[PMLA
Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading,
and Sound Studies
MARIT J. MAcARTHUR
As writers ...
. . . are we putting
each other to sleep
or waking each other up
-Charles Bernstein, "Artifice of Absorption"
E
VERYONE LOVES TO COMPLAIN ABOUT POETRY READINGS. I AM
confident that most readers of PMLA have been disappointed,
MARIT j. MAcARTHUR is associate professor of English at California State University,
Bakersfield.ln 2015-16, as an ACLS Digital
Innovations Fellow and a visiting scholar
at the University of California, Davis, she
is collaborating on a project to integrate
pitch-tracking tools with machine-learning
applications for humanities scholars interested in vocal performance.
bored, even maddened by some poetry readings and moved or at
least entertained by others. What makes a poet a "bad" or "good" reader?
Little consensus exists on this question, even as the poetry reading has
become an institution of the contemporary academy. 1 And while the field
of sound studies develops apace,2 the rich questions of what we expect of
a poetry reading, and why and how we listen, resist familiar modes of
analysis and are often diminished by polemics about how poetry should
be read or performed. This is the case even if we limit ourselves to the
contemporary academic poetry reading (as I do here, though I circle
back to so-called performance poetry), sponsored by a university English
department, creative writing program, or similar cultural institution.
In a well-known polemic against poetry readings, "The Poetry
Reading: Public Performance I Private Art" (1985), the poet Donald
Hall quotes the satiric protest of John Frederick Nims (the editor of
Poetry from 1978 to 1983), who substituted "poetry reading" for "sermon" and "visiting poet" for "preaching clergyman" in a passage from
Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857):
There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind
in civilized countries than the necessity oflistening to poetry readings.
© 2016 MARIT ). MACARTHUR
PMLA 131.1 (2016), published by the Modern Language Association of America
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No one but a visiting poet has ... the power of
compelling audiences to sit silent, and be tormented. No one but a visiting poet can revel
in platitudes, truisms, and untruisms, and yet
rec~his undisputed privilege, the same
respectful demeanor as though words of impassioned eloquence, or persuasive logic, fell
from his lips .... A member of Parliament can
be coughed down or counted out .... But no
one can rid himself of the visiting poet ....
[A]nxious longing for escape ... is the common consequence of poetry readings ....
[Y]ou must excuse me, my insufficient young
poet, if I yawn over your imperfect sentences,
your r~peated phrases, your false pathos, your
drawlings and denouncings, your humming
and hawing, your oh-ing and ah-ing.
(72)
This is amusing. Moreover, it is revealing:
contemporary American literati complain
about, and yet submit to, the poetry reading
much as the educated classes of nineteenthcentury England as portrayed by Trollope
suffered through sermons. 3 And indeed the
phenomenal experience of the poetry reading
may be the closest thing to a church service
in our allegedly secular academic culture-I
say allegedly, in agreement withl£incent p;c_
:§"~thesis that the process of secularization
associated with modermty has not spread as
w~ly nor penetrated as deeply as Western
humanists have tended to assumt;, not even
in the academy. 4 From their founding, universities in Europe were closely allied with
the Catholic Church or the Church of England; later, in the United States, with mostly
Protestant sects. Only in the late nineteenth
century did some American universities begin to disavow religious affiliation. 5 And the
formal arrangements and conventions of the
academic lecture, like those of the poetry
reading, are modeled on Judea-Christian services: a podium for the officiate's lectern, rows
of chairs for the pews, scheduled moments for
response from an otherwise passive audience
whose silence signals respect, if not reverence,
for the speaker.6 In an academic lecture, as
Marit ]. MacArthur
in a poetry reading, an understated manner
of speaking may aim to focus the audience's
attention on the subject matter at hand-the
way that a religious ritual intends to focus attention on a sacred text (Goffman 165-66).
Such affinities are not surprising, Pecora observes: "The idea that the humanist intellectuals of the academies represent a sort of secular
clerisy is very old, and long possessed a sort of
literal truth in places such as England, where
religious orders were required of academics
well into the nineteenth century" (2). As they
have been absorbed into the academy, poets
have assumed a similar role/ and their styles
of performing poetry have arguably been influenced by religious cultures and rituals outside the academy as well as by trends in acting.
What frustrates Nims and Trollope is the
poet's or clergyman's inadequate performance
or bad acting, its unspontaneous, predictable
style-and perhaps lack of sincerity. The speaker's "repeated phrases," "false pathos," and
'2.-h-llig and~" key the poetry reading or
s~ as a particular type of performance.
Drawing on Erving GoHman's concept of
frame analysis, which guides participation in
and interpretation of communal experiences,
Richard Bauman lists a number of "devices
[that] have been widely documented in various
cultures as serving to key performance," including "parallelism ... , special paralinguistic
features ... , appeal[s] to tradition ... , [and]
disclaimer[s] of performance" (16). Below I
discuss some aspects of parallelism and paralinguistic features common to contemporary
poetry readings as well as to sermons and litanies; I note that religious services in the Puritan tradition are linked to an antiperformative
ideology and, in turn, to sincerity.
In studies of the lyric, Susan Rosenbaum
has traced the opposition of sincerity and
theatricality:
39
1> ~ct.+­
ev.f.
Historians have documented sincerit.y's ~ole as Wllf
a moral ideal as opposed to a theatncahty as- \... .
so ciated with commercial culture, especially ~CICI\ 0 I"
n.- s...,,,., I ft....~-'""i
C.f"ct...C-t- or
L.. ....~l
40
Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies
in Puritan thought, while recent scholars have
considered the role of theatricality in modern
culture by challenging the antitheatrical prejudice. While both literatures have historicized
and contested the opposition between sincerity and theatricality, in studies of the lyric this
opposition remains stubbornly in place. (12)
'
'
As with other modes of performance,
and in rough parallel with the evolution of
acting, styles of poetry reading in the United
States have gone through fashions, displaying
the same unresolved conflict between sincerity and theatricality, both before and since
the institutionalization of the reading in the
academy. 8 The wax-cylinder recording of
(perhaps) Walt Whitman reading his "America" exemplifies a ponderous rhetorical style
he m.ight have used when he concluded some
of his public lectures by reciting "0 Captain!
My Captain!"; he also sometimes declaimed
Shakespeare in public (Reynolds 156, 502,
513-14, 531). In the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries in the United States and
England, the ideal form of poetry reading
was formal, dramatic recital, taught through
elocution training and sometimes used, misleadingly, to demonstrate literacy (Middleton;
Robson). As Lesley Wheeler notes, "[M]any
modernist-era poets were schooled in the
presumption that the poet would rarely be
the best oral interpreter of her own poetry, ...
that superior recitation required unusual skill
and sensitivity" (Voicing American Poetry 4).
While we might agree with these presumptions-many talented songwriters and
playwrights do not perform their own songs
and plays-modern and contemporary poets
have long been expected to read their work to
audiences, since audio recordings and (sometimes recorded) poetry readings help them
gain recognition and supplement income
from teaching. Robert Frost, who according
to Allen Ginsberg invented the contemporary
poetry-reading circuit (Parini 319), imagined in his anonymous youth that he might
make a little side money declaiming Shake-
[PMLA
speare (Thompson 154). Frost maintained
that both a poem and a poetry reading are
performances, that a poet ought to be able to
"act I Without his being taken for an actor" •
(Notebooks 544). When he gave readings, he
chatted about poetry, art, and politics, passing down an anecdotal, pedagogical reading
style exemplified now by popular poets such
as Billy Collins. The antithesis of Frost's approachable manner was the austere reading
style of high-modernist poets (e.g., T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens), which was overthrown
during "poetry's performative turn" at midcentury by the beats and confessionalism,
inspired by various sources, from the theatrical bard and "charismatic drunkard" Dylan
Thomas to method acting (Grobe 216, 225; see
also Wheeler, Voicing American Poetry 131).
