How to Read an Oral Poem

Folklore, Dec, 2004 by Jonathan Grove

How to Read an Oral Poem. By John Miles Foley. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. xviii 256 pp. Illus. $19.95 (pbk), $44.95 (hbk). ISBN 0-252-07082-8 (pbk), 0-252-02770-1 (hbk)

In How to Read an Oral Poem, Foley sets out to make oral poetry accessible to the general reader: "If in championing the cause of the non-specialist this book errs on the side of simplicity and availability," he states, "then so be it" (p. xi). The result is a lively account of oral poetics, which, with its clarity of exposition, its smorgasbord of examples, and its helpful sample of textual and electronic references, will surely become a staple introductory handbook.

The premise that oral poetry differs fundamentally from written texts, and thus requires a completely new interpretative toolkit, is a persistent leitmotif. Foley, however, is among those who helped steer oral theory beyond the reductio ad absurdum of the oral/written dichotomy, the "Great Divide" as he characterises it (pp. 36-8). His four-part taxonomy of oral poetry (pp. 38-40), a core element of this book, clearly represents the loosening of old parameters. "Oral Performance" includes material composed and transmitted entirely without writing, while works written for oral performance, such as modern slam poems and blues songs, are designated "Voiced Texts." Two further categories comprise works that Foley terms "oral-connected." Poems transmitted in writing from distant times, such as Homeric epic, Beowulf, and Mahabharata, the original performance contexts of which are now unclear, are classified as "Voices from the Past." In accordance with the practice of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, these works are identified as "oral" on the grounds of characteristic features such as formulaic diction, but Foley abandons the fundamentalism of earlier theorists by admitting that not all texts in this category were necessarily performed orally. The distinctive form of a poem such as Beowulf, however, shows that whatever its origins, it participated in a traditional pre-literary poetic style. The taxonomy concludes with "Written Oral Poems," poetry such as James Macpherson's Ossianic poetry, and Elias Lonnrot's Kalevala, written to be experienced as oral, although read by literate audiences.

The book opens with introductory sections illustrating the diversity of oral poetry, and the non-applicability to it of standard literary assumptions. The second section, "What the Oral Poets Say (in Their Own 'Words')," quotes from interviews with South Slavic guslari, who define formulaic units of expression in their poetry, from phrases to whole narrative episodes, as discrete "words." Foley takes this flexible conception of variable basic units of utterance as a symptomatic feature of oral style, and with this formulation in mind, divides the rest of his book not into chapters, but into "words."

In the first two such sections, Foley begins to map the territory by defining the terms of his title. Asking "What is oral poetry?," "What is an oral poem?," and "What is reading?," he demonstrates that conventional notions of poetic form imported from textual culture cannot encompass the formal variety of oral poetry; that the individual oral poem is the product of wider cultural and poetic contexts; and that the reader of an oral poem must thus seek to situate it contextually. Foley's negative definition of oral poetry is unavoidable given the diversity of the form; less acceptable is his failure to clarify exactly what constitutes "poetry." Oral-connected prose works such as the Mabinogion (p. 46) and the Norse sagas (p. 48) fall within the discussion, but Foley develops no distinction between the poetic and the non-poetic in the context of oral art.

The next three sections outline some useful methodological approaches. "Performance Theory" looks at how poets use signs embedded in performance--special codes, figurative language, parallelism, formulas, appeals to tradition, and disclaimers of performance (p. 85)--to alert their audiences to the status of their speech acts as verbal art. "Ethnopoetics" attempts to disclose the components of a performance on its own terms, allowing us to identify and "score" the aural markers that define the experience of the listener, and thus, ostensibly, to re-perform the poem. Finally, a section on "Immanent Art" determines how the register and performance context of oral poetry create an expressive idiom that is not simply mechanical or arbitrary, but alludes to a wider traditional frame of reference.

There follows a list of ten ad hoc "proverbs" embodying the core principles represented in the preceding discussions. These overlapping, deliberately riddling formulations can be reduced to a set of uncontroversial propositions expressed in plain English: (1) Oral poets compose their poetry in conventional idiomatic modes through which they are intelligible to their audiences; (2) these conventional modes confer great expressive power and do not simply represent mechanical compositional devices; (3) performance opens the channel for the poet's exposition of verbal art, endowing it with its special potency; (4) the diversity of oral poetries demands diverse reading strategies.