<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 \u201cOrality, Graphology and Cadence.\u201d 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<\/em>, which is part of <\/em>my award-winning 1998 collection, A Writer\u2019s Pains & Caribbean Blues<\/em>.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 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 \u2013 especially poet-scholars \u2013 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, \u201cAn Essay on Criticism\u201d, 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: \u201cCavil you may but never criticise.\u201d That is, in my own rough paraphrase, the critic must be gracious and may praise the poet\u2019s efforts in grappling with language and meaning but not castigate his efforts without clear proof.<\/p>\n Moreover, the ideological quarrel between the critic and the writer as far as meaning and intentionality go, is legendary \u2013 even though both must work together. And despite Roland Barthes\u2019 dictum that the author is dead, the text is still a metonymy for the author\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n This is demonstrable in, for examples, Seamus Heaney\u2019s critical writings, Percy Shelley\u2019s reflection on poetry and statecraft in his 1886 \u201cIn Defence of Poesy,\u201d T.S Eliot\u2019s critical rumination in the now famous \u201cTradition and the Individual Talent,\u201d and not least \u2013 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s critical meditation that focuses on sound and poetry in The government of the Tongue<\/em> (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. <\/p>\n Heaney\u2019s 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\u2019s sense is to successfully and judiciuously rule and control the artifices of poetic production in all their aspects \u2013 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.<\/p>\n At some point in my development as a poet, well past the juvenilia stage, I took very much to heart the Shakespearian dictum that \u201cbrevity is the soul of wit\u201d, which is spoken through the mouth of the ironically verbose Polonius in Hamlet<\/em>, 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 \u2013 as might be noted today in some so-called prose poems \u2013 or in poems one could refer to as versified prose. I will proceed in the present tense. For the empty page to become transformed into sheet music, I mentally divide it into two from the middle \u2013 with the left and right halves being commensurate with a rising and a falling reading tone respectively. To complete the impression of the page as sheet music, I dispense totally with punctuation; another reason for this is the irritation of those punctuational markings on the page to the reading eye. Instead of punctuations, I govern the space on the page by leaving gaps between words where a comma or semi-colon should have been. In place of a full-stop is a reading tone of finality at the end of the three-line stanza. This means that a stanza in itself makes a full statement, is a complete sentence, at the end of which the full-stop is understood by the reading eye rather than seen. I also avoid all capitalisations \u2013 again because I find them visually interruptive. So my aesthetics is not only concerned with content and form but with graphemes as well, that is, with the physical script as object.<\/p>\n The idea is to Not interrupt the readers immersion in the imagism and cadence of my poetry due to the visual irritation of scripts on the page.This is such that although the eye is reading, the mind is reciting and imagining and is not encumbered by heavy scripting \u2013 just the way someone viewing a movie is not encumbered by the director\u2019s cuts; the viewer is simply transported by the images on the screen and by the action of the film. The viewer and the viewed merge and become one. <\/p>\n To go back to the stanza as sentence and as a rounded statement as noted above, I write for example in the poem, \u201cGlobetrotter\u201d: \u201ctoronto\/ is amsterdam \/ adrift at Sea.\u201d That is the first line of that very long poem. It is a complete statement; it is a sentence and can stand alone. It does not need punctuation at the end, the scripts are all in lower case. The next stanza follows the same pattern: \u201cit breathes \/ the open atlantic \/ where line and angles blur \/ and bend into mist. There is no punctuation at the end.<\/p>\n It is important to note that just as each stanza and each line in a stanza are units of complete thought, so are each section of the the long poem form that I prefer a complete thought and can stand alone individually. However I need to get back to the core of my discussion: Graphology.