An understated style of academic poetry reading arose in response to, without
entirely displacing, the perceived histrionics
of the confessional and beat reading style,
which Hall criticizes in 1985: "the poet's
performance substitutes an actorly texture
(pitch, volume, gestures; screaming, jump-'lC
ing, singing) for the .zygJ sound of words" (76; '\:
my emphasis). 9 In Hall's view, such dramat'
ics threaten the orthodoxy of close reading:
"Performance makes passivity. When we read
silently, we must hear what we read in the
mind's ear.... [O]ur response to the poem is
our own: no communal laugh or sigh or in- 1·_,
taken breath controls or suggests the direction
of response. Poet and reader, alone together, ·
find an intimacy that crowds inhibit or prevent" (72). By 1998 Charles Bernstein (whose
aesthetic allegiances otherwise differ from
Hall's) characterizes as "anti-expressivist ...
the common dislike, among poets, of actors'
readings of poems ... [when] the 'acting'
takes precedence over letting the words speak
for themselves (or worse, eloquence compromises, not to say eclipses, the ragged music of
the poem)" (Close Listening 10; my emphasis).
Bernstein's preference for a neutral reading
style may also arise from skepticism about the
It
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Marit j. MacArthur
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man's terms, the frame through which we parcoherence of the self rather than from distaste
ticipate in and interpret an event. In relation
for confessional performance. 10
Wheeler ascertained that a neutral style is
to an antiexpressivist style of poetry reading,
now the norm; after attending an exhausting
the more compelling question is where the
number of readings at the Associated Writcorrelation of sincerity with neutrality origiing Programs (AWP) conference in 2006, she
nates. If the contemporary academic poetry
concluded that as a rule "poets perform the
reading sometimes strikes us as an impovfact that they are not performers." They do
erished form of secular performance-and
I don't claim that it should, given that indinot "display emotions at their readings but instead tend ... to manifest intellectual detachvidual taste and modes of audience reception
ment, if not in the poem's words then through
vary, and those who complain about theatrical
carefully neutral delivery" (Voicing American
poetry readings sometimes sound like highPoetry 140). 11 A Poets and Writers grant apchurch Anglicans turned off by a street-corner
plication separates poets into two categories:
evangelist-its shortcomings or defining fea"poet" and "performance poet" ("Funding").
tures arise not only from trends in and debates
about the nature of performance but also from
As vague and deceptively neutral as the antiexpressivist alternative might sound (what
its decidedly limited adoption and transforis the "real sound of words"?), it is a fact that
mation of religious ritual's conventions, from
an almost puritan avoidance of theatricalthe way the text is read to the audience's role.
Coincidentally, during the same peity-justified by the implicit belief that an
understated style implies sincerity, an antiriod in which a neutral style of poetry readconfessional, even spiritual humility, or skeping became dominant in the academy, the
ticism about the coherence of the self-now
United States experienced a rise in evangelitypifies the reading style of a wide range of
cal Christianity, marked by a passionate style
of preaching intended to save souls-and
academically sponsored contemporary poets.
by internal conflicts about the theatricality,
We need, however, to interrogate this
sometimes tainted by commercialism, that
notion of neutrality and the opposition between the theatrical, or expressivist, and
has been crucial to its growth. In Preaching
to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Perthe sincere. It can be argued with equivocal
logic that traumatic subject matter necessiformance Activism in a Secular Age, John
Fletcher reflects on the
tates theatricality, or that theatricality sensationalizes trauma (how should Sylvia Plath's
church marketing movement, which counsels
"Lady Lazarus" be read?). Bernard Williams,
churches to view themselves as commercial
who designates "Accuracy and Sincerity" as
enterprises
striving to win customers. The
"the two basic virtues of truth" (11), suggests
Sunday service ... becomes a live, multimedia
that people sound sincere if, in stating a beadvertisement for Christian life .... As suclief, they are "spontaneous and uninhibited"
cessful as such models have been ... they have
(193). Yet we cannot define a spontaneous and
also inspired a great deal of criticism from
~ •
uninhibited speaking style, except to call it
other evangelicals. The attractional worship
l~ Dl
unrehearsed-intensity, affect, and inhibition
service [has] ... prompt[ed] many evangelicals
•
1;(111 \~
depend on the speaker's character and mood.
"-~to ask whether the impulse to grow has led to a '~ 11 6,_ tJI.I' ~JIJ
Good method acting, in short.
~"' watering-down of the substance of faith. (10) l ,I "
,,..l;lf' ·
"
!/" II
.\
How we define sincerity, then, or a sincere 1)- t\.
"
•
\ kO 0( £' \~
style of speaking or performing, depends on
Some evangelicals and contemporary poets LCJ-'
~ >-""
the conventions regulating the expression of
share a suspicion that theatricality-attended ~ ,1\}1\ ~ 1.
by commercialism or the appeal of popular "~ - J
affect in a given cultural context-or, in Goff-
II
Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies
42
entertainment-breeds insincerity and might
interfere with a deeper experience of faith or
poetry. Ironically, when the academic poetry
reading aims to avoid the theatrical (as if
everything were not performance, as if performance could be relegated to performance
poetry, which is rarely sponsored by the
academy), it often becomes churchy, in an affirmative or pejorative sense. A neutral reading style approaches !!~~!:':1!_~-lOnotony, and
monotony is associated across cultures with
chant and the power to invoke the divine, in
religious ritual and the performance of sacred
poetry (Welsh 162-89).
When we describe a poet's reading styleusing terms like neutral or dramatic-one
implied feature is intonation, "the rise and
fall of the voice; its changes in pitch" (Oliver
xvii). When we call intonation "neutral," we
evoke these senses: "Exciting no emotional response; provoking no strong reaction; innocuous, inoffensive," as well as "Displaying ...
no overt emotion; dispassionate, detached"
("Neutral"). Neutral intonation easily approaches "monotony": "Sameness of tone or
pitch; lack of variety in cadence or inflection" and, pejoratively, "Wearisome sameness
of effect; tedious recurrence" ("Monotony");
monotone means "dull, repetitive" ("Monotone"). Religious ritual from Christianity to
Hinduism, especially "the musical recitation
of psalms, prayers, etc. in a liturgy" ("Intonation~mmonly employs monotone.
A monotonous style may seem likely to
-bore listeners, but if the academic poetry reading serves a secular function analogous to religious ritual, the goal may be the opposite: to
lull the captive audience into a state receptive
to poetry. Indeed, a distaste for expressivist
styles of poetry reading implies a close relation
to ritual, since theater, as Richard Schechner
explains, is typically associated with entertainment, and ritual with efficacy, or "results"-in
religious ritual, some sort of spiritual transformation is effected, while a secular ritual
may affirm a community's identity. The con-
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[PMLA
ventional nature of the academic poetry reading suggests it is closer to secular ritual than
to performance, even as it features theatrical
qualities-that is, the audience "appreciates"
rather than "believes" in the performance (qtd.
in Stern 79). Rituals, as Henry Bial notes,
are based on repetition ... , exemplify and reinforce the beliefs of the group that performs
them ... , define [that group] ... , [and] emphasize efficacy over entertainment, adherence to tradition over technical virtuosity....
Religious or sacred rituals express or enact belief, connecting the participants to a spiritual
power. Secular rituals ... invoke the authority
of some concept larger than the individual:
(77)
the state, the community, tradition.
In the academic poetry reading, the authority
of literary tradition and of the higher education system that sponsors it are invokedand, for some audiences, the ritual of poetry
reading effects a transformation, in aesthetic
or even spiritual terms.
