Dear Carlos, 

Poetry is not a performing art. It  expresses the mood of the poet. Language is just the medium of expression. The richer the language, the richer is a poetic composition. When a poem is read aloud or recited, it is not a performance.  A recitation is successful if the rendition is artistic, being done by a person who understands a poetical composition in all its layers.

Sibaprasad

Dear Sibaprasad,

I could not disagree more! Drama is a subcategory of poetry and, even to the most traditional view, would have to be included among the "performing arts" as you describe them. Still, your view suffers from yet another difficulty: You equate "performance" with "performing arts". The novel cannot be classified as a "performing art" and yet the sense of the modern novel, as Cervantes gave it to us, has to do with a cultural shift, evolving from Gutenberg's gizmo to the time of the first modern novels, seeing the reader as audience. Prior to that shift, audience entailed quite another perception, as did the function of writing. Written poetry may have more in common with sheet music than it does with the written words of a novel. The existing dialog among scholars concerning how well poetry performs for its audience in printed form versus how well the novel performs through that same form, would seem to bear out my point. 

The final difficulty I have with your contribution has to do with its Modern, maybe postmodern, bias. Test your statements on poetry prior to 1453, and tell me what you come up with.

Carlos

I think of all the poetic devices employed in everyday conversation, and all that Pound and Wordsworth describe as well, yet I do not see the point of transformation there. These things could all come together in a bar or café among friends without ever reaching poetry, couldn't they?

Hello all of you and, Carlos, glad to meet you!

Dear Carlos, this is a real challenge, and a beautiful and mischievous question. The thing is that poetry has been —and still is— too many things: it is the basis of the greek gnomon —the first greek philosophical sayings—, it has been the aide-memoire par excellence, the template for all ritual petitions, invocations, insults, charms, omens, curses... poetry is used for wooing, for advertising a product, for joking... In most cases, the "poem" requires a performance because there is no ritual that does not implicate the human body as a whole.

Poetry entices, seduces. It's figurative language tells and withdraws its telling. Poetry affirms and negates. Marvell would agree: poetry is a coy mistress and a coy mister(y). When it is poetry already is probably established by context and tradition, especially all the performative and traditional uses I mentioned, and there is something to be said as to the "poetried" poem that actually is a curse or an omen or an insult in "poetry drag". For example, even when we feel that we are going beyond the ritual tradition in the love poems of poets like Catullus, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Góngora, Pope, Byron, Espronceda, Musset, Bécquer, Tennyson, Rilke, Neruda, Castellanos and so many others who inherited the themes and structures of the Roman erotic elegy, the thing is that they go about the physical traits of the loved woman, and endow the poetic voice with a specific timbre and tone, for example. Anyone may recognize a Roman erotic elegy precisely because its traditional traits that come out mainly in the performance.

What falls out of the performative tradition is precisely the few singularities poets introduce to configure a specific personal style in the sense that Buffon said "Le style c'est l'homme". The performative is based on ritual: all deviations from ritual become "style", and an audience recognizes a style because how much the poem omits the ritual accorded to that type of poem.

In sum, though in modern times we tend to underestimate the ritual or the traditional performativeness of poetry, the truth is that, when the poem lacks that recognizable structure and thematic repertoire, the audience either embraces it for its contemporariness, or dismisses it because of its contemporariness.

The challenge to the traditional: not to abandon tradition nor falling into the trap of the trite. The challenge to the non-traditional: abandoning tradition and falling into the trap of the trite... Oh, well...!

Best regards to all!

Dear Carlos, I sort of missed your point about non-poetry in a bar being non poetry... 

Wolfgang and Lilliana,

I am so glad to have you both in the conversation. You are very helpful and you both make wonderful points. However, I have been down most of those roads already.

Let me see if I can resolve some of the issues you two address concerning my inquiry. First, Wolfgang, when you say "I also would NOT say "two primordial elements of poetry are: 1) Language, and 2) Performance". One must first have a (flexible) notion of poetry (what type of) - and there's an evolution behind", I am moved to assure you that I have distilled this quest down to these two primordial elements in order to begin at the trailhead. Lilliana also writes: "In most cases, the "poem" requires a performance because there is no ritual that does not implicate the human body as a whole". There must be something in the word performance that is complicating this exchange. By "primordial elements" I mean the last two elements poetry needs in order to be poetry, without which there is no poetry. Much like theater, which cannot go on without an actor and an audience and still be theater, music requires sound and performance in order to be music, poetry requires language and performance in order to be poetry. Try not to confuse performance via the printed word with an absence of performance. Cervantes taught us that lesson four centuries ago. The written work is also a performed work, save in cases like sheet music, a play, et cetera, in which the written work is the avenue toward the target performance. Still, much language in performance is not poetry. The friends in the café about whom I spoke before engage in all manner of performative, even theatric, exploits in order to make their points and entertain their comrades; they may incorporate all sorts of poetic and rhetorical devices, including, hyperbole, simile, metaphor, enumeration, et cetera, in order to engage with their friends. It may all be full of language and full of performance, but it is not yet poetry. Perhaps the poet sitting two tables down is listening to them and will make the whole adventure poetry...? Well, what is that step? If we were anthropologists, what would we be looking for? What are we seeing? 

