Making choices about voices

Composition Studies, Spring 2002 by Keil, Charles, Trimbur, John, Elbow, Peter

Charles Keil John Trimbur

Peter Elbow

INTRODUCTION

John Trimbur

I take great pleasure in introducing the following document/memo/ manifesto in part because Charles Keil was one of the faculty in the visionary American Studies program at the State University of New York at Buffalo who opened my eyes, as a graduate student in the late 1960s, to culture as the lived experience of ordinary people. But aside from acknowledging this longstanding debt, I want to explain who Charlie Keil is to colleagues who study and teach writing. As it happens, he is an award-winning ethnomusicologist (see bibliography) and the founding spirit of projects to reunite the arts in community-building performance, the school-based Musicians United for Superior Education (see www.musekids.org) and the path band movement (see www.128path.org). His notion of "participatory discrepancies" is the best explanation I've ever heard of how music swings and gets people in the groove by being slightly "out of time" and "out of tune." And, to my mind, it also offers a way to think about how people can do things together at all-how, that is, we participate in common life by speaking, writing, singing, dancing, or otherwise signifying in constant give-and-take split-second negotiation.

This concern for the way participation actually works (what Keil calls "controlled imperfection") is central to "Making Choices About Voices." The work of composition begins in this instance, as it invariably does, with an interpretive reading of student writing. You can feel a familiar, palpable sense of empathy and frustration when Keil describes the half-articulated voices and sliding registers in two book reports. As you will see, this critical reading puts the student's writing in crisis, not to correct it but to grasp its latent powers, yearnings, and affiliations-and reveals Charlie Keil to be a rhetorician who draws on his association with Kenneth Burke not only to understand musical performance but, in this case, to imagine how students might enact, dramatistically, multiple codes, identities, and social allegiances.

MAKING CHOICES ABOUT VOICES

Charles Keil

This memo could have a lot of different titles. I want to persuade one student in particular to take three steps: 1) write poetry regularly; 2) develop a prose style for and from her home culture, a prose style of solidarity; 3) develop a crisp, professional, all-purpose "King's English." But many students and human beings generally could use this "triple competence," a "both/and" approach to communication in writing, starting with: 1) "who I am" as a poet; 2) "who we are" socially; and 3) "who I could become" in the corporation-controlled, university-assisted, bureaucratically manipulated world as it has been recently and is today. With these three foundation competencies established a person can move confidently to fluency in more than one language, knowing some dialects of each language, having a variety of solidarity prose styles and poet's skills as strategies for situations. This is a good goal for many individuals and probably good for the world historical process too.

I'm looking at two "book reports" that have some poetry in them, but it is hidden, smothered; ideas behind the sentences are poetic, playful, hinting at participatory consciousness' but these impulses are screened from view. The book reports have some African-American dialect in them but it is scattered, NOT free-wheeling, flowing, in your face, NOT a celebration of another way of being and speaking both in the world and on the page. Rather, the writing comes across as long, unpunctuated sentences filled with annoying `grammar mistakes' suspended somewhere between the `black world' and the `white world.' It is NOT poetry. It is NOT sassy black prose. It is NOT crisp, clear, easy to read `King's English.' And this prof wants one of these three voices, or another compelling voice, to appear on the page representing a person I know to be very intelligent, very quick, very eager to make a difference in the world.

I call the third voice "King's English" because it has authority and centuries of text usage, dictionaries, thesaurus compilations, libraries full of books, behind it. To get a good job, rise up the ladder, be effective in today's world you need to have command of this language. Go to the composition course, go to the writing lab, read Ernest Hemingway, learn to write short sentences in topic-sentenced paragraphs, practice noun verb agreement, avoid the passive voice constructions, learn the rules of punctuation and any other rules that an efficient user of the King's English can tell you have been broken over and over again in your present ineffective prose style. To often, what I'm reading is the writer's imagined approximation of what the King's English might sound like! Get it right and make it real.

Poetry. Demystify it. Practice it a few times a day. Make metaphors in the moment. Find the poems inside the prose you have written. Bring it out. Try different line schemes. Speak into a tape recorder and transcribe it. Speak or scream or whisper it just the way you want it. Try to get the sound and feeling of it on to the page. The King's English is the King's. There are rules. Learn them and follow them. Poetry is yours. No rules. Whatever you say and put on the page is what it is. Get a copy of The Rattlebag and rattle with the rest of us.