NOTATION
AND THE ART OF READING
by
Karl Young
This article was commissioned by bpNichol, for Open Letter magazine,
and attests to his endless ability to bring out the best in people.
Introduction
The idea of notation implies, if not demands, performance. Virtually
any form of writing is a kind of notation and any form of reading is
a type of performance. Poetry is an intensely physical art, one that
activates several senses at once. In aural societies poetry has
traditionally been accompanied by facial movement, gesture,
manipulation of symbolic objects, the drawing and painting of
figures, the wearing of costumes, etc. -- all of which, in a tribal
context, are read. Poetry still is a physical art using multiple
senses: the body as a whole equals or sometimes replaces the voice
in performance art, and even silent readers turn pages, move their
heads, their eyes, the roots of their tongues if not their tongues
and lips, and so forth.
The kinesthetic link between sight, sound, and speech is mirrored by
an inner speech, inner sight, and inner sound. Our thoughts are a
combination of inner sight and inner speech. With this inner
kinesthesia, we name things as we see them and form images of
things about which we hear. Poetry, whether it is heard or seen,
stimulates these inner sensations. An Anglo-Saxon warrior listening
to a performance of Beowulf in the near darkness of a meadhall
would not only be able to see dragons in the flickering coals of the
fire, his mind would be filled with images generated by the words
he heard. In like manner, a contemporary reader reading silently
(provided she or he hasn't been hampered by speedreading practices)
will hear an inner voice, which may call up inner sight. A great deal
has been written about the "image" in poetry throughout this
century. When that term is used it seldom refers to anything that can
be seen on the page, but rather the inner vision of the reader.
In the mainstream culture of the western world in the twentieth
century, reading becomes an ever more ephemeral, dephysicalized
act. At the same time contemporary poets work against this
tendency, rediscovering reading methods from other cultures and
discovering new ones on their own. Though for most people reading
becomes more and more a system of simple data transference, poets
attempt to find alternative notations and to expand the range of their
performance. In this essay I will give examples of how poetry was
read in three cultural contexts removed from ours in culture and
time, and then describe some forms of notation in contemporary
poetry and how they can be read.
Mexico, 1500
Many different types of books and documents were in use in Mexico
on the eve of the Spanish conquest. Perhaps the most elaborate of
these were the religious books of the Mayans, significant portions of
which remain undecipherable at the present time. In cosmopolitan
Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), all sorts of handbooks, bureaucratic
documents, and legal papers were actively produced and used. The
Aztecs also kept religious and historical books, books closely
associated with poetry. They were generally produced by making
long strips of animal skin or fig bark paper and rolling them into
scrolls or folding them into screenfold format. They were sized with
lime gesso and painted with a limited palette of bright, mineral base
colors and lamp black ink. The writing system used was
iconographic, based on highly stylized pictures representing ideas
that could be orally formulated in different ways. This was not a
system for recording specific words. There are instances of rebus
notation, but the books chiefly presented concrete images rather than
abstract symbols that shaped vocalization.
The way in which these books were read is largely a matter of
conjecture. I have been studying this problem for a number of years,
and will sketch some of my conclusions here. Scholars who consider
the problem at all simply say that these books were mnemonic
devices, used to remind readers of things they would not otherwise
remember. This may have been the case with bureaucratic
documents, such as the Matriculo de Tributos, but makes no sense
in the case of the religious and historical books. The Aztecs were in
our sense pre-literate and, like many other pre-literate peoples, they
probably had excellent memories and didn't need external devices to
remind them of their history or mythology. They seem to have had
several orders of professional singers of myths, histories,
genealogies, etc. not unlike the Yugoslavian Singers of Tales studied
by Lord and Parry and the west African Singers of Genealogies
brought to popular attention in North America by the tv series
Roots.
The first, and probably most important, method of reading was
mnemonic, but it approached memory from the other direction.
We have a fairly large body of information, including citations by
Sahagun's informants, that indicates that painted books and recitation
of verse were major parts of education. As teaching tools the books
were probably used to engrave myth and history, in a form that
could be internally visualized in the minds of students. Their
purpose, then, was not to remind readers of things they might
otherwise forget, but to help make those things unforgettable. The
brilliant and simple colors, the decisive black frame line, the striking
clarity of icons, and the vibrant paratactic compositions -- the basic
qualities of indigenous style -- are perfectly suited to this purpose.
Students would embed innumerable myths, histories, genealogies,
prayers, etc. in verse form in their minds along with the visual
images in the books. The words and images need not have explained
or commented on each other -- each may have balanced,
complemented, or extended the other, and each probably gave the
student something the other couldn't. The visual and oral
components of their education would then inform their dreams, their
visions, their ethics, their conceptions of the world, and their actions
throughout their lives. An image of the god Tezcatlipoca would not
be in a book to tell students of his existence -- they all were
absolutely sure of his presence -- but to fix a concrete image of him
in their minds, one that intermeshed with his mythology, his liturgy,
etc.
A number of sources tell us that books of this type were mounted,
fully extended, on walls for ceremonial occasions. We can imagine
readers standing in front of the mounted books, reciting the verses
they'd learned in youth, as they visually reaffirmed and refurbished
the images in their minds. A number of people acting in this manner
would somewhat resemble contemporary performances of, say,
Jackson Mac Low's Gathas -- performers achieving a high degree of
concentration on the images before them and on the sounds they
uttered, and simultaneously feeling a sense of community with other
participants. We shouldn't, however, push this parallel too far: a
contemporary performance would not involve the same stored
energy and association as did those of pre-conquest Mexico, but
would include a sense of exploration not present in the older type of
performance.