A parallel between poetry readings and
religious ritual is unsurprising, as a corollary to Matthew Arnold's hope that literature
might provide the satisfactions of religious
faith without requiring belief in miracles.
Forms of the Arnoldian hope-or of Stevens's
man with the blue guitar, who intones, "Poetry I Exceeding music must take the place I
Of empty heaven and its hymns" (167)-have
survived the upheavals of postmodernism, as
Amy Hu~gerford argues in Postmodern Belief
American Literature and Religion since 1960.
(Aside from an important consideration of Allen Ginsberg's chanting, however, Hungerford
addresses the private experience ofliterature,
not its public performance and reception.)
What she construes as "belief in meaninglessness" often comes down to belief in religious
forms emptied of religious content, including
"the nonsemantic qualities oflanguage" that
gain religious authority by virtue of scriptural
history-by the precedents of style, cultural
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prestige, and literary complexity ... rooted in
the American understanding of the Bible as a
literary and a religious work. ... It is not what
the Bible says, but what the Bible is, and how
scripture sounds, that carries religiously inflected authority.... [L]anguage becomes in this
sense a form of religious ritual. . . .
(xiv-xv)
What interests us here is the indirect influence on the academic poetry reading of the
style and form, rather than the content, of
religious ritual-or, in Bauman's terms, of
overlap between deyices that' key the performance of religious ritual and secular poetry
readings, including parallelism and special
paralinguistic features. Not only the language
ind form of the Bible, which have influenced
so many poets directly, but conventions of
sermonizing, of reading sacred texts and reciting litanies, some of which tend toward
monotony in a precise sense.
Listening Closely
Analyzing intonation in recorded poetry
readings-taking into account aurality (how
the audience listens) and orality (how the
poet speaks)-and making such analysis intelligible as literary scholarship can be daunting. While we recognize that the entire body
is involved in poetry performance (Middleton 56-58), most of the recorded archive is
audio, rather than film or video, so we often
have only sound to discuss. And although a
growing body of research analyzes sound
recordings of poetry with methods commonly used in musicology and linguistics
(Grabner and Casas; Leech-Wilkinson; Oliver), the study of voice in poetry frequently
"veers into dry dissection of the human vocal
anatomy," divorced from the body and larger
cultural contexts, as Christopher Grobe recently noted (217). On the other hand, it is
too easy to leave the voice aside, to generalize about the varied life of the poem in live
and recorded performance and about contextual issues of audience, media, and venue. All
Marit j. MacArthur
43
the while, the study of lyric poetry remains
largely a page-based scholarship, as do the
digital humanities, which emphasize visual
analysis-for instance, text mining or distant
reading-over sound (Drucker 85). Indeed,
"[t]he very phrase 'poetry reading' shows how ·
criticism marginalizes performance ... as .. .
[a] secondary mode of presentation [and] .. .
reflect[s] the success ... of New Criticism in
casting a focus upon the autonomous text"
(Sherwood 120).
In performance studies, as well, modes of
analysis need refinement.(PEgg_r.__~~~~x­
horts scholars that it is not enough "to consider
literature as performance, although that task is
always welcome. What we need is and: close
readings of performances and poems, more
muscular math for calculating oversound, the "'po..ro..l ;, uis+.
thing not in the words, not in the melody, not 1
ol' ~
in the dance, not in the meter" (946). Phelan .. f"'-""'l101j~AAI~)'d1
borrows the term oversound fromTFi=OS"PSJ
2
theory of the soundof-~ense (Frost:~
·
Frost 58-60, 63-64); for him, it means a "tone alle..r ~D '""'""' ~~a.of meaning but without the words" ("Never
Again"; see also Vander Ven 241).
To analyze intonation in poetry readings,
I employ the "muscular math" of pitch tracking, or tracing the fundamental frequency of
the human voice as measured in hertz. 12 The
readings of poems I discuss below, all less
than two minutes in length, were recorded
from various audio archives online, analyzed
for pitch in the range of 75 to 600 Hz, and
graphed in Excel. An average frequency for
male voices is 125 Hz, for female voices 225
(Gussenhoven 3). As a rule, more-expressive
speakers use a wider range of pitch. However,
pitch perception is not linear; an octave is
a logarithmic relation, twice or half a given
frequency-for instance, an octave above 120
Hz is 240 Hz, an octave below is 60 (Lehiste
65). In practical terms, this means we do not
perceive women as having a wider vocal range
than men, although they use a wider frequency range. While each poet speaks discontinuously-silence occurs between words-I
d
J.
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Monotony, the Churches ot Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies
have used interpolated line graphs to present
intonation patterns, over the course of an entire poem as well as in shorter segments.
One common style of monotonous reading-instantly recognizable to frequenters of
contemporary poetry readings-! call monotonous incantation, a version of the neutral
style that performs an understated sincerity.
This style is popularly known as "poet voice."13
Monotonous incantation, however, is not simply neutral. As Hungerford argues about the
use of religious forms of language in contemporary literature, "sincerity overshadows
irony as a literary mode when the ambiguities
oflanguage are imagined as being religiously
empowered" (xix). Monotonous incantation is
characterized by three qualities: (1) the repetition of a falling cadence within a narrow rang£,
of pitch;-(2) a flattened affect that suppresses
idiosyncratic expression of subject matter in
favor of a restrained, ~arnest tone; and (3) the
subordination of conventionalj!}tonatjon pa1-..
t~ dictated by particular syntax, and of the
poetic effects ofline length and line breaks, to
the prevailing cadence and slow, steady pace.
Monotonous incantation serves as a traming device, combining aspects of parallelism
and paralinguistic features that key the performance of a contemporary poetry reading.
JParallelism:.Jor Bauman, includes "the repetition ... of phonic, grammatical, semantic,
or prosodic structures ... [that] may serve as
mneiii'Oiiic aids to the performer of a fixed
traditional text, or enhance the fluency of the
improvisational or spontaneous performance
[or] disRla ... c
unicative competence"
e (\
(18-19). Paralin uistic eatures include "rate,
o..rq : V'\j i.t!lll ''"length, pause duration, pitch contour, tone of
c{ e ~' (e ~
voice, loudness, and stress" (20).
Listening to monotonous incantation, we
may register its affinities with styles of reading sacred texts that feature parallel grammatical structures; we may also take it as the
poet's recapitulation of a conventional style
of contemporary poetry reading-a "display
of communicative competence." In acting
_,,,,.~·-!:::r.::3
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terms, monotonous incantation is a vocal cliche, which [.onst~nhn Stamslaws!!Jiefined
pejoratively in criticizing ''hack-actors" who
"us[e] theatrical means of expression worked
out long ago ... [that] often destroy the logical stress and even the sense" of the words
(qtd. in Benedetti 111, 112). Though I d()n2! vJ lA
i.::_voke the term as a judg~~' heafi'ilg'aft~" I
poem read in this style makes us register tha\
/
poem's repetitive cadence more than its id- v.<iosyncratic sense and rhythm. And, indeed,~'
graphs of intonation patterns of poems read111
in this style resemble each other and diffel' 1 \ ll
from those of poems read in a more expressivist or dramatic style (figs. 1-14).
The following poets, from a variety of
backgrounds, all employ monotonous incantation and suggest how widespread this style
of reading is. Louise Gluck, born in 1943,
grew up on Long Island and studied poetry at
Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University without taking a degree; Michael Ryan,
born in 1946 in St. Louis, Missouri, studied
at the University of Notre Dame and Claremont Graduate University before earning his
MFA and PhD at the University oflowa; Natasha Trethewey, born in 1966 and raised in
Atlanta and New Orleans, earned an MA in
poetry from Hollins University and an MFA
from the University of Massachusetts. Juliana
Spahr, also born in 1966, grew up in Ohio and
received her PhD from the State University"\
of New York, Buffalo. Clearly, monotonoul(!rfi'
incantation does not originate in a particu }Ao~;
lar region or university in the United States. f>-\:'tl,,.
