SOULSPEAK:

Here’s what others are saying about SOULSPEAK: The Outward Journey of the Soul:

“Justin Spring’s poetry, writings, and accompanying recordings resonate with something deep inside us all that is longing to be touched. I felt myself yearning for, and in connection with, deep mystery while reading and listening to the SOULSPEAK materials. I find Mr. Spring’s work with disenfranchised individuals to be a beacon that may be a means out of the darkness that inhabits much of our present day lives.”

Jerry Wellik, Ed.d. Professor of Special Education, St. Cloud State University

“Here is a book that really explains not only the origins of poetry, but how today we can again create poetry as a form of the soul speaking. Justin Spring is passionate and compelling in his pursuit of this pure poetry, what he calls “the outward journey of the soul.” And in his text he teaches all of us how to speak from a deeper place, letting the unconscious, or the soul, rise up into language and art. Taking us step by step through the process, he provides specific techniques to break through old boundaries and limitations. Spring’s many years of leading poetry workshops have produced a very clear, strong, almost prophetic sense of where art and truth lie, and—more importantly—how to achieve them.”

Victoria Sullivan, poet, playwright, editor of PLAYS BY AND ABOUT WOMEN

“In an age in which so much of what people say is social gambit, political rhetoric, make talk cliché, I applaud Justin Spring’s powerful technique for returning us to what is truly important, a language that means something, and that

echoes vertically as well as sending out ripples horizontally; that is to say, it combines communication with a reference to the soul and the realm of the invisibles. It is a language that you could never be ashamed of having spoken, because you would like these words to echo around the eaves of the universe. They are beautiful, incantatory, descriptive, and wise. They are the glittering mantle in which the soul likes to wrap itself.

SOULSPEAK hovers between the realms of the shaman’s magic and the priest’s incantation, the artist’s stroke, and the philosopher’s insight. Poetry is a calculus of the emotions, and if the poem is designed for immortality, also a calculus of the spirit. It describes a curve, an acceleration of realization, an epiphany; in short, the movements of the soul.

I advise you to work with this book experientially, try the exercises, sense the vast imponderable soul-animal Spring invokes for us, lying beneath us. Think that God is hovering nearby, just waiting to borrow your voice.”

Dr. Stephen Larsen, Professor Emeritus SUNY, co-author of A FIRE IN THE MIND, A LIFE OF JOSEPH CAMPBELL.

Snow Angels

I was six. No, five, I was five: my first snow.

I remember the angel suddenly coming together

and then bleeding out underneath me

like I was turning myself inside out,

and then I remember awakening

to a white field, because the angels

were always a surprise to me,

the way they kept falling in such

peculiar positions, like someone

screaming, or dying.

Like the wings.

Friends would take me aside,

tell me the wings were a bit too much:

Like a Babylonian lion's, really.

Those wings, they'd say.

They were right of course,

but what could I say to them except

I couldn't help it, that my arms

always moved up and down like that

whenever I fell down out of heaven.

Sometimes I felt like telling them

maybe it would help

if they thought of the angels

as small relief-maps of my soul,

sudden, uncontrolled curdlings

that occurred whenever I

stopped, opened myself

to the sun, or the moon.

And then there were times

I didn't know what to say, except

maybe they should think of them

as detailed descriptions of another life.

A life I was living but knew nothing about.

Author’s Note

If You Have Purchased This Book Without a CD

Some versions of this book are sold without the accompanying CD. If you have purchased such a version, please be assured it is the same book and can be read and enjoyed as is.

The purpose of the CD is to guide you in creating your own poetic speakings. The oral art of speaking is best learned by listening to it and imitating it. As you listen, your body will begin to remember this ancient, sacred way of speaking.

You can hear what SOULSPEAK sounds like by visiting our web page, www.soulspeak.org and selecting Many Voices. You can order the SOULSPEAK: The Outward Journey of the Soul CD via the web, or at a special, reduced price, by using the order form at the back of this book.

Acknowledgments

This book would never have been written without the aid of my partner in SOULSPEAK, Scylla Liscombe, because without her persistence, encouragement, and insight, SOULSPEAK might never have taken form. I would also like to thank the following poets and musicians and singers, all of whom have been instrumental in the ongoing development of SOULSPEAK as an art form: Joan Adley, Gary Drilling, Ellie Silver, John Le Gasse, Jack Notestein, George de Jong, Eric Wachsman, Jimi Gee, Jane Odle, and Ally Smith. I also owe a huge debt to the teachers, therapists, and students of the Sarasota County School system for providing crucial feedback on the SOULSPEAK process over the years. I would be amiss if I didn’t thank the many others who have assisted in preparing and evaluating the manuscript as it took form: Jan Dorsett, who was instrumental in shaping this book, Wayne Bussone, Norma deSofi, Lea and Cliff Huxford, Victoria Sullivan, Fran Johnson, and Meg Chow. And finally, I can find no words adequate enough to thank Pauline Spring, my former wife, friend, and the woman who gave me back my true life.

