But I mean, I think you can get into a place where a good reading or a bad reading is at least partially about how the reader/performer is relating to the poem. And Doug was also thinking of the act of writing as a performance of the poem, and the act of reading a poem to oneself as another kind of performance, so there’s a lot of terrain there.
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Thank you! In reverse order: I don’t know that Doug had a take on automated voice readers. I don’t think he was very exposed to the technology, for one thing. The ability to get the tech for his recording experiments was, I believe, very temporary. I suspect he’d have something to say about it, but that’s a bit inadequate of a statement — it’s more about my desire to hear him talk about it…..listening to doug talk was a real delight whatever the subject.

I do think the experiments had an impact on his own writing, but prosody was something important to his sense of poetry his whole writing life, so the experimentation with prosody within his writing predated the scientific work. And the poems I mentioned before – The Infant and The Pearl, and Penniless Politics, are good examples of this. The former written before the study, and the latter written afterwards.

I also imagine Doug was thinking about listening as a way of participating in a performance – his take on the neutral tune relies upon a near-consensus among listeners as to very particular qualities of a poem being recognizable in order to come near it at all. This strikes me as significant because I think, actually, that the ability to listen to a poem or a song at the micro-level that Doug is talking about requires a combination of attention and experience….it’s something like a skill. When I hosted readings on weekly basis for four years at the poetry project in nyc I was often struck by how difficult it was for audience members to allow themselves to do nothing but listen.

One thing about performing poetry as a high-skill matter – I agree that how one handles the social space of performing in combination with one’s personality has a lot to do with whether or not a performance “works” in a theatrical sense. But when it comes to performing the “music” or “tune” in a poem or piece of writing, I think there’s a real skill to that, and it has to begin with being able to detect the music in the first place (much less being able to write with it anywhere in mind – the writing of a poem necessarily has to be faster, in most cases, than the ability to design the music I think). And I think that’s part of why Doug made a point of separating dramatic reading from the performance of the tune of the poem, such as it may exist.

I don’t think, finally, that he was equating the neutral tune with an ideal tune – I think he was suggesting that by looking at stress as the smallest possible moment in which we perceive the development of form we might begin to imagine a relationship-of-scale from stress to whatever the largest “unit” in the work might be that could lead to something like a snapping together of all the parts in unison so that the poem swings, vibrates, gives delight, and so forth. But he’s also careful not to separate meaning and emotional response from his ideas of music – and this is why referring to a poem’s music is far from simplistic (as has been said to me on occasion when I’ve referred off-handedly to a poem or poet’s music. sigh.)

What I’m really struck by at the moment is the fact that stress can be readily apparent and elusive (moving) at once – this could be a very freeing notion for someone who is interested in prosody and looking for a fresh way to talk/think about it.
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Well, Doug can’t speak for himself, alas….but my feeling is that his take on duration would interfere with any absolute decision regarding all poetries being quantitative. There is also the matter of different languages and their relations to tone, vowel sound, stresses and so forth.
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Among recordings of classical music are dozens of competing interpretations of the same scores, which nonetheless agree on the basics of the meanings of the pieces. The miracle of splicing and overdubbing allows for any recording to convey its interpretation perfectly. Whether one subtly different interpretation of “The Rite of Spring” is more perfect than another can only be *felt* in performance, not described definitively.

This is perhaps only relevant in an emotional and gossipy way, but the best reader of poetry I ever heard is Alice Notley, whom I heard several times in the early and mid-’80s, reading her own and others’ work.
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he pops weakly to Swisher in right,
so the Yankees might come back
after all, that’s what money can buy,
a downtick in spending causing

the stock market to plunge 250 points,
Happy Halloween Americans!
welcome to Dante’s Inferno, where
everyday citizens are whipped

mercilessly by the momentary
failures of nerve of day traders
at Goldman Sachs, Swisher doubles
down the third base line