Nor is it restricted to a particular aesthetic, a\';:;,
these poets' work varies considerably in form
and content. At times monotonous incanta2'-~
tion has served as our national reading stylen \t~
for instance, during Gluck's and Trethewey's '7
terms as poet laureate (2003-04; 2012-14).
Trethewey routinely reads in the monotonous incantation style. The poem "Monument" (recorded at the 2007 AWP conference
in Atlanta) appears in her third book, Native
Guard, and it arises from heart-wrenching
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Marit j. MacArthur
tragedy: when Trethewey was nineteen, her
mother was murdered by an ex-husband
(not the poet's father). In first-person autobiographical mode, "Monument" evokes the
speaker's guilt about neglecting her mother's
grave. Composed of six unrhymed quatrains,
the poem has lines of uneven length, roughly
three or four beats per line. What strikes the
listener is how little the poem, as she reads it,
changes or develops. The repetitive cadence
1~ v{suppresses the variable intonation and ~R.b~.::
f:~i~ ~ ~f conversational speech, as if the speiikef
-t-d _/ Ieit the same way about every sentence.
f}~k- ~~·
Figure 1 shows how Trethewey's voice
and falls by small increments to simi8
~ I d\Jar highs and lows, predictably returning to
\1 ~ ~"" the same frequency again and again. She also
1
:!1 constrains herself to a fairly narrow range of
,f/\""itch, as when she reads these.lines:
y
v:f}lises
·t,
~· J
,'?_
Today the ants are busy
beside my front steps, weaving
in and out of the hill they're building.
I watch them emerge andlike everything I've forgotten-disappear
into the subterranean, a world
made by displacement. In the cemetery
last June, I circled, lostAt my mother's grave, ants streamed in
and out like arteries, a tiny hill rising
above her untended plot.
. . . . . . . . .
Even now,
the mound is a blister on my heart,
a red and humming swarm.
petitive cadence begins with the highest pitch
on "Today" and starts over with "weaving,"
overriding the unit of the line; the line break
is inaudible compared with the return to a
higher pitch with "weaving." As Trethewey
continues, the intense affect of certain words,
such as "lost," "blister," and "swarm," which
might earn relative emphasis and thus higher
pitch in an expressivist style, is flattened to
match the pattern. Her voice continually returns to the same pitch and gradually falls
away, speaking the word "Today" at the same
pitch as "in and out," "last June," and so on,
avoiding affective development. An understated reading style might suit this particular
poem, with its subject of suppressed grief and
self-accusation-yet Trethewey reads other
poems of hers in much the same way. This is
not to diminish her achievement as a poet,
only to say that her poems come across as
more distinct from one another on the page.
A 1992 recording of Louise Gluck reading "Witchgrass" (at the Alliance Fran<;:aise)
sounds similar. The poem, which appears in
The Wild Iris, begins:
~
·Y
+-'v VJ
); 0 .. 'lr 9
~J f2' -J 0,;
t',J ~ A\1
at~ ~
-, ~ q...~ '
\("'
There is no normative way to read this. What
monotonous incantation obscures is the
speaker's mood and most variation in the
syntax. It also makes the line lengths sound
more regular than they are, as Trethewey
largely ignores line breaks in favor of the duration of the repeated cadence. Figures 2 and
3 trace her intonation of the first three lines of
the poem. The underlined words and syllables
correspond to relative peaks in pitch. The re-
.
Something
comes into the world unwelcome
calling disorder, disorderIf you hate me so much
don't bother to give me
a name: do you need
one more slur
in your language, another
way to blame
one tribe for everything-
(22)
Her manner of reading the opening lines, from
"Something" to "disorder," again introduces a
falling cadence within a narrow range of pitch,
repeated by returning to a higher pitch with "If
you hate me," falling to the lowest with "name,"
rising to "do you need," falling to "everything,"
and so on. Figure 4 shows her intonation of the
first two lines. Again the underlined words and
syllables correspond to relative peaks in pitch.
45
Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies
[PMLA
FIG. 1
"Monument" (1:13}
300
275
N'
"E 250
6
G~
225
Q)
;::l
CT'
Q)
..t:
200
~
E 175
Q)
s
"'
"0
~
;::l
150
~
125
100
10
0
20
30
40
50
70
60
80
Time (seconds)
FIG. 2
"Monument" (0:0 1-0:04)
300
275
N'
"E 250
6
Gg.
~
225
Q)
~
200
~
5 175
~
]
150
;::l
To~
~
the
ants
are
busy
beside
my
front
steps
125
100
1.5
2
2.5
Time (seconds)
3
3.5
4
1
3
1 . 1
l
Marit j. MacArthur
47
FIG. 3
((Monument" (0:05-0:08)
300
275
N'
"E 250
6
:>-.
~
225
<l)
g.
..;:: 200
---;
1:: 175
<l)
<l)
s
'".:
"0
150
;::l
I'I-<
wea-
125
ving
in
and
out of
hill
they're
············----~--·······-----·
100
5
5.5
6
6.5
7.5
7
8
Time (seconds)
FIG. 4
((Witchgrass" (0:00-0:04)
300
275
N'
"E 250
6
:>-.
~
225
<l)
;::l
o<
<l)
..;:: 200
---;
1:: 175
<l)
s
'".:
"0
150
;::l
I'I-<
125
100
0
0.5
1.5
2
Time (seconds)
2.5
3
3.5
Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies
Figure 5 shows the intonation pattern for the
entire poem; like Trethewey, Gluck mostly
constrains herself to a narrow range of pitch. A
more expressive reading of the opening might
rise to "disorder, disorder," as these words are
called out; such an impulse is consistently subordinated to the overriding cadence of monotonous incantation.
"Witchgrass" notably differs from "Monument"; the speaker in Gluck's poem is witchgrass personified, and its line and stanza
lengths vary more. In formal terms, if "Monument" is free verse, "Witchgrass" is freer.
Aside from the slightly slower pace at which
Gluck reads, however, it sounds much like
"Monument": the flattened affect, the repetitive falling cadence that overrides the unit of
the line, making it sound like a more formal
poem. It is a remarkable poem, full of psychological resonance about the human addressee,
who is interrogated and criticized by the
witchgrass for the naive manner in which she
"mourn[s] and lay[s] blame" (23). The effect of
listening to Gluck read it in the monotonous
incantation style, however, is to feel lulled, unconcerned with meaning. We feel that we are
listening to any poem, not this particular one.
Michael Ryan's poem "Outside," recorded
in 2004 at Poets' House in New York, shares
the theme of grief with "Monument." The
speaker observes a grieving widower whose
muted suffering is invisible; others see him as
"a neatly dressed polite old man," in the last
line. Formally the poem is more regular than
"Monument" and "Witchgrass," composed of
mostly tetrameter lines, often iambic, with
several quiet slant rhymes:
The dead thing mashed into the street
the crows are squabbling over isn't
her, nor are their raucous squawks
the quiet cawing from her throat
those final hours she couldn't speak.
But the racket irks him.
It seems a cruel intrusion into grief
so mute it will never be expressed
[PMLA
Nor could there be a word
that won't debase it, no matter
how kind or who it comes from.
t,~oJt
)t~
J
Ryan speaks more slowly and at a lower pitch,
as a deep-voiced male, and his intonation is \;o.-\'
as monotonous as Trethewey's and Gluck's,
keeping within a narrow range of pitch and
repeating a falling cadence, as if each statement carried the same affective weight (fig.
