November 4, 5, 6

Leonard Cohen once said to the CBC’s Shelagh Rogers: “I think my opinions are second-rate, but when you submit yourself to a (poetic) form, then something happens and you’re invited to dig deeper into the language and to discard the slogans by which you live, the easy alibis of language and of opinion.” This remark is somewhat paradoxical: he seems to be saying that by embracing form (literary structure), the poet frees himself from form (custom, convention, cliché). Most of us are not conscious of how aspects of form impact us, but writers are among those who think about it a lot.

Before going on, I should mention that I have become more aware of form in recent months, since I began working with the Words Aloud Spoken Word, and Storytelling Festival, which takes place every November in Durham, ON (www.wordsaloud.ca). Though I am very keen on poetry, and have on occasion attempted to write it (generally badly), my experience has been limited to what I read on the printed page.

Spoken word, as I have been learning quickly, is an eclectic and vibrant performance art. An evening of spoken word can include dub, sound, and beat poetry; rap and hip-hop; storytelling; and reading of written poetry; and may incorporate such diverse elements as beat-boxing, comedy, music, and audience participation. When I read the Leonard Cohen quote, I got to thinking: does the concept of form have any meaning for spoken word? Or is it really true that “anything goes” in this medium, and that form is a relative cultural or artificial construct which can be eliminated from the work?  I suspect that the answer to the first question is “yes”, and to the second “no,” but to support those answers we need to take a few steps back and determine what we mean by “form” in the first place.

In the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, the word form has 21 noun entries and 9 verb entries, and originated with the Latin forma, meaning ‘shape’ or ‘contour’. Form has retained this general meaning to the present day, but its applications have expanded to include structure, composition, categorization, standardization, social behaviour, fabrication, instruction, and development. In the arts, form applies to the structure and external characteristics of words, as well as the arrangement of ideas or the style or genre of the work. Finally, in the sense in which Leonard Cohen used it, form refers to the metrical and rhyming properties of a work of poetry.

Metre denotes the stressed and unstressed syllables of words and phrases, and can range from Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter (ba-BA, ba-BA, ba-BA, ba-BA, ba-BA) to a lewd limerick’s anapaestic trimeter (ba-BA-ba, ba-BA-ba, ba-BA-ba). Rhyme, in which mongrel English is rather weak, has traditionally fallen at the end of poetic lines; the four-line stanza called a quatrain has a range of rhyming patterns such as abab, abcb, abba, aabb. At the same time, English is strong in consonants, which may explain alliteration’s perennial popularity in poetry.

So what does this have to do with modern poetry in English, and specifically, spoken word? Haven’t we thrown all these rules out the window? After all, a catch-all term for modern poetry is “free-form.” Modern poets, according to this, have literally been freed from form. Not only are there no longer any rules, by some analyses even the guidelines have been tossed. Are we living in an age of guerrilla poetry, a poetry that inhabits marginal, lawless places and swoops in to terrorize peaceable literary kingdoms?

Well. . .yes, and no.

There is no question that spoken word can feel like an insurgency sometimes, a call to break out of comfort zones, deviate from norms, head-butt “the Man,” think outside of boxes the walls of which we’re sometimes not even aware. At the same time, like most other states, events, and processes, spoken word poetry exists within a context, a matrix of tradition, interaction, influence, cultural assumption, and history (personal, social, political), which gives it form whether it wants it or not. As radical as a poet might get in terms of his or her content, by virtue of the fact that a poem is an act of communication, there is a necessity to ground it in a common frame of reference. Even sound poetry, much of which has had the semantic meaning extracted from it, still relies on the poet and listener to mutually recognize the sounds and words as familiar. Indeed, the very rejection of semantic meaning has meaning in itself. So at this macro level, form is still in play.

Form also makes an appearance in the guise of genre. When we call someone a dub poet (dub poetry is an outgrowth of reggae, which may be performed with or without music), or a hip-hop artist, we categorize them, identifying them by what we already know of that particular genre. Many times they will surprise us by innovative uses of the genre’s conventions, but the conventions provide a framework by which we can recognize where the artist is “coming from” in the first place.

