Introduction
The poems and songs in this volume show a certain trajectory of writing and oral performance in English since the Middle Ages. As a reader designed for students new to poetry, it provides guidance through significant formal developments and social outlooks expressed by a diversity of writers and performers. The many formal possibilities of poetry are found in lyric performance, with close links tying the art of poetry to the oral folk traditions in popular song. My goal is to reduce binaries of thinking about written and oral/recorded art to think of both poetry and popular music as competing approaches to expression channeled through diverse and overlapping traditions of social making. The embodiment of art, in the rhythms and cadences of language, competes with the silence of the printed page.
Poetry in English since the Middle Ages often found its greatest institutional support through the Church and Courts of Europe, and in the Modern Era, the academy and the mainstream publishing industry profoundly shape the circulation of poetry in its diverse forms. But apposed to these institutional formations, song has often found expression in folk cultures where music and voice embody the experiences and outlooks of the cultural reality beyond the Church, the Court, or the University. This brief anthology, therefore, proposes a way of thinking about poetry in relation to oral performance to see how creative understanding merges, or is submerged into, competing social pressures and outlooks. There are elements of writing in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, for instance, that overlap with folk traditions, church music, and public oratory while the songs of Son House or Fred McDowell, located in the experiences of incarceration in Southern labor camps and plantations, combine elements of gospel, work songs, and West African formal traditions to speak to audiences in the Jim Crow South of the 1920s and ’30s. The overlap of popular forms, folk traditions, and formal poetry is the reality this book draws to attention.
Beginning with examples of Medieval Church lyric, students encounter the language and values of Middle English lyricists who join elements of devotion to musical patterns. Weeks three and four concentrate on the major developments of Renaissance poetry and the radical departure from those outlooks by Romantic poets like William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Although poetry’s development in the British Isles influenced the English language for centuries, those formal traditions meet creative upheaval in North America beginning especially in the nineteenth century. Weeks five and six therefore present the overlapping poetic and oral realities that grew out of the experiences of people located in diverse regional and national geographies, and in competing social and economic circumstances. Robert Johnson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Langston Hughes, and others are approached to better see how music and poetry can inform how we understand the social force of art as a public event that grows out of private responses to diverse regional conditions. Weeks seven, eight, and nine draw on the reception of poetry and oral art by postwar artists who increasingly speak to the histories and experiences of diverse peoples in North America. By challenging normative assumptions of race, gender, sexuality, and economic and political conditions shaped by an increasingly homogenized society and its global wars, poets and songwriters shaped words and sounds to embody feelings and outlooks through unique formal opportunities. See for instance Charles Olson’s summation of Western culture after the devastation of World War Two in “The Kingfishers,” while Amiri Baraka and Diane di Prima challenged 1950s and ’60s assumptions of race, feminism, and political alliance in the Cold War Era.
As you read and listen to the material in this reader, practice reading or singing out loud the words you see. What do you experience in that gap between the voiceless page and your own embodiment of sound? Perhaps you internally “hear” the music of the page as you read, and experience sound as a personal and interior reality. Nevertheless, whether it is embodied by voice or experienced as an interior phenomena of imagination, tone, volume, rhythm, cadence, sound, silence, and memory interact in the ongoing listening this volume invites. How do we hear the world or the people around us? How does poetry teach us to listen and how to hear? How might song and poem intervene in our lives to give us what critic Kenneth Burke called “equipment for living”? The work presented in this volume asks us to listen across time and cultures to better understand the ways language, feeling, thinking, and attunement to voice and sound correlate in an ongoing making of new outlooks that help inform us of larger cultural and historical circumstances.