History books may have been used in the singing of epics. In this
type of situation, a small audience would sit around a singer, who
would place the book between himself and his audience, unfolding
its pages as he sang. The book would act only minimally as a score
for the singer -- its main function would be a visual counterpart of
the song for the audience to contemplate (and memorize) as they
listened. Books could also be read privately. Private readings were
not silent readings: the reader probably recited verses of all sorts as
he read. With some of the religious books, this type of reading may
have been an important part of an internal self-discipline, a form of
yoga. Certainly many of the religious books could have been used in
visualization exercises like those practiced by Tibetan Buddhists,
and this may have been an important stage in the deity
impersonation so important to Aztec religion. The central section of
Codex Borgia [Fig. 1] may even have
been used as a set of
mandalas. The religious books contain lists, charts, and calendars
used in divination and in organizing ritual. These, of course, would
be read in a different manner from the less compartmentalized
books, and may have conveyed some new information. But even in
these cases, when the reader may only have been looking for a date
in a calendar, he probably did so in a prescribed manner, singing as
he proceeded.
The screenfold format is well suited to these different types of
reading. The Singer of Epics could spread out as many pages as
necessary before his audience. The whole book could be mounted on
a wall in ceremonial situations. When held in a reader's hands, a
book of this type could be organized in different ways by folding up
pages and thus creating juxtapositions of them. For instance, if a
reader wanted to juxtapose page 1 and 6 of a book, he could simply
fold the intervening pages together, placing 1 and 6 next to each
other.
This would be particularly useful in using ritual-calendrical books,
where charts, diagrams, and calendars would be compared and
correlated. In histories it could have also have been useful: the
indigenous Mexicans had a cyclical conception of history, and this
format would allow comparison of one cycle with another.
An interesting feature of the books is that they could be given what
I call a brief or an extended reading. In brief reading, the reader
would simply identify the figures in the book and their functions.
An extensive reading would involve a great deal more: the reader
would recite portions of the verse associated with each image,
though not necessarily contained in it. Let's say the page begins with
a god: the reader would begin with an invocation of the deity, list
his powers and attributes, narrate his relevant myths, and end with a
prayer. The next figure is a man: the reader would recite his
genealogy, his biography, maxims associated with him, and so forth
[Fig. 2] A brief reading of a page might take
several minutes; an extended reading, several hours. The amount of time
spent reading would not depend so much on the amount of information
contained in the image, but how much the reader wanted to interact with it.
A Calmecac, or University, in Tenochtitlan in 1500 would probably
contain a number of people reading books in a number of different
ways. One reader may have hastily determined the suitability of
marriage partners by the dates of their birth, as charted in an
almanac. Another might have hastily determined the days on which
the planet Venus would exert an evil influence on members of one
of the classes of society. A third may have just as quickly checked
out the genealogy of an important person, giving the book a quick
reading. Elsewhere in the school, a small group of students may
have sat around a Singer of Tales, letting the images of a hero sink
into their minds as they more or less automatically committed the
narrative to memory. Another group may have sat in a similar circle
around a scholar who explained to them the mechanics of time, the
will of the stars, the proper use of hallucinogens and other sacred
plants. A third group may have discussed historical problems, using
a book spread out or folded into a new page order in the middle of
their circle. A merchant may have shown a priest his list of goods
sold to prove his humility and pay his tithe. A student of book
painting may have done sketches in sand while reciting formulas
concerning the symbolic nature of straight lines and curves, perhaps
as they related to mathematics. A student cloistered in a private cell,
after strict fasting, ritual ingestion of psylocibin and peyote, and
rigorous self- mortification may have recited a mantram over and
over as he concentrated his total being on the image of a deity he
would impersonate, becoming a living page of the book. A high
priest may have sat in his study, contemplating the interaction of
omens and an upcoming festival, whose rites he would have to
organize. He may not have had any books in front of him, but have
made his correlations by books he had committed to memory.
For the Aztecs, the world was full of voices, human and divine.
Even plants and birds had voices, and part of the business of life
was learning how to understand them. The first thing an Aztec child
heard on entering the world was verse exhortation, delivered by the
midwife; his life would revolve around prayers, verse formulas, and
incantations; and his death would be surrounded by massive
recitation. The Aztecs generally did not use books to acquire new
information, but to deepen what they already knew. Books were an
essential part of cult, and the interaction of spoken word and painted
image had a magic function. In some of the oral poetry transcribed
in the roman alphabet shortly after the conquest, we find lines like
"only as painted images in your books have we come to be alive in
this place" -- "perhaps his heart is a painted book" -- " he [the giver
of life] paints in your soul" -- and "like a painted book we will fade
away." In the Aztec world, books did not provide scripts for
vocalization, nor could they record a fixed sequence of words or
sounds. A text was not a set of symbols telling readers what to say,
but a tool that allowed them to see what they heard. Books and oral
poems set up complex patterns of reverberation between each other,
enmeshing the reader-singer in a totality of sensual and cerebral
activity impossible in a world of phonetic books.
China, 810
For millennia Chinese scribes and publishers have used many surfaces to write on, and
they have used all the major bookforms: scrolls, screenfolds,
mapfolds, spinebound volumes of several types. A practice reaching
back nearly to the beginning of Chinese writing is the inscription or
painting of poems on buildings and on the rock faces of cliffs. This
latter practice united reading with the viewing of landscapes -- an
activity raised to a high art in China. Chinese literature is full of
stories about people making long trips to read inscriptions on
mountains and temples. Occasionally these inscriptions were cut
very large: we have instances of several inscriptions whose
characters were each more than ten feet tall. Neither giant banners
with political verses written on them nor Democracy Wall in Beijing
were Maoist inventions. Readers of inscriptions often made copies
of them by covering the text with wet paper, working the paper into
the incisions, and rubbing them with charcoal or ink. These rubbings
could be rolled, folded, or bound into books and it may have been
this practice that gave rise to the art of printing
[Fig. 3]. At some Chinese universities, official texts were
inscribed on stone drums, and students acquired their textbooks by
making rubbings from them. Not only was this a good way of generating
copies, it produced standardized texts, without textual variations, an
invention usually attributed to Renaissance Europe. Surfaces for writing
didn't have to be flat or static: Tuan Ch'ng-shih, writing in mid 9th
century, reported seeing a workman whose whole body was tattooed
with poems by Po Chu-i.
