Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016

Spoken word: a gesture toward possibility
Re-writing the creative writing tradition poetic form as experimental procedure: the view from renaissance England

DAVID B. GOLDSTEIN

One of our most complex challenges as teachers and critics of poetry is to explain both how writing changes and how it stays the same. Teachers of avant-garde or experimental poetry are especially called upon to elucidate these matters. Just what is “avant” or experimental about such work? How does new writing establish continuities with earlier traditions, and when is it effacing or rejecting them? One of the most pressing and least studied of these issues, especially in English-language (as opposed to French) criticism, is the distinction between form and procedure. This distinction goes by many names — what some critics call form, others call “rule,” “generic convention,” or “regularity,” while “procedure” is also called “constraint.”* The multiplicity of terms underlines the fact that there is no agreed-upon definition of the two categories. But we know it when we see it. In general, form is associated with traditional poetic structures with histories dating back before the twentieth century, often involving metre and/or rhyme. Procedure is linked to innovative, experimental, and organic poetic structures employing particular constraints, sometimes generated for use in a single piece of writing. In creative writing and critical classes, we tend (I would venture) to teach the difference between these two modes of poetic structuring as a difference not just between contrasting approaches to poetic making, but as a historical divide, between “new” poetry and “old” poetry. I will suggest here, instead, that procedurality has always been with us, and that while it may be useful to draw distinctions in these techniques among current poetic approaches, to view “form” historically is to discover that it is nearly indistinguishable from procedure. My argument here will focus upon Renaissance prosody, especially in the sixteenth century — the formal concepts that influenced Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In comparing Renaissance poetic practice and theory to contemporary, and especially Oulipian notions of procedure, I will suggest that the two are virtually the same in most important respects. Renaissance poets would have found themselves in significant, if perhaps not total agreement, with the Oulipo movement as well as with much of what goes by the term procedural poetics. What can we learn from this about our own practice as writers and teachers? Who cares if Sir Thomas Wyatt or John Donne thought of poetry as procedural? The answer, I will suggest, is that we must undertake a fundamental shift in the ways we teach “form,” as well as metre and rhyme, to our students.

The concept of procedure — or its close cousin, constraint — arose in experimental circles, such as those of Language Poetry, the conceptualists, and above all Oulipo, as a challenge to the notion of form as a culturally fixed and outworn vessel into which a poem’s content is poured. The goal of a procedure is to reinvigorate poetic language through restriction. Following Jacques Roubaud, one of Oulipo’s primary theorists, Marjorie Perloff makes a distinction between metrical form and procedurality, arguing that form denotes a “rule” or “fixed property of the text,” while a procedure is “generative,” denoting “how the writer will proceed with his composition” (Radical 139). Elsewhere, Perloff elaborates, “Whereas a Petrarchan sonnet may be understood as a kind of envelope (octave plus sestet), whose parameters govern the poem’s composition, the Oulipo constraint is a generative device: it creates a formal structure whose rules of composition are internalized so that the constraint in question is not only a rule but a thematic property of the poem” (Differentials 208). She lays special emphasis on two of Roubaud’s chief Oulipian tenets: first, that “a text written according to a constraint describes the constraint,” and second, that procedures are often constructed in relation to numerical and mathematical schemes.** As Alison James writes, procedure describes “a process of undoing an established form in order to construct a new one” (n. pag.).

Perloff draws her distinction between form and procedure not in order to separate traditional from contemporary poetry, but rather to mount a critique of traditional form as currently conceived (especially by the New Formalist movement) as a timeless and ahistorical set of rules. Conversely, Perloff argues, paraphrasing the critic Henri Meschonnic, “There is no prosodic form that isn’t, at least to some degree, historically bound and culture specific” (Radical 136). Indeed, some proceduralists go out of their way to demonstrate continuities between ancient forms and modern procedures. Roubaud, in La vieillesse d’Alexandre [The Old Age of Alexander], argues for a continuous reinvention of the French alexandrine whose latest avatar is the Oulipian experiments of Michel Bénabou and others (Perloff, Differentials 208). Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie, ruminating on the vexed question of the sonnet, conclude (invoking Roubaud’s research) “that by Oulipian standards no precise definition of the form can be said to exist. All the same, Oulipians have always loved experimenting with it” (229).*** Confusion, or perhaps a refreshing ecumenicalism, also surfaces on the formalist side. For example, the editors of In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry, offer a rather New Formalist definition of form: “A form poem is one in which key details of composition, including rhyme, repetition, meter, and rhythm, are accepted as givens” (Braid and Shreve 13). “Accepted as givens” seems to suggest a notion of form as fixed or received. Yet the anthology includes a selection from Christian Bök’s Eunoia, as well as concrete and anagrammatic poems by bpNichol, all of which treat procedure as generative in the Oulipo sense. Thus, in spite of the concern over categorical distinctions between form and procedure — and, beneath it, between the bona fides of traditionalism and the avant-garde — distinguishing firmly between the two is a challenging, if not impossible, endeavour. I plan to muddy the waters further by expanding upon Roubaud and Perloff’s arguments in order to suggest, not only that Renaissance prosodic forms were historically produced and contextualized (as others have pointed out), but that in fact Renaissance poets viewed what we now call forms as something much closer to what we now call procedures. On the continuum of form and procedure, Shakespeare’s contemporaries considered not only the anagram, but also the sonnet, and indeed metre and rhyme themselves to be generative and unpredictable constraints — fields of play upon which language scatters and finds itself through rigours both mathematical and mystical.

