The Acoustical Prehistory of Poetry

If we want to understand the emergence of poetry in our culture, we cannot look to an alleged "essence" of poetry for an explanation. Instead, we need a genealogical method, one that can trace the source or sources of poetic practice. Oral traditions, including the modalities of transmission that characterize pre-literate narratives, help us grasp the sensibilities and techniques that lead to the creation of poetic texts. In oral traditions across the globe, perception and memorization are universally corporeal: events and experiences are internalized and then re-enacted as real presences. The very musicality of such manifestations is an aid for memory and accounts for the temporal flow and provisional meanings that we find as well in modern written poetry. These persistent features of poetry link modern works to archaic ways of being and communicating.