Avocations: On Poetry and Poets

Body and Song

106 Avocations Body and Song The Poetry of John Logan No one read anything silently until two or three hundred years ago. Sometime after Gutenberg, when reading became more widespread through the growth of education and the availability of “texts,” some anonymous schoolteacher in some anonymous town or village somewhere discovered “silent reading” and began a fundamental change in our perception of literature. “Don’t move your lips when you read,” the teacher says to the third-grade class, thereby missing the primary form of all literature: the noises it makes. The Greeks and Romans taught slaves to read aloud so that they could relax and listen, or listen while attending to other things. One of the foundations of Jewish culture, the oral tradition presented not only poetry, but history and theology and social persuasion, drama, and philosophy– all in rhythms and measures designed to make them accessible through memorization. John Milton, his eyesight failing, taught his daughters to pronounce Latin—with little or no comprehension. He wanted his ears full of the sound of it, and their understanding of the “text” meant nothing to him. In ancient China, poets and audience alike gathered for “poetry-andwine ” festivals that included poetry writing contests and the chanting of works judged best. Formally “reading” a poem is comparable to “reading” a Bach sonata or a great tune by John Coltrane: the “educated” may draw “informed” conclusions, but will invariably turn to theory rather than to the emotional, the gut-level—the very foundation of art—in order to respond. When John Coltrane first began performing “My Favorite Things,” a jazz critic somewhere (in Downbeat?) transcribed a solo from a Carnegie Hall performance, then showed the transcription to Coltrane at the beginning of an interview. Coltrane looked at it long and hard, squinting as though listening to black smudges of ink that covered several pages. Then he looked up. “Can’t play it,” he said. That was all he said. Later, after listening to a recording of his performance, Coltrane realized that he had played it, and played it exactly as it had been transcribed. His body possessed a knowledge far greater, far deeper, than even his own mind could conceive. John Coltrane was a poet, and had a poet’s ear. Speaking about poetry, we often permit ourselves to return to third grade, to sit and read squiggles and ink-smudges in silence, completely unaware of how the poem might engage, might propel or compel our physical bodies. A hundred years ago, there were Tennyson and Browning societies who gathered to listen to poetry in the same way some people now gather at bookstore or college campus poetry readings. It is doubly unfortunate that so many university literature courses continue to “teach” poetry silently, stuck in logos, the “reason” of the poem, and stuck in phanopoeia, the imagery of the poem. Our insistence upon a way to “explain” the poem often denies us the truest experience of the poetry. From the very beginning, the notion of poetry as a gift of and from the body is apparent. The Greeks believed that by emptying ourselves of ourselves, we may draw into our bodies the breath of one of the Muses—inspiration; becoming inspired, we become pregnant with meaning; pregnant with meaning, we make a song by listening; listening attentively, we make sounds with the body, and a poem is born, a poem we then give away in order to become empty again, in order to become inspired. The song, the spiritual exchange, is the fundmental experience of poetry. The lyric poem itself exists only as a condition of music, whether that music be flatly spoken or whether it be an aria, and it cannot be properly understood without being heard. Rhyme became a fundamental part of poetry because it is a mnemonic device. Mnemosyne is the mother of the Muses. More people “remembered” the poems of Robert Service than T. S. Eliot because, in part, the former used predictable meters and predictable rhymes—Service is easy to remember. When I was a teenager memorizing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” I bought the Caedmon recording of Eliot and “learned” the poem the exact same way I learned a new recording by Miles Davis or Elvis Presley: by saying it as I listened. I learned every nuance in the voice, every pause. Learning to recite “Prufrock” was the first step toward my own self-definition as a poet. It was the equivalent of...