Orality, Graphology and Cadence
This meditation is the result of a talk I gave during the 2024 SpokenWeb symposium at the University of Calgary. The title of my presentation was, predictably – “Orality, Graphology and Cadence.” I approached that topic in terms of how its individual themes apply in my poetry. In other words, my discussion was a practice-based enunciation of how I deploy and centre graphology in my poetry to intensify its effect, affect, cadence and, overall musicality in relationship to meaning. I demonstrated this by giving a reading from the the long poem, Caribbean Blues, which is part of my award-winning 1998 collection, A Writer’s Pains & Caribbean Blues.
Why, one might ask, does a poet have to meditate on the particulars of his own poetics? Perhaps the answer should lie in the fact that sometimes there is no better critic of a poet than that poet himself – if he is self-reflexive enough, possess the necessary scholarly intuition or training, can distance himself from the object of contemplation and display brutal honest objectivity. Or perhaps, I ought simply just to note that poets – especially poet-scholars – bring special insights to bear on practical poetics generally due to years of, and intimacy with, actual praxis in this genre. It is in that understanding, I presume that in 1711 Alexander Pope wrote the long poem, “An Essay on Criticism”, in which he insinuates the limitations of a lack of direct poetic praxis in the literary critic by admonishing the latter in relation to a poet: “Cavil you may but never criticise.” That is, in my own rough paraphrase, the critic must be gracious and may praise the poet’s efforts in grappling with language and meaning but not castigate his efforts without clear proof.
Moreover, the ideological quarrel between the critic and the writer as far as meaning and intentionality go, is legendary – even though both must work together. And despite Roland Barthes’ dictum that the author is dead, the text is still a metonymy for the author’s writing hand. As such, poets have always provided important insights into their own work, into the work of other poets, or into the nature of poetic practice itself. In other words, they double as critics and bring unique, original and intimate viewpoints to bear on the subject.
This is demonstrable in, for examples, Seamus Heaney’s critical writings, Percy Shelley’s reflection on poetry and statecraft in his 1886 “In Defence of Poesy,” T.S Eliot’s critical rumination in the now famous “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and not least – even if it is a foreword, William Wordsworth preface to the Lyrical Ballads in 1800. In more recent times we have poet-scholars in contemporary University Creative Writing programs who inject a blend of the scholarly, experiential and practical into poetic analysis. In Canada I can name poet-scholars like George Elliot Clarke, Adam Dickinson or Christian Boek, to mention a few. It is in the same spirit that I have decided as a poet-scholar myself, to discuss my own poetics. This is in the hope that it might become a useful alternative or supplementary purview for other critics or poets – especially for those from a different cultural background.
While it is common-knowledge that the whole arsenal of English prosody and meter has traditionally aided poetic cadence in the Western tradition, the uniqueness of my contribution is a practicing African poet’s analysis of conscious and unconscious praxis in a poetics of sound that has an oral African provenance as its immediate genesis but which is in mediation with the Western. That aspect of Heaney’s critical meditation that focuses on sound and poetry in The government of the Tongue (1997) is in the background of my discussion. I juxtapose traditional Western prosody with the African, and specifically, Yoruba, oral trajectory of my own sound- and meaning-making.
Heaney’s reflection on modern English poetry from Patrick Kavanah, Osip Madelstam, Elizabeth Bishop to W.H Auden, Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath and so on centralises its arguments with a concept he refers to as the “government of the tongue”. For the poet to govern the tongue in Heaney’s sense is to successfully and judiciuously rule and control the artifices of poetic production in all their aspects – form, language, image, sound, syntax and semantics; and to marry these together towards an aesthetic balance and equilibrium such that the poem achieves its intended overall effect and expands the field of signification beyond its immediate localised meaning. It is important to note that that poetic mastery and control also recognises that the poet at some point must give up all control and allow an inspired moment to dictate progress. In discussing my poetics, I want to focalise that aspects of a governing of the tongue that is a central engine in my production, namely graphology or stanza and, line arrangement.
At some point in my development as a poet, well past the juvenilia stage, I took very much to heart the Shakespearian dictum that “brevity is the soul of wit”, which is spoken through the mouth of the ironically verbose Polonius in Hamlet, Act 2 scene 2. I needed to govern my tongue, my poetic utterance, through a reigning in of the tendency to overstate, to over-explain or over elaborate – as might be noted today in some so-called prose poems – or in poems one could refer to as versified prose. I will proceed in the present tense.