6). Given that the speaker is a widower who
silently contains his intense, habitual grief,
the flattened affect may seem apt-but because monotonous incantation is a vocal.sli::
~~it comes across instead as conventioruJ
~of expression.
::::--what would a moretexpressiviSWeading
of a poem by an Americ~n p~(otK:.d like?
I offer the familiar example o Plath eading
"Lady Lazarus" (in 1962 at the BBC studios);
she uses a wider range of pitch and more varied intonation patterns (fig. 7). Written in
tercets with frequent rhymes, "Lady Lazarus"
lends itself to repeated cadence, and Plath
reads the poem musically. Yet the poem's
ironic mood and affect are clearly expressed
through her intonation and emphasis. For
instance, figure 8 graphs Plath's intonation
of the lines "I am only thirty. I And like the
cat I have nine times to die. I This is number
three." Again, the underlined words and syllables correspond to relative peaks in pitch.
To hear Plath read the poem is to register the
challenge to readers in. the speaker's tone: we
are charged with the offense of experiencing
mental suffering and recovery as spectacle.
For contemporary examples of alterna- X
tive readin s es I tur to two dissimilar{'-~')(
poets, enneth Goldsmith and Frank Bidart. peQJ
Goldsmith, who holds no formal degrees in \
writing, is a conceptual poet known for what
he calls uncreative writing, appropriation
of found texts. The following is the opening of Traffic (2007), his transcription of the
New York radio station WINS's hourly, oneminute traffic reports:
f
131.1
l
Marit j. MacArthur
49
FrG.
"Witchgrass,, ( 1:40)
300
275
N'
.....
~
6
250
225
200
"a
.....
.:: 175
<!)
sro
"".....::
;:I
ISO
125
100
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Time (seconds)
FrG. 6
"Outside, ( 1: 10)
300
275
N'
..... 250
iJ
6 225
"a
1:1 150
<!)
~ 125
""&100
75
50
0
10
20
30
40
Time (seconds)
50
60
70
Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies
50
[PMLA
FIG. 7
"Lady Lazarus" ( 1:43)
300
275
N'
"E 250
6
>-
;:l 225
<l)
&
1::
200
'(;l
"E 175
<l)
s
(lj
"0
~
;::l
150
~
125
100
0
20
10
30
40
50
70
60
80
100
90
110
Time (seconds)
FIG. 8
"Lady Lazarus" (0:40-0:47)
300
275
N'
"E 250
6
>-
;:l 225
nine times to die.
<l)
&
1::
200
'(;l
"E 175
<l)
s
(lj
"0
~
;::l
150
~
125
100
40
41
42
43
44
Time (seconds)
45
46
47
1
3
1 . 1
l
Well, in conjunction with the big holiday
weekend, we start out with the Hudson River
horror show right now. Big delays in the Holland Tunnel either way with roadwork, only
one lane will be getting by. You're talking
about, at least, twenty to thirty minutes worth
of traffic either way, possibly even more than
that. Meanwhile the Lincoln Tunnel, not great
back to Jersey but still your best option. (l)
Figure 9 graphs Goldsmith's intonation for
the first report. A traffic report tends toward
monotony, yet Go~dsmith performs it with
verve, registering each impediment with
rueful dismay. Unlike Trethewey, Gluck,
and Ryan,\Qoldsmithlemphasizes particular
words with a higher pitch because of their
semantic significance instead of assigning
pitch to each word or phrase based on where
it falls within the pattern of the prevailing cadence. For instance, "horror show," "at least,"
and "not great" are read at higher pitches for
emphasis. And in reading "Big delays in the
Holland Tunnel either way with roadwork,"
Goldsmith reads "Big" and "either" at a
higher pitch, emphasizing obstacles and the
impossibility of avoiding them (fig. 10). Also
a deep-voiced male, Goldsmith reads with a
-.JJ'l wider range of pitch than Ryan, dramatizing
~fll- a radio announcer's conspiratorial air of fruso~rtihation and resignation, enlivening ostensibly
t-"~ \e-fdull material to draw out the idiomatic nu":,/ ances and rhythms of the report.
./
Bidart, who studied at Harvard University with the confessional poet Robert Lowell
and later coedited Lowell's Collected Poems
(Farrar, 2007), also reads expressively. His
2008 reading of"An American in Hollywood"
(at the Affinia Hotel in New York City), from
Watching the Spring Festival (2009), shows a
wide range in pitch and variation in cadence
(fig. 11). The poem is addressed to a werewolf,
a figure for the self whose aberrant longings
he cannot control and who longs to be part
of a glamorous Hollywood world that deems
him (he feels) outrageously unsuitable. As
with some other Bidart poems, the alienation
Marit j. MacArthur
51
of an outcast suggests an allegory for the experience of being queer in a homophobic society, which encourages the self to internalize
homophobia. Thus, the poem begins:
After you were bitten by a wolf and
transformed
into a monster who feeds on other human
beings
each full moon and who, therefore, in disgust
wants to die, you think The desire to die is not
feeling suicidal. It abjures mere action. You
have
wanted to die since the moment you were born.
Crazy narratives-that lend what is merely
in you, and therefore soon-to-be-repeated,
the fleeting illusion oflogic and cause.
Like Plath and Goldsmith, Bidart reads his
poem with irregular intonation patterns and
a wide range of pitch. Figure 12 shows how
he emphasizes the intensity of the wish to die,
<
1 0
reading the words "moment" and "born" at a ""'\ fJ, ·~
{'e.
.QL <,
higher pitch and gradually falling to a lower
n
pitch with "Crazy narratives" to ~~the
Q 1.-i..
e.. --t
authority of the preceding lines. Bid art reads
VL oi e._
these lines as an argument with the self, registering its affective and logical developmentadvancing, then rejecting, an explanation of
the werewolf's nature and self-disgust-which
~
is reflected in the downshifting intonation.
- f\;'
After Bernstein, we might call Plath, Goldsmith, and Bidart expressivist readers.
Juliana Spahr, the final poet I examine
who reads in the monotonous-incantation
style, sounds as if she means to treat ironically-perhaps to parody-the earnest tone of
this style. "We Arrived," the first loose sonnet
from a sequence, recounts arrival by flight to
Hawai'i. Published in Well1hen There Now
(2011), the poem was recorded in 2001 at State
University of New York, Buffalo.
i' [ .-J
J
J'
L
We arrived.
We arrived by air, by 747 and DClO and LlOll.
Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies
52
FIG.
[PMLA
9
"Traffic" ( 1:07)
300
275
E,_
250
v
6 225
>-
u
5
200
:::1
0"
...;:: 175
Cii
..... 150
t::
'l)
v
s
"0
""
!:::
125
;::!
...... 100
75
50
0
20
10
so
40
30
60
70
Time (seconds)
FIG. 10
"Traffic" (0:08-0:11)
300
275
E....
25o
v
6 225
>-
u
5 200
g.
.1: 175
right now. .llig delays in the Holland Tunnel
Cii
-;:: 150
v
s
.a
125
t::
:::1 100
......
~
,- ~
~ther way with
road work
A
/~
~
-
75
50
8
8.5
9
9.5
Time (seconds)
10
10.5
11
131.1
l
Marit j. MacArthur
53
FIG. 11
((An American in Hollywood" (1:25)
300
275
N'
..... 250
...
<l)
6 225
>..
u
~
::1
0"'
<l)
<.!:::
200
175
--;
15 150
<l)
~ 125
'"0
>=::
;:I
p;..