Calligraphy has been essential to the art of writing poetry in China,
and calligraphy, in turn, has been closely linked with painting, so
that there has been a continuum between the three arts, often
referred to as "The Three Perfections." Ideally, the calligraphy that a
poem came in should be of as high an artistic caliber as the poem
itself. The nature of written Chinese encourages this sort of artistry
in a way that the roman alphabet (for all its beauty) can not do. The
large number and complexity of Chinese characters provide a wide
range of design problems that challenge even the best calligrapher's
abilities, as well as allowing the widest range of potential forms
with which to express himself. This range becomes even larger in
the cursive styles of writing, in which the calligrapher abstracts,
simplifies, or elides the characters, working on intuition and a sense
of the design of the whole text. The cursive hands are difficult to
read, even for adepts, and this puts an extra emphasis on the
calligrapher's art [Fig. 4]. Poems often
appear with paintings, and developments in each art influence the
other. In some periods, landscapes, birds, etc. have been painted in
calligraphic manner; in others, pictorial possibilities of characters
have been stressed.
One of the reasons for the continuity of arts is that the basic tools of
painter and calligrapher have been the same: a hair brush mounted
in bamboo and lampblack ink. This brush allows the artist-
calligrapher a wide range of strokes: it can handle straight lines,
sharp angles, graceful curves, thick lines can be modulated into hair-
thin ones; outer hairs on the brush can create delicate traceries
around the main strokes, etc. The brush, however, does not allow the
calligrapher to rest his hand in mid stroke, which would cause a
running blot. The artist has to work quickly and this encourages
both spontaneity and care in visualizing what he wants to do before
dipping brush in ink. The artistry of the calligrapher has shaded into
the craft of the inscriber and block-printer. By the 9th century,
characters could be painted by master calligraphers on stone or
wood blocks with enough skill and precision to accurately reproduce
the graceful curves, sharp angles, and outer hair traceries. Many
rubbings and blockprints seem as spontaneous as brushwork
[Fig. 3 & 4].
Another reason for the continuity of the three perfections is the
nature of written Chinese. Basically there are three types of
characters or character components: 1, pictograms, characters based
on abstract pictures of things;
= man, and looks like a stick-man; sometimes these characters imitate
gestures instead of static forms. 2, phonograms, symbols representing
sounds without any pictorial content. 3, ideograms -- these are often
combinations of components in the other categories; they chart ideas
but do not wholly represent them either phonetically or pictorially.
The reliance on gesture could be seen as a character type of its own,
although most character components include gesture to a greater or
lesser degree. The gestural nature of Chinese expands Chinese beyond
pictograms, and in this respect makes it unique among writing systems.
This gives the characters a "body language" -- and internalizing the
gestures of writing not only gives them a more profoundly human and
organic quality. It also makes up an essential charateristic of
learning to read and write Chinese. As with the Aztec writing system,
deepening the reader's understanding was essential.
Arthur Cooper has called the system etymological -- perhaps the most
important characteristic of this type of writing is the history behind
each character. Chinese readers don't pay much attention to any of this
when reading everyday documents, such as letters, popular fiction,
newspaper and magazine articles -- in such instances characters are
just symbols for words. In writing or reading poetry, however, readers
tend to be much more attuned to the interworkings of sound, sight,
gesture, and idea. The interaction of components emphasizes continuity
and versatility; a mind trained to read interwoven pictograms, graphs of
gestures, phonograms, and ideograms can be expected to feel a
continuity between sight, sound, gesture, and intellection.
The Chinese have felt that sound is an important element in poetry,
as basic as the three perfections. In the 9th century, poetry was
generally chanted or sung and the ideal poet was not only a good
singer but also a skilled lutanist. According to the Confucian
Analects, "Except in unusual circumstances, a cultured man is never
without his lute." The Chinese spoken languages, which rely heavily
on variations in pitch, encourage poets to create musical patterns in
their poetry. This is perhaps the most difficult characteristic of
Chinese poetry to bring across to western readers. I don't know of
anyone who has tried to translate the music of Chinese poetry along
with the lexical meaning. Many poets have tried to find correlatives
for its visual forms [Fig. 5] ,
but its melopoea has been thus far beyond us --
perhaps it's a job for some future sound poet or composer.
Though printed books of poetry were available in the year 810, most
poetry was circulated in manuscript form. A ninth century Chinese
poet receiving a manuscript from a friend would first unroll or
unfold it before him in an almost ritualistic fashion. He would
certainly take notice of the silk or paper on which it was written,
feeling its texture, hearing the sounds it made, perhaps smelling it.
He would first look over the manuscript as a piece of abstract
design. Then he would start reading it. It would probably be written
in a cursive script, so reading would be something more like
deciphering -- he probably would have started figuring out the
author's particular approach to cursive script when he began looking
at the manuscript as abstract pattern. The design would have implied
a mood or state of mind which he would now work out on the level
of individual characters.
Having gotten his bearings, gotten the hang of the individual nature
of the calligraphy, he would determine the form of the poem.
Although modern editions of Chinese poetry sometimes indicate line
endings by a small disk or other device, traditional Chinese poetry
has not had any markings or layout conventions to indicate where
lines end. A reader determines line endings by internal means
involving pauses, syntax, parallelism, etc. Five and seven character
lines were most common, with a caesura just before the middle and
the reader would have these numbers in mind as he determined line
length. Parallel or antithetical couplets were focal points in poems of
the period, and the reader might isolate them first, reading them as
units before he began reading the poem through from the beginning.
Chinese is a language without tense or number, and with a minimum
of the connective and relative components (such as pronouns,
prepositions, articles, etc.) found in western languages and Chinese
poets have often accentuated the ambiguities and generalizing
tendencies latent in the language. The reader would probably decide
fairly quickly on solutions to these ambiguities (as he would do
almost instantaneously in less artful writing) but keep other
possibilities in mind as the poem as a whole took shape in his mind.