as if in sympathetic magic
with the author of this poem,
thrilled by being able to use the word
“swisher” in a poem – a game –

that has just seen Andy Pettite
drive in the tying run, 3-3,
Hamels has to gather himself
but he doesn’t, Damon doubles in

two more, and the Yankees lead
five to three, but the silver lining
is that an American League pitcher
getting a hit in a World Series

exposes the DH as an embarrassing
lapse into literalism, because anything
can happen in a poem – a game –
and I don’t want Wittgenstein

to be called in from the bullpen,
when you’re talking about philosophers
(as Anselm Berrigan was earlier
today, quoting his stepfather on Harriet)

my weakness is Whitehead
(can’t you see that line being quoted
in an admiring review? No?) Well,
when Andy Pettite’s glove makes

a perfect dark triangle with
the shadow his cap makes
over his eyes, his true Scorpio
demeanor becomes apparent,

especially when facing Howard,
who’s struck out six times
in a row (at least he didn’t
make it seven), but let’s face facts:

if the Yankees win this game,
this Series is over . . . the Phillies’
pitcher now is named “Happ,”
like Thomas Hardy’s great poem

minus one pee, which proposes
that Swisher would hit a home run
just when things are looking good,
blind chance ruling the universe,

(it goes on like that)

Regards . . .

Joe
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http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/07/douglas-oliver-radial-symposium.html

The poems of Doug’s that have the most intricate prosody include his satiric political poem The Infant and The Pearl – a satire on Thatcher’s Britain written in the mid-1980s and making use of the alliterative verse form of the The Pearl with some extra technical devices added to that form for purposes of attending to the modern ear (I’m paraphrasing Doug’s own description here). He also wrote another longer satirical poem, Penniless Politics, that covers the rise of an imagined third party out of manhattan’s east village. That poem is in ottova rima, also with a few extra prosodic twists so as to update the music a bit.
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But don’t take my word for it. Read a G.M. Hopkins poem aloud. Catch the sprung rhythm and the hovering stress and the outriders, as he called them. This is the stuff your uncle is talking about. Better yet read again Early English poetry and see if the scops were not looking to meet poetry to performance.

Terreson
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I still couldn’t help tensing up a bit though, when he says says, “this implies that… [some people]read poetry better than others.” My problem is not with that statement–I do in fact agree that some people read / perform poetry better than others, even if ultimately, let’s face it, performing poetry is not a very high-skill activity, it has much more to with personality and ways of negotiating the public sphere. And I don’t disagree with the notion that a poem contains within it an intrinsic tune, though I would prefer the adjective “intrinsic” as opposed to “neutral” or “unmarked” or “perfect”–the last word, especially, does seem very clearly Platonic to me.

Nevertheless, I’m wondering about(at least, the faintest hint of) the suggestion here that a “neutral” performance is an ideal one. Of course, he hedges and plays off his claims very carefully, showing both that that “other interpretations will yield other tunes” and (in part 1 of your post) that this intrinsic tune is “ineffable”, that it “doesn’t quite exist”.

What do you think about this? It seems to me that Oliver’s great achievement in this letter is to establish the validity of an intrinsic (if ineffable) tune for the poetic line, and to then posit a far more sophisticated base for prosody than we ever had before; but the question of what actually constitutes a good or bad performance of poetry remains an entirely separate question, doesn’t it?

A couple of other questions: 1) were these explorations in prosody mainly about listening, or did they lead Oliver to invent / try out any new prosodic systems in his poetry writing and, if so, can you point me to specific poems /books where he experiments with prosody? 2) Did Oliver have a take on automated voice readers– like Microsoft Sam — since I think in some ways of these being as close to “neutral” as we have thus far? (They also, in their way, demonstrate the impossibility of the neutral performance; but I find them “good to think” through prosody.)
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It’s a pleasure to see a discussion of the technical aspects of the art form.

Are you a proponent of the notion that “all poetries are quantitative”?

-o-
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