Our understanding of Renaissance prosody is conditioned above all by two pressures: selection (with respect to modern canon-formation) and fixity (with respect to modern printing). The pressures of canon have left us with the sense that Renaissance writers chose from among a narrow range of forms — above all the sonnet — and that writer and reader, as Timothy Steele puts it, “would have recognized the verse forms and could have traced … their continuity all the way back to the misty beginnings of Greek lyric” (426). The fixity of modern print has left us with the impression that Renaissance form was static and iterative — that all sonnets looked more or less alike, with small variations (such as the replacement of Petrarchan by Shakespearean rhyme schemes) having only slight effects on the rules of the form. Open just about any modern printed anthology, and you will see the familiar result of these two biases: a sonnet equals fourteen lines of left-justified iambic pentameter, the last two lines (if the rhyme scheme is Shakespearean) always indented.****

To define the Renaissance sonnet as a fixed form, even in the most usual and general sense of having fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter, is already to forget the well-known fact that Renaissance sonnets actually come in several line-lengths, from the alexandrines of Philip Sidney’s “Loving in truth” to the tetrameter of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 145, as well as varying numbers of lines (from twelve to sixteen), and experiment widely with rhythm (as in Thomas Wyatt’s syllabic experiments), rhyme (as in Spenser’s Amoretti), and subject (such as Michael Drayton’s parody of sonnet commonplaces in his sequence Idea). All of these examples indicate that “sonnet” was less a fixed rule than a cloud of possibilities that interacted with various factors to produce something that contemporaries recognized as a poem. The freezing of the sonnet form, which played out from the 1590s through the early seventeenth century with the seemingly endless parade of sonnet sequences inspired by Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, heralded the form’s demise, not its development. Put another way, from Wyatt and Surrey’s resurrection of the form in the 1530s through the sonnet sequence vogue culminating in the 1611 publication of Shakespeare’s attempt at the genre, the English sonnet was transformed from a procedure into a rule. With the exception of Donne’s spectacularly strange Holy Sonnets, it took several decades before the sonnet was resuscitated, and then only by Milton, who did love a challenge. It may be that the vogue for sonnet sequences after Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella did more than anything else in English literary history to solidify the idea of form as a fixed, intrinsic set of poetic rules. No wonder Donne, Jonson, and others rebelled by writing in whatever forms they could make, revivify, or find lying around on the street, or that Shakespeare decided in his plays that the most radical form of dramatic poetry was prose. For Renaissance writers, when a form became fixed — became a rule rather than a generative set of possibilities — it was time either to rewire it or to ditch it.

All Renaissance poems had their initial existence not in printed books but, of course, in manuscripts. Rather than single-author works, many of these manuscripts were produced by a coterie of like-minded people who wrote, circulated, and annotated them collaboratively.***** One of the best-known and most important of these is the so-called Devonshire Manuscript, now housed in the British Library.

The manuscript, which was compiled in the 1530s and 40s, centred on Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s infamous and ill-fated queen. The manuscript includes sixty-six poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt found nowhere else, as well as numerous poems by his contemporaries, including Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey. Most strikingly, it provides the first sustained evidence of men and women writing together in the English tradition, and many of the poems are related to questions of gender and love.******

One of the most curious is identified by its first line, “all women have vertues,” and attributed in the manuscript to the poet Richard Hatfield.

Although the manuscript poses challenges both in terms of legibility and handwriting style (it is written in a sixteenth-century hand called Secretary, which includes several features that have long since dropped out of English script), at least one remarkable feature of the poem stands out even to the modern eye: although it is lineated, there are occasional slashes in the midst of the lines, as well as extra-grammatical periods and other odd forms of punctuation. What is the poet up to?

Read carefully, the meaning of the backslashes quickly becomes apparent. The poem is structured so that it can be read in two ways: one respects the line breaks of the manuscript, and the other respects the internal punctuation. Here are two transcriptions of the poem, both with modernized spelling, the first printed as lineated (with added punctuation to clarify syntax), and the second as dictated by the internal backslashes:*******

All women have virtues noble & excellent.

Who can perceive that they do offend?

Daily they serve god with good intent,

seldom they displease their husbands to their lives’ end.

Always to please them they do intend.Never man may find in them shrewdness;********

commonly such conditions they have more & less.

What man can perceive that women be evil?

Every man that hath wit greatly will them praise,

for vice they abhor with all their will.

Prudence, mercy, and patience they use always;

Folly, wrath, and cruelty they hate, as men say.

Meekness and all virtue they do practise ever;

sin to avoid, virtues they do procure.

Some men speak much evil be women —

truly therefore they be to blame.

Nothing a man may check in them,

abundantly they have of grace and good fame,

lacking few virtues to a good name.

In them find ye all constantness;

they lack perde******** all shrewdness as I guess.

Or:

All women have virtues noble & excellent?

Who can perceive that?

They do offend daily,

They serve god with good intent seldom,

They displease their husbands to their lives’ end always —

To please them they do intend never.