About the Author

Justin Spring resides in Sarasota, Florida. His poems have been published in such distinguished periodicals as American Poetry Review, Passages North, and Organica as well as numerous anthologies. He is the recipient of many prizes and honors and is the author of two collections of poems: Polaroid Poems, published in 1995 by White Eagle Coffee Store Press; and Other Dancers, published in 1991 by March Street Press. Mr. Spring’s oral poetry can be found on the following Many Voices/Soulspeak Studio recordings: Gathering (1997), Smoke (1998), Nursery Raps (1998), Speakings (1999), and In Your Mind (2001). Mr. Spring is the founder of SOULSPEAK/Sarasota Poetry Theatre and the originator, along with Scylla Liscombe, of SOULSPEAK, a contemporary version of ancient oral, antiphonal poetry. He is also the developer of Therapeutic SOULSPEAK, a specialized version of SOULSPEAK used by at-risk children and adults in therapy. Mr. Spring was educated at Columbia College.

Foreword

Dr. Stephen Larsen

The concept of soul, until the European Enlightenment, has never been disputed in world culture. “Animism,” the oldest mythological stratum according to classical Anthropology, and found on every continent, holds that the entire world is filled with spirit. The idea is glimpsed in the Paleolithic images of dancing shamans, in ceremonial burials in Egypt, in Socrates’ speculations, in Vedic texts, and in fact, in most world mythologies, which envision a soul which “incarnates” in this world, and when the body dies, moves on to a world of spirits, rejoins the ancestors, dissolves into multiple souls, or comes back for another go-round (re-incarnation). In ancient China the soul was seen as compound, some parts falling back into Earth at death while others transmigrated into ethereal heavens. In Christianity, the soul was not only believed to transcend death, but then to stand before God and receive judgment for deeds done while alive in the world (which was the theologians’ answer to how God could allow a world so filled with unfairness as this one, to exist).

In the seventeenth century, Descartes, like many of his contemporaries, was seeking to reconcile the older mythic-theological idea with the new revelations of the physical sciences. He would find the “seat” of the soul in the anatomy. His conclusion was that it dwelt, somehow, in the pineal gland, like a squirrel in its nest. An eighteenth-century scientist turned visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg, made a more plausible guess—that it lay in the cerebral cortex (now recognized as the seat of the “higher faculties”).

Through the nineteenth century, science was discovering the enormous complexities of physiology, and particularly the human nervous system. We were now to be seen as the bi‑products of chemistry and biology, with a veneer of social learning. “Nature vs. Nurture” was the controversy of the day. (But the argument left the soul out entirely.) After the discovery of the “bilateral functioning of the cerebral hemispheres” (attributed to Hughlings Jackson in 1864), and the revelations of the psychologies of the unconscious, with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, it began to be suspected that there was a split at the root of our natures—between the left hemisphere (words and reason) and the right hemisphere (images and myths). [Note that because of a crossover in our anatomy, symbolically, the left hemisphere controls and relates to the right hand, and all symbolism of the “right.” While the right hemisphere relates to the left hand, and the symbolism of the “left” including that which is sinister (Latin-Italian) and gauche (French), but which also includes intuition and mental imagery.]

And guess what? Most of the very thinking and communicating about this problematical split has been in words. The left hemisphere, historically, has been in the ascendancy! (Though in Julian Jaynes “Bicameral Mind” theory, the rational ego side equated with the sense of “I” is subject to encounters with the non-dominant hemisphere, which produces hallucination-like experiences interpreted by a person who has them as the voice of a god. Thus the revenge of the non-dominant hemisphere; it pronounces like an oracle or a hidden god, deus absconditus. The non-dominant hemisphere is not only the “underdog,” but a crafty one, who manages to get his way through something other than “reason.”)

To be sure, the soul waited in the wings. (See, our metaphor turns visual.) Exiled from the social sciences, soul lurked in the humanities, literature, music, the arts. Joyce, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Picasso, Debussy. (The soul announces itself even when movements, such as Surrealism, Dada, or Existentialism pronounce its annihilation, because at least it is treated as a worthy antagonist.) And we know how Picasso was unable to keep “primitive art” out of his paintings (more on this in the book) and an unbelievable sense of the daemonic seems to follow his very line.

But what is soul? Is it a “divine fire,” a fragment of God embodied in ourselves? The capacity to dream and to create? An hallucination? An epiphenomenona, a mere by-product of a brain that contains ten billion neurons (and so it has to entertain itself with the fantasy of immortality, as well as trying to figure out the universe—a task at which it keeps perpetually failing)? Or is it language, the godlike ability to create realities through words, explored years ago by Ernst Cassirer, and currently debated by Leonard Schlain in The Goddess and the Alphabet? (Where words are seen associated with patriarchy, and images and symbols with the antique cult of the Great Goddess are associated with matriarchy). Or is the soul consciousness itself, that flickers out when the brain perishes? Clearly it has to do with the way our brains and bodies are organized, so let us pursue this track just a little.