C

 This is a rather logical question. SO it seem to me, what you need is at least a 3. point, as the two earlier ones do not distinguish poetry from a number of contenders.

In fact, I do find the job of defining poetry rather difficult. :)

Exactly, Ferenc! What do you think that next element could be? I suspect something formal. Lilliana spoke of ritual. ...?

 Ritual would not help us, in the sense that it does not distinguish it from religious acts, like sermons and prayers.

ALthough I do not think that a finite number of elements would not do the job - in this sense I share the view of those, who claim there is a family resemblance among different art forms.

But for the sake of the conversation I would go for the first person perspective. I think it works even in the case of the objective correlative - just to answer one possible counter-argument. For this perspective is not necessarily expressed in the grammatical form, itself.

Now what do you think?

Art forms, there is an avenue there. In order that anything be considered art, it must be accepted as art by society, a public. The same is true for "literature". "Literature is what gets taught" to use Eagleton's phrase. It is not so much how it begins but how it is treated by the public. When performed language is treated as poetry, it is poetry? ...?

I think, Carlos dear, that you missed my point about ritual, which is mainly cultural, not religious, and has pertained, along the centuries, to the orality of poetry. The linguistic characteristics of poetry —rime and rhythm, to mention two— prevailed for thousands of years until writing came in. But the fact that rime and rhythm can still be somehow detected in written poetry encourages me to say that, thereby, the ritual of orality, plus the "primitive" scene of a poetic action, is still "oral" and present in a "print-native" poem. Think of the ancient epic, of the ritual invocation of the gods, that were formulated as poems (e.g., the Homeric Hymns). Walter Ong's splendid Orality and Literacy is still the best insight on this subject. For one, ritual brings language outside of the ordinary, like still most poetry does with its compressed brevity, its densely figural use of language, its rhythm that shuns the everyday use of language. Even the more prosaic poetry of somebody like Bertolt Brecht keeps its brevity and at some point a phrase or a verse go back to an "exalted" tone and form.

Most poetry belonging to a strictly ritual use may not be "literary" poetry, and also, not all "literary" poetry has preserved the imprint of ritual. Think of Mallarmé's "Un coup de des n'abolira le hasard", for example, or the subgenre we call "concrete poetry" which flourished in Brazil, or the visual poems of René Magritte. 

What I mention are facts, and a factual relationship between orality and poetry, ritual an orality which constitutes the backbone of a millenary tradition, and, as you know, traditions die hard. It is not clear to me what exactly is your point about theater and poetry and performance and acting and writing. I am not sure whether your assertion that "then we might also observe that language in performance is used more often outside of poetry" is reasonable. Maybe you should give us an explicit definition of "poetry" (there are many definitions of poetry) so we can better be able to discern wether that is acceptable or not.

Best regards!

I think, Carlos dear, that you missed my point about ritual, which is mainly cultural, not religious, and has pertained, along the centuries, to the orality of poetry. The linguistic characteristics of poetry —rime and rhythm, to mention two— prevailed for thousands of years until writing came in. But the fact that rime and rhythm can still be somehow detected in written poetry encourages me to say that, thereby, the ritual of orality, plus the "primitive" scene of a poetic action, is still "oral" and vestigially present in a "print-native" poem. Think of the ancient epic, of the ritual invocation of the gods, that were formulated as poems (e.g., the Homeric Hymns). Walter Ong's splendid Orality and Literacy is still the best insight on this subject. For one, ritual brings language outside of the ordinary, like still most poetry does with its compressed brevity, its densely figural use of language, its rhythm that shuns the everyday use of language. Even the more prosaic poetry of somebody like Bertolt Brecht keeps its brevity and at some point a phrase or a verse go back to an "exalted" tone and form.

Most poetry belonging to a strictly ritual use may not be "literary" poetry, and also, not all "literary" poetry has preserved the imprint of ritual. Think of Mallarmé's "Un coup de des n'abolira le hasard", for example, or the subgenre we call "concrete poetry" which flourished in Brazil, or the visual poems of René Magritte. 

What I mention are facts, and a factual relationship between orality and poetry, ritual an orality which constitutes the backbone of a millenary tradition, and, as you know, traditions die hard. It is not clear to me what exactly is your point about theater and poetry and performance and acting and writing. I am not sure whether your assertion that "then we might also observe that language in performance is used more often outside of poetry" is reasonable. Maybe you should give us a more explicit definition of "poetry" (there are many definitions of poetry) so we can be able to discern wether that is acceptable or not.

Best regards!

Hi Wolfgang,

Your post is excellent.