Man may find in them shrewdness commonly;

such conditions they have more & less.

What man can perceive that women be evil?

Every man that hath wit.

Greatly will them praise for vice:

they abhor with all their will prudence, mercy, and patience.

They use always folly, wrath, and cruelty;

they hate, as men say, meekness and all virtue.

They do practise ever sin.

To avoid virtues they do procure.

Some men speak much evil be women truly.

Therefore they be to blame nothing.

A man may check in them abundantly.

They have of grace and good fame lacking.

Few virtues to a good name in them find ye.

All constantness they lack, perde,

all shrewdness as I guess.

The procedure, as we see, produces two antithetical poems, each nestled within the other. The first poem is a rousing, if formulaic, protofeminist defence of women’s constancy and wisdom, while the second is an equally formulaic misogynist attack upon women’s behaviour. Neither of the poems in themselves would be interesting; conjoined by a creative procedure, they produce a complex commentary on gender relations in the court of Henry VIII, in which Anne Boleyn and her fellow queens are alternately seen as the pinnacle of beauty and nobility, or as whores, with little in between. Circulated within a mixed-gender coterie which without doubt included Boleyn herself, the poem further comments upon how gender operates in courtly poetry, with women acting both as authors and objects — ­sometimes revered, sometimes reviled — in social and literary contexts.

There is a great deal more to say about the social ramifications of both the poem and the manuscript in which it appears, but my interest here is in what this poem and its context tell us about Renaissance poetic form.******** It’s a surprising poem in many ways:

· It uses not a received form but an invented one.

· It is generative, producing discourse through the fact of its constraint.

· It is also rule-bound, in the sense that it imposes a rule inseparable from the poetic construction.

· It is rhythmically structured, and is written — the first version at least — in the rhyme scheme of rhyme royal, but neither version is metrical. In other words, the fact that it is a form does not mean that it automatically corresponds to the mathematics of metre: it conforms to a principle of measure, but not to the principles of alternating accents and fixed syllable count that we usually attribute to most English verse between Chaucer and Thomas Hardy.

Such a poem seems to contradict most descriptions of form as conceived historically. It is not received, it is not a conveyor of abstract rules, it is not associated with a particular metric, and its relation to its content is utterly inextricable. We might say, by way of objection, that it’s a pretty mediocre poem, long on cleverness and short on art, and we might point out that it was never published. But in doing so we would be judging the poem by anachronistic standards. The Renaissance placed a very high value on cleverness (Shakespeare’s sonnets are full of witty wordplay), and many poets — including Wyatt, Sidney, Donne, and Herbert — withheld their poems from publication. (The facts that this poem is found in three other manuscripts, and is one of the few poems in the Devonshire manuscript carrying an authorial attribution, both imply significant popularity).******** The point of the poem is not to turn a beautiful phrase, but to use a poetic procedure to explore a linguistic phenomenon that comments, in turn, upon the procedure.

Lest we consider this poem an exception that proves the rule of an ­otherwise unitary conception of form, let us turn to the period’s most important theorist of poetic practice, George Puttenham, whose 1589 Arte of English Poesie was the first full-scale poetry-writing manual in the English language. Puttenham begins his book with a thumbnail history and description of formal verse patterns. At moments he ascribes, as did most theorists of the period, intrinsic meanings, subjects, and emotions to specific verse forms: he describes the Roman funeral elegies, for example, as “placing a limping Pentameter after a lusty Exameter, which made it go dolourously more than any other meeter” (39). But when it comes to contemporaneous practice, he rejects these distinctions in favour of a more fluid relation between form and content. Love poetry, for example, “requireth a forme of Poesie variable, inconstant, affected, curious and most witty of any others,” suggesting that one must construct one’s verse organically, in tandem with the fleeting emotions one is trying to capture — a notion that mixes the Black Mountain Poets with the Oulipians (36).

The second book of Puttenham’s treatise, “Of Proportion Poetical,” treats the technicalities of practice. It begins (as does Jacques Roubaud’s introduction to the Oulipo Compendium) by relating poetic procedure to mathematics. Puttenham’s discussion of metre emphasizes experiment and innovation over traditional rule-following, and indeed he shares both of these qualities — viewing metre as a kind of math, and poetry as an innovative practice — with the two major poetic theorists who follow his work, Thomas Campion and Samuel Daniel. (This continuity is all the more remarkable for the fact that Campion’s treatise may be read as a reaction to Puttenham’s, and Daniel’s is an explicit retort to Campion’s.) Having admitted, for instance, his preference for lines with even numbers of syllables, Puttenham nevertheless allows that lines with an odd syllable-count, “if they be well composed … are commendable inough …” and offers an example (N7v).******** Nor does Puttenham address forms in the sense that we teach them — as discrete concatenations of metre, line- and stanza-length, and rhyme scheme to which a single label is affixed. Nowhere is the sonnet mentioned in either Puttenham’s or Campion’s treatises, and Puttenham invokes Petrarch — the great innovator of the sonnet — only in order to vaguely discuss his “canzoni,” which might refer either to a particular form or generically to his vernacular poetry, and his “seizino,” which seems to be a garbled term for sestina (72).******** The single common modern form discussed is an Oulipian favourite, the anagram. Puttenham devotes the majority of his discussion to a minute analysis of different sorts of feet and line-lengths, interleaved with a disquisition on visual poetry. He encourages his writer to try different stanza-lengths, according “to the makers phantasie and choise,” illustrating them ocularly to show some different possible shapes.

