Poetry and the speaking voice

Poetry and the speaking voice

David Jackson. Toot Hill Comprehensive School, Bingham, Notts. A member of the Nottingham Politics in English Group.

‘ . . . t o defend his poetry, the poet of the modern age accepts the investiture earned in the street . . . ’ Pablo Neruda from Memoirs, Souvenir Press and Penguin.

At the end of one of the most forward looking ‘A’ level English Literature courses (A.E.B. 753), after a range of encounters with many different kinds of poetry over the two years (some of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Pansies’, contrasting alternative translations of Voznesenky’s ‘First Frost’, leafing through ‘The Penguin Book of Women Poets’, Edwin Morgan’s ‘Instamatic poems’, listening to Linton Kwesi Johnson performing ‘Sonny’s Lettah’ from ‘Forces of Victory’, Virgin Records, and meeting the Sassoon of ‘The War Poems’ and the Byron of ‘Don Juan’), the students faced this in the June examination paper, as one of two poems that they were required to answer questions on:-

Sunday Morning, King’s Cambridge File into yellow candle light, fair choristers of King’s

Lost in the shadowy silence of canopied Renaissance stalls In blazing glass above the dark glow skies and thrones and wings

Blue, ruby, gold and green between the whiteness of the walls And with what rich precision the stonework soars and springs

To fountain out a spreading vault - a shower that never falls. The white of windy Cambridge courts, the cobbles brown and dry,

The gold of plaster Gothic with ivy overgrown, The apple-red, the silver fronts, the wide green flats and high,

The yellowing elm-trees circled out on islands of their own - Oh, here behold all colours change that catch the flying sky

To waves of pearly light that heave along the shafted stone.

Poetry and the speaking voice 31

In far East Anglian churches, the clasped hands lying long Recumbent on sepulchral slabs or effigied in brass

Buttress with prayer this vaulted roof so white and light and strong And countless congregations as the generations pass

Join choir and great crowned organ case, in centuries of song To praise Eternity contained in Time and coloured glass.

John Betjeman

In its elevated, high style, precious tone and socially exclusive reference the limitations of a certain line of poetry become clear. Over the years, one of the varied strands of poetry - the academic/introspective/scholarly poem tradition - has been over-valued at the expense of speaking voice directness. The possible range of poetic styles and voices has been reduced so that students frequently associate poetry with just one, approved voice - the voice of sophisticated, literary artifice.

In allowing this to happen many schools have forgotten that ‘poetry and fiction have their roots in everyday speech”. Poetry doesn’t come from an isolated literary convention detached from the vigorous and subtle movement of the human voice. All poetry, however elaborately and ornately made, has its origins in the common soil of everyday speech. The problem is that some poems and poets, like ‘Sunday Morning, King’s Cambridge’, seem to want to deny those origins in the way they have composed their poems. It’s as if Betjeman here wants to turn his back on the idioms, rhythms, and experiences that link him with the majority of other people’s lives.

Against this tendency I want to put the idea of a much more robust and varied poetry-making continuum that extends, in a non-hierarchical way, from word of mouth language that gives a heightened and selected impression of natural speaking through to shaped and patterned artefact.

In practice we are always talking of a complex interweaving of different elements within the continuum so that spontaneous speech poems represent a seeming spontaneity, made memorable by heightening and intensifying the impression of colloquial speaking, and the more consciously crafted patterns of deliberate artifice are built upon the sounds of dynamic human interaction and exchange.

Probably the most important aspect in all this is the reader’s or listener’s sense of a poem’s closeness or distance from experience. Working at a greater distance from experience doesn’t automatically imply, as I think it does in the Betjeman poem, and in many other academic tradition poems, that the writer needs to close down the possible routes and interplay between spontaneous speech and con- trolled artifice. Michael Drayton’s, ‘Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part:/Nay, I have done; you get no more of me . . . ’’ works solidly within a tightly regulated sonnet framework but keeps up a direct contact with colloquial speech rhythms. Indeed its force comes from the tension between these two poles. So what matters to many readers is whether a poet can acknowledge the living movement of the human voice in the way he or she has ordered and shaped an experience.