Poetry of the period was full of allusions and a sensitive reader
would let these reverberate through his memory, linking the poem
before him with many other texts and with social situations at which
they had been sung or recited. After pondering over the verses until
he felt he grasped them, he might explore the poem's sound
potentials beyond those of ordinary speech. The line and caesura
structure would suggest a rhythm, and the tones a melody. This
would give him the keys he needed to chant or sing the poem. Many
poems were written to well known tunes, and if this were the case
an attentive reader would sing the poem to the appropriate tune --
setting up further reverberations of allusion and memory. At this
point he might get out his lute and accompany himself or grind
some ink and paint a picture or write a poem in response. If the
poem pleased him, he would commit it to memory.
This reading would obviously have been a slow process, but it
would have allowed the reader a wide range of activity and
creativity. We find in this reading a continuity between visual text
and sung poem, each dependent on the other, and the two together
drawing on other senses and experiences.
Like the Aztecs, the Chinese found magical powers in writing --
those scrolls and wall hangings you occasionally see in Chinese
restaurants in North America may have talismanic significance to
the proprietors. A number of myths attribute divine and mystical
origins to books and writing, and written characters retain an affinity
to the hexagrams of the I-Ching, to which they are etymologically
related. In the 9th century, Po Chu-i hoped that his profane poems
would be reborn as Buddhist sutras; he hoped that he would be
reincarnated as a monk, and be able to read them in their
transfigured state.
England, 1620
In 1620, indigenous style documents were still admissible as
evidence in the Spanish courts of Mexico, and some of the religious
books may still have been used in secret. In China, poetry was still
written and read in much the same way as it had been in the 9th
century, though conventions had become more rigid and printed
books were more common. In England, poetry was circulated in a
number of forms: it was commonly read aloud or recited from
memory at all sorts of social functions, and as part of family
entertainment. The theaters were still active, and at times audiences
could still go to plays by Shakespeare performed by actors who had
known the author. Written poetry was circulated in printed books
and in manuscript. Manuscripts were versatile: often they were
fascicles rather like chap books today; they could contain a single
work, a collection of poems, or a miscellany of poems by different
writers, sometimes topically selected.
Printing was a different business then than it is now. In order to
curb sedition and control the press, the number of printers licensed
by the crown was limited, as was the number of type founders and
the amount of type they could cast. Of course, there were
underground presses operating in the country and type could be
smuggled in from the continent, but, nonetheless, printers
overworked their type, reusing it until it became completely
illegible. Ink was expensive and hard to make, so it was used as
sparingly as possible. Although editions with a standard of clarity at
least as high as our own could be commissioned by wealthy patrons,
this was by no means the norm -- but the crude norm may have had
some benefits. The roughness of impression gave letters a tactile
quality: the printed word seemed more of an object, more a physical
reality, than it does today. Print was more difficult to read then --
lack of standardized spelling and a multitude of inconsistent symbols
and abbreviations contributed to the difficulty, along with the worn
type, the rough impression, and the light ink. Paper was heavier and
the wire marks on its surface were the result of normal paper
making processes, not a superfluous decoration as in today's laid
finishes. Paper, like print, was more palpable, and a reader holding a
book or turning a page probably had a greater awareness of its
tactile quality than does his modern counterpart. Book bindings were
sturdy, meant for active use; if they fell apart from extended wear,
they could be rebound. A book might stay in a family for
generations, being read and reread by many of its members as well
as friends to whom they might lend it. A reader buying a copy of
The Faerie Qveene [Fig. 6]
in 1620 would as likely as not be buying a
used book -- books were made to last and the difference between the
new and used market was less distinct than it is now. The Faerie
Qveene had become a classic by 1620, recalling an epoch that
seemed glorious, however painful it may have been to those actively
involved in its political events. The reader may well have heard a
good deal of the book read or recited before he bought it and may
have already committed some passages to memory -- he may even
have used passages as maxims, things he turned over in his mind
when making decisions or trying to make sense out of the world.
The book he had purchased would probably not be read through and
shelved (though some ostentatious buyers might keep a copy on
their shelves just for show). It would be used as a script for reading
to family and friends, as something to ponder over in private, or as
something to commit, in part, to memory (which was still
considered one of the basic arts of life). The text is admirably suited
to these uses: the narrative allegory could be listened to with
varying degrees of attentiveness; its regular rhythms and graceful
phrases would be easy to read aloud; and the combination above
with the regular stanzas and rhymes would make passages relatively
easy to memorize. Even its inconsistencies and obscurities --
unintentional results of composition in installments -- would make it
something to reread many times. Even when reading the book in
private, it would be more a script to declaim than a source of silent
information, conveyed from page to brain by an easy activity of the
eyes.
Poetry that circulated in manuscript, of course, shared with printed
books the current freedom from standardized orthography.
Shakespeare, for instance, spelled his own name half a dozen
different ways, almost one for each signiture we have. In "The
Good-Morrow," John Donne could render the word "be" three
different ways (bee, beest, be) on the same sheet of paper. For
Shakespeare and Donne and most of their contemporaries a written
word was not confined to a single orthographic form: it could
change according to the writer's intuitive sense of how it should
look or sound, showing shades of emphasis, intonation, color,
perhaps even pitch in his own pronunciation. Written language
maintained the fluidity, even volatility, of speech: a phrase or line
was something a poet created with his mouth, not an arrangement of
fixed parts that could be precisely interchanged. A written poem was
essentially a record of spoken verse and a score that could enable a
reader to recreate it. The elaborate and inconsistent abbreviations
and symbols current in script and print also underscore the oral
orientation of writing. When a text is just a form of notation, "&" (a
symbol that is still with us) could easily stand for "and," and "ye"
could be an acceptable abbreviation for "the" (the "y" stood for "th"
as in "thorn," not "y" as in "year" as some people now pronounce it
in an attempt to sound old fashioned). Punctuation of this period
often seems illogical to us for the same reason: we punctuate
according to fixed notions of sentence construction, whereas the
Jacobean poet punctuated by ear: his punctuation was a form of
notation, often indicating a pause where the normal construction of a
sentence would not suggest one. A number of conventions, create
ambiguities somewhat similar to those in Chinese verse. The use of
the apostrophe in possessives had not come into standard usage, and
when Donne used a word like "worlds" he may have primarily
meant "world's," but wished to leave a sense of secondary meaning:
multiple worlds (he was probably familiar with Giordano Bruno's
notion of infinite worlds). Letters like "I" and "J" or "U" and "V"
were at that time more or less interchangeable, creating further
ambiguities and keeping the reader at a speed approximating serious
speech.