Sibaprasad

Dear Dr. Wolfgang F.Schwarz,/dear All,

Thank you for sharing a wonderful article about R.Tagore.The poetry of "Art for Art's sake" is for admiration,it appeals to the ear,eye,heart,touch and taste.It delivers aesthetic pleasure.It's the access to diverse cultural experience.At the same time cultural identity and interculturalization take place. Magic musical perspective is characteristic of the lyrics.To Dostoyevsky,"Need in beauty and creation,reflecting it,is inseparable with a human being.May be,without it a human being wouldn't want to live"."I found in dreams a place of wind and flowers",or "We were neighbours for long,but I received more than I could give"Amazing! There is no another way of saying it like in verses,so called the music of a soul.To I.Kruchik,"Poetry is quintessence of the expressed or may be the inexpressible"A.Fet,F.Tyutchev,A.Grigoryev,A.Maikov, Bryusov...The most effective way is to recite(sing)the poem to music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrxD6ZcFdZk

I will not tell to you anything.

I won’t raise a concern in your mind.

To attention of yours I won’t bring

A desire of mine any kind.

Nightly flowers sleep whole day long.

But when stars light a grove from above

Past the dusk all the way ‘til the dawn

Petals radiate music of love.

In a chest that is tired and weak

Breath of freshness drops in and I’m shook.

Let confession remain a mystique.

I won't lay on you my ardent look.

I will not tell to you anything.

I won’t raise a concern in your mind.

In the air that's piercingly thin

I will never appear refined.(translation by E.Leitman)

https://www.stihi.ru/2009/11/01/227

. 

Dear Lilliana and Wolfgang,

It would be very difficult for me to provide you with the definition you request when this query is chasing that very definition.  If I had that definition, I might also have the answer to the central question I pose.

Your use of Ong has been helpful. I would also add John Miles Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem, and The Theory of Oral Composition; also Eric Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write; or Paul Zumthor's Oral Poetry. I would also include Kathryn Starkey' Reading the Medieval Book to the list. They have all helped to bring me to the point we are now, especially Zumthor and Starkey. Starkey deals directly with "Word, Image and Performance", and all of them point out, one way or another, how much written performance encroached upon how we receive our poetry. But not just poetry shifted the way it was performed. Almost every level of communication changed with the culture of literacy. A question I often entertain with my students is: What did we use before Gutenberg made everybody a reader? Students normally answer first that quills and parchment and paper were used. When I point out that such an answer is a technological answer, and alter the question to ask "how did we do what we do with writing/reading before print?", they begin to move their imaginations in very much the same direction as all of these scholars of orality that we have mentioned. Think of the town/court/etc. crier, pregonero, prior to the modern age. S/he had to deliver news, information, and announcements (even advertising) some places everyday and other places twice a week. How did s/he remember all of it and keep it straight, understanding too that it would be ever changing? The answer given by these, and other, scholars describes an aesthetic that I would call "poetics" if we were talking about poetry rather than about criers, pregoneros. After all, the crier, pregonero, uses language in an equally performative way, does s/he not?

Dear Carlos, I've read all except Foley's book. Thank you for the reference because I am very interested in orality. You keep rejecting definitions and now you say that you have none because your are chasing the very idea of a definition. What are we going to talk about, then? You want us to second-guess you, which for me entails an endless fight of shadow boxing.  You make strong assertions in your comments. I want to know the concrete basis of such assertions so that we can really have a meaningful debate. We would love to know what you mean by "They have all helped to bring me to the point we are now." Which exactly is that point? Maybe that would give us an idea on where you stand. Best regards!

Dear Lilliana,

I have rejected definitions? What definition have I rejected? To my knowledge, the only items I take issue with concern your, and Wolfgang's, disagreement with the two primordial elements of poetry. (It is true that I did reject one contributor's contribution completely, but that also had to do with the rejection of performance as a defining element.)

I am not interested so much in a debate as I am in getting help from colleagues concerning what more than language and performance is required in order to have poetry? I have defined the trailhead as clearly as I can.

Wolfgang,

In response to your question, My understanding of performance, for the purpose of this inquiry, would include any method by which a poet, or anybody, presents whatever the composed language may be to an audience/public. 

Let me try to say this another way. I think the question got splayed with the Sibaprasad contribution. So, here are other ways to understand the question: How much can we take away from poetry before it is no longer poetry? Or, once we add language and performance, what more must we add before we have poetry? What is the most basic recipe for poetry?

Give us an actor and an audience and we have theater. For poetry we need: Language, performance, ...? 

I hope that helps.

Ok! 