The Development of a Gentility Principle How has this over-valuing of one kind of poetry and the related neglect of speaking voice poetry come about? On the one hand many teachers

32 English in Education

have been taught to distrust the language of home and street. Through the process of education they have become exiled from the everyday speech of their local communities; ‘ . . . lost us our purchase on the things of home’, as Matt Simpson remarks in his poem ‘Latin Ma~te r ’~ .

In jockeying for academic status in Higher Education many teachers have learnt to equate seriousness and profundity of thought with long-windedness and the appearance of scholarly language habits (perhaps a reflection in itself of the Classical Languages’ origins of English teaching?) As Marian Whitehead comments in a letter to the T.E.S. ‘Nearly one hundred years of state education produced generations of people ashamed of the vigorous vernacular of their home areas and convinced (them) that they could not speak “properly” ’‘.

This sense of shame and distrust also comes from the incorporation and swallowing up of the vernacular voice by the genteel voice. Historically, one Southern form of the language grew into ‘Received Standard’ English and became associated, through the Public Schools, Universities, and later the B.B.C. and other social institutions, with the power and prestige of the ruling class in Britain.

As a result, lively mother tongue speakers from thriving communities often learn to under-value what they already possess when they measure the quality of their vernacular against the ‘power, learning and material success’6 that is identified as a part of being able to use ‘Received Standard’ forms.

The main development of this gentility principle, estimated by both David Craig and Raymond Williams as taking place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries6, also powerfully affected the contrasting status and quality of spoken and written forms. Instead of the way written forms, in the work of Elizabethan dramatists, could be constantly re-charged with the current of popular, spoken idioms and usage, written and spoken forms become viewed differently in terms of quality and status. So spoken idioms, and especially colloquial ones, were increasingly seen as vulgar and inferior in status to the politely fashionable and tasteful forms of writing. As a result of this vernacular, speech and poetry has been ‘under attack from a b ~ v e ’ ~ . Speaking voice forms of fiction have been largely ignored or undermined because of the comparative authority and respectability of ruling class utterances. Grudgingly, isolated works have been taken up, like Grassic Gibbon’s ‘A Scot’s Quair’, but that doesn’t seriously affect the general drift of the argument.

In over-emphasising sophisticated, literary artifice in schools at the expense of vernacular forms many working class children and children from multi-racial communities have felt cut off from their own everyday experience, language and knowledge. At home much of their sense of cultural identity and self-respect is tied in to an oral culture - banter, whacky repartee, anecdotes, rhymes, jokes etc. - and so the challenge is: can we as teachers work with the energy of their own voices, building bridges between their already existing but generally unacknowledged cultural resources and the world of poetry.8

Speaking Voice Poetry and Children’s Oral Culture (5-12)

Names for tapioca and sago:


Fishes’ eyes Frog’s eyes Fishes’ eyes in glue Frog spawn Wallpaper paste Baby food.

Eeny/Meeny/macca racca/Rare-O/dominacca/chicka bocka/lolly poppa/ rum tum tosh. Our culture ~ a definition by description of its partsg

1. Proverbs 6. Rules 2. Rhymes 7. Punishments 3. Riddles 8. Sayings 4. Games 9. Stories 5. Laws (the original list goes on to number 40)

Children bring with them to school a highly developed and vital culture of lore and language. But it’s often unrecognised by the official agenda of schools. So the positive possibilities of the vernacular mode are that poems can work alongside these hidden energies, often basing themselves on the exuberant rhythms and movements that children find familiar from their own storehouses of lore and language. A joining together of the two worlds can often result.

If children feel that their home resources are being recognised and respected in the classroom then they frequently feel willing to make sense of the world of the school poem in terms of what they know and expect. Sometimes they can more readily tune in to an immediately recognisable tone of voice ~ wheedling, sulking, bossing or finger-wag- gingly stern - like in this poem from Mind your own businesslo that comes off the page ‘live on the lips’ of people they might know from their own out of school experiences:

Father says Never let me see YOU doing that again father says tell you once tell you a thousand times come hell or high water his finger drills my shoulder never let me see you doing that again

My brother knows all his phrases off by heart so we practise them in bed at night.

