Voice and song of the poem that starts,
What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
It’s W.B. Yeat’s September 1913 at The Glór Sessions in Dublin with Enda Reilly reciting/singing in January of this year.
Stephen and Enda are currently recording an E.P. of old Irish poetry which will be available early in 2010 go to either of their websites for info when it is out.
I heard them do this piece in person last fall. Beautiful sound.
People in the room could mouth along with the words. Imagine, a country where people can recite poetry from their national history, and enjoy. Not eye rolling or vague familiarity. Not with the sense of the irrelevance of the old except as a fodder or foil or rebellion point, but an honouring and continuity with it and the information contained. This seems to be a sign of health and maturity of culture. To continually and exclusively try to pipe up one’s own voice seems an insecurity, individually or culturally. It’s sort of a bad vibing to insist on creation continually.
Singers do entire albums or sets of cover songs that they enjoy but where is the equivalent for social for writers? There’s Jackdaw’s nest. It’s pretty rare that an open set reading involves someone calling out some classic they enjoy, and a treat when they do.
What causes this? I suppose the protectionism and copyrightism? Or just reading is a private act? Or information overload means we process so much that the top shelf of the mind quickly displaces and buries what was read and time isn’t taken to take something in deeply?
Maybe that’s more of a personal admission than a cultural issue. For all the thousands of poems I read every year, there a few I like but not a lot impresses, especially for long enough for me to want to own them tangibly or to own them as internalizing them.
One writes reviews of whatever is whiz-bang newest. Anthologies might stretch back a bit and retrieve potential contemporary classics that resonate reliably across a variety of people and are of sufficient skill to be exemplar.
What are the universal literary touchstones for Canada? What lives in the back of the heads like a roses are red sort of rhythm that get indexed without being referenced as making the age make sense. It can’t be The Shooting of Dan McGrew. Maybe it’s nothing homegrown. My Last Duchess. The Highwayman. Scarborough Fair. Basho’s pond.
Would most of the universals taking up connections in the neurons be TV and radio jingles?
thank goodness for chef boy r dee
I’m stuck on bandaid, cuz bandaid’s stuck on me
737-11-11, call pizza pizza hee-ea-ven.
I somehow doubt this percolates even as a rhythm into poems anymore than the curriculum poems do. Maybe in every society, time and place, there are millions of potential influences and only those of the immediate peers have an effect with whatever history is carried forward embedded in those immediate iterations.
Poetry isn’t a closed loop. Literature comes from people, from actions, from reactions. Content and form are a product of what’s important to communicate generally, to counterbalance or create toque towards order or mussing up overly ordered. It’s derived from the body. Some from rhythms of walking. Some arise from the pace of onrush of sitting passively and being conveyed at irregular jolts and long runs of cacophonic places. Some from sustained sound environment and some from habituated to being continually interrupted by different moods and tones and subjects incoming. That informs the form.
The writing isn’t coming primarily as a leaping off point the shoulders of other writers. It’s an acrobatics more from ground level.
The idea of personal story is compelling and promoted. Why are there book clubs for novels and not for discussing poetry in the same way? Is it not interesting to discuss? Or we just haven’t happened to do that habit?
A community habit is committed to individual voices, continually reinventing the wheel in the same of self-development and literary developments, validating the new voice as equal to any. It is a fiction is it not? A kind fiction to coax the new to mix with the more practiced voices, but the idea of mentorship is still weak when the model is not hierarchical. Peer-to-peer teaching can careen off down some dialect of promoting some obscure consensus without a master. No doubt the journeys and destinations can be engaging when the blind lead the blind and to have a visioned guide can also lead to interesting journeys and destinations but aren’t they unlikely to be the same places?
If you have no idea what has come before, people who have been around can see clichés from far off. Does telling the person help? Or each person cannot be sped up thru lived experience and gain from being told there’s an accumulation of this metaphor. Take my word for it. Move along.
At the same time, if everyone is bent on reinventing the wheel, the literature can become overstocked in wheels of no standard size. I think it’s mistaken and condescending to think that a purely consumer culture, without remixing or subverting, doesn’t lose a capacity to express or be represented. Individuals use other voices to express his or her individual one and in quoting, inflect. One can’t help but do a personal spin.
Still I feel like I’m still not at a satisfying answer to what the knowledge bank is of utterances we all would be familiar with once not a total naif. Should we have common cultural reference points from literature or would that be streams of, if you are demographic A, B or C, this is your set and the Venn diagram can only be determined/defined retroactively at life end in any meaningful way from the aggregate collection in historical calm?
Good to compare poetry with other arts..
other times, for that matter.
Of course, people used to get together
and recite famous poetry a lot..not now.
Such intense insistence that everything
be nothing ever seen. Overload, boredom,
and a lack of a real public? Being in a gallery
for a few years, I can say regular artists are
a lot less uptight and factional about what
“is art”. The first confession is: poetry is
personal. For cook and diner.
But what about all this “…overstocked in
wheels of no standard size..”? There are
thousands of forgotten originals per year.
Your analogy holds true on consequences.
You can’t do it in cliches, though: true.
I really love it when I read, or coin, a new
phrase that tacks off from the known into
something new. If you know the old catch,
you have a wry smile. If you don’t, you get
that slick jolt of 2-4 words that work in
awesome ways.
Past v. unknown. Maybe it’s a hybrid…
winning terms seem to have a foot in the old
known and a foot in a new take. One step
past this time into another. The best is “oh
yeah, I hadn’t thought of that”. “I wish I said
that” is good. An “instant classic” phrase.
Musicians know…one good hook and you
could have a hit. Nice coinage works in
both prose and avant. That making
of new language the makes a new view.
We see something differently.
This sense of new-only mandate I was thinking is not just literary but at the level of conversation. How often do people cut one another off when they start to repeat a variation of a story or tune out rather than settle in to hear that good one they heard before and relish it more?
In Morocco and Ireland, to generalize for example, there’s more attunement to oral culture and a desire to recall verbatim, and pass along stories rather than a fixation on fresh.
That spin of phrase that sticks in the ear for a lifetime can be done in repeating legends or making a new thing.
Panning for the gold of an “Instant classic”, yes. That’s a lot of time on the knees in the muck to hit a nugget.
One other thought…Maybe we are culturally outsourcing the role of storyteller to tv/movie/etc playback to act as memory. Or would people have said that about the printing press? But would it be right? A reliance on external reference than internal reference of memorized ideas?
As we bore with the passivity of playback and remix maybe we shift back into an era with something not based in clips in their entirety and something more collaborative than Single Soul Alone to Succeed, variant of writer as the embodiment of living the American Dream?
If you get to a Seven Towers reading in Dublin (see seventowers.ie), especially the Last Wednesday one, downstairs in Cassidy’s of Westmoreland St on guess which night, we have a habit of reading our own plus someone else’s (the gift), which could be a classic or could be a personal favourite that the audience doesn’t know. It works well and you are welcome to borrow it.Even better, come down and see it in action.