All of the best arts span the human hemispheres, our two kinds of mentality, and thus represent what makes us wholly and completely human: When we try to describe the emotional meaning of an experience, paint an idea, critically analyze a symphony or a painting, introduce a pastel, romantic atmosphere into a novel, or write a poem that puts images into structured language. We rely on soundtracks in movies to tell us what the emotional “take” on the scene is to be. (And we think of the small boy who said to his parents after seeing a movie of a mugging ambush on a street, “I wouldn’t have gone around that corner if I’d heard that music playing!”) The soul seems to arise as our experience arises; it is alive, and lives where we live; it is neither this nor that, but both and . . .

The soul is there, as the poet Novalis declared, in the “overlap” between the worlds, where “the inner world meets the outer world.” It is also there where the left meets the right, where the swirling waveforms from each hemisphere intersect and create moiré patterns, where images appear out of the smoke, where we are truly haunted.

This, then, leads us to the subject of this book, and to some stories. [Developmental Psychologist Jerome Bruner says that not until we have “narratized” our experience (that is, made it into a story) can we understand it. Word and image, causal inferences, are associated with the left hemisphere. It tells us of the denotative, dictionary meanings of the words and action. But the right hemisphere makes it all make sense in an emotional way. We look at the characters, the situation, and make feeling inference: “If he did this and this, he must have meant that . . .” Story brings words to life.]

Sometimes stories can even nest within stories, and poems as well, as you will see.

The manuscript of SOULSPEAK: The Outward Journey of the Soul arrived just a little before Woodstock’s first International Poetry Festival (August 2001). I carried it with me in my briefcase as I went from the theater to the library, to the cafés in town. I heard many dozens of poets recite or read works that varied from the exquisite to the excruciating. But great poets were there: Robert Bly, Billy Collins, Edwin Sanders, Janine Vega, Mikhail Horowitz, intoning and incanting in the bosky vale beneath the late-summer Catskill mountains. And soul in a large sense was present. The readings were passionate, piquant, hilarious, and the hip audience as one organism often laughed at subtle lines in long poems. There was no lack of attention to the poetic experience; in fact, the group’s attention hovered like an invisible entity above the rustic Bearsville theater, discerning, humorous, palpable. The ghosts of Utopian experiments and failed artists’ colonies, Beat poets and psychedelic hipsters gathered around. The air was thick, actinic, volatile.

Between the events, my wife Robin and I went out to a little park behind the theater, with the Aesopus Creek babbling softly nearby. Late afternoon sunlight slanted through the pine and hemlock, tinting pink the exposed granite boulders in the creek bottom.

Robin (pretty and brunette, my wife of thirty-seven years) was lulled by a glass of wine at our creekside brunch, and an overrich diet of mental imagery. She lay curled and sleepy on the soft moss. I sat on a little stone bench and read the instructions for how to “SOULSPEAK.” We used the seed words: “mountain, love, green, arms, mother, cold, window.” I don’t think Robin understood the instructions exactly, so sleepy she was, and that she was allowed to take each seed word and make a separate sentence of it, pausing in between to let images form. So she spoke almost all of them at once. “In the warm darkness, under the mountain, my mother sits in her green dress. The arms of her love cradle all our cold shadows.”

Rich imagery flooded my mind and I felt an unexpected rush of emotion at what Robin had just said. I was glimpsing the power of the oral tradition, and the authority of the voice that came with it: the authentic poetic voice that Justin Spring would teach us to evoke, in this book.

There were definitely bad poets at the festival too, so comparison was easy. When they read, shouted, droned, or kvetched, I would find myself distracted, or bored, if not just pissed off. But when the poet touched that subterranean power that Spring talks about, my attention was rapt, breathless, respectful. I thought of the archetypal Bard, Taliesin, who rebuked the false poets, praise singers of the cruel King Maelgwyn. Taliesin said that poetry was a “divine fire” and not to be used carelessly, or for the vain praise of men.

As I sat in the warm darkness under the mountain, the scale and implications of what my friend Justin Spring was trying to do broke through. He was trying to teach the art of touching divine fire, and not just for poets in a rarified atmosphere, but for youth at-risk in a ghetto—for the elemental human soul. My mind felt joyous for the path Spring had chosen, not only a path with heart, but one with soul. It was an authentic spiritual experience, without the trappings of religion, to learn the elemental voice, the soul’s voice, that depends, beautifies, and ennobles all our experience.

My mind went back to Columbia University in 1960, when Justin and I were students there. Columbia was a galaxy of talent in those days: Mark van Doren (and his famous son Charles), F.W. Dupee, Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun. While the “pre-meds” lurked in the back of our brownstone fraternity house, poring over their books, the “humanities” guys gathered around the front room, the “triple,” where Justin and his friend Joe dwelt—which also became a salon for profound ideas and amazing metaphysical discussions, going on far into the night: Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Yeats were our main menus.

One semester, finals were fast approaching. At these fey and unstable times Columbia students would respond to the tension either by cramming desperately on the one hand, or escaping to the nearby West End bar on the others. Sometimes the tension exploded into an orgy of water balloon fights up and down the halls. (I think we were all ADD, as well as fairly bright.) Back in at the “triple” Justin Spring and his friend Joe suddenly decided to draw a full, wall-size copy of Michelangelo’s Damned Sinner. They worked for days on the masterpiece. When they were finished, all the bleary-eyed “brothers” came to marvel at this final triumph of the right hemisphere—even during the great apotheosis of the left (the final exams). And sure enough, after the “imagery buffers” had emptied themselves out in this peculiar and wonderful way, Justin and Joe finished their term papers in good style, and passed their finals.