Michael Rosen The commanding prod of the voice in each separate word or phrase carries the poem right into the heart of the child’s world of feeling. The poem dramatises and parodies the child’s relationship with adult


authority and so connects, nakedly and memorably, with the playful irreverence and inventiveness of children’s customary debunking wit and repartee, like in:

‘Sir is kind and sir is gentle Sir is strong and sir is mental’.

or in this crazy book title, ‘Twenty years in the saddle’ by Major Bumsore.

So strong is this sense of connection, a t times, that some children can feel encouraged to try and catch voices, rhythms, exchanges from home through their own writing. Although clearly modelled on the work of writers like Michael Rosen and Kit Wright these children are on the way to discovering their own authentic voices:-

No Buts1 ‘But Dad’.

‘No buts Andy you’re going if you like it or not!’ ‘But. . . ’

‘Look you’re coming and that’s that!’ ‘But I’ve got my homework to do . . . ’

‘You can do that when you get home!’ ‘But dad!’

‘No buts son you’re coming no matter what you say’. ‘Oh alright dad’.

‘That’s better son’.

Telling 0fP2 I’ve told you once

I’ve told you twice I’ve told you three times

And you haven’t done it yet.

Go and do it NOW or when

your dad comes home

you’ll GET

A GOOD

HIDING Marisa Horsford

The closer poetry, both the stuff we put in front of children and their own efforts, approaches the qualities of heightened, expressive talk, the more meaningful it often becomes to both children and teachers.

Getting Through to Senior Pupils: Speaking Voice Poetry and Pupils (13-18)

The strenuous economy and compression of the academic poem, with its difficult conventions of pared down, often obscure phrasing, oblique


imagery, mythological reference and generally indirect meaning, frequently walls off the pupils from the world of poetry. They often reject it as a world that is too-aloof and remote that can have no bearing on their daily lives.

On the other hand, if the child from 5-12 has been weaned up to create bridges between home experiencellanguage and poems like the ones referred to above then there is usually more chance of vernacular poems getting through at a more mature level.

Take Langston Hughes’ ‘Ballad of the landlord’ for example:

Ballad of the landlord13 Landlord, landlord, My roof has sprung a leak Don’t you ’member I told you about i t Way last week? Landlord, landlord, These steps is broken down. When you come up yourself It’s a wonder you don’t fall down. Ten Bucks you say I owe you? Ten Bucks you say is due? Well, that’s Ten Bucks more’n I’ll pay you Till you fix this house up new. What? You gonna get eviction orders? You gonna cut off my heat? You gonna take my furniture and Throw it in the street? Um-huh! You talking high and mighty. Talk on - till you get through. You ain’t gonna be able to say a word If I land my fist on you. ‘Police! Police! Come and get this man! He’s trying to ruin the government And overturn the land!’ Copper’s whistle! Patrol bell! Arrest. Precinct Station. Iron cell. Headlines in press: MAN THREATENS LANDLORD TENANT HELD NO BAIL JUDGE GIVES NEGRO 90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL

Langston Hughes

Although the poem is carefully patterned (with its repetitive, ballad-like structure) its accessibility lies in the way that it doesn’t forget its origins in popular idioms and everyday talk. In its dramatic


enactment it keeps open the routes between spontaneous gesture/ behaviour and significant pattern. As a contrast, in their tendency to move towards a more detached, analytic mode many academic poems seem to want to deny these routes and beginnings and so forget this actively engaging gestic14 quality. As a result the academic poem tradition often cuts itself off from the majority of people.