100
75
50
0
20
10
30
50
40
80
70
60
90
Time (seconds)
FIG. 12
((An American in Hollywood,, (0:24-0:30)
300
280
3'
260
[;
6 240
G'
>=::
moment ... born. Cra-
220
~
~ 200
<.!:::
--;
E 180
~-
<l)
~ 160
.. )
]
&
140
lf'V
120
I
zy
narratives
A
\a.
\
\
\
\1..
'"'--
-
·-
·~-,--
L..---
100
24
25
26
27
Time (seconds)
28
29
30
54
Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies
We arrived over the islands and we saw the
green of them out the window.
We arrived and then walked into this green.
Things were different.
The air was moist and things were different.
Like other poets who read in this style, Spahr
repeats a similar intonation pattern within a
narrow range of pitch (fig. 13). Although she
reads at a higher pitch than Trethewey and
Gluck, like them she reads irregular line length
as if it were regular, subordinating line breaks
to the prevailing cadence. Unlike "Monument," "Witchgrass," and "Outside," however,
"We Arrived" employs repetition, including
anaphora and parallel phrasing. These are
signature techniques of many Spahr poems,
which might make monotonous incantation a
more apt choice for a reading style-though it
still has the effect of attuning the listener to the
cadence rather than the semantics of a poem.
And like other poets who read this way, Spahr
reads words with distinct affective weight or
importance, such as "air," "islands," "green,"
and "window," at the same pitch, according to
where they fall within the repeated cadence.
Though I do not attempt to trace a precise genealogy of monotonous incantation,
its origins may be found in poetry, rhetorical
modes, and sacred texts that display a closer
correspondence between the phonic, syntactic, and grammatical form of a text and the
manner of reading it-in particular, poems
that use repetition and parallelism. One likely
inspiration is Allen Ginsberg, especially his
influential readings of Howl-a poem whose
anaphora, parallel phrasing, and prophetic
voice, modeled on Whitman, biblical verse,
and the jeremiad, lends itself to repetitive
cadence. Despite Ginsberg's interest in chant
and his use of monotony, he does not quite
read in the monotonous-incantation style.
His intonation, in reading the first minute
and a half of Howl (recorded in 1956 at the
Poetry Center at San Francisco State University), looks somewhat monotonous, since
[PMLA
the poet limits himself to a narrow range of
pitch, but it is distinguished by rising intensity-an increase of about 17Hz per minute.
(The graph in figure 14 runs halfway through
line thirteen, "wine drunkenness over the
rooftops" [3].) Rising intensity is not the only
quality that distinguishes Ginsberg's reading
style from monotonous incantation. What he
delighted in-audience participation-the
contemporary academic poetry reading tends
to suppress, keeping listeners silent, passive,
and respectful, as if they were at (Trollope's)
church. But not all congregations keep quiet.
Talking Back
Though we lack a recording of the famous
1955 reading of Howl at the Six Gallery in San
Francisco, we do have Ginsberg's memory it:
I gave a very wild, funny, tearful reading
of the first part of "Howl." Like I really felt
shame and power reading it, and every time
I'd finish a long line Kerouac would shout
"Yeah!" or "So there!" or "Correct!" or some
little phrase, which added a kind of extra bop
humor to the whole thing. It was like a jam
session, and I was very astounded because
"Howl" was a big, long poem and yet everybody seemed to understand and at the same
time sympathize with it. (qtd. in Kramer 48)
Ginsberg compares the reading to a bebop
jam session, during which his dominant voice
and Kerouac's humorous interjections interacted like musicians improvising together.
Peter Middleton observes that "[a]udience
participation must have had something of the
force of a mass chorus ... a litany in response
to Ginsberg's delivery.... [R]eadings like this
are rare" (62). As he revised Howl, Ginsberg
sometimes listened to Bach and Ella Fitzgerald, and he referred to the poem as a "jazz
mass" (qtd. in Raskin 25).
Jam session, jazz mass, mass chorus, litany-from jazz club to theater to church or
temple, such modes of performance involve
131.1
l
Marit J, MacArthur
55
FIG. 13
''We Arrived, (0:48)
300
275
N'
ii
250
6
>g
225
v
;::l
ar 2oo
...c:: 175
.,t::
<;
v
§
"tl
c:: 150
;::l
1:1.,
125
100
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
Time (seconds)
FIG.
"Howl" ( 1:30)
300
275
250
225 r~·-----~----~--,--·-·~-~------,~~-----~·~-"~
>-
\)
5 200 ~--~---~~-~~·----·
I
;::l
cT
v
.,t::
175 r-----······-·---·
I
<;
150
E
v
§
"tl
c
;::l
1:1.,
125
100
75
50
0
10
20
30
40
50
Time (seconds)
60
70
80
90
Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies
multiple performers, often members of the audience or congregation. Though it was not until the early 1960s that Ginsberg, after visiting
India and Japan, conceived of poetry reading
and chanting as a means of spiritual transformation (Schumacher 373, 396-97; Hungerford
28-51; Miles 298-321), there have always been
readers who assumed that Howl-the poem
and his manner of reading it, engaging the
audience-is modeled on religious ritual. Leland S. Meyerzove, in a Hillel-sponsored publication, writes that "one may picture Ginsberg
as an old religious Ghetto Jew ... in union
with his God, moaning in the synagogue,
rocking back and forth, crying out for the holiness ... in each of us" (qtd. in Hoffman 131).
At mid-century, many poets felt that poetry readings were spiritual experiences, especially on the West Coast. David Meltzer
remembers, "In the Fifties a poetry reading
[had] ... a celebratory and devotional aspect.
Nonsectarian yet charged with expectations
of performance" (29). Stephen Vincent recalls,
of readings at San Francisco State's Gallery
Lounge in the late 1950s and 1960s, "The act of
reading was similar to a religious act of sanctification" (21). Jerome Rothenberg, speaking at
the annual American Theater Association conference in 1975, suggested that "[i]ncreasingly
the model, the prototype of the poet has become the 'shaman': the solitary, inspired religious functionary of the late Paleolithic ....
[T]here's also a second side to it: the visionary
& ecstatic, & a third perhaps: the communal"
(123). More recently, John Lardas has argued,
"The Beats' new vision of literature contained
a strong evangelical strain, both in regard to
an emphasis on conversion experience and a
desire to precipitate that same experience in
others" (Lardas 166). The beats' style of encouraging audience participation feels evangelical, although their style derives primarily
from jazz; in performance terms, the beats
wanted to break through the fourth wall.
In Ginsberg's description, his reading, punctuated by Kerouac's interjections,
[PMLA
sounds like call-and-response, a form of discourse common to the African American
church, to evangelical churches in general, 14
and to many forms of African and African
American music. 15 Repetition in any form
becomes monotonous when variation and
interruption are ruled out; repetition and
interruption, or counterpoint, are key features of call-and-response. As James Snead
describes it, call-and-response "elicit[s] the
general participation of the group at random,
[with] spontaneous 'cuts,"' which he defines
as the brief interruption or suspension of an
established rhythm (71). He places "the black
church ... at the center of the manifestations
of repetition in black culture," which include
biblically derived patterns such as epanalepsis, epistrophe, and anaphora, and he emphasizes the importance of interruption by and
participation of other voices:
Both preacher and congregation employ the
"cut." The preacher "cuts" his own speaking
by interrupting himself with a phrase such
as "praise God" ([not] denotative or imperative but purely sensual and rhythmic-an
underlying "social" beat provided for the
congregation). At various intervals a musical instrument such as the organ and often
spontaneous dancing accompany the speaker's repetition of the "cut." When the stage
of highest intensity comes, gravel-voiced
"speaking in tongues" or the "testifying,"
usually delivered at a single pitch, gives creden~e to the hypothesis, that, all along, the
very texture of the sound and nature of the
rhythm-but not the explicit meaning-in
the spoken words have been at issue. (71-72)
Cheryl Wharry further categorizes such cuts
or "discourse markers" in African American
sermons as "textual boundary marker[s], spiritual maintenance filler[s], rhythmic marker[s],
and call-response marker[s]," tracing their origins to West African oral traditions (203-05).