A year or two after Justin graduated (he was ahead of me), I had an opportunity to study with the poet Kenneth Koch. Koch not only made poetry come alive for Columbia students, he did the same for high school students in Harlem, just below Morningside Heights on the East side, at a public school where he would teach once a week. He would greet the sea of African and Hispanic faces with “Good morning, poets!” He made poetry come alive for them, and them for us. Koch read us their poems, and them ours, closing a circuit between both populations of his students.

This summer, one of our own projects at the not-for-profit center my wife and I administrate was to teach Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” to inner-city high school students. Among other projects, one of the most powerful was to make a mask. The masks empowered the students to find their voices in much the same way as Koch and Spring did. In a recent weekend public event in an inner-city park, the young people presented their poems—some with masks and/or music. They also showed personal movies they had made. Their families stood around proudly witnessing all the soul talk—right there in the inner city. The atmosphere was magical and unmistakable: “Hablamos Alma aqui.” (Soul is spoken here.) We make SOULSPEAK!

In an age in which so much of what people say is social gambit, political rhetoric, make-talk cliché, I applaud Justin Spring’s powerful technique for returning us to what is truly important, a language that means something, and that echoes vertically as well as sending out ripples horizontally; that is to say, it combines communication with a reference to the soul and the realm of the invisibles. It is language that you could never be ashamed of having spoken, because you would like these words to echo around the eaves of the universe. They are beautiful, incantatory, descriptive, and wise. They are the glittering mantle in which soul best likes to wrap itself.

The best poets know this. They know that if their words are not charged with emotion, painted with color, weighed and balanced (internal structure), and graced with spirit, they will break up like small inconsequential clouds and drift into the realm of unbecoming. The poem should evoke something not graspable in any other way. SOULSPEAK hovers between the realms of the shaman’s magic and the priest’s incantation, the artist’s stroke and the philosopher’s insight. Poetry is a calculus of the emotions, and if the poem is destined for immortality, also a calculus of the spirit. It describes a curve, an acceleration of realization, an epiphany—in short, the movements of soul.

I advise you to work with this book experientially; try the exercises, sense the vast imponderable soul-animal Spring invokes for us, lying beneath us. Think that God is hovering nearby, just waiting to borrow your voice.

As one of my exercises, going through the manuscript of SOULSPEAK, I did a written poem. Though I do not consider myself a poet (I have a few prose books in print, and my last one, The Fashioning of Angels, has just one poem of mine in it, and one from my wife, Robin), I offer a piece of it to you the reader, nascent poet that you are. (Good morning poets!) and potential student of SOULSPEAK. (To help contextualize the poem, I will share with you that I had just come back from Africa, where I had seen many animals in a marvelous game park in an antediluvian volcano crater [The Pilansberg, it is called], and that a figure I had seen in a filmstrip there, of a little bushman imitating an antelope, lurked in my mind. Also, as I told you, I had just heard some bad poets. In the poem I found myself comparing the “capturing” of the metaphors, images, and words of live poetry to how we relate to animals. I saw all the word-creatures in my mind standing there in their furry coats, the elegant eland, the lordly lion, the disreputable warthog.)

Be like the Bushman

Don’t frighten the children of your imagination, friend,

try not to come in like a Boer beating the bush for beasts,

but a little bushman, who mostly wants to learn their story.

So that, puckish, in front of the communal fire,

your fingers in a cone, with little pinky

horns to the side,

eyes bright as the antelope, you unmistakably

mimic the creature’s routine.

Everyone watches

(everyone listens)

and everyone understands.

Stephen Larsen, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus SUNY, and the author/editor of seven books currently in print, among them The Shaman’s Doorway, and the Mythic Imagination. With his wife, Robin, he co-authored, A Fire in the Mind, The Life of Joseph Campbell, and The Fashioning of Angels: Partnership as a Spiritual Practice. Stephen and his wife Robin co-direct The Center for Symbolic Studies in New Paltz, New York (mythmind.com).

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part I ~ Background and History