Then he suggests a variety of shape poems, each of which observes a metrical scheme devised by Puttenham in keeping with the exigencies of the shape’s required line breaks, and nearly all of which somehow describe or enact their shapes.

They are, in other words, nearly indistinguishable from Oulipian forms, like the snowball. In fact, one of the most frequently ­anthologized Oulipian poems, Harry Mathews’s lozenge snowball “Liminal poem,” employs a constraint much discussed, under the same name, by Puttenham.

Throughout the section on proportion, Puttenham’s attitude is that of a craftsman or scientist. Given a range of tools and strictures — ­syllable, accent, caesura, line — how does one construct a workable, harmonious verse? The emphasis on construction and materiality (Puttenham, like Sidney and every other Renaissance poet, reminds his reader straight off that poet comes from the Greek poiein, to make) gives the lie to any notion of form as received or fixed vessel.******** Puttenham’s goal is to make his readers into good builders of poems, giving them an arsenal of equipment and then setting them to work creating beautiful, intricate patterns. Puttenham isn’t too far from Jacques Roubaud’s definition of an Oulipian author as “a rat who himself builds the maze from which he sets out to escape” (41). Likewise Robert Duncan’s definition of poetry in “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” as “a scene made-up by the mind, / that is not mine, but is a made place / that is mine” (lines 1—3).

We might object that these poems clearly do not belong to mainstream Renaissance writing, since our anthologies are not exactly littered with shape poems. Perhaps they were seen as mere ditties, as are the “posies” Puttenham describes that were commonly painted on plates, to be revealed as a kind of epistemological palate cleanser at the meal’s end (47). Yet we know that a great part of Renaissance social life expressed itself through ephemera, ornamentation, and triviality. The Renaissance was a culture of fragments, “a cosmos,” to quote Patricia Fumerton, “in which even central historical configurations seemed broken apart and marginalized in incoherence, and where self was thus fixed in fracture” (1). These trivial fractions of verse helped give structure to both public and private life. Puttenham presents them as survival tactics for courtier-poets, and as glittering linguistic constructions that achieve a social function, and potentially‚ — though not necessarily — a literary one. Poetic form — for Puttenham, Richard Hatfield, and most of their contemporaries — consists in using the material tools of language to construct lyric and narrative objects with a range of purposes — political, cultural, linguistic, literary. The Arte of English Poesie — both Puttenham’s book and the art itself — ­provides a workshop for the writing of potential literature. Those shape poems do, by general agreement, become literature when George Herbert, whose “The Altar” and “Easter Wings” were likely influenced by Puttenham’s manual, elevates them to that status. In the meanwhile, they are still made objects, are still forms. As Roubaud again writes, “It is clearly in the resort to complex systems of constraints, to strategies of progressive demonstration, and to ceremonials of revelation and dissimulation that the distinction is created between the ’five-finger exercises’ of elementary pieces written according to constraints and creation that is truly literary” (qtd. in Mathews and Brotchie 42). The art of Renaissance English poetry is a procedural art of potentiality. It makes things out of syllables, words, lines, and shapes, and those forms bring content out of and through themselves — sometimes as revelation, sometimes as artifice, sometimes as expression. At best, as all three.

The idea of “poetic form” as received vessel or static structure no doubt recurs in various places and times, attached to particular kinds of writing, as it does in our own. Once certain procedures harden, they may inevitably start to become forms. This is one reason why Oulipians and other proceduralists, from Puttenham to Roubaud, emphasize the importance of the new. “The constraint,” writes Christelle Reggiani, “is a rhetoric of invention which owes its powerful effect precisely to the fact that it exceeds the cultural expectation defined by the rule” (qtd. in Andrews 224). As Chris Andrews argues, speaking of Reggiani and other theorists of procedure, “The constraint is implicitly defined as a new and/or little-imitated rule” (224). But for the late sixteenth century, a period of tremendous poetic experiment and transformation, the power of metrical and other prosodic units lay in their power both to organize and surprise — to describe and advance the ways in which language builds a world both cognitive and material, a lived world.

To acknowledge that Renaissance formalism is far more avant-garde — even in the contemporary sense — than we usually give it credit for may change us as writers, for when we return to that time for inspiration, we may find it altogether richer and stranger, and more like our own experiments, than we care to admit.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Jennifer Summit, who introduced me to the wonders of the Devonshire Manuscript. An earlier version of this essay was given as a talk at CCWWP 2012, and I am grateful to the audience of that panel, especially Christian Bök, for insightful comments and questions that helped shape subsequent drafts.

Works Cited

Andrews, Chris. “Constraint and Convention: The Formalism of the Oulipo.” Neophilologus 87 (2003): 224. Print.

Braid, Kate, and Sandy Shreve, eds. In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry. Vancouver: Raincoast, 2005. Print.

Campion, Thomas. Observations in the Art of English Poesie. London, 1602. Print.

Carlson, David. “The Henrician Courtier Writing in Manuscript and Print (Wyatt, Surrey, Bryan, and Others).” A Companion to Tudor Literature. Ed. Kent Cartwright. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2010, 161—62.