To take a famous example of African
American rhetoric influenced by the ser-
1
3
1 . 1
l
Mar it j. MacArthur
mon, Martin Luther King, Jr., uses something like monotonous incantation in his "I
Have a Dream" speech (28 August 1963), but
it builds in intensity, like Ginsberg's Howl, at
about 10 Hz per minute; Molefi Kete Asante
cites King's "almost methodical pathos" in
the context of explaining the importance of
"nommo ... the transforming power of vocal
expression" in African and African American culture; such transforming power marks
the speech as related to ritual (96-98). King's
speech, modeled on the prophetic sermon,
uses parallel structures and a_naphora, repeating for effect phrases like "Now is the time,"
"We can never be satisfied as long as," "I have
a dream," "Let freedom ring," and, in the following passage, "One hundred years later":
Five score years ago, a great American,
in whose symbolic shadow we stand today,
signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This
momentous decree came as a great beacon
light of hope to millions of Negro slaves ....
But one hundred years later, the Negro
still is not free. One hundred years later, the
57
life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the
manacles of segregation and the chains of
discrimination. One hundred years later, the
Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in
the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still
languishing ... an exile in his own land.
The opening of the speech features a repetitive cadence that begins within a narrow
range of pitch (fig. 15). Gradually rising in
intensity, King's voice also begins to use a
wider pitch range, reaching higher and lower
as it becomes more emphatic. What the graph
does not reveal are the cuts, or interjections,
from the enormous audience (audible in the
recording), which I have eliminated from
the graph to isolate King's intonation. The
animated audience takes advantage of brief
pauses-indeed, King pauses to allow for
their response-to affirm and applaud and
thus counterpoint the established cadence.
The recorded speech sounds like the moving
communal experience it was, in which the
audience played an audible, essential role. In
FIG. 15
"I Have a Dream" (1:37)
300
275
'N
"E 250
6
>-.
;:j 225
0)
&
0)
<.!:::
200
-;
~
0)
175
"0
150
a
oO
~
::s
l'l-.
125
100
0
10
20
30
40
50
Time (seconds)
60
70
80
90
100
58
Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies
clear contrast, in the live recordings of the
poems I analyze above, not a single sound
from the audience is audible just before, during, or after the poem is read.
Like speaking in tongues or testifying,
and like Jewish mysticism's "crucial focus ...
on language, in its material form," monotonous incantation emphasizes the nonsemantic qualities of language, the pure sound and
rhythm of a repeated cadence rather than
the idiosyncratic affective development of a
particular poem or its verse or stanza form
(Bernstein, Attack 172). As a reading style, it is
an absorptive technique in Bernstein's sense:
engrossing, engulfing
completely, engaging, arresting attention,
reverie,
attention intensification, rhapsodic, spellbinding,
mesmerizing, hypnotic, total, riveting,
enthralling: belief, conviction, silence.
("Artifice" 29)
) ,-:; ·vJ k::. I~
--\ .r~t.-keJ. ~
As a churchy style, it may enthrall the audience in the silent conviction of implicit belief
in the spiritual significance of the readingor, failing that, in the enduring significance
of literary tradition and the system of higher
education that sponsors it. Repetitive cadence
can create a hypnotic feeling, which~ight
feel secure, transformative, or dull; ~obert
~writes of the contrasting rhythms of
formal and free verse, "Repetition makes us
feel secure, and variation makes us feel free"
(ll5). The repetitive cadence of monotonous
incantation may lend dignity to a poem,
making it sound something like a sacred text
rather than a personal poem whose content is
new to the audience; it also makes any poem
sound like a formal rather than a free verse
poem, since the prevailing cadence audibly
overrides irregular line length.
Such associations of solemnity and formal
parallelism-as well as the "display of communicative competence," in Bauman's terms
(19), which signifies the poet's membership in
[PMLA
the clan of contemporary academic poetsmay explain why some choose to read in this
style. And poets who are not confident performers may adopt monotonous incantation
as a default style, which makes a poem sound
like a poem to contemporary academic audiences. Those who dislike poetry readings in
the monotonous-incantation style often suffer
through them anyway, much like Trollope's
narrator who longs to escape a dull sermon.
In each case, the poet or clergyman is generally preaching to the converted, and thus perhaps there is a less pressing need to perform:
"most official rituals do not have general audiences-you have to be invited to attend or be a
member of the group involved" (Santino 364).
Whatever the case, one remarkable difference between the use of monotony and
repetitive cadence in religious ritual and
political oratory such as King's, on the one
hand, and monotonous incantation in the
secular performance of the academic poetry
reading, on the other, is that the element of
response is eliminated. It is all call, call-andresponse denied the possibility of response,
whitewashed. Dispensing with counterpoint
and variation, it allows no interruptions or
"cuts" from the audience (aside from laughter, occasional frame-breaking heckling, and
polite applause at the end), and it offers little
change in intensity (unlike Ginsberg and
King). Listening to an entire reading of monotonous incantation is like listening to ambient trance music without change in rhythm
or pitch, without the introduction of another
voice or instrument-or like a church service
in which the congregation remains silent, in
which there is not even a chance to recite a
creed or sing a hymn. For the duration of the
poetry reading, virtually no voice but the
poet's is heard. If Judea-Christian religious
ritual is one source of monotonous incantation, the silence and passivity of audiences at
the conventional academic poetry reading is
all the more remarkable, since virtually all
Jewish, Muslim, and Christian services have
131.1
l
(A-Ce~ eMil: c
some form of antiphonal liturgy, in which the
officiate and congregation formally alternate
in speaking, not to mention the spontaneous
responses that commonly occur in evangelical and many African American churches.
If the beats were poet-evangelists who
wanted to convert their audience to a new
openness to subject matter, language, and
form, Ginsberg's charismatic, incantatory,
participatory style of reading played no
small role in their success. What many contemporary academic poets .have inherited of
that style is a subdued strain of monotony
without progressive intensity or the counterpoint of audience participation, a distinction that mirrors some of the differences
between a mainline Protestant service and
an evangelical one. In a precise sense, then,
the contemporary academic poetry reading is "uninterruptable discourse," as David
Antin calls it (23). Evangelical preachers and
prominent slam poets, by contrast, involve
the audience. Slam Nuba, a slam-poetry collective based in Denver, Colorado, which won
the 2011 National Poetry Slam competition,
is "widely known for their voice recall and response" ("Complete History").
The participatory, communal element of
the popular poetry reading, as opposed to the
close reading of the text alone or with a class,
disturbs its academic critics. Harold Bloom
has called slam poetry "the death of art"
(qtd. in Somers-Willit 21). In "The Peril of the
Poetry Reading: The Page versus the Performance" (1997), the poet David Groff-whose
views I mention merely as representative
of persistent critique (he sounds much like
Hall in 1985)-argues against the corrupting effects of audience participation on the
poetry reading: "an 'mmmmm' emanat[esj
from somewhere in the crowd .... Does that
... mean that listeners have been transported
into the sublime? Or is the poem just cheap,
the 'mmmmm' a smug 'Amen!'?" Like Hall he
exhorts lovers of poetry to return to the spiritual experience of silent close reading, and to
t
r·l -r- i t~.-Le
Mar it J. MacArthur
59
affirm its value he employs an analogy that
subverts a basic tenet of performance studies'
approach to literature: that the object of appreciation and study is the performance of a
text. "Attending a poetry reading," he writes,
"has as much in common with reading a
poem on the page as reading a screenplay has
to do with seeing a movie. Only when we ac-·\ 1 <S = J 0 l L
knowledge that a poem performed is no sub- 1 1:s "t>V\ -fi..... e..stitute for a poem read in private will we truly 1 r7 G\.J (Z <
advance the cause of the poetic word." Here
I
Groff sounds like a secular Martin Luther,
arguing for the right of individuals to interpret the (sacred) text according to their own
lights-and like evangelicals who worry, as
noted above, that a theatrical church service
may "water ... down the substance offaith"
(Fletcher, Preaching 10).