Chapter 1 Speaking to the Gods 5 Chapter 2 Accepting Tribal Art 10

Chapter 3 The Vocabulary of Tribal Art 13

Chapter 4 The Soul’s Stories 17

Chapter 5 The Effect of Writing on Consciousness 25

Chapter 6 Preliterate Poetry¾A Primer 27

Chapter 7 SOULSPEAK as a Participatory Art 35

Part II ~ Preparing to Speak

Chapter 8 The Communal Nature of SOULSPEAK 42

Chapter 9 SOULSPEAK as a Journey 44

Chapter 10 My Own Journey Continues 56

Part III ~ Creating a Speaking

Chapter 11 Creating a Speaking 61

Chapter 12 Some Additional Tips on Speaking 68

Chapter 13 Speaking and Responding 73

Chapter 14 Expanding SOULSPEAK 75
Chapter 15 Other SOULSPEAK Catalysts 83

Chapter 16 SOULSPEAK as an Aid to Writing Poetry 91

Part IV ~ Some Final Thoughts on SOULSPEAK

Chapter 17 Some Final Thoughts on SOULSPEAK 95

Part V ~ A New Call for an Older Poetry

Introduction to Part V 103

Chapter 18 The State of Contemporary Poetry 105

Chapter 19 What Oral Poetry Brings to the Table 110

Chapter 20 We Have Mistaken the Totem

for the God 113

Chapter 21 The Encroaching Sea of Orality 117

Chapter 22 Oral Poetry: Common and Uncommon

Speech 126

Chapter 23 The Transition from Oral to Written

Poetry 131

Chapter 24 A Brief History of Oral and Written

Poetry 135

Chapter 25 The Form of Oral Poetry 142

Chapter 26 The Difference Between Oral and Written

Composition 146

Chapter 27 Let’s Pretend You’re an Epic Poet 158

Chapter 28 Oral Poetry as a Galapagos of Poetry 170

Chapter 29 Rap and Slam Poetry 172

Chapter 30 Performance and Music in Poetry 179

Chapter 31 Using Rap and Homer to Convince 186

the Skeptical

Afterword 192

Appendix 196

Introduction

This book is about unlocking a source of beauty already within us—a source that has been with us since we first became human. It is the first poetry—a musical, spontaneous poetry that will rise out of us as easily as gossip does, once we reawaken it. I call these poems speakings because they are created by two or more people speaking out spontaneously from their deeper selves.

Some will be drawn to the history and nature of this ancient poetry, and some to what it can teach us about poetry in general. Others will be challenged to create their own speakings.

The book has been laid out in five sections and an Appendix to accommodate the needs of a wide range of readers:

• Part I looks at preliterate, tribal poetry from an historical and artistic perspective. The term speakings is introduced to describe that poetry.

• Part II is background material about the nature of SOULSPEAK, a contemporary version of preliterate speakings.

• Part III details the actual SOULSPEAK processes used in creating a speaking.

• Part IV looks at the value of speaking in contemporary life.

• Part V looks at contemporary poetry through the lens of the ancient art of speaking. Contemporary poetry, the art of Homer, and rap are examined under a new and revealing light.

• The Appendix contains detailed information on SOULSPEAK programs available for the general public, at-risk children, and adults in therapy.

As much of the material in this book has no counterpart, I would suggest that the reader first approach the book as a whole and read it in its entirety, then decide which sections are of primary interest.

Finally, I’d like to say that this book was not created as an abstract exercise, but is the end result of my efforts, along with Scylla Liscombe, my partner in SOULSPEAK, to create a more speakable written poetry. These efforts eventually allowed us to step through the looking glass into the ancient world of oral poetry. The journey that awaited us was far beyond our expectations and still continues for us. This book is an invitation for you to join us on that journey.

Envoi

I would have preferred

teaching you

by speaking to you,

by touching your face and lips

as a blind man would.

But as we are all

prisoners of time,

I am sending you

this offering, this shadow

of my speaking.

I send it out to you

like Noah lofting his last dove,

not knowing if it will ever reach

the land of your body.

Not knowing

if you will ever feel

the rush

of its small fierce heart.

Part I

Background and History

Speaking to the Gods

It is the sound of the soul speaking.

SOULSPEAK. Just the word, or the sound of it, seems to strike something deep inside us. We look up expectantly, as if we somehow know what it means, but not quite. When people ask me what I do for a living and I tell them SOULSPEAK, they have that same look of expectancy and puzzlement. Then they break down and ask me what it means, really. When I say it means just that, SOULSPEAK, they accuse me of teasing them. Perhaps I am, but in a Socratic way, because I’m trying to tease them into discovering what they already know. And they do know what it means, because after a moment’s hesitation they almost always say back, Yes, the soul speaking, or, Yes, speaking from the soul, and then there’s a second moment of confusion because they don’t really know what speaking from the soul means, even if they somehow sense that it’s possible.

The reason for the confusion is that we have forgotten how to do it. But if our minds have forgotten, our bodies haven’t. It’s in our DNA—but hidden away, recessive. Recessive is a good word in this case, like the recessive genes that sometimes cause babies to be born with small tail-like appendages. A little piggy reminder of our animal heritage. The act of speaking from the soul also comes from our distant past. It is the way our tribal ancestors spoke to the gods. They knew it was a different way of speaking than their normal, everyday talk, or gossip. But they also knew it was somehow related, in that it materialized as mysteriously as their everyday speech, but from a deeper center of their beings, from their souls.