We are just talking about genre boundaries and how fluid they are at a time when genre boundaries are no longer essential to literature. And I agree that, to be called "theater", theatre probably needs less ("Give us an actor and an audience and we have theater"),  and poetry needs more as to form, intent, language. Poetry is still a challenge, and, arguably, it is harder to write poetry than any other thing. At present we prefer genres closer to everyday life: we like "staging", we love to imitate how others speak or walk, we make fun of others, we lie, we posture. People like Erwin Goffman say we are always "presenting" ourselves "upon the stage" of life. In that sense, theater is omnipresent in life. On the contrary, poetry is contrived, uses a language that tends to "elevate" the everyday by means of a special diction unusual in everyday speech, uses figural language in order to mean something beyond what is said, thus posing challenges to the reader or listener in terms of the "true" meaning. It uses rhythms and structures that go against normal speech, and even though it may sound normal, contents, language or diction go against normal speech. Poetry wants to say something "more" and makes it hard for the reader or listener to find what that "more" is. There is no specific claim in theater as to the challenge of complexity, while poetry aspires to complexity. But there is something that might be the key to difference: theater needs performance and an audience. Poetry needs neither.  

I already talked about poetry and performance and I would only add that writing changed poetry, gave it resources oral poetry did not or could not have. Nevertheless, both  are poetry.

But my question to you, dear Carlos, would be "Why the fuss?"  

My best! 

Lilliana

All right, Lilliana, your "genre boundaries" description helps, though I would omit "at a time when genre boundaries are no longer essential to literature". Time corals constitute limits that might better be sorted out with the help of the answer we are looking for rather than as a component of that answer. Antiquity, Middle Ages, Modernity, and Post-Modernity, all evolve the dissemination of poetry, especially concerning performance. For instance, while writing certainly existed before print, the written form actually being the performance had to wait for Modernity. Performing options in the cybernetic age have mushroomed even more. Still, performance continues to be one of the defining elements, independent of era.

Lilliana, I am glad the theater example was helpful to you. You also list "form" and "intent". Most of the rest of your post does stay with intent. The exact intent(s) to which you refer still seem a bit nebulous. Can you condense that a bit? Olga also speaks of form, mainly verse and prose. I am anxious to see where that goes.

I cannot be sure what you mean by "fuss". Is fuss just interest? Are you asking why I am interested? Are you asking for purpose? Is fuss an indication that I am overly engaged? ...?

Ex Animo,

C 

Dear Olga,

Thank you for joining the dialog. I feel the frustration, and the excitement. We can name two universal points but, either they include so much more than just poetry, or poetry is so much more than we think it is. (Is the evening news poetry; it certainly can be theater.) I would love to hear more about you and your students forays into the question. I think we need at least one more universal in order not to absorbed by the poetry-does-not-exist crowd.

Verse and prose is a devious arena in which to engage, and unavoidable. When Cervantes was advocating for the poetics/poetry of the novel, did he see the novel as poetry? There is, of course, a lot of poetry, in verse, in his novels, but I don't think that is what he was referring to. What did he mean by "poesía"? Poetry? Poetics? ...?

Dear Wolfgang, I wholeheartedly agree with you. Our time is that of joyous hybridity. That might be why I really cannot connect to the question. I like the classics and I have studied them carefully and with lots of enthusiasm, but I am well aware that we are not in classical times. Borges is a great example. Once the world expanded beyond the "continental" (meaning "Europe") the possibility of returning to the classics sort of lost any prominence and/or interest. I like to see the classics in Borges or Cortázar or Yourcenar or Gerhard Richter or Jeff Wall or Eddie Gómez, but they are interacting with the classics without becoming "classical classics", if you excuse my wordplay. :-)

Prepost(erous) postmodernism... oh, well... It was fun while it lasted and made many people think, including me and most people I know. And that was good. It sort of opened the gates to hypercritical thought. I think it was very positive. We got to fight often and, as you know, I love a good fight, Wolfgang, dear friend!

Dear Carlos, I tend not to start with definitions that should be the outcome of research. After looking at way many examples, I can either deduct or induct or abduct a draft  definition, then to test it again and again. It's called "method". Besides, the way you express the difference between poetry and theater is based on a micro specific experience and the idea of "performance". What if I do not agree but want to speculate on it for a while? From my previous answer, Wolfgang inferred a good concept: hybridity. You have a fuss with delimiting genres. And I do not share your fuss. No mystery there, Carlos. No mystery in my words. Best regards!

Dear Wolfgang, I have no problems with the postmodern movement cum skepticism, as I am an enthusiastic skeptic bearing the brunt of paradox, It was my time when I began to study literature. But it had its limit. Skepticism excess threatened to leave just a void, I mean, an impossibility to come to terms with the morning after. I thought of it as a cleansing parenthesis, a fundamental debridement of the excesses of modernism. A violent hiatus was indispensable. It was imperative to clean the house of such a forceful racist, misogynistic modernism apparatus. I think we gained a lot of insight, especially new insights to go into a new manner of making and understanding culture, of bringing into culture whole objects, ideas and peoples who had been left out up to then: everything not Europe and not the US. But it became a comical fashion, especially in the US whose academia tends to trivialize things for a while and then catches up. So do not get me wrong. We are harvesting the "New" on the debris of the postmodern state of affairs. We still need a name for this time. 