Recognisability for most people when meeting poems for the first time is whether they can detect in the poem certain habitual idioms, voice qualities and contexts that they use themselves for making sense out of what they live through. So that as well as being absorbed by the physical directness15 and down to earth concreteness of the piece, they were also tuning in to the dramatic dialogue, (the rapid exchanges between landlord, tenant, narrator and the newspaper account) a recognisably customary idiom for many people, especially working-class speakers, as Harold Rosen shows.16

The power of this poem, and many other vernacular pieces, comes through the sharpening and selective heightening of the movement and rhythms of everyday speech. It is stylised in its use of repetition and rhyme but the reader connects with the tenant’s voice of mounting exasperation. The spontaneous gesture of indignation (‘What? You gonna get eviction orders?/You gonna cut off my heat?’) and the retaliatory, waiting defiance of, ‘Um-huh! You talking high and mighty/Talk on - till you get through’ are made active on the page within a patterned framework.

Another important aspect of this is that the context of many speaking voice poems - in scenes where people respond directly and immediately to one another or where there is an implied dramatic exchange or conflict of views - often has a unique value in provoking the attention of otherwise indifferent listeners or readers. Poems that present human interaction, or an implied relationship, with a conversational directness, clarity and power like Tennyson’s ‘Northern Farmer: New Style’, several poems by Sassoon and Owen between authority and the common soldier, ‘Sonny’s Lettah’ by Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘The Collier’s Wife’ by D. H. Lawrence and poems by Adrian Mitchell and Roger McGough often are able to activate readers’ curiosities about why people say and do the things they do. Many readers seem to have a rare preparedness to enter into these kind of worlds perhaps because the concrete, dramatic realisation of such scenes keeps them intrigued whereas the more distanced, abstracted mode of the academic poem, where meaning seems to be severed from human interaction, doesn’t motivate them to want to speculate about what’s going on. Connecting this to ‘The ballad of the landlord’ the reader can get engaged in the poem at the level of wanting to understand the position of the tenant (perhaps seeing himself or herself in a similar kind of powerlessness) being exploited by the landlord and the media.

Writing for the Ear as well as the Eye ‘.. .(sentence sounds) are apprehended by the ear. They are gathered by the ear from the vernacular and brought into books. The most original writer only catches them fresh from talk, where they grow spontaneously. . . ’

A great deal of poetry, working within the academic poem tradition, Robert Frost’


that we offer to children between 13-18 seems to have been solely written for the eye of a student. In its composition it often implies the detailed, mental scrutiny of an isolated student, enclosed in a room, preparing for an exam, rather than suggesting a fuller experiencing of the poem through ear and eye. This shrinking of the range of possible response can be changed if teachers provide a regular chance for students to try out reading speaking voice poems aloud, to share together in small groups readings and interpretations of poems, and to listen to recordings (in the case of John Cooper Clarke, Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Linton Kwesi Johnson) and performances of writers in school like Roger ‘McGough, Kit Wright, Michael Rosen, Gareth Owen, Mick Gowar, Liz Lockhead, James Berry and Adrian Mitchell.

The quality of some of the most arresting vernacular poems is this sense of living immediacy, of familiar tones of voice, proverbial wisdoms, of sentence sounds’ caught fresh from talk that demand that the only way to fully get inside them is to experience them on the ear, and through physical gesture as well as the eye. Like this Tom Leonard poem which is exploring the actual Glaswegian speech sounds that he hears going on around him all the time:

The Dropout

scrimpt nscraipt furryi urryi grateful no wan bit

speylt useless yi urr twistid izza coarkscrew cawz rowz inan empty hooss

yir fathir nivirid yoor chance pick n choozyir joab a steady pey

well jiss take a lookit yirsell naithur wurk nur wahnt aw aye

yir clivir damm clivir but yi huvny a clue whutyir dayn

Tom Leonard

After the initial shock of encountering a fidelity to speech sounds on the page, and given enough time to try the poem out aloud (either saying it to friends or tape recording it), the colloquial energy usually strikes home.