I should say precisely what I mean by the soul, as there have been centuries of religious, metaphysical, and philosophical discussions about its nature. While I dismiss none of this out of hand, I’m suspicious of most organized thought. I only know what I know, and what I know is that there is something very deep in me, almost hidden from me, that is guiding me towards some end. What that end is, I have no idea. Nor do I know why this is happening, or who is making it happen, or what is its nature. I know only that it exists. I can feel it, and I call it the soul, which is the word I use for my deepest, most mysterious self. The soul is both me and not me. In some sense, the word soul is really a metaphor for that most mysterious part of us that is utterly beyond knowing, much as God is a metaphor for that indescribable mystery that is at the heart of everything. What God actually is is beyond comprehension. The same thing applies to the soul. I can’t tell you what it is, I can only tell you stories about it. Here is one, a story of discovery:

You are in a small boat, alone. You’re anxious, but not afraid. You know where you’re going. Dover, then somewhere else, you say to yourself. You’re ready for anything. And flexible. Hell, sometimes you change directions just like that. At any rate, you have reasons for every move you make: if not before the fact, then after. You’re sure of yourself, you have maps, sextants, whatever, to guide you. You raise and lower sails; turn on, turn off the motor as the mood suits you. You make port, just as you had planned, but you’re slightly off, landing in Calais instead of Dover. You can’t really say why.

Sometime later, back at sea, you lean over the side. There is something thin, almost invisible, like a line, attached to the bottom, leading down to the cavernous depths. The line, if it is a line, seems infinitely long, almost numinous. It comes and goes, as in a dream. As you watch, you sometimes see it moving in the same direction as the boat, then sometimes in a different direction. When it goes in a different direction, it pulls you slightly off course. Or at least that’s how it feels. Calais instead of Dover, you say to yourself. All of a sudden, something dark and glittery rises up from the depths. You can almost see it. It is just beneath the surface, rippling the water. You sense something familiar yet mysterious, something that is like you and yet not you. You want to call it something, you’re not sure what. And then it disappears. The soul is the term that suddenly comes to mind.

Later on, you realize the boat shudders when it is not going in the same direction as the soul. You don’t know why, but you guess it has something to do with the strain on the line. But how do you keep in step with the soul? Something in you says, Lean with it, whatever that means, and you do. The boat stops shuddering. You’re in the groove, but absolutely in the dark as to where you’re going. But you know it’s where you’re supposed to be going. For better, or for worse.

If that little story describes a moment of awakening—the moment when you first became aware of something utterly mysterious in your deepest self, something that is you and yet not you—then the story has done its job. But I’m still no closer to telling you what the soul really is. I can only tell you its effects, much as physicists use a cloud chamber to prove the existence of atomic particles. You never see the actual particles, only their traces. And you never see the soul, only its traces, its effects. The soul can only be approached indirectly, through stories.

Perhaps I should tell you another story about the soul, one closer to the point of this book, which is that speaking from the soul is an art we have forgotten. It is a very human art, and it is in us, waiting to be reawakened. Somehow, the body knows how to let the soul speak. We just have to hear it and we can do it. Why? Because mimesis (imitation—the urge to imitate, to replicate, to make) is an essential human urge. It is what drives the creative artist to portray the world in a particular way, a way that imitates the texture of the soul’s expressions.

None of this is news. Without the urge to imitate, the soul’s messages would pass through us like smoke through a forest. Because of our need to imitate, however, all we have to do is witness (or experience) something that appeals to us and something in us wants to replicate it—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Insofar as the spoken arts are concerned, this is how we learn to gossip, to make jokes, to speak from the soul. Here is another story. It is a story about the soul speaking:

You are in a boat, alone. Again. You keep busy, playing the radio, talking to yourself. You remember someone telling you, you forget who, that whales are always somewhere beneath you, singing their mysterious, elaborate songs. But you have no way of knowing exactly where they are. How could you? The whales, wherever they are, are in another world, one far beneath the surface of your life. You hear only the music from your favorite station, your own mutterings.

Then, for some reason, you become restless. Suddenly, the hull begins to throb so loudly you vibrate like a string. You’re trembling, but not afraid. Somehow you know what’s happening, even if you can’t quite put it into words. You don’t know why, but you sense that something absolutely huge and wondrous is just beneath the boat. You glance over the side. The water all around you is dark, rippling like a shadow. You surrender to it, let it rise up through your body. Something in you speaks. But the sound of your voice is different. Suddenly, you realize what the sound is, why it is different. It is the sound of you and not you. It is the sound of the soul speaking.

I know you would like more precise directions on finding the whale, perhaps positioning the boat, but they’re not necessary at this stage. That comes later. All you have to do is accept the essential truth of the story: that speaking from the soul is in us, that all we have to do is bring the self and soul close enough and the body will take care of the rest. The problem for us is that unlike tribal man, our souls have been layered over with our modern consciousness, a consciousness much different from that of our tribal ancestors, a consciousness that makes it much harder for us than it was for tribal man to speak because, for us, the whale is too far beneath the boat.

Just what that distance is—the difference in consciousness between tribal and modern man—is a matter of debate, but I think it is clear that prehistoric, preliterate man operated in a different sea of consciousness than modern, literate man. Tribal man lived more in the present, in the sea of is. Modern man, who only occasionally lives in that sea, is preoccupied with the life inside his mind, where he is constantly reliving his past and previewing his future. Endlessly. Endlessly.

Accepting Tribal Art

Everyone was an artist because there was nothing else but art.