Daniel, Samuel. Defence of Ryme. London, 1603. Print.

Duncan, Robert. The Opening of the Field. New York: New Directions, 1973. Print.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. Print.

Fumerton, Patricia. Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Heale, Elizabeth. “Women and the Courtly Love Lyric: The Devonshire MS (BL Additional 17492).” Modern Language Review 90.2 (April 1995): 296—313. Print.

James, Alison. “Meter, Constraint, Procedure: Some Problems of Form in American and French Poetry” (presented at La forme et l’informe dans la création moderne et contemporaine, Cerisy, France, 2009). Web.

Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Print.

Kalas, Rayna. Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2007. Print.

Love, Harold, and Arthur Marotti. “Manuscript Transmission and Circulation.” The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature. Ed. David Loewenstein and Janel M. Mueller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.

Marotti, Arthur F. Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Print.

Mathews, Harry, and Alastair Brotchie, eds. Oulipo Compendium. London and Los Angeles: Atlas, 2005. Print.

Perloff, Marjorie. Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2004. Print.

. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Print.

Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. London, 1589. Print.

Roubaud, Jacques. “The Oulipo and Combinatorial Art.” Reprinted in Mathews and Brotchie, Oulipo Compendium, 41.

Smith, Pamela H. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2004. Print.

A Social Edition of the Devonshire MS (BL Add 17,492). Wikibooks. Web. 10 Nov. 2013.

Steele, Timothy. “Tradition and Revolution: The Modern Movement and Free Verse.” Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry. Ed. Dana Gioia, David Mason, and Meg Schoerke. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003. Print.

Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1993. Print.

* See the various critics cited in this discussion.

** These schemes are, of course, occasionally metrical: the sonnet is listed as one of the procedures in the Oulipo Compendium.

*** Examples of Oulipian sonnet experiments include Raymond Queneau’s A Hundred ­Thousand Billion Poems and Roubaud’s own debut collection of poetry, E. See the discussion in Mathews and Brotchie.

**** For key standard accounts of the relationship between printing and fixity, see the writings of Elizabeth L. Eisenstein and Adrian Johns.

***** On the Renaissance practice of coterie publication, see, for example, Harold Love and Arthur F. Marotti (55—80); Arthur F. Marotti; and Wendy Wall.

****** The best ongoing work on the Devonshire Manuscript, including a facsimile and a thorough bibliography of its critical context, is to be found in A Social Edition of the Devonshire MS (BL Add 17,492).

******* Transcription and modernization mine, based on the facsimile provided in A Social Edition of the Devonshire MS.

******** Shrewdness: shrewish behaviour.

******** Perde: by God.

******** On the social valences of the manuscript, see the article by Elizabeth Heale.

******** On the issue of authorial attribution, see David Carlson’s “The Henrician Courtier Writing in Manuscript and Print (Wyatt, Surrey, Bryan, and Others).” On the poem’s appearance in other manuscripts, see A Social Edition of the Devonshire MS.

******** I employ the folio number here, as the page numbering throughout the section is incorrect.

******** Daniel’s treatise, however, addresses the sonnet briefly on F7r-F8v.

******** On poem-making as a kind of artisanal and material knowledge, see especially works by Rayna Kalas and Pamela H. Smith.

Spoken word: a gesture toward possibility

ANDREA THOMPSON

We die. That may be the meaning of life.

But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

— Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1993

In 2011, during my second year studying creative writing through the University of Guelph’s MFA, I was assigned a reading that deeply affected the way I thought about spoken word, an art form I had been practising and teaching for close to twenty years. The reading, Toni Morrison’s lecture for the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, served as an antidote to an incident that occurred during an evening at the program’s reading series, when two classmates openly snickered about the fact that I write poetry that rhymes. Though I had found the program’s administration and instructors to be supportive of my performative background, this incident did not completely take me by surprise. While audiences of spoken word have been growing in Canada at an exponential rate, I knew some still viewed the form with suspicion and distain.

Once upon a time. It is these words, spoken aloud, that so often mark the beginning of our experience of literature. Through stories we are initiated into the world of metaphor, language, and symbols used to convey the values, traditions, and history of our society. In this way, oral lore becomes cultural artifact; transitory in its transmission, yet serving as the thread of know­ledge passed from generation to generation. On the day she spoke before the Swedish Academy, the narrative Morrison chose to share was a folk story of a blind old woman who, in spite of her physical handicap and her station as solitary outsider, had been granted the position of wise elder. Morrison’s story begins as a group of children approach the woman, seemingly to test the breadth of her knowledge. They stand before her, telling her that they have a bird in their hand, and posing the question: Is the bird alive or dead?

All stories are an invitation to explore a personal specificity of meaning behind the symbols and narrative presented. The information these stories impart is a facet of our understanding of culture, as well as our understanding of who we are as individuals at our particular stage of development on our life journey. Morrison said that for her, the old woman represented a practised writer, while the bird she viewed as language. Though this key to the story’s semiotic meaning serves to clarify Morrison’s subsequent interrogation of the uses and abuses of language, we must each view the narrative through the lens of our own perceptions and experiences in order to fully unlock its mysteries. Rather than a metaphor for language in general, for me, Morrison’s story reflected the journey of spoken word towards claiming its place in the national canon as oral literature.