Only four of Donne's poems were printed in his lifetime, and one of
them was plagiarized rather than published under his own name. The
was not because Donne couldn't find publishers for his work, but
because he had several reasons for not wanting to see them in print.
He only meant them for an audience of friends and didn't like the
idea of having strangers see them -- particularly if the poems could
be used to thwart his political and ecclesiastical career. Restricting
distribution allowed him a great deal of freedom to experiment with
meter and syntax, use arcane reference comprehensible only to a few
fellow cognoscenti, and deal with subjects he would otherwise have
to keep to himself. This was not unusual at his time: other
gentlemen circulated verse only in manuscript, or published their
more public poems in book form while circulating more personal
verses in manuscript.
Generally speaking, the manuscripts circulated by Donne and his
fellows were not written in the wide-curving and ornate hands of
which some 17th century penmen were capable, though they were
not without flourishes and decorations. The capacity of quill pens to
swing from thin to thick lines allowed a certain amount of
expressive coloration in individual words, though this was minor in
comparison to the expressiveness of Chinese calligraphers. Of
course, manuscripts, even in fair hands, had to be read slowly. And,
as important as anything else, manuscripts were personal in a way
that printed books could never be. A manuscript was something
fashioned by the author's (or a friend's) own hand and passed more
or less directly to the reader, without the intermediary machinery of
type and press, or the scrutiny of censors, publishers, typographers,
proofreaders, salesmen, etc.
Donne's poetry reads as though it were meant for manuscript
circulation. He assumes that the reader will be willing to spend a
fair amount of time figuring out what the poems mean and how they
should be vocalized. He assumes a stance of familiarity with his
readers, not only sharing his private thoughts with them but also
assuming that they are familiar with the arcane images, scientific
experiments, philosophical arguments, and biographical details he
knows.
Donne seems to assume that the manuscripts' recipients would not
only read the poems aloud, but carefully rehearse them, perhaps to
be recited to other friends. Lines like
-
She's all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing elfe is
are difficult to recite and would have demanded a skilled speaker
who had practiced a bit to bring them off right. Donne's metrics are
tricky. Sometimes he creates uneven patterns simply to keep the
poems from becoming too neat, too prim. Sometimes his
irregularities are metrical experiments, or approximations of
colloquial speech, or theatric gestures, or based on melodic patterns.
Sometimes if you read what seems to be an uneven line with even
stresses, the reading brings out meanings that would be muffled if
normal speech rhythms were followed. A reader would have to
spend considerable time sorting these options out.
The poems are, in their nature as well as their written form, often
ambiguous, asking serious questions and filling in witty answers
without disturbing the original puzzle. A reader would be expected
to ponder them after reading them aloud and even after committing
some to memory. The reader was expected to contemplate them,
turn them over in his mind, apply them to the changing patterns of
his life, the way he would an important letter. At the same time, the
poems served as a social bond between a small group of people:
something they shared but held private from the rest of the world.
They could be recited in all sorts of interpersonal situations:
amorous, entertaining, jocular, serious, consoling.
In 1615 Donne was ordained a minister and in 1621 became Dean
of St. Paul's. After this time he tried to suppress most of his poems,
apparently because they were then in fairly wide circulation and
might tend to discredit his office in the church. Both the writing of
lyrics and the preaching of sermons in Donne's time were closely
related to theater. The texts of Donne's sermons are full of the same
kind of conceits, striking images, ringing phrases, grandiose tropes,
and poetic cadences as his sermons. Accounts of his preaching
indicate that he could use dramatic gestures, employ a wide vocal
range, and even weep when it seemed like the right thing to do. He
preached his last sermon dressed in his own shroud, which sounds
like something out of a play by Webster. If the theater was the basis
of language art in the Jacobean era, we can see a private extension
of it in his lyrics and a public one in his sermons. Play, lyric, and
sermon were all vocal arts that used scripts, and that's precisely what
the texts of Donne's poems and sermons are.
A certain aura would have surrounded a manuscript fascicle of
Donne's poems coming into a readers's hands in 1620. The reader
would probably know that the author was trying to suppress them,
which would make them all the more interesting. Many of the
poems' initial readers had been members of an unofficial elite, and
access to the manuscripts would make the new readers feel
privileged to share in the glory of the small group of savants
associated with Donne. The reader would certainly be aware of
Donne's reputation for wit and may have heard some of the poems
read or recited by other people.
He would first read through them quietly, perhaps silently. He would
try to get a general sense of the poem, then concentrate on details.
He would probably commit some of them to memory, and make
copies of some or all of them. Copying was a form of reading in
those days: a way of becoming one with the text, of tracing its
graphic form, much the way art students have copied paintings and
drawings as part of their apprenticeship. In 17th century Europe
there were still monks who copied scripture as a form of prayer:
they spoke the words as they wrote, touched the sacred energy of
the script, and created more copies that could be used to save other
souls. Transcribing also aided memorization.
The reader would rehearse oral performances of the poems.
Probably, like his Chinese counterpart, he had had some musical
training, and he may have tried to work out melodies for the poems,
or fit them to existing tunes, perhaps accompanying himself on a
lute. A poem like
-
Goe, and catch a falling ftarre,
Gett with child a Mandrake Roote,
Tell me, where all paft times are,
Or who cleft the Divells foote,
Teache me to hear Mermaydes finginge,
Or to keepe off Envyes ftinginge,
And finde
What winde
Serves to'advance an honeft minde.
almost demands such treatment. We have one anonymous 17th
century setting for it [Egerton Ms. 2013, f. 586; see John Shawcross's
The Complete Poetry of John Donne, p. 91] and certainly other
readers composed settings for it. The reader might sing the poem to
family or friends and it would become an integral part of social life.
A more difficult poem would require prolonged intellectual effort.