In ‘Dropout’ Tom Leonard is speaking out from common experiences in a language, voice and rhythm that confronts the evasiveness of more remote forms. The reproachful weariness of the mother’s voice comes through clearly to the reader with a tuned-in ear. Those nagging parental homilies ring familiar echoes in the reader’s experience, and, momentarily, writer and reader become joined in their sense of shared ‘human associations’. ‘Scrimpt nscraipt furryi’, ‘yir fathir nivirid yoor chance’, and, ‘well jiss take a lookit yirsell’ - all these recognisable proverbial sayings prompt the reader to create meaningful connections


between the world of the poem and the world of his or her own personal associations.

Instead of the ‘smoothness and harmony of conventional poetry, ‘the reader meets, with more of his or her senses working than usual, an expressive popular idiom that is dynamically alive to the dilemmas, uncertainties and disappointments of felt experience that shows ‘human dealings as contradictory, fiercely fought overl9. . . ’ The fluctuating rhythms of the human voice are there because they point up the meaning of the poem more sharply.

Speaking Voice Poems and a Sense of Audience The writer’s awareness of a potential audience, however small and insignificant, is an important factor here. Being a part of regular sharing sessions where your words have got to carry across to other members of the group helps to develop a responsibility in the writer to a wider public. I don’t mean in any superficial, populist sense but rather that an awareness of listeners with different concerns and preoccupations can prevent the most obscure abuses of a private, self-referential language in the poet. As David Craig points out, some vernacular writers ‘ . . . are supported by the knowledge that there is a body of people wanting to hear (them) not only confirm their intimate thoughts but also to experience the sharing of common events in a language that isn’t specialised’. 2o

This contact with a wider public then, through sharing sessions and live performance for both inexperienced child writer and published writer, helps to keep open the interaction between the directness of everyday speech and a developing sense of significant pattern. So that vernacular poetry reaches out for an accessible simplicity which isn’t simplistic or reductive, and can be concrete, plain spoken and emotionally and intellectually searching all a t once. And in the most telling of Brecht’s poems - ‘On everyday theatre’, ‘Burial of the trouble-maker in a zinc coffin’, ‘Questions from a worker who reads’, ‘General, your tank is a powerful vehicle’, ‘A worker’s speech to a doctor’ - some of these qualities can be seen starting to come together.

In Touch with the Growing Points of the Age ‘English has been robustly inventing itself for centuries - stretch- ing and reshaping and enriching itself with every language and dialect it has encountered’21

Mina Shaughnessy The academic/scholarly poem tradition often has a fixed, static relationship with the new language energies and new experiences crackling out on the street, corridor, football terrace and rock concert. Indeed it’s constitutionally unable, because of its closest isolation and self-referen- tiality to respond to these fresh pressures and energies.

Alternatively, the vernacular mode is often much more able to keep in touch with these developing energies and experiences, enriching itself and extending its range as it opens itself to new rhythms and voices. The way that poets like Karla Kuskin, Carl Sandburg, She1 Silverstein, Kit Wright and Michael Rosen have responded, in their own ways, to the fertile resources of child language is one example, but the most significant illustration is to be found in the work of the black, Caribbean


writers and performers, or ‘Dub Poets’ as Mervyn Morris refers to them.22

There are individual variations in the backgrounds and influences of these poets but generally their work is a developing response to the energies of reggae rhythms and Caribbean (and especially Jamaican) popular speech. Writers and performers like Edward Kamau Brathwaite, James Berry (particularly in his ‘Lucy’ poems), Mikey Smith, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Louise Bennett and others use these rhythms to voice their own unique sense of cultural identity and political militancy, uninhibited by the official weight of the written, ‘Received Standard’ version of English.

For evidence of the vitality and zest of this growth point just listen to Linton Kwesi Johnson’s renderings of ‘Five nights of bleeding’ (from Dread Beat An’ Blood: Poet and the roots: London: Virgin Records 1978 FL1017) and ‘Sonny’s Lettah’ (from Forces of Victory: London: Island Records 1979 9566), and read James Berry’s ‘Lucy’s Letters’ (from Cut- Way Feeling Loving and Lucy’s Letters, Strange Lime Fruit Store, Stafford - London) and Hugh Boatswain’s ‘Dub Rock’ from Talking Blues, (Centerprise, 136 Kingsland High Street, London E8.)

