"Blasts of Language": Changes in Oral Poetics in Britain since 1965
In 1943 George Orwell described the situation of poetry in terms almost unimaginable 60 years later: "many people who write verse have never even considered the idea of reading it aloud" (1994:240). He knew what he was talking about because he was trying to persuade poets to contribute to a wartime broadcasting experiment that aimed to win the minds of intellectuals in India by making a poetry magazine available on the radio. He also felt that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had done little in this area in Britain. Although the BBC would go on to make poetry broadcasting a significant but small part of its programming, their initiative would remain of limited importance to poets, as would the production of LP and later tape and CD recordings. What did change was the growth of live performance by poets who would willingly read aloud; over the next few decades speaking poetry aloud would become central to most poets' reputation and reception.
Today all but a very few dissenters read their work aloud, some are more performers than writers, and for many poets performance is an integral part of their writing career—compositionally, socially, and not least financially. One arts organizer goes so far as to say that "more poets read more often than at any time since the troubadours" (Robinson 2002:7). The situation has reached the point where the refusal to read aloud can become as distinctive as the elective anonymity of a novelist like Thomas Pynchon. Oral performance is for many poets the primary activity: they were first excited by live performance, they have learned to compose for performance, and their readership has been shaped by performance. What Andy Croft says about Middlesborough—"almost all the most distinguished poets of our time have read in Middlesborough during the last fifteen years" (quoted in ibid.:43)—could be said about many cities and towns. The poet Basil Bunting, whose career as a poet stalled during the 1950s after an early success in the '30s, was a beneficiary of the development of the new [End Page 44] performance culture, as a bibliography of his performances illustrates. 1 Nor was it for lack of broadcasting—he did have two BBC readings in 1954 and 1957. The complete absence of live public readings was the problem. Only after he began to read at the Morden Tower series in Newcastle curated by Tom Pickard was his reputation re-established. Live public readings were essential to the building and maintenance of this reputation.
In a prior sketch of the history of this transformation of the reception of poetry, we have suggested that the contemporary poetry reading emerged from the demise of private reading circles and the use of poetry as a primary text for elocutionary training (Middleton 2005). Most readers of poetry in the nineteenth century would have heard poems read aloud by friends and family, and by the author only if they had a personal friendship. Many such readers, if they came from middle and upper-class backgrounds, would also have learned to speak poetry aloud as one of the various regimes of elocution that were supposed to be an asset to social and public life, as well as to clarity of thought and its expression.
The formation of poetry choirs by John Masefield, Elsie Fogarty, and others in the 1920s and early 1930s was arguably a decadent extravagance at a moment when the social structures that had made possible this wide circulation of the aural values of poetry were no longer viable. Changes in leisure brought about by the mobility of the car and the new entertainment technologies had put an end to the reading circles and the interest in elocution. Masefield tacitly...