Spoken word is enigmatic. An umbrella term that refers to a hybrid genre that includes forms such as performance poetry, dub, jazz, and hip-hop, each branch of spoken word has its own historical lineage. While some spoken word artists use traditional elements of literary verse (or “page poetry,” as it is often referred to in the spoken word community), this adherence to poetic norms is not required in order for a spoken word piece to be successful. Many spoken word artists draw inspiration from a different well — blurring the lines between poetry and performance art, theatrical monologue, standup comedy, sermonic rhetoric, and storytelling. Most spoken word artists use a blend of varied influences, creating their own unique aesthetic — the common denominator being that each artist writes and performs pieces that are focused on creating a sense of engagement with an audience through a combination of sound-play, word-play and an unlimited range of other perfomative techniques.

Spoken word is a paradox. While some audiences are just beginning to become acquainted with this dynamic “new” oratory, spoken word is one of our oldest forms of creative expression. A natural evolution of the oral tradition, with an ancestry deeply rooted in pre-print literature, spoken word is as primordial as cave painting. In English literature, it can be traced back past the European troubadours of the eleventh century, to Beowulf and the Homeric epics. In other literary traditions the role of spoken word is closely related to the poetic oratory of cultural figures, such as the African griot, or the traditional song, storytelling, and chanting practices of aboriginal people around the world.

In the early nineties, as Morrison joined the ranks of Nobel laureates, the spoken word movement in North America was undergoing a flourishing revival. In the United States, many marked the emergence of oral forms into popular culture as being rooted in a renewed interest in the Beat Poets of the fifties and sixties, and their rejection of the norms of both the literary establishment and society as a whole. Allen Ginsberg commented on the similarity between the Beats and the growing spoken word movement in an article that appeared in a 1995 issue of the New Yorker: “This movement is a great thing: the human voice returns, word returns, nimble speech returns, nimble wit and rhyming return.”

This growth of spoken word in the United States prompted a similar wave of interest north of the border. Poets such as Black Cat and Jill Battson stirred up the scene in Toronto, while others such as Sheri-D Wilson, Adeena Karasick, and Kedrick James and his performance troupe AWOL Love Vibe lit up West Coast stages with their unique brand of spoken word play. In the book Impure: Reinventing the Word, spoken word practitioners Victoria Stanton and Vincent Tinguely document the theory, practice, and oral history of the thriving spoken word scene in Montreal at the time. One of the results of this momentum was the creation of the first Canadian poetry slam in Vancouver. From this lively, weekly performance event organized by James P. McAuliffe and Graham Olds, the first national slam team emerged. The team, consisting of Cass King, Justin McGrail, Alexandra Oliver, and myself travelled to Portland, Oregon, where we reached the semi-finals in the 1996 National Poetry Slam Championships and witnessed a new brand of vibrant spoken word as practised by artists from across North America.

The history of slam in the United States goes back to the mid-eighties, when poet and activist Marc Kelly Smith created the form of competitive performance poetry, as a method to inspire poets to share their work in a way that was engaging, and to integrate the audience into the process of determining literary merit by appointing them as judges. In a 2009 article in the New York Times, Smith declared that his intention was to challenge the current literary establishment with a form of poetry that was both democratic and subversive. Slam was, and continues to be, a popular art form with youth and, as such, often represents a microcosm of youth culture. As the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of its practitioners express a direct reflection of the experiences and preoccupations of their generation, slam pieces often gesture toward themes of disenfranchisement and social justice.

Despite its vibrancy, the spoken word scene of the late nineties lacked self-definition. Many of us called ourselves performance or action poets. Spoken word was just one of the new terminologies used for this form of orature. While the phrase “fusion poetry,” first put forth by Todd Swift in 2002 through his anthology Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry, successfully captured the hybridity inherent in spoken word, it did not become common terminology. At the time I believed that categorization was essentially irrelevant. Like many spoken word artists of the time, I was more interested in exploring the parameters of the form, as I began to move beyond the staging and time restrictions of slam into experimentation merging poetry with elements of music, theatre, and the new electronic media that were beginning to open up even more doors of possibility.

While the spoken word community continued its creative exploration and self-definition, a palpable rift began to form between those who practised the oral presentation of poetry and those who focused on the written word. Many of us who came to the stage from the page felt pressured to declare allegiance, with spoken word portrayed at best as a cheap trick of theatrics, and at worst a toxin to the body of poetic culture. Through a proclivity toward performance, spoken word artists became literary other and, as the other, many experienced anxieties of marginalization and self-representation as we practised a form viewed by some of our peers to be terminally transgressive.

By 2003, the voices of protest against this new wave of spoken word had moved beyond barely audible grumbling at poetry events to a full frontal attack. Due to the sudden growth and popularity of slam in Canada and around the world, many detractors collapsed spoken word and slam into a single entity, and viewed the entire genre, not as an evolution of oral tradition, but as a substandard poetic, the creation of which was indefensible. Shortly after George Bowering’s appointment as the first Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate in 2002, a reporter from the Globe and Mail asked Bowering if he thought there were any connections between the success of B.C. poets in the award circuit that year and the growing proliferation of spoken word in the province. Bowering replied, “Horseshit,” adding that spoken word artists and slams were “abominations” that were “crude and extremely revolting.”