Wolfgang,

Your illusion to the staging of a poetic text constituting the performance of that text works quite well throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, even into the Renaissance, however seeing the poetic text itself as the performance complicates that view of performing from the Baroque forward. Still, I take your point. The staging aspect links intent and formality, maybe even ritual, to the poetic dynamic. I would love to see Olga, and all of you, run with that a bit.  

I am not so much interested in what poetry is (not my field), but in the performative aspects of creative texts in the broadest sense. As "fuzzy" or confused the first statement read which defined poetry as to be performed, there is still a performative aspect in all means of human communication. (If we accept a communication model to analyse art forms). Poetry does not have to be performed to be poetry, but there is a performative aspect of poetic texts. The so-called performative turn in the humanities produces new approaches and insights into old forms and genres, but on the other hand also generalization and a vague use of terms. In this way I find the opening question as disturbing and "fuzzy" as it is interesting and inspiring.

Claus,

Can you produce an example of poetry independent of any performance, no voice, no print, no recording? That is something with which I am completely unfamiliar.

I guess we have different definitions of performance. I would not consider print as a form of performance.

Poetry can't be independent of performance.Bards of all kinds originated from the folk oral tradition."Bodies or masks are used as signs".Commedia Dell' Arte or the Puppet Show demonstrate this fusion.Rock-operas or musicals combine a lot of arts.The intuitive approach by Meyerhold is interesting.He criticized Stanislavsky's method of experience.To him,an actor should move from the external to the internal.Theatre and biomechanics(the structure of movement and gesture) consists of 3 stages:intention,realization,response.A team of propagandists,a montage(all literary or other heterogenious arts composition) are special (as a rule,collective) forms of poetic self-expression.In any case,a poet(an actor) is a medium to audience,who uses embodiment is when an actor takes the actions of others,remaining himself.  

Claus,

Your definition would work out just fine throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages, however, shortly after the book culture imposed itself, print grew more and more into the instrument of performance that we now see being changed again in the postmodern/cybernetic age. For much of the twentieth century poets used print as their primary performance instrument. (There is a big debate going on these days about just how well poetry performs in print but we can leave that for another question.)

Dear Carlos, I am as intrigued as Claus. What do you mean by written performance? First of all, it lacks an audience. If you type, we cannot see the traces you make on the writing surface, contrary to, for example, Jackson Pollock's, or Cy Twombly's or Richard Serra's or Basquiat's performative markings. It can take years to finish a written poem and make it public because no one is waiting. Please explain what do you mean by this written "performance". Body movement? Images on the page? Sound? Texture? What? What would then be the difference between a Pollock painting and a poem? Are you talking about something similar to "action painting"? I would like to know about this debate. Any references we may use to understand what you mean? That would be helpful. A lot.

Dear Claus, earlier in this debate I proposed a performative aspect in poetry: the vestiges of orality still evident in a certain regular rhythm, meter, a certain dramatic closure, the "drama of address" to the Other in most love poetry and political verse. Verse itself imposes a certain visual form on the page, the reason behind Apollinaire's calligrams. The fact that you can interrupt the flow of the verse visually by cutting the verse and continuing the metaphor on the next verse (enjambment)... but still a better form of talking about this would be great. Any examples? I would like to learn more about this. 

Readership as audience is a modern phenomenon that has been with us at least since 1605. Blas de Otero or Robert Frost certainly gave readings of their works now and again but, their audience is primarily measured through the copies of their collections published and sold. Don't tell me that you believe a writer of a Best Seller has no audience. The poet who has a work accepted by a poetry journal delights in having an audience for his/her poetry. S/he submitted the poem with an audience in mind. 

Ah, you mean "reading aloud", slamming, that kind of performance! I love slamming. So it is not in the written poem... It is just what poets normally do: read aloud. We all love it. But if we write then to read aloud, it was already poetry BEFORE the performance, wasn't it? Or it was what I said days ago, the vestigial marking of orality...

No, Lilliana, I do not mean "reading aloud", slamming, although those certainly are to be included within performance. I mean published poetry, broadsides, et cetera. It has been going on for over 400 years. You must have noticed.

Irony is quite unbecoming here, Carlos, especially in view that you have been extremely imprecise and obscure in your own exposition of what you seek, and most contributors to your question have had the same reaction I have had: perplexity and impatience. If this "has been going on for over 400 years", it's hard to understand why only you can understand it but not quite express it! So I say good bye now. Have a nice slam. 

A little peek: I just looked at all the contributions and it seems that you have not been receiving any up-votes. Interesting! Now it is really good by. :-)

Lilliana, You keep saying goodbye, and yet you keep posting. A very odd brand of generosity.

Wolfgang,

Very entertaining. Kafka is good for that kind of lesson.

