver in the poem of the Baal Shem

is being born

he is the generative part of man

the cock hair

the low intelligence erupting

changes what we are

the soft becoming

hard the cold one

hot

It seems that the speaker in the poem closely identifies the life of the beaver closely to that of man, especially, perhaps, that of the early Native American.

English 766

Dr. Kenneth Sherwood

4 October 2005

Leon Stennis

Literacy Needs Orality and Vice Versa

The question of which is the most powerful in literature, orality or literacy, came to mind as I read the readings for this week. The question is akin to the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. I stress akin because the analogies do not have total similarity.

What this week’s reading assignments from Albert Lord’s Singer of Tales, Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, Dennis Tedlock’s The Spoken Word, and John Miles Foley’s “How to Read an Oral Poem” prove is that both orality and literacy are important in literature. They compliment or supplement each other and serve in ways that the other cannot.

When I use caution with the work akin in talking about the similarity of the chicken vs. egg argument and the orality vs. literary argument, it is because the similarity centers on the fact that both arguments tend to deal with what is most important. The two arguments become dissimilar on the “which came first” question. With the chicken and egg analogy the debate can go on forever. That is not so on the orality and literacy analogy issue. We all know that orality came first. However, on the question of “which is most important,” the debate on orality and literacy could go on forever too.

Fortunately, the readings provide some powerful ammunition for both sides of the orality vs. literacy debate. They tend to neutralize my position on the issue to the point that I swing back and forth, depending on which medium of communication I am more involved with at the time.

I agree with the statements about the principles of oral form made by Milman Perry and used by Lord in his introduction. “…They would be a starting point for a comparative study of oral poetry which sought to see how the way of life of a people gives rise to a poetry of a given kind and a given degree of excellence,” Perry said (1). “They would be useful in the study of the great poems which have come down to us as lonely relics of a dim past. We would know how to work backwards from their form so as to learn how they must have been made.” Without a study of the principles of oral form we could not have learned so much about the epic poetry of Homer and the other classic poets, Native American poetry, etc?

I found particularly interesting Lord’s statement about the use of writing and “setting down” oral texts. “The use of writing in setting down oral texts does not per se have any effect on oral tradition. It is a means of recording. The texts thus obtained are in a sense special…” he said. (128). “…They are not those of a normal performance, yet that are purely oral, and at their best they are finer that those of normal performance. They are not `transitional,’ but are in a class by themselves.” This helps to debunk the notion that writing or literacy has superiority over orality. As Lord shows in this case, writing is a supplement; it compliments the work of the recorder of oral traditions.

My belief that both orality and literary have powerful roles to play in literature is also supported by Ong in Orality and Literacy when he refers to a statement by Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of modern linguistics. “Writing, he (de Saussure) noted, has simultaneously ‘usefulness, shortcomings and dangers.’ Still, he thought of writing as a kind of compliment to oral speech, not a transformer of verbalization,” Ong wrote (5). Ong demonstrates the power of oral communication in oral performances with an example. “When a speaker is addressing an audience, the members of the audience normally become a unity with themselves and with the speaker,” he writes (73). “If the speaker asks the audience to read a handout provided for them, as each reader enters into his or her own private reading world, the unity of the audience is shattered, to be re-established only when oral speech begins again.”

The value of oral performance in learning about extinct or nearly extinct cultures is high, but it is also time consuming as Miles indicates in his “How to Read and Oral Poem.” He notes that the undertaking of a transcription of an accurate or precise work to illustrate or demonstrate an oral culture is no small task. “To take realistic account of the diversity of oral poetry and the crucial importance of context, the ‘how’ must involve a variety of perspectives, not one but many nontexual approaches…” he said (81). “…We need a full menu of methods, a collection of perspectives that will allow us to understand the whole range of Oral Performances, Voice Texts, Voices form the Past, and Written Oral Poetry,”

As Dennis Tedlock indicates in his introduction to The Spoken Word, sound and its effectiveness is also a very important ingredient in making oral performances authentic and credible. “It is not only the voice of the storyteller that is set free by sound recording, but also the ear of the mythographer he said” (1-2). “Even as the story is being told, the ear already takes in a broader spectrum of sounds than the anxious ear that tried to hear how each word might be spelled.” Tedlock also notes that gestures by the performer can affect the quality of an oral performer, both negatively and positively. “We might still draw a hard line between voice and gesture, but the fact that bodily movement can affect sound of the voice is only the beginning of the problem with distraction,” he said (9).

While we as Americans are a very literate society that benefits from all of the benefits of both orality and literacy it is not always easy to remember the value of orality to societies that have little or no literacy or those societies that are not as literate as ours. I think that is the case because we sometimes forget how much of the world is not literate. In addition to being reminded of that number, the readings for this week help us understand better the value of oral literature and oral performances, and to have a better appreciation for how oral traditions are preserved through to performances and transcriptions.

Fortunately, as Ong suggests, there is still a lot we can learn from oral cultures, both past and present. “The more sophisticated orally patterned thought is the more it is likely to be marked by set expressions skillfully used,” he said (35). “This is true of oral cultures generally from those of Homeric Greece to those of the present day across the globe.”