Here is the last stanza of "To Chrift":
-
I have a finn of feare yt when I have fpunn
My laft thred, I fall perifh on the sfore;
Sweare by thy felf that at my Death, thy Sunn
Shall fhinne as it sfhines nowe, & heretofore;
And having done that, thou haft done,
I have noe more.
The spiritual and intellectual dimensions of this poem are immense -
- I will only point out one approach to it that is dependent on
writing in the 17th century. "Sonne" is both a person of the trinity
and the illuminating sphere in the sky, about which Donne and his
fellows speculated endlessly. "Done" is a pun on the author's own
name, and "more" is a pun on the maiden name of his wife, who
was dead when this poem was written, if our current dating is
correct. We tend to scorn puns because our language is not as fluid
or as magical as it was in the 17th century. For Donne, however, the
links between Christ and the sun, himself and his death, his wife
and the joy of living were not crossword puzzle games, but the
threads that shaped his life. No one bound by static orthography or a
frozen conception of language could have written this poem. Its
author might have understood more easily than we do the puns
blood = water and flower = heart in the Aztec books, or the origin
of writing in the union of light from a star with the footprints of
birds in Chinese mythology.
North America, 1983
For most people living in late 20th century North America, reading
is a dreary task. Its main objective (even in fiction) has become the
acquisition of data. Standardized orthography and usage have taken
the fluidity and magic out of the language and encouraged silent
reading. Reading is now something most people want to get out of
the way as quickly as possible and speedreading is perceived as the
ideal way to read. Since speedreading alters the order of words,
makes some words disappear or pass in a blur, negates the timing of poetry, suppresses the sensations of inner and outer ear as well as
the throat, tongue, and mouth, it takes the physicallity out of
language and is completely incompatible with poetry. It is like
ingesting a nutrient that you don't have to eat -- smelling, chewing,
tasting, digesting are time consuming activities. Even people who
don't know how to speedread approach reading as if they did,
wanting to get it over with as soon as possible and trying to avoid
its physical qualities as much as they can. People no longer
memorize verse and recite it to each other or use it to give depth or
breadth to their discourse. The closest most people come to this sort
of social interaction is the discussion of popular novels, often as
they relate to movies or tv programs, making the reading activity
subservient to the video medium. According to many sources,
dyslexia is increasing among young people and I imagine one of the
major reasons for this is the ephemeralization of reading. A
disproportionately large number of dyslexic students have I.Q.'s
above average and I suspect their refusal to learn to read is, on a
human if not a practical level, an intelligent response to current
attitudes toward reading.
[2009 note: At the time that this essay was written "dyslexia" was
most commonly used to mean "inability to read or extreme difficult in
learning to do so." Some, but not the majority, used it to mean seeing letters in
different orders, seeing letters move on the page, and other problems probably
based in unusual neurological functions or other problems, including some which
are still not understood. I did not then, nor do I now,
mean the latter in this essay. I leave it as I originally wrote it to retain the harshness
and stigma associated with reading disabilities among young people. I
may change it in a further reproduction of this essay, but for now would
like to see how this note works. Although I have made some changes in this
essay since its first publication, I am retaining the character of another
historical moment, and want to get a sense of how much difference a
relatively short time makes in usage. My apologies to any current-usage dyslexic
readers or those who work with them who may take offence by my usage in
this instance. Notes on reading ability could overgrow this essay and leave its
original intent invisible. I would like to mention a few in passing, however: 1. I
was myself severely stigmatized for a complex disorder in vision as a child; 2,
although I don't see the situation as desirable, I have nothing but admiration for
those writers whose dyslexia actually acted as a challenge and contributed to their
abilities in the long run, and in saying this I don't in the least want to belittle those
who have not made something positive of the challenge; my admiration for the
physicians, reasearchers, opticians, teachers, book designers, typographers, and
others who continue the process of reducing the problems encountered by millions
of young people in gaining the prize of literacy has increased considerably since the
original time of composition, and working with people who are mentally ill and find
their problems compounded by reading and motivational difficulties and
legions of other stigmas and scape-goating practices have made my views on related
issues much more complex; 4, I would also like to note that my knowledge of some subjects
and my views on others expressed in this essay have changed considerably in a
quarter century, and although I'm generally pleased with this essay, some of the errors,
mistaken opinions, and ignorance dislayed in it remind me of my continuing limitations
and encourage me to try to overcome them to the extent I can.]
People interested in contemporary poetry approach reading
differently. Contemporary poetry uses many of the forms of reading
described in the three historical examples (more often than not
without awareness of precedents) and has invented quite a few more.
Unfortunately, people who are not familiar with contemporary poetic
practice find contemporary work incomprehensible because, due to
their notions of reading, they don't know how to read it. If their
ephemeralized reading habits are too deeply ingrained, explaining
alternative reading methods will probably not help them -- teaching
them a difficult new language, say Arabic or Hopi, might be easier.
At this point it's impossible to say how much this will change in the
future. Perhaps the self-destructive nature of speedreading and
developments in technology will make reading for information's sake
obsolete, and will return the act of reading to a form of art.
Whatever the case, readers of poetry are not part of the mainstream
and poets constantly develop ways of staying out of it.
One of the most positive things contemporary poets have going for
them is the total lack of standardization at all levels of notation. In
writing about Donne, I pointed out that standardized spelling
reduced the sense of fluidity and magic in language. Many poets of
the last two centuries have reacted to this on a gut level by simply
not learning to spell "correctly" -- William Morris, W.B. Yeats, and
Ezra Pound have been among their company. More recently, poets
like bill bissett have completely rejected standardized orthography
and have spelled by intuition and their sense of how the words
sound, look, and feel. When bissett writes "seek / sum priva see
its wintr fr reel now sins ystrday," notions of correct spelling are
completely irrelevant. Though people inured to inflexible
orthography cringe at this sort of thing, feeling that some immutable
law of the universe has been violated, intuitive spelling returns
poetry to its oral base: readers must work out the sounds of words
to be able to read the poem at all.