If we want to speak from the soul, we have to somehow quell the busy nature of our modern consciousness. That is what makes speaking so difficult for us. To put it another way, we have to shorten the distance between the whale and the boat. Some may question the value of going back to that state of consciousness. After all, we are who we are: civilized, twenty-first century beings. Of what value is the primitive soul-speaking of tribal man to us? This is a pivotal question because it assumes that, unlike us, tribal man was simple, child-like, inferior. But was he? Let’s just say he had a different sphere of attention. He lived more in the sea of is. Because of that, he didn’t care about the things we hold so dear.

To understand this we will have to shake the belief of our nineteenth- (and sometimes twentieth-) century forefathers that tribal man was inferior to modern (scientific, rational) man. This conviction goes back to the early Greeks, whose highly developed sense of language drove them to define everything they encountered (thus the cliché, “The Greeks had a word for it.”) They gave us, for example, the word barbarian (barbaros), because that is what the language of less verbally developed races sounded like: bar-bar. Thick-tongued. Inferior.

But humans develop what they need. An incredibly flexible language was obviously the key to expressing the Greek genius. If you didn’t have it, the Greeks felt you were lost. Bar-bar. But the “barbaric” peoples of the Sudan, for example, whom the Greeks obviously encountered in their ancient travels, may not have needed a highly developed language to express their genius. Perhaps rhythmic song was more to the point. Whose cultural expression is transforming the arts around the globe today, Greek succinctness or African song?

It is only in the twentieth century that we begin to see ourselves truly awakening to the genius of tribal art, because of the traffic in prehistoric masks and art, the small artifacts that somehow survived the ravages of time. And, the time was right. Painters like Picasso were looking for new ways of seeing. He recognized the genius of tribal art and immediately incorporated it into his work. Others followed. It is important to note that it was an artist who recognized the true worth of tribal art. Picasso didn’t see it as primitive, child-like, stupid, but as insightful, daring, beautiful. Indeed, it is difficult to find artists of any kind today who don’t find the sculptures and glyphs and drawings of tribal man original and stunningly beautiful.

This didn’t just happen overnight. Eighteenth-century thought gave birth to the idea of the noble savage, with all its implications for the Romantic movement and the concept of the inherent dignity of man. But the actual savage seldom benefited from his perceived “nobleness.” Certainly something genuine was being perceived, as in the later nineteenth-century paintings of Rousseau and Gauguin, but both those artists were ultimately concerned with their own ideas of art, which had little to do with tribal art. Other than these early glimmerings that the “primitive” held something valuable, the concept of the noble savage seldom broke the surface of ideology into the world of equality. Don’t forget that those same noble savages were enslaved by the millions, and often by the same people who held them to be noble. It is really only when tribal cultures are first perceived through their art, and not through ideas, that we began to see the true power and beauty and intelligence of those cultures. Why is this? Why did a twentieth-century artist like Picasso see the power of tribal art? Why wasn’t it also seen by historians and anthropologists and philosophers and critics and sociologists and mathematicians? And why didn’t earlier artists see it?

Well, perhaps some did, but maybe the time wasn’t right for it to be generally accepted. When the time was right, however, it was an artist who first saw its true worth. He saw it because, like himself, tribal man was an artist to the bone. He expressed himself only through art, most of which was self-created. Everyone was an artist because there was nothing else but art. Although this surprises some people, there was no history or sociology or mathematics or philosophy or anything else except art until the act of writing was invented. So it is only natural that the true, perceptive link back to tribal man would ultimately be made by an artist. It makes sense then that the conclusion many artists have come to is very much to the point of this book: there is nothing primitive or simple about tribal man, or his art. If art is any indicator of “intelligence,” tribal man was the equal, if not the superior, of modern man.

The Vocabulary of Tribal Art

We are stories within stories within stories

There is another way to describe the link between the artist and tribal man. If tribal man lived easily in the deepest center of himself, in the sea of is, then he has a sometime companion in the true artist. The true artist is a constant traveler to the underworld of the soul—a traveler who reappears from time to time with the gifts, or celebrations, we call art. Thus, it is easier for the true creative artist to journey past the strange, alien surface of tribal art to see it for what it truly is: a powerful portrayal of the soul, but a portrayal whose vocabulary is closer to the vocabulary of the soul than the self.

What I mean by the vocabulary of the soul is that the shapes, colors, words, images, sounds, movements used in tribal art are not the realistic ones we have come to favor in our art. If we put our various abstract experiments in art aside, our artists generally portray the world of the soul by using the realistic world of the self. A cow looks like a cow, because that is what we want in our art. Tribal man was aware of the realistic. He knew what a cow looked like, just as he knew that the odd-shaped, flowing-line figure he drew of a cow was different from the actual cow. He simply had a different way of getting to the heart of the matter. His artist’s intuition told him that his odd, elastic line-figure portrayed the spiritual essence of the cow. It was closer to the way the soul recognizes the cow. So it is only natural that someone who lived closer to his soul would portray the cow in these “unrealistic” terms. The idea of portraying the cow realistically would never have occurred to him. This closeness of self and soul is what often makes tribal art seem child-like to us, despite its often bizarre and mysterious subject matter. Like tribal art, a child’s stick figure drawings are as real to him as the imaginary friend who visits him every afternoon. This is because the child still has one foot firmly placed in the sea of is. In that, he is very much like tribal man. The bones in his head haven’t completely sealed yet. There are still openings. Little cracks. Fissures.