It is not news that many ethnic poets, including African American poets who trace
their roots to the black arts movement, favor
audience participation and an expressivist
style. Among the inspirational models for
such poets, particularly Amiri Baraka, were
"rhetorical conventions of the black church"
in which "the antiphonal interaction with the
congregation ... reveals the same structures
that inform the early 'collective improvisation' of New Orleans jazz, bebop, and the
avant-garde jazz of the 1960s" (1homas 309,
310). In his early incarnation as Leroi Jones,
Baraka made his start among the beats and
the New York school, evolving from a somewhat placid reading style-such as the one he
employed in his reading of "Poem for HalfWhite College Students" at San Francisco
State in 1965-to an expressive style influenced and sometimes accompanied by jazz,
like his 1978 reading of "I Love Music," after
John Coltrane, at Just Buffalo Literary Center
(both readings are available on PennSound).
Clearly the term performance poetry distinguishes more expressivist (read: ethnic and/
or nonacademic) poetry-reading styles from
the dominant, neutral style of academic
poetry reading, which is treated as the norm
e
l'
J
6o
Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies
by an academy unfriendly to evangelicals and
to performance, outside of theater departments,16 Monotonous incantation-one version of the dominant, neutral style-is the
haunting of the academy by the expressivist
style of the beat and black arts movements,
and by the religious cultures that flourish outside it. As such, it represents the half-realized
dream of a secular church for academia.
NOTES
I am grateful to Dave Cerf, David Tcheng, Renee Kemp,
Sean Fulop, and Georgia Zellou for their invaluable assistance with pitch tracking and to the research community
of PennSound and HiPSTAS, especially Tanya Clement,
Kenneth Sherwood, and Steve Evans. Christopher Grobe
and Gregory Leon Miller provided helpful comments on
earlier versions of this essay.
I. "[A]s of 2004 there were more than 350 [graduate]
creative writing programs in the United States ... all ...
staffed by practicing writers .... [I]ndud[ing] undergraduate degree programs, the number soars to 720 ..." (MeG uri 24). As poets build reputations through readings,
the number that occur each year in the United States is
mind-boggling.
2. Seminal texts include three edited collections:
Charles Bernstein's Close Listening (1998), Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin's The Sound of Poetry I The Poetry
of Sound (2009}, and Jonathan Sterne's The Sound Studies Reader (2012}. See also Hoffman; Grabner and Casas;
Grobe; Middleton; Murray and Wiercinski; Novak and
Sakakeeny; Oliver; and Wheeler, "Undead Eliot" and
Voicing American Poetry.
3. See Trollope's Clergymen of the Church of England
(1866}. We can perform a similar trick with Ralph Waldo
Emerson's "Divinity School Address" (1838}, substituting
"poet" for "preacher," "poetry reading" for "church": "I
once heard a poet who sorely tempted me to say, I would
go to poetry readings no more .... It seemed as if [people's] houses were very unentertaining, that they should
prefer this thoughtless clamor."
4. "[R]ecognition ... of continuing high levels of
religiosity in the United States ... and ... structurally
similar societies, and of the ... battle lines in many
geopolitical and domestic struggles ... drawn around
religion, has led to an outpouring of ... work questioning and rethinking secularization theory ... exploring
the role of religion in arenas of modern social life long
thought destined for rationalization and an evacuation
of the sacred" (Gross and Simmons 101-02}.
[PMLA
5. Many limited their acceptance of Jewish and Catholic students until after World War II (Gross and Simmons 104-05).
6. Some churches host prominent poetry-reading series, like the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church-in-theBowery, in New York City.
7. Writers who teach in academic settings may play the
role of secular cleric more than professor, since manythough by no means all-creative writing programs insulate themselves from the critical theory and attendant
skepticism about the coherence of the self, soul, and author that revolutionized the study of literature in English
departments, which often exist in uneasy partnership with
creative writing programs. "The ... head of the M.F.A.
program at the University of Michigan, Eileen Pollack, ...
recalls [her education] at Iowa: ... 'most of us got through
two years of instruction without any formal discussions of
theory ... , New Critical or otherwise"' (McGurl 34-35).
8. Howell gives a masterly account of rhetorical eloquence during the Renaissance.
9. In 1989 Douglas Oliver defined a "normal" reading
as "not marked by dramatic emphasis, accentuation, or
unconventional interpretation" (22}.
10. Bernstein's poem "Thank You for Saying Thank
You," Daisy Fried observes, playfully dismantles the
artifice of a transparent poetic speaker. In recent years
Bernstein has advocated more expressivist reading styles
(Attack 127).
11. Such uniformity of reading style is analogous to
the perception of-and anxiety about-uniform MFA fiction (Aldridge).
12. Errors in pitch tracking, such as octave jumps, are
common and often require manual correction; some errors are caused by consonants, others by a failure to find
pitch values for lower registers at which the vocal cords
vibrate irregularly or slowly. For the pitch graphs in this
essay, I used ARLO (Adaptive Recognition with Layered
Optimization}, an open-source audio-analysis program
initially developed by David Tcheng to classify birdcalls.
Tcheng, a collaborator with the NEH-sponsored HiPSTAS
(High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and
Scholarship) and a former research scientist in machine
learning at th'e Illinois Informatics Institute, is now a senior audio-signal analyst at GoPro. On noisy recordings,
ARLO works better than Praat, a program commonly
used by linguists. For a technical explanation of ARLO's
pitch-tracking features, see "Fundamental Pitch Tracking." Max Hawkins, Robert Ochshorn, and I are preparing for future research by experimenting with a different
algorithm developed by the computer scientist Byung Suk
Lee and the electrical engineer Daniel P. W. Ellis for pitch
tracking on noisy recordings (Lee and Ellis).
13. See, e.g., Rich Smith; Lisa Marie Basile. Matt
Krefting writes, "Her [Susan Howe's] cadence, full of
hesitations and lurches, threatens to spill over into the
dreaded pattern many like to refer to as the poet voice."
1
3
1 . 1
l
14. "A rule of thumb in historically white U.S.
churches is that the more 'evangelical' a church is, the
more spontaneously responsive a congregation gets"
(Fletcher, Message).
15. Amiri Baraka cites "an old African dictum ... ,
'The spirit will not descend without a song' ... , [which]
was necessarily incorporated into Afro-Christian worship ... ," sometimes called '"gettin' the spirit' ... 'gettin'
religion' or 'gettin' happy"' (41). Call-and-response features in collaborations between beat poets and jazz musicians, like the one between Kenneth Patchen and Charles
Mingus (Farrington).
16. For much of the history of American higher education, conservative and evangelic;al Christians, associated with the working class, have had a limited presence
as students or faculty (Gross and Simmons 107). Even in
mainstream theater, call-and-response is uncommon; at
a recent Broadway performance of Horton Foote's play
"The Trip to the Bountiful," it made front-page news
in the New York Times when the audience sang a wellknown hymn along with the actress Cicely Tyson. Much
of the cast was African American, as were the audience
members who sang along and who found it unremarkable
that they did so (Grimes).
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