This public lambasting of spoken word has not been merely a Canadian phenomenon. Jonathan Galassi, honorary chairman of the Academy of American Poets, referred to poetry slams as “a kind of karaoke of the written word,” and literary critic Harold Bloom declared them “the death of art” in the spring 2000 issue of the Paris Review. Condescension toward, and positioning of, spoken word artists as inferior has furthered the conceptualization of spoken word artists as literary other, and has also helped to perpetuate the page versus stage dichotomy.

But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?

— Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1993

Some artists in the Canadian spoken word community began to volley their own criticism in response, many viewing traditional page poets as out of step with the times. In a 2010 blog post entitled “The Living Language of Spoken Word,” poet and activist Chris Gilpin noted, “Each old guard tries to expel the work of the avant-garde before inevitably embracing it,” citing early criticism of Ginsberg, and Robert Frost’s dismissal of free verse as “playing tennis with the net down,” as historical examples. Gilpin goes on to chastise poets, “entangled in academia and its publish-or-perish credo,” for creating work “so insular and cryptic, so divorced from broader society that they have alienated a generation from their brand of poetry.” South of the border, poet and critic Victor D. Infante stated in an essay in OC Weekly, “[The death of art] is a big onus to place on anybody, but Bloom has always had a propensity for (reactionary) generalizations and burying his bigotries beneath ’aesthetics,’ insisting — as he did in his prologue to the anthology Best of the Best of American Poetry — that the ’art’ of poetry is being debased by politics.” Infante goes on to say, “The irony, of course, is that denying politics a place in the poetry canon is itself a political position, one undeniably born of class and privilege.”

Critics of spoken word on both sides of the border have overlooked the sociopolitical implications of the genre’s roots. The impetus for its creation, as well as many of the performative techniques currently used by spoken word artists, is reminiscent of one of the form’s precursors, the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, which was based on an imperative to create a representation of the realities of Black people, while unearthing racial inequities in American culture. This manifested itself through an assortment of techniques designed to use art as a vehicle toward the creation of community — where accessibility of language and commonality of cultural reference are reflected in both content and delivery. Didacticism, a dirty word in most contemporary poetry, was openly encouraged as an extension of what Gwendolyn Brooks referred to as “preachment,” a sermonic oracular style rooted in the history of Black sermons, gospels, and spirituals. Didacticism also served the purpose of furthering a political agenda. The immediacy of performance was often punctuated by a call-to-action or the use of call-and-response or dialect to further the imperative of audience engagement and accessibility. Idioms, slang, and profanity served to challenge traditional syntax, spelling, and grammar, while representing the rhythmic patterns of Black vernacular.

Rap (most commonly believed to be an acronym for “rhythm and poetry”), dub, and jazz poetry all use the technique of “signifying,” the practice of using homonyms to explore the complexity of allusion that arises from the use of common vernacular to imply a deeper meaning, or what Louis Henry Gates calls a “verbal strategy of indirection that exploits the gap between the denotative and figurative meanings of words.” In his landmark book The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, Gates investigates the roots of signifying that go back to the days of slavery and the development of a communally based language that allowed slaves to communicate to each other without their meaning being deciphered by their overlords. Gates summarizes the confluence of these sorts of historically based speech patterns with the evolution of its speaker’s literary aesthetic by stating, “A vernacular tradition’s relation to a formal literary tradition is that of a parallel discursive universe.” As Modernist poets of the early twentieth century experimented with fragmentation and a desire to, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, “make it new” rather than emulate traditional forms, the poets and writers of the Harlem Renaissance were creating a written aesthetic that strove to bring the traditions of the past forward. In his book Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic, Houston A. Baker calls this impulse Afro-American Modernism, which “was concerned pre-eminently with removing the majority of the black population from the poverty, illiteracy and degradation that marked southern, black, agrarian existence in the United States.… Rather than bashing the bourgeoisie, such spokespersons were attempting to create one.”

While the influence of Afro-American literature on spoken word is significant, it is only one of the streams feeding the form. Contemporary spoken word in Canada has also been influenced by poetry that emerged in of the sixties, seventies, and eighties: the experimental poetry of bill bissett and the Four Horsemen (bpNichol, Paul Dutton, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, and Steve McCaffrey), De Dub Poets (Lillian Allen, Clifton Joseph, and Devon Haughton), and the Tish collective (which included Frank Davey, Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, and others). In From Cohen to Carson: The Poet’s Novel in Canada, Ian Rae tells us that the name of this groundbreaking group came about as a playful reference to an anagram for “shit,” adding that “the scatological connotations of Tish underscore the collective’s anti-establishment irreverence.” Ironically, George Bowering was a key member of this radical youth movement, disenchanted with the current state of Canadian poetics and driven by a desire to move beyond the conventional parameters of the literary establishment.

You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong?

— Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1993

Spoken word is a hybrid animal and, as such, must be evaluated in terms of the particularities and genealogy inherent in the dialect of spoken word being experienced. Some pieces clearly emphasize theatricality, musicality, comedy, or sermonality. Each spoken word practitioner is attempting to master their own language, their own unique expression of the creative influences that inspire them. Judging spoken word on its use or misuse of traditional poetic devices is as useful as judging a poem printed on the page based on its ability to explore the full range of performative possibilities. One cannot judge a page poem for its lack of audience engagement; neither can one judge a spoken word piece by its ability to survive and thrive within the confines of the printed page. The concept of an oral literature that is different yet equal was encapsulated by Ugandan linguist Pio Zirimu in the early seventies when he coined the term “orature” in response to the growing sentiment in African literature that the oral traditions were inferior, less evolved forms than their printed counterparts.

As the controversy over the legitimacy of spoken word as a literary form continued, most artists practising under the auspices of this incarnation of oral tradition moved on from the debate. No longer children at the feet of their elders, begging for validation, spoken word artists moved the genre forward on their own terms. Over the last two decades, Canadian scholars such as Corey Frost and T.L. Cowan have conducted extensive research in the area of spoken word as part of their graduate theses. In addition, spoken word artists have taken their work into the areas of community building and youth engagement, using the form as a tool for empowerment and the development of literacy skills. Spoken word artists are often invited to perform and speak at community centres, libraries, literary festivals, high schools and post-secondary institutions across the country, and spoken word ­components have been a part of several university creative writing courses for years.

In 2010, spoken word artist Brendan McLeod began teaching the form at Langara College — opening the way for spoken word to be taught at a post-secondary level. Yet the genre remains marginalized, with only a few designated credit courses on spoken word theory, history, or practice currently offered at Canadian universities. Lillian Allen, who teaches a fourth-year Dub, Spoken Word, and Performance Writing course at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, states that one of the problems in academic circles is that spoken word seems like too much fun to be taken seriously. “Spoken word artists also have an unapologetic appreciation of media and multimedia technologies, and the methods they afford to further creative expression,” she says. “The book isn’t quite dead, but it’s no longer the only train leaving the station.” Allen also sees the dichotomy created between the stage and page communities as artificial. “It’s a spectrum,” Allen states, adding that the need for people to reduce the issue to a polarity is due to the urge to categorize, define, and marginalize what they don’t understand or perceive to be “other.”

It is this literary marginalization that Morrison alluded to in her Nobel lecture. In the book What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, Toni Morrison and Carolyn C. Denard elaborate on the motives of the children in the tale Morrison shared. They were not attempting to humiliate the old woman; rather they were offering her an invitation to impart some of her wisdom — an invitation that Morrison refers to as “a gesture toward possibility.” The silence the old woman offers in response is indicative of neither indifference nor condemnation: it is offered as a sign of respect, and a willingness to learn and listen. “It’s quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman breaks into the silence. ’Finally,’ she says, ’I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done — together.’”

Perhaps the best strategy to bridge the gap between spoken word artists and the literary establishment is to aim for mutual appreciation and respect through creating events that provide the opportunity for cross-pollination. Through both his Mashed Poetics series and his role as organizer for the Vancouver slam, veteran spoken word artist RC Weslowski has included writers from outside the spoken word community in his programming for years, as has Warren Dean Fulton with his series, Twisted Poets. In Toronto, the ArtBar (the longest-running literary series in the country) regularly features a mix of page and stage writers, and the Toronto Poetry Slam has showcased literary writers such as George Elliott Clarke (who featured at the slam shortly after his appointment as Toronto Poet Laureate).

After reading Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture, I was inspired to find that Morrison also had a history with slam, when in 2006 she organized a performance event in Paris while serving as guest curator at the Louvre. This event centred on the theme of “The Foreigner’s Home” and investigated the concepts of identity, exile, and belonging. Moved to action by the anger and alienation felt by youth in Parisian suburbs, which had sparked violent rioting in the predominantly working class immigrant communities that live there, Morrison wanted to give the youth a venue for free creative expression. In an interview in Libération, Morrison stated that “from my experience in the United States, I know that the music of outsiders, those who are discriminated against, have historically become very powerful…. I have come here to listen to the young people; it is not for me to tell them anything.”

Spoken word artists are the town criers of the world: our subject matter is as old as human emotion and as new as the most current regional and global events. The national spoken word scene in Canada has blossomed from coast to coast. From Calgary, home of Canada’s first International Spoken Word Festival and the Banff Centre of the Arts Spoken Word residency program, to Montreal, where innovative artists like Cat Kidd and Alexis O’Hara are pushing multimedia performance into realms reminiscent of eighties Laurie Anderson, and musical fusion performances by Ian Ferrier, the Kalmunity Vibe Collective, or Les Filles Electriques, artists are redefining the parameters of the genre. On the East Coast, Shauntay Grant, El Jones, and the Word Iz Bond collective continue to create work that inspires, ignites, and reflects Halifax’s complex social climate. Nationally, the slam scene has grown from its roots in Vancouver to a flourishing movement, with over thirty regional venues (including four youth slams) in cities across Canada. Spoken word is and will always be the voice of the people, rooted in community at a grassroots level. Each year, spoken word events across the country draw crowds in the hundreds, who come in order to listen to a form of orature that is both old and new, and fed by a variety of cultural and artistic streams. At its heart, spoken word is a fluid, ever-evolving form of guerilla literature, a verbal transmission of culture — from performer to audience — word by word.

Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. “Toni Morrison — Nobel Lecture.”Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media, 7 Dec. 1993. Web.