Wolfgang,

Looking over your desire to reduce the designation "language" still further, and along Jakobian lines, I cannot be sure as to which of Jakobson's six functions you think should be eliminated for playing no part in poetry? It seems to me as though all six functions relate equally well to poetry as to non-poetry. Jakobson himself seems to make that point when speaking on the poetic function. Perhaps you are refering to primary functions and secondary ones?

As a poet, this conversation interests me, but I have to say the terms of Carlos's question are vague. "Language" is not made poetic by performance; in fact, I once published an essay on the disconcerting phenomenon of listening to an excellent poet who couldn't perform his way out of an open door. My conclusion was that the orality (thanks to Lilliana for that good term) of the poem can be weakened by poor performance. (Check out any of the performances online by Robert Frost of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and you'll hear what I mean.) This implies that orality is the fruit of the poet's engagement with language, not his or her engagement with an audience as a performer.

Several commentators have mentioned the bards of antiquity, but the fact is that most bardic poetry is a communal achievement. Kabir, for example, according to his most recent (and excellent) translator Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, was in all likelihood illiterate, and his poems passed into print only after a century or so of bardic performance. In that process, the performers altered images, metaphors, and structure to better convey the essence of the poems to their contemporaries. This bardic process implies that the essence, the poetry, of the poems may not be entirely language dependent. Critics tend to think of poetry as the sum of certain oral and intellectual effects, but poets know that poetry precedes and inspires those effects. Still, the orality of poetry is primary; it is the reason, as Eliot noted, that a good poem can communicate before it is understood.

The great advantage of print is that a reader can establish a direct connection to the orality of the poem. Readers of novels tend to read them in silence, but readers of poetry, under the pressure of orality, tend to voice them (if only in their heads). The poet's personal performance skills can't interfere with the reader's naked exposure to the poem's musical force. Nor can the skills of a "performance poet" distract the audience from a bad poem's the lack of poetry once the poem finds its way into print.

Joseph Hutchison,

The question does not maintain that "language is made poetic by performance"; it maintains that poetry without language is not poetry, and that poetry without performance is not poetry. A poem requires language, even unintelligible language, in order to be a poem. A poem requires some form of performance, live, print, recording, et cetera, in order to be poetry. The question does not insist upon orality in order to perform, nor does it insist upon publication, nor upon recording, nor any other delivery system. All systems for the performance of poetry are included in the category, just as all languages are included in the category of language. What you are discussing is another question. A good question, but not this question.

I too can name many poets who perform their own poetry live, or live on tape, very poorly, Pablo Neruda comes to mind, and others who are masters presenting their own poetry, Luis Palés Matos falls in with this group. It is a good thing that publishing was around for Neruda and all of us who love his poetry. And I would love to get into a dialog about how well poetry performs orally versus in print. I have some very heartfelt ideas on that subject. Still, that is not this question. This question asks what else is required beyond these two primordial elements in order to have poetry. Forgive my insisting; I do not mean to single you out. You may have noticed that many others here have made the same error, so we get stuck on those two elements when the object of the inquiry is to get beyond them.    

Has anyone hear read Aristotle's Poetics?. I realize that deals with more specific poetry; however, one key point that Aristotle makes is mimesis as essential to all poetry. Performance reminds me of spectacle, which according to Aristotle is not necessary to poetry, and in some cases, may actually take away from poetry. 

Rick,

I suppose I should really only speak for myself, but I presumed that everyone here had read Aristotle's Poetics. Just as I presume we have all read Saussure. 

Hi Carlos, 

I think it should be Aristotle's Poetics, not Poetica. Horace wrote Ars Poetica. I have not read Saussure. Would you kindly refer to the particular book? 

Hi Rick, 

Aristotle deduced this theory against the background of the plays he had already seen. He also discussed the epic, but not lyric. Aristotle spoke of mimesis ( imitation) in respect of Art as a whole. 'Spectacle' is relevant to drama, and in some respects to 'epic poetry'. Lyrics, for example, sonnets, odes and other forms were not practised in Aristotle's time, so he did not theorise on these topics. 

Sibaprasad

Hi Carlos, 

I think it should be Aristotle's Poetics, not Poetica. Horace wrote Ars Poetica. I have not read Saussure. Would you kindly refer to the particular book? 

Hi Rick, 

Aristotle deduced this theory against the background of the plays he had already seen. He also discussed the epic, but not lyric. Aristotle spoke of mimesis ( imitation) in respect of Art as a whole. 'Spectacle' is relevant to drama, and in some respects to 'epic poetry'. Lyrics, for example, sonnets, odes and other forms were not practised in Aristotle's time, so he did not theorise on these topics. 

Sibaprasad

Sibaprasad,

Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure.

Also, you are correct about Poetics. Sorry, my mind must have stayed in Spanish for the moment.

Hi, Carlos

Regarding your reply, you note that "many others here have made the same error." I wonder if this speaks to the vagueness of your question rather than a failure on the part of so many intelligent people. Worth considering, perhaps.