In "The Prosody of Open Verse" (Open Letter, 5.2, pp. 5 - 13),
bpNichol and Frank Davey provide an excellent catalog of notational
devices in projective verse and its descendants. Visual poets and
language centered writers have similar arsenals of notational devices.
Though the notational devices are numerous, they are done largely
by intuition or personal system and they do not seem to be tending
toward any sort of standardization. One poet may mean one thing by
a certain notation, another poet may use the same notation for a
completely different purpose. Readers must try out several
possibilities when reading a new work, actively participating in the
realization of the poem, considering the text from several different
angles, turning it over in their minds, testing it in vocalization, and
becoming more familiar with it in the process. Ultimately readers
will have to hear the poet read before they can come to a complete
understanding of the notation employed.
After reading sketches of some of my visual poetry, Charles Stein
and George Quasha asked me how I performed it and I read them a
couple pages. They then did a two voice rendition of the same pages
as they thought they should be performed. Their reading bore little
resemblance to mine. Quasha and Stein are knowledgeable readers
and extraordinary performers and in some ways their reading was
better than mine. The important thing, though, is that all three of us
ended up with a fuller appreciation of the work after we had been
exposed to the two different readings. Even misreadings can expand
the reader's sense of the poem, once the poet's intentions are
understood.
During the sixties, concrete poetry had a tendency to be pictorial,
trivially self-referential, and static. Works like the tiny masterpieces
of Emmett Williams tended to get lost in the juggernaut of poems
made up of the word "pine" typed over and over in the shape of a
Christmas tree. The tendency of visual poetry now, however, is
away from pictorial and mimetic representations in favor of gesture,
motor stimulus, gestalt, and abstract archetype. Visual poetry,
whether complex or minimalist, has become deeper, more capable of
reaching more levels of thought, perception, and action, and, at the
same time, more oriented toward performance, public or private.
This can lead to multimedia performance, incorporating other arts,
sometimes interacting with work produced by a number of people in
a cooperative or collective effort.
Projective verse and visual poetry shade almost imperceptibly into
performance art and sound poetry. The emphasis shifts from visual
texts that can be performed to scores that exist primarily to shape
vocalization but can also be read as images. A good example of a
score that could find its way into an anthology of visual poetry is
Jackson Mac Low's "Vocabulary Gatha for Pete Rose"
[Fig. 7]. Readers seeing this piece in print can read it casually,
as a piece of graphic art. After reading the performance instructions,
they can do their own performances -- either single voice or with friends.
They will probably appreciate the piece more if they have attended
performances done under Mac Low's supervision, and most if they
have participated in such performances themselves. If they have
done this, they may be able to hear performances with their inner
ears. Experienced performers can experience this in much the same
way as musicians can hear music with their inner ear while reading
musical scores. Though the reader may find the score visually
interesting, that interest pales in comparison to the satisfaction of
taking part in a performance of the work -- a satisfaction that can be
carried over, to some extent, into silent readings of other Mac Low
scores.
A score of this sort must be relatively easy to follow and use. It is
not necessarily meant to be performed by professional performance
artists but by sympathetic and knowledgeable members of the
audience. The distinction between artist and audience blurs in this
sort of performance. Other scores may be more cryptic. A score like
the page from "16 Part Suite" by the Four Horsemen shown in
figure 8 is a good example of this type of
notation. It was developed for the use of a single performance group.
The Horsemen weren't thinking about how it might be read by other people
at the time of composition, they were simply using the form of
optophonetic scoring developed by Raoul Hausmann as a working method. I
doubt that anyone else using it would end up with a performance
anything at all like that of the group that originally developed it.
Nonetheless, it can be read as a work of graphic art as long as the
reader understands that it was composed for a different purpose.
Other performances that it might inspire could be just as meaningful
as the Horsemen's and the Horsemen themselves might have been
able to further develop their own performance from such a reading.
Readers already familiar with live performances of this piece might
find their understanding of it deepened by seeing the score,
somewhat like the original readers of the Aztec books found their
oral poetry enhanced by visual images.
The amount of lexical material in a score, the number of words and
letters, need not be great: many scores are for minimalist
interpretation, somewhat like the music of Philip Glass or Steve
Reich, and some scores have no words or other forms of traditional
notation at all. Some Horsemen scores fall into this category, but
probably the supreme master of nonlexical scoring is Bob Cobbing.
It seems that Cobbing can use virtually anything as a score, though
the scores he has published are almost always visually impressive,
capable of standing alone as works of graphic art.
Poetry evolved from song and still has close ties to the parent art.
Poets often write with melodies in mind, and some poems still get
set to music. Many poets base their work on larger musical
structures; some, like Theodore Enslin, have had rigorous training in
music and their knowledge of musical form shapes their work on all
levels. In the case of sound poets, it's often a matter of semantic
quibbling whether you call the work music, song, or poem. In Mac
Low's "Vocabulary Gatha for Pete Rose," the same notation can be
used for speaking voice, singing voice, or musical instrument, and
other poets have written pieces to be performed in conjunction with
music. Like music, poetry is essentially an art of time. The sense of
timing a poem creates is its rhythm and that rhythm is one of its
most expressive characteristics. "To read Donne you must measure
Time, and discover the Time of each word by the sense of Passion,"
wrote Coleridge -- he could have said the same thing about his own
poetry, or that of Arthur Sze or The Four Horsemen or Rosmarie
Waldrop or Toby Olson or Louis Zukofsky or Daphne Marlatt or
Clark Coolidge or the original singer of Beowulf. The sense of
timing in a poem can vary from the timing of discrete units, such as
the clues in Anglo-Saxon riddles or the accretions of examples in
Pound's Cantos, to the sense of time implied by spatial
deployment in visual poetry, to the sense of time implied by regular
meters. You can find songs meant to be delivered more rapidly than
normal speech (Carmen Miranda comes to mind) but these are
usually comic, and the general tendency of song has been to
progress less rapidly than ordinary speech. Sound itself is a function
of time: you hear different pitches by different rates of vibration. If
you play a 33 1/3 r.p.m. record at 78 r.p.m., you will not be able to
hear the music on the record. Not only will the notes come too short
and too fast and the rhythm be altered, the increased speed will have
changed the pitch of the notes. This is one of the reasons that
contemporary verse must fight the speedreading tendencies of the
times. Many forms of notation in contemporary poetry tend to slow
reading down, to encourage the reader to dwell on small units of
language, or at least to perceive the words in real (i.e. spoken) time.