It’s not enough to acknowledge this range and variety every now and again, or say that this variety doesn’t apply to us in the English classroom. It demands respect as an unostentatiously integral part of any approach to poetry between 13-18. Not as a way of making token gestures but a part of making all classrooms (especially insulated, country ones) more generously open to the widening range of voices and experiences to be met with in society at large. If our definition of poetry can’t adjust to and take in the new impulses and energies being generated by daily life in Britain in 1986 then perhaps we need to re-make our definitions and invent new forms that can exist at the front line of experience.

Conclusion Poetry then needs to transform itself in the popular imagination. The general view of poetry as remote and aloof comes from the inability of tha academic/scholarly poem tradition, aimed at a middle class readership (in a study?), to deal with the experiences of the majority of people in an idiom that they can feel at home with.

The official respectability of a high status, writerly tradition (subtle and nourishing for an enthusiastic coterie though it may be) needs to be realigned and demystified. Its common roots in everyday speech need to be vigorously re-asserted, re-opening the choked footpaths between popular speech and literary artifice. So that it can no longer be viewed as a hierarchically separate convention working in isolation from the daily language of home and street.

In some cases this will mean re-discovering and re-claiming alternative parts of a famous poet’s output, and drawing attention to them again, like Poet Laureate Tennyson’s use of Lincolnshire ~ e r n a c u l a r ~ ~ :

Dosn’t thou ’ear my ’erse’s legs, as they canters away? Proputty, proputty, proputty - that’s what I ’ears ’em saay. Proputty, proputty, proputty - Sam, thou’s an ass for thy paans: Theer’s moor sense i’ one 0’ ’is legs nor in all thy braains. That voice and experience needs to be brought out again, dusted off

and set alongside his more established work.


In others it might mean a re-emphasis; of pointing to poems like Sassoon’s ‘Atrocities’ or Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Chances’, ‘The Dead-Beat’, ‘Inspection’ where they both explored ways of using a biting vernacular to give edge to their trench experiences, even though they are firmly embedded within the established canon of Great Names. To bolster this re-direction a fresh theoretical perspective needs to inform these new choices - a growing awareness of the reasons why we have over-valued and over-emphasised one of the varied strands of poetry and cut if off from a more healthy relationship with its roots and off-shoots.

In the end, the claims of speaking voice poetry need to be respected alongside other forms (with at least, a parity of esteem) because through it, either writing, reading or sharing it, many hitherto ignored and neglected areas of people’s experience can be confirmed within the classroom. The vernacular mode can contribute to ‘breaking the long silence’ in giving voice to the felt life of the majority of people in a robustly recognisable way that has been too rare in approaches to poetry in schools.

Poetry Books for use in the English Classroom

Selected Poems, Langston Hughes, Alfred Knopf Inc. Strictly Private, ed. Roger McGough, Puffin Plus. Many People, Many Voices, ed. Norman Hidden, Hutchinson. Salford Road, Gareth Owen, Kestrel. Swings and Roundabouts, Mick Gowar, Collins. Bluefoot Traveller, ed. James Berry, Harrap. Hot Dog and other poems, Kit Wright, Puffin. Talking Blues, Centerprise (136 Kingsland High Street, London E8). Where the sidewalk ends, She1 Silverstein, Harper and Row. City Lines, I.L.E.A. English Centre, Sutherland Street, London SW1. M’Mam sez, Barry Heath, Your Own Stuff Press (18 Waterloo Road, Beeston, Notts.) Children as Writers, (published each year), Heinemann/W. H. Smith. Mind your own business, Michael Rosen, Fontena Lion. Zn the Glassroom, Roger McGough, Jonathan Cape. Tall Thoughts, Deepak Kalha, Basement Writers (Old Town Hall, Cable St., London El) The Penguin Book of Oral Poetry, ed Ruth Finnegan, Penguin. Znglan is a bitch, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Race Today Publications. For Beauty Douglas: Collected Poems 195s1979 Adrian Mitchell, Allison and Busby. Speaking to You, ed. David Jackson and Michael Rosen, MacMillan Education (1984). Voices, (the publication of the Worker Writers and Community Publishers) 61 Bloom Street, Manchester M13LY. The Grimm Sisters, Liz Lockhead, Next EditionsIFaber and Faber. Terry Street, Douglas Dunn, Faber and Faber. Poems, Vivian Usherwood, Centerprise. Poems 1913-1956, Bertolt Brecht, Eyre Methuen. Fractured Circles, James Berry, New Beacon Books. Seeing things, Robert Froman, Abelard. The Complete Poems, D. H. Lawrence, Penguin. Poems, Marisa Horsford, Your Own Stuff Press.


