How to Read an Oral Poem (review)

The title of John Miles Foley's How to Read an Oral Poem contains an apparent contradiction, for how is it possible—and why is it necessary—to "read" oral poetry? The title may also suggest that the book is a kind of instructional handbook, perhaps intended for college speech classes, high school forensics, or workshops for aspiring slam poets. Neither supposition could be further from the truth. By exploiting the manifold possibilities of the verb "read"—meaning, among other things, to scan, to verbalize, to interpret, even to understand—Foley has produced a masterful synthesis of much of his thinking in oral-formulaic theory over the past thirty years.

The book, Foley says, is "intended as a reader-friendly invitation to think about oral poetry in its own terms" by speaking "to the nonspecialist in a straightforward, uncomplicated way" (p. xi). To this end, Foley begins with descriptions of four very different kinds of oral poets: a Tibetan paper-singer (one who performs oral poems while seemingly reading from a piece of paper, even if the singer is illiterate), a North American slam poet, a South African praise-poet (who not only praises leaders but has the license to critique them and to comment on current political issues), and the bard Phemios, described in Book I of The Odyssey. Foley also provides brief commentaries by three South Slavic guslari, or oral epic bards, as a way of establishing the complexity of attitudes and values that performers have for their performances.

The remainder of Foley's book is divided into eight "Words," and these chapter-like divisions are consistently referred to in this way (with quotation marks) as a way of differentiating them from our habitual notion of the word as a string of orthographic symbols. Instead, as the performers make clear, the "Word" is an utterance, speech act, or unit of performance rather than a sequence of phonemes or printed symbols. The "Words" of this volume, then, are attempts to escape the bounds of textual units, so that the commentary (which the reader is, of course, reading) might become ontologically parallel to the representation of oral performances on the printed page. It is a bit reminiscent of Lévi-Strauss's insistence that commentary is as much a part of myth as the mythical text itself.

Foley's Sixth "Word" introduces ten "*proverbs*" (again, they are consistently denoted with asterisks), which provide a series of paradoxical statements that help to reveal the equally paradoxical nature of oral poetry. Samples: "Oralpoetry is a very plural noun," "The best companion for reading oral poetry is an unpublished dictionary," "Composition and reception are two sides of the same coin," and, tellingly, "The play's the thing, and not the script." This last *proverb* suggests Foley's indebtedness to performance theory—which he discusses thoroughly in the third and fourth "Words"—and his efforts (remarkably successful, I think) to combine these perspectives with those he has developed as the best-known successor to Milman Parry and Albert Bates Lord in the continuing attempt to expand the understanding of oral performance. In summary, Foley's aim is to create a "hybrid experience" (p. 20) in encountering oral poetry.

Despite the initial disclaimers that the book is intended for a nonspecialist audience, the text is not easy reading, for Foley's intent is to produce in his audience a kind of defamiliarization; alert readers must constantly remind themselves that "Words" are not necessarily words, nor are *proverbs* nuggets of wisdom intended to guide—or perhaps abash—the listener. Once its self-conscious process is absorbed, the work reveals a remarkable richness in its multiplicity of examples from ancient to contemporary times and from throughout the world. Though largely text-focused, How to Read an Oral Poem provides enough discussion...