Joe

Hello Joseph,

Yes, I have done as you said and considered as you suggest. I am unable to see how the question "...at what point does language in performance become poetry?" communicates that language is made poetic by performance. The misunderstanding seems to get little help from the conditions that set the up: That is to say "if we accept that the two primordial elements of poetry are: 1) language, and 2) performance, ..." I am not sure where you find this vagueness. Do you have a less vague way of asking the question? If you do, I would be most grateful for your sharing it with me. If it would help people address the question, I am all for it.

Ex Animo,

C

Your use of "performance" is what makes the question vague, I think. The word clearly misled almost everyone in this conversation, and it's not necessary. If we eliminate "performance," it seems you're after something like: "What characteristics does language have to assume in order for us to call it 'poetry'?"

All right, let us run with your wording of the question. I like it very much.

I think the first thing I would have to add to language, on the road to becoming poetry, is performance. I can think of no instance in which a poem may be deemed a poem if it is not performed either live, recorded, in print, ... Still, much language fuses with performance that is not poetry, so we are still in need of some pixie dust in order to get to poetry. What do you suggest is still required?

By your definition, isn't "performance" an aspect of language itself? It would seem so. In which case attaching performance to poetry would be redundant.

Are you saying that all language is performed?

You'll have to tell me, Carlos. My statement is based on my interpretation of your use of "performance." It seemed to me that you meant any use at all of language, so I may well be off base. Can you provide your working definition of performance? 

I would distinguish between use and performance with an eye toward the territory between, or transitioning between, the sender/receiver connection and that of presenting to an audience. I know this may sound a bit like Roman Jakobson having cocktails with Terry Eagleton, but it actually is informed largely by Miguel de Cervantes advocating for the poetics of the novel.

So "performance" is a feature of poetry because of the cultural role of the poet? I like that idea. Puts me in mind of Karl Shapiro's account of reading some William Carlos Williams poems at a poetry festival in Iran (when the Shah was in power). Shapiro writes that members of the audience, mostly Iranian poets and scholars, came up to him afterward and asked, "Are those things poems?" The disconnect, presumably, being between their view of the poet's role and the role assumed by Williams and by Shapiro in presenting Williams's poems. Maybe "the point at which language in performance becomes poetry" is the point at which it satisfies the audience's view of what poets are supposed to express.

I like that description of the dynamic. It certainly plugs into the fickle variables of public reception. Your example brings to mind an ode by Neruda that transforms a recipe into a lyric dining experience. 

Still, if we watch the evening news, we are going to see and hear carefully crafted language in performance, very intentionally performing, which we might not call poetry. Maybe we should. ...?

Who is doing the performing on the evening news? Is the language being presented as poetry? If not, can we call it poetry? Is "crafted" meaningful in this context if the language isn't crafted to be poetry? Can poetry arise accidentally (a fortuitous slip of the tongue)? Unless we divorce language from the speaker of language (poetry from the role of the poet), none of this can be called poetry. Can it?

Poet's intent? Poet's declaration? Audience's decision? ...? Good questions. I especially like the first one: "Who is doing the performing on the evening news?" Each news program has its "talent" do the news. It certainly is not being presented as poetry. It is being presented as news. Presumably, they are not mutually exclusive, but I can't think of anybody who calls it poetry. The news often incorporates editorial opinion, as do many poets. (Nicolás Guillén' "Elegy for Emmett Till" has a lot from the news reports.) If Wolf Blitzer were to present a poem on his show one day, I presume he would say "and now for a poem". Is the label what does it? What is performed as poetry and received by an audience as poetry is poetry; everything else is ...? Would a Formalist say there is no poetry, there is no news? That would be news. What would it take to make the evening news, poetry?

"What would it take to make the evening news, poetry?" It would take a commitment to layered language, I think, to not just an embrace but a cultivation of multiple meanings. Not what corporate journalism is about, of course. There is no equivalent on the evening news of Neruda's "The Dictators," for example, or "I'm Explaining a Few Things" (the impact of which depends on Neruda's status as a poet, no?). Evening news language is crafted for clarity (or the appearance of clarity); poetry is crafted for richness in an attempt to capture the fullest possible complexity of experience in the fewest words. All too often the evening news is crafted to render experience in the most simplistic terms possible, to flatten it, perhaps on purpose, so that the listener's scope of understanding is narrowed and weakened. Poetry's language empowers the audience, while the language of the evening news encourages powerlessness.

Here endeth today's sermon!

Joseph, I love your answer and I love the questions you ask. Still, I am not sure I have not read poetry that is not also "crafted for clarity (or the appearance of clarity)", or that has not been "crafted for richness in an attempt to capture the fullest possible complexity of experience in the fewest words". The word "attempt" is problematic here, going back to intent. Also, many journalists might argue that their language also "empowers the audience". And the reference to "in the fewest words" makes me think of the old newspaper editor's description: A newspaper article is literature in a hurry. That sounds to me like poetic aspirations and, if not, it is at least using the same poetic/literary tools that it speaks of.