<\/p>\n My poetry is spaced out like a graph that governs meaning on the page and at the same time renders the page into sheet music. That sonority is as much a music of the spheres as it is a music of African verbal communication. That is because the cadence inaugurated by my graphological arrangement of lines is inspired by a unconscious, or shall I say, primordial immersion in Yoruba sonic and rhetorical strategies. I<\/p>\n Postcards exotic Jamaica <\/p>\n <\/p>\n postcard of Bob Marley because II Your photographs It is the camera-flash of your smile against the bright and the dark do not feel that I do not feel<\/p>\n but those palm-grooves It is love ship-wrecked in the sun even though your name it is safe harbour for the sea-faring gulls water to flood sea-winds swaying the sad palms – eternal witnesses to many a drowning even though you once said to the waves:<\/p>\n \u201eNo panic on the Titanic\u201c<\/p>\n <\/p>\n III <\/p>\n still the Titanic sank The graphological arrangement of the sample suite of poems above demonstrates the visual lineation and its placement and displacement of words. You read the lines above quietly or out loud in relationship to the tonal undulation suggested by the placements of lines relative to the margins of the page as explained previously. The sonic result would be the natural rise and fall expected of measured lyrical poetry – the ta-dum-ta-dum of Heaney’s theorising. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u2013 \u201cOrality, Graphology and Cadence.\u201d I approached that topic in terms of how its individual themes apply in my poetry. In other words, my discussion was a practice-based…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5327,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":133,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5434,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions\/5434"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue28\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nI tighten my syntax without suffocating meaning \u2013 much like tightening the reigns on a horse for speed, elegance and performance without choking the animal to death in the process. I reduce every unit of thought to a stanza of three lines, which ought to make complete sense as a stand-alone and even in the absence of any other stanza, and no matter how long or short the whole poem is. Such astringent stanza and lineation suggests that each word in a line has to mean more than its everyday denotative understanding. Connotation, symbolism, imagism and pun become important in alignment with sound-making \u2013 internal rhymes especially \u2013 by way of syllabic variation. That sound-making is enhanced in that I calibrate the empty writing page as as a kind of space for musical notations, with each syllable representing a musical note.<\/p>\n
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\nI grew up speaking the African Yoruba language, which is highly tonal and performative. The sonic range of Yoruba speech and verbal arts therefore is the unconscious underbelly of my experimentation with postcolonial English prosody. The \u2018do-re-mi\u2019 of Yoruba diacritics is then conjoined with the \u2013 to appropriate Heaney \u2013 \u201cta-dum-ta-dum\u201d of English meter and prosody. Due to this indigenous African provenance of my modern postcolonial poetics, I have an unconscious preference for the free verse form, which in self-reflection, is probably not unconscious at all but influenced by the verbal arts in Yoruba orature. This is because Yoruba is the first language I spoke before English and before German. That non-Western antecedent is remarkable when I perform my poetry \u2013 the very art of delivery is symptomatic of an oral performance in Africa. I do not read from a book, I recite as much of the work that I can remember that makes full sense and then I stop. Typical of what Walter Ong refers to as Oral noetic, it is the rhythm of the poem that acts as memory. I only remember in as much as the rhythmic pattern is not broken in my mind. Once there is a break and unexpected pause, I lose the thread. This further emphasises the importance and interrelationship of Orality, graphology and cadence in my work. Reading a poem for me is a practical demonstration of how my poetry becomes sheet music on a page in which word placement, and displacement aids the reading voice to find the right enunciation and rhythm. In conclusion, I will give an example of such sonic performativity by reading the poem, \u201cCaribbean Blues.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n scented with love
\n describing<\/p>\n
\n still careful artists painting pictures
\n <\/p>\n
\n immobilised forever in stone
\n plucking a tone-dead guitar
\n <\/p>\n
\n he does not know
\n the reggae of it <\/p>\n
\n pictures of gurgling brooks
\n of lakes of sunlight
\n of surf and sand and nothing… <\/p>\n
\n are all hidden away
\n but do not feel that I do not feel
\n <\/p>\n
\n which blinds
\n and I must shutter my mind <\/p>\n
\n bullet-proof my soul against your
\n flash-bulb eyes <\/p>\n
\n of naked bodies
\n all that oil all that ripeness <\/p>\n
\n <\/p>\n
\n promises a plenitude
\n like the blue waters of the bay <\/p>\n
\n or the salt of life
\n for the diver-fish<\/p>\n
\n the sea-ways to a arid heart it is<\/p>\n
\n sitting still in the still blue silences
\n of a dead sea-bed \u2026<\/p>\n