"all 'typographical' features are notations for the performance of the reading"

--Robert Duncan

If he means that the arrangement and appearance of the printed poem (or story or whatever) on paper - i.e punctuation, line breaks, capitalisation etc - give some indication of the way in which it is to be conveyed to an audience, then I concur.

r

"I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top"

---Anonymous, but I'll claim it as my own.



Les

great quote Les

He does. He even pushes it to the point of the connection between oral poetry and dance and other muscular movements. He is great for provoking ideas about poetry and other things.

Peter

You should see how he punctuates a caesura: with a comma followed by a double space!

"It (a poem) needs print in order to exist at all, and it is nomore expected that a poet, as such, will know how to sing or even to declaim than it is expected that an architect will know how to plaster a ceiling."

George Orwell, Poetry and the Microphone, 1943.

Aha! I'd like to see that!!


"The creative person is more primitive, more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner than the average person." Frank Barron.

r

William Tell the Bowler

There is evidence that William Tell and his family were avid bowlers, but unfortunately all the league records were destroyed in a fire.
Thus we'll sadly never know for whom the Tells bowled.


Les

Les,

Is there some occult reason for this joke, or did I miss its connection to typography and oral poetry?

I find this point by Orwell fascinating, yet I hesitate to depend on it in thinking about poetry, since I have never seen his poems, and I have an inclination to trust what poets say about the process over what novelists or linguistics or mathematicians do, even though they are entitled to their opinions. I guess it is the old habit of restricting what we take as expert opinion to those in the feild. After all, no one would take my opinion of the best way to write a novel for much, since I am not known for writing novels. Does this make any sense to you, Linda?

Peter

Peter, let's leave it to the rest of the forum, are spoonerisms appropriate to a thread whose first post is this:

"all 'typographical' features are notations for the performance of the reading"


Les

I just did not know what was going on, since there is a tendency to try to keep threads 'on topic' with the use of friv cons and the like.

Peter

I don't even think of 'spoonerisms' anyway. Not my kind of humor.

Peter

I have a longstanding interest in how the poem looks on the page, having cut some of my poetic teetn on cummings' poems by reading all of them in sequence once. I also am of the habit of reading poems, especially long poems, out loud, for the ear. Olson and Creeley have a lot to say about this in their critical writings, but I am just getting around to Duncan, who is a great hero out this way among the last three generations of serious poets and public perfomers.

Peter

It is not my habit to leave thinking to someone else.

Orwell's essay was actually on the subject of broadcasting. He had been involved in a series of literary programmes broadcast to India which included a "good deal of verse by contemporary English writers" and was drawing out the difference between reading a piece of writing to oneself, speaking to a live gathering of people whose differing resonses must be handled at the time and broadcasting to individuals who will either switch off or pay proper attention.

He thought that one value of a poet reading his own work was not the effect on the listener, but the effect on the poet, most of whom had not considered their readers as real people before this.

Thanks Linda,

I think Orwell is almost always interesting. I use to teach "Politics and the English Language" to my Freshman compostion classes. He engages his audience partly becasue he is provocative, I think. Thanks again for the reference.

I find him a bit Orwellian

most of whom had not considered their readers as real people before this.



And who might they have been writing for, robots?



Les

We can never be REALLY sure

I thought D Madison was a bot for a time

I feel like a robot sometimes.

I am functioning within normal parameters

good thing I have wide parameters

I am functioning within paranormal meters

good thing I have a wide pair of meters