We have seen many examples of compositions, mostly written, that began as anthropology or correspondence or history or philosophy, et cetera, which later came to be read/heard/studied as literature. Or, as Eagleton says it: "Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness thrust upon them". Does poetry behave any differently? Is performed language only poetry when it is self aware? If those of us who have participated in this discussion were to produce an evening news program as poetry, what would we have to do differently? And, if we did nothing differently and simply called it poetry, would it be out of our hands/voices, leaving us to wait and see if our audience accepted it as poetry? And if the audience does? And if it does not? What if we heard/read/watched the evening news as poetry? I think I know what Eagleton would say: "If they decide that you are literature then it seems you are, irrespective of what you thought you were".

I speak, as ever, from a practicing poet's point of view. I have intentions, French fried theorists be damned, though I admit to including both conscious and subconscious impulses under that rubric. The flattening of genres into the goo of "text" is problematic for me; Eagleton's cleverness aside, it is irrelevant to me whether someone looks at one of my poems and says it's not poetry, or says it's really prose, or journalism, or history. The world is increasingly full of over-credentialed parsers of quite intentional works--parsers whose parsings exist primarily to puff up their own careers. Eagleton, for my money, is one of these, spilling lots of ink and butchering lots of trees to get us nowhere. I once got into a rather blistering argument with one such overeducated fellow who insisted that a basketball game is a "text." This kind of foolishness is depressing, but publishing his theories far and wide did earn him tenure, so I suppose he, at least, had discernible intentions behind his work. But I may just be in a low mood. You can blame it on Trump, who goes from success to success sans ideas, sans argument, sans taste, sans everything. The fact that so many call him a leader doesn't make him one, does it?

Yes, Joseph, I feel very much the same way when I view the panorama as a poet; when I cast the gaze of a scholar over the same terrain, I am forced to, if not accept, at least confront Eagleton's, and his partisans', observations concerning these matters. They also ask some very good questions. Can any of us say where rhetoric ends and poetry begins, or vise versa? And the overeducated fellow who insists that a basketball game is a "text" is going to find my scholarly ear more sympathetic than my poetic ear, even though what he is doing is really poetry, or at least, a poetic device: a metaphor. Looking at representations and events as text makes a great deal of sense from an anthropological perspective since both representations as well as events inform society, much as a text might. Therefor, an event, like your basketball game, or a representation, like a poem or a painting, potentially insert themselves into the cultural dynamic in very much the same way, in a cultural informatives in, material practices out, continuum. It may be to your overeducated friend's advantage to study them all as text. It seems to work for the New Historicists,. Hayden White speaks to this in his article "New Historicism: A Comment" when he says: "This is, to be sure, a metaphor, but it is no more metaphorical than Marx's statement that 'all previous history is the history of class struggle' or the statement by Fox-Genovese that 'History, at least good history, is inescapably structural.' More importantly, the statement 'History is a text' is in no way inconsistent with these other statements about the nature of history. On the contrary, it is or at least can be so considered for methodological purposes, if anything, a qualification of these other statements." Still, "history as text" and "culture as text" help the scholar more than the poet, which may have more to do with priorities than education.

Also, I am with you that distinctions regarding verse and prose do not help us much. Cervantes and Unamuno both seemed to consider their prose to be poetry as much as their verse. Many other writers and scholars do too. To them prose and verse is not a distinction between prose and poetry. I don't think we need to do the evening news in verse in order to execute our experiment.

I am also with you concerning Trump! It is a good time to reread Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, though not so good for my nerves. 

Artistic composition which includes for me Composition in-situ or improvisation is basic to poetry and should be one of the important elements to look out for in the distinction of poetry and non-poetry. I do not see the need to insist on recognizing intentionally created verse alone as poetry.  Trying to detangle poetry and plain speech performance would make us forget that poetry itself is always present in social interaction and in expressions in different contexts, artistic and non-artistic. It would also do a disservice to primary oral cultures. As has been suggested, a look at walter Ong's seminal Orality and Literacy and Isidore Okpewho's Epic in Africa would clarify issues here.  

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow-A.P.J.Abdul Kalam

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than histoty-Plato

Poetry is the unexpected utterance of the soul-Mark Nepo

These views on poetry are very poetic but not very defining.

At a conference of the Medieval Association of the Midwest at the University of Kansas back in October, a rethinking/restating of the two primordial elements of was expressed that you all may find to be illuminating. Rather than language and performance, the two primordial elements were said to be: Language and publication. A medievalist might understand that distinction immediately since, to a medievalist, "publication" simply refers to making a message public. It has come to mean something much more specific as the term has evolved through modernity. Perhaps we need a new verb in English: to public.

KIRAN, I would say your first item applies.to great poetry.

"Nobody can say it not in verse"L.Tolstoy. Other genres can be repeated, rewritten and stolen.