The sort of song that poetry evolved from was dependent on an
audience. Though some critics have claimed that contemporary
poetry has no audience, this is patently false. The audience may be
small, but this may also be one of its strengths. Donne actually
wanted a small audience. Serious contemporary poets can get to
know one another relatively easily, and at the numerous readings,
festivals, etc. that have occurred during the last two decades, poets
have been able to make contact with many (in some cases a
majority) of people interested in their work, and to talk to them on a
personal level -- the party after the reading can be as important as
the reading itself. Readers depend on these performances in order to
understand the notation used by poets. In many cases, such as
performances of Jackson Mac Low's Gathas, there isn't a clear
distinction between author and audience: the author is the central
figure; a number of people who would ordinarily sit passively
listening join in as performers; and they, in turn, take cues from the
rest of the people in the room. Some poets have developed
performances that include the audience, leaving no room for passive
spectators -- Pauline Oliveros has done a great deal in this area.
At present, poetry is largely a participatory rather than a spectator
art. A large percentage of the audience for poetry is made up of
writers, performers, and other artists. Readers often read not simply
to be moved or entertained or instructed or morally uplifted, they
read to improve their own art. This encourages them to read more
closely, more critically, more intensely than they might otherwise
do. Younger poets tend to imitate poets they admire and their
imitation is a way of intimately identifying with the work that is
most important to them. This sort of imitation is not unlike the
copying of Donne's contemporaries, of scribal monks, of Chinese
calligraphers, and of Aztec book painters. Experienced poets also
learn from and identify with the work of their peers: any poet is
potentially part of a given poet's audience, even if the two poets are
going in different directions or working in different modes.
A large portion of the audience for contemporary poetry gets
involved in publishing the work of other poets. They may only act
as a magazine's assistant editor for a short time, or they may edit
their own magazine, or run their own presses. For some, this
becomes a way of life. Poet-publishers tend to read manuscripts
carefully and critically in determining whether or not to publish
them and put a great deal of effort into the means of producing
those they decide to publish. This type of activity tightens the bonds
between poets, opens channels of communication with whatever
larger audience there may be, gives the editors a sense of proportion
in terms of nature, size, and scope of their audience, and, again,
given the intimacy with the text encouraged by copying. Publishing
requires commitment and encourages the poet-publisher to be textual
analyst, literary critic, and graphic designer. Working with layout,
type, perhaps presswork and binding, has suggested new kinds of
notation and presentation and has inspired work that would
otherwise not have been done. The method of production a poet-
publisher uses often effects or reflects her or his work: offset
publishers often write differently from letterpress printers. The
mimeo format of d.a. levy publications continues to be an integral
part of the outlaw urgency of the work, even though levy's been
dead for many years. The austere design and impeccable typography
of Elizabeth Press Books underscores the restrained precision of the
poets published in that series. The limited press runs and
personalized distribution of most poetry publishers creates a sense of
intimacy and fellowship not unlike that created by the circulation of
manuscripts in Donne's time.
Book art may negate notation on the level of individual words and
replace it with notation by size or shape of page, materials used,
form or content of book as whole entity. The reading of such a book
may depend heavily on gesture, and the book may in turn be
incorporated into performances including other forms of notation
[Fig. 9]. The book art movement seems to
have originated in the small scale cottage industry environment of
alternative presses and luxurious artists' studios and can draw from
all current types of poetry.
At present there are at least twenty major schools of poetry
functioning in North America, each with dozens of subgenres. No
group dominates, so poets at the present time enjoy more freedom
than they ever have in the past. Members of some schools can be
dogmatic and exclusionist, and members of one clique can become
extremely bellicose toward another coterie, but few, if any, can limit
their interests to members of their own group. Hence poets
belonging to one clan can be influenced by members of another -- in
fact, some poets switch allegiances at times, and many function in
several schools at once. The cross-fertilization among these groups
produces all sorts of hybrids, sometimes showing a great deal of
what biologists call hybrid vigor. We should note that what poets
work against is often as important as what they work with, and even
bitter antagonisms can lead to positive action. As well as producing
hybrid vigor, interaction among schools seems always to exert an
influence on notation, keeping it from becoming rigid or consistent,
and opening up new possibilities.
Contemporary readers read in a number of different ways for a
number of different purposes. Sometimes the text dictates their
manner of reading, sometimes their needs recast the text. A
sequence of reading might be: 1, casual examination of the text -- in
the case of visual or sound poetry this might involve scanning the
page for a point of entry, a place to begin; 2, closer examination of
the text, including tentative determination of how its notation works;
3, close reading of the text once a method of reading has been
established; 4, hearing the poet read, live or on tape or record; 5,
reconsidering the text in light of the poet's reading. All of these
except 4 would probably include at least some vocalization on the
part of the reader. Going beyond this, the reader could branch off in
several directions: A, making use of something learned from the
text; B, rejecting the text in whole or in part; C, getting people
together for a performance of the work, soliciting work from the
author for a magazine or anthology, or setting up a reading for the
author; D, establishment of personal relations with the author, which
could lead to interaction on a number of levels. Of course, there are
other sequences readers could follow: the reader could begin by
hearing the poet read or attending a performance of her or his work
and then turning to the text; the reader could find something lacking
in her or his own work and cast about for a solution, coming upon
the text in the process, and so on.
However a poem is read, readers can employ all their faculties in
reading and the possibilities of interaction with the poem are
virtually endless. At the same time, notation is not a static body of
convention, but a nexus between large areas of contemporary
practice.
This essay was written in 1983, and published in Open Letter s.4,
no. 7, Spring, 1984. Coach House Press, Tornoto.
Copyright © 1984 and 1996 by Karl Young.
|
|