The Penguin Book of Women Poets, ed Cosman, Keefe and Weaver, Penguin. I see a voice, ed. Michael Rosen, HutchinsonIThames TV. The Arrivants, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, O.U.P. I Din Do Nuttin, John Agard, Bodley Head. The War Poems, Siegfried Sassoon, Faber and Faber. Three Glasgow Writers (Alex Hamilton, James Kelman, Tom Leonard) Molendinar Press, 73 Robertson Street, Glasgow, G2. News for Babylon, ed. James Berry, Chatto and Windus.

Notes:

1) See Harold Rosen’s essay, ‘The dramatic mode’, from Coming to know

2) See The Penguin book of Elizabethan verse ed. Edward Lucie Smith.

3) From ‘Making arrangements’, Matt Simpson, Bloodaxe books (1982). 4) Times Educational Supplement. 4/3/83. 5 ) Much of the thinking here is influenced by the chapter ‘The Growth

of ‘Standard English’ from The Long Revolution, Raymond Williams, Chatto and Windus and Penguin (1961).

6) The Real Foundations: Literature and Social Change, David Craig, Chatto and Windus.

7) From Towards a people’s culture, Charles Parker, Tract, Spring 1972. 8) See ‘In their own voice’, Michael Rosen from Becoming our own

experts - The Talk Workshop Group (I.L.E.A. English Centre, Sutherland Street, London, SW1.)

9) See ‘Our Culture - a Definition by Description of its Parts’ - Michael Rosen from Becoming our own experts.

ed. Phillida Salmon, R.K.P. (1980).

Page 106.

10) Mind your own business, Michael Rosen, Fontana Lion. 11) From Ways oftalking, David Jackson, Ward Lock Educational. (Now

12) From Poems, Marisa Horsford, Your own stuff Press, 18 Waterloo

13) From Selected poems, Langston Hughes, Alfred Knopf Inc. 14) The importance of this term is that it integrates the meaning of a

poem with the whole physical gesture embodied in a shared performance. See the introduction to Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913-1956, Eyre Methuen, where it defines ‘gestic’ as, ‘ . . . to convey the attitude of the speaker and the precise force and weight of the thing said.’

15) See pages 54-59 from A good night out (Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form), John McGrath, Eyre Methuen where McGrath usefully outlines some of the expectations, demands and tastes of working class audiences. Amongst his list he includes directness, comedy, emotion, variety, effect and immediacy.

16) See ‘The Dramatic mode’ included in Coming to know, R.K.P. (1980). 17) See Robert Frost on writing ed. Elaine Barry, Rutgers University

18) From Bunnit Husslin, Third Eye Centre Publications, Glasgow.

out of print.)

Road, Beeston, Nottingham.

Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey.


19) From ‘On rhymeless verse with irregular rhythms’, Brecht, included in Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913-1956, Eyre Methuen.

20) The Real Foundations, David Craig, Chatto and Windus. 21) From Errors and Expectations, Mina Shaughnessy, O.U.P. 22) See ‘People Speech’, Mervyn Morris from Race Today Review,

23) From Tennyson’s poem, ‘Northern Farmer: New Style’. Volume 14, No. 5.

Documents

Poetry and the speaking voice