Finally, we arrive at form as it relates to rhythm and rhyme. (Both words, incidentally, have the same origin: Grk. rhuthmόs, meaning ‘recurring motion.’) At first glance, we may have some latitude there, because as noted above, modern poetry often does not contain metre and rhyme in the way it is traditionally understood, and storytelling is a form of prose and not subject to metrical and rhyming rules. This is by no means a given in spoken word, however. Rap, hip-hop, and dub poets, possibly because of their musical backgrounds, utilize powerful and often intricate rhythms in which syncopation (stressing off-beats) is integral. In addition, they often play with rhyme in unorthodox and innovative ways. Eminem, in an interview with 60 Minutes’ Anderson Cooper, illustrated this by rhyming “orange” with four-inch, door hinge, storage, porridge, and George (“geor-idge”). Storytelling also contains rhythms of one kind or another – think, for instance, of how often elements in fairy tales and ghost stories appear in sets of three. Storytelling also often makes use of arresting techniques like alliteration and onomatopoeia.

Spoken word artists in general are very aware of the musicality of words, even if they don’t actually incorporate music into the performance, choosing words as much for their aural value as their semantic or symbolic meaning. A good written poem is not necessarily a good spoken poem. Shane Koyczan comments in the Words Aloud documentary, directed by Elizabeth Zetlin, that “. . .I don’t sit down and consciously decide, ‘oh, this is going to be a performance piece.’ Sometimes I’ve tried that, and sometimes they don’t work as performance pieces but they work really nice on the page.”

The spoken word is different from the written word simply by virtue of its mode of expression. Email provides a nice demonstration of this – how often has a recipient been offended by the tone of an email when no offense was meant? The absence of a smile or friendly tone turns a phrase like “we need to fix this” into an unintentional barked command.

This brings us to another element of spoken word, a thing called “prosody.” To illustrate this quality, let’s take the word “oh”, a word that poet Robert Priest explored so wonderfully at Words Aloud 4 in 2007.
We can say “oh!” (expression of surprise or interest, or, when uttered very sharply and flatly, an expression of antagonism), “oh?” (expression of inquiry if brief and inflected upward, or expression of whiny protest if extended over a longer period), “o-o-o-h!” (sudden enlightenment or understanding when starting on a high pitch and descending slowly; or suggestive and lewd when starting on a low pitch, rising in the middle, then descending again), or “oh” (disappointment, confusion, or boredom depending on subtle modifications of pitch, brevity, and breath control).

This demonstrates what we mean by prosody: it is the feature of language that deals with length, rhythm, stress, pitch, intonation, and loudness in speech, and it is a critical feature of the art of spoken word. It is the thing that often conveys the emotional content of a given text, even when the text itself is emotionally neutral. We are most aware of the effects of prosody in the world of public speaking and entertainment, where it is often used to great effect by evangelical preachers, debaters, comics, politicians, narrators, voice-over performers, and actors delivering Aaron Sorkin monologues. As in the “oh” example above, however, we all use it on a daily basis, without even thinking about it. For instance, sarcasm makes extensive use of prosody by belying a statement with an opposing tone of voice, e.g. the apparently benign question “How’s that working out for you?” becomes sarcastic when the speaker’s tone makes it clear that he or she already knows the outcome is negative.

There is one more element “forming” the experience of spoken word. Gesture, encompassing body movement and facial expression, is essential to enhancing the emotional content of performance poetry and storytelling. Like prosody, gesture is absent from the written word except in limited ways, such as a graphic arrangement of lines, words, and spaces in a poem that conveys some sense of movement.

Some forms of gesture appear to be common to humans all over the world, and in fact surface in primates as well as some other mammals. These include the facial expressions that register anger, fear, surprise, disgust, sadness, and happiness. Other gestures are culturally determined: winking, nodding yes and shaking the head no, flipping the finger, circling a finger in the air to signify “whoop-de-doo.” Still other gestures seem to be natural to all humans, but may be culturally repressed; for instance, all babies point, but in some cultures pointing is considered impolite and the action is discouraged, thereby imparting to it properties of force and emphasis which might otherwise be absent. The spoken word artist makes use of all these familiar non-verbal communication tools to enhance, embellish, contradict, or provide a counterpoint to the words being said, chanted, or sung.

In closing, form appears to be alive and well in the world of the spoken word, but perhaps not in entirely obvious ways. Some of its superficial manifestations, such as traditional metre and conventional rhyming, have fallen by the wayside, and the merging of music, performance, and poetry blurs genre designations. Some practitioners are politically pugnacious and socially activist, and their transgressions of convention and decorum challenge the formulae by which so many of us live. And there are so many different voices in the spoken word scene that it continually changes shape, like Odo in Star Trek’s DS9. On the other hand, an audience rising to its feet at the end of a performance clearly demonstrates the more deeply embedded commonalities which form the spoken word artist-listener bond.

Form your own opinion. To quote Cohen once again, “. . .discard the slogans by which you live, the easy alibis of language and of opinion,” push back the borders that form your world of entertainment, and grab the opportunity to participate in the spoken word experience.