"What they do is this. They take a poem (twenty-five of them, actually), break it down to its component parts from stanza to line to syllable to vowel and consonant, settle on a rhythm, and deliver it as a group, sometimes passing it around phrase by phrase, sometimes word by word, sometimes in unison, sometimes as a soloist and chorus."
"The struggle itself ... is enough to fill a man's heart." --Camus
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My grandfather used to do something like this in the 1930s, during the Depression.
ReplyDeleteHe was a high school English teacher. He would take his students and form a kind of poetry chorus -- they'd recite together, solo and so on -- whispers, full-voiced and in between. They toured the state, playing in granges and schools in rural Colorado. I don't know which poets; perhaps Vachel Lindsay. Robert Browning was a favorite of his. It's too bad that we don't even have a recording, let alone some visual record of one of the performances.
Good to see that, again, what was old in new once more.
Great comment and reminder. Thanks.
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