Like tribal art, our dreams also employ a vocabulary closer to the soul than the self, and this sometimes makes them appear as strange—as alien—as tribal art. In very early tribal art, one detects an elastic sense of dimension, time, place, and identity. It is the same elastic sense we detect in our dreams. This is a reflection of tribal art’s closeness to the soul, because it reflects the fact that the soul exists both in time and out of time. This is because the soul is both us and not us. Because the not us exists in a mysterious, unknowable world, we could hardly expect the demarcations of time and place and identity to be as precise as they are in our waking life. This sense of imprecision occurs only to modern man. Tribal man, on the other hand, saw the elasticity of his art as very precise, because it perfectly reflected the true world of the soul.

This may be tricky ground. Some will say that all vocabularies are vocabularies of the self—that the soul has none. Perhaps on the very deepest level, they’re correct. But the earlier metaphor of our total awareness as an ocean that simultaneously supports the conscious self (the boat) and the whale (the soul) is an apt one, because we can’t tell where the self stops and the soul begins¾we sense our awareness as a continuum. Sometimes that continuum is shaded more towards the soul as we go deeper, and sometimes more towards the self as we approach the surface of our consciousness. That continuum, however, exists only in time. When we enter that timeless place that is also the soul—as through very deep meditation—there is no way to talk about what we’re experiencing. It simply is. It has no face.

As an artist, however, I can’t stay there. In fact I don’t even want to be there because I can’t make art until the soul has a face, or a voice, albeit a very deep, very hazy, very mysterious one. In the world of the soul I inhabit, the soul has already crossed into time. And as an artist, I am standing at that threshold. In that world—the world all artists have inhabited since the beginning of time—it is impossible to say where the self stops and the soul starts: where me becomes not me. The soul has many faces. And many voices. And all of them are you. And not you

I don’t mean to make too much of the closeness of the artist to tribal man. It’s somewhat misleading. At best, today’s artists hear only whispers of what those ancient tribal artists heard—those artists who inhabited the soul’s world almost continuously, so much so as to humble the most gifted of us. While it is sometimes easier for the artist to get past the seemingly strange surface of tribal art, there are times when we all can begin to experience its power and beauty. When we do, we dispel forever the idea that these people were primitive with nothing to teach us. This happens when tribal art bears a close resemblance to contemporary art. Two rare and notable examples are the thirty-thousand-year-old cave paintings of bison at Lascaux, in France and Altamira, in Spain.

How these miraculous paintings came to be is a mystery—a part of the mystery of art. I believe that at each cave there was an initial artist of genius who simply transcended his time, much as Homer and Michelangelo transcended theirs. Homer and Michelangelo may have started in their time, but they didn’t end in their time. The later dark, serpentine humor of the Odyssey is vastly different from the early, statuesque nobility of the Iliad and everything else of its time. And the last, ghost-like, barely formed Pietas of Michelangelo are so different from his early, charged, highly polished David and everything else of its time, that we can only conclude these artists somehow burst out of the constraints of time. Indeed, in their later work, Homer seems to be suddenly living in the time of Cervantes, and Michelangelo in the time of Brancusi.

Thanks to those nameless, preliterate artists at Lascaux and Altamira who also transcended time, even the thickest of us can see that these prehistoric people, despite their lack of shampoo and atom bombs, were not primitive in any way whatsoever. They may have been more sophisticated in the ways of the soul than we could ever expect to be. The cave paintings aside, what makes most prehistoric art so difficult to “get” is that its surface is so radically different from what we are used to seeing: a more realistic representation of the world. Modern abstract art has taught us to see in a different, “unrealistic” way, and may help us a bit in looking at tribal art. But tribal art is not abstract in quite the same way as modern art is. Modern abstract art is the result of an intellectual decision to challenge the eye. The tribal artist, on the other hand, felt his “abstraction” to be real beyond belief. I have no doubt the hair on the back of his neck rose up when he looked at those intricate, abstract glyphs, much as ours does when we look at Michelangelo’s sculptures. Maybe even more so.

To understand why this is so, you have to throw out all the academic nonsense about “art” and see it for what it really is. Once you strip away all the ideologies and “isms” we have attached to art (and the act of artistic creation), we can see art for what it truly is: a portrayal—or imitation, in human terms—of the soul’s stories. For tribal man, those human terms had a vocabulary closer to the soul than the self. That is why the surface of tribal art seems so puzzling to us. We have to go deep to get it, if we can. Once we understand this—that art is a conscious and unconscious partnership between the self and the soul—we can look even more closely at its true nature. For one thing, this partnership makes art different from our dreams, which occur only when the self is asleep. For if it is the soul’s inherent nature to express itself endlessly, both in our waking and sleeping states, it is the self’s inherent nature to want to portray—to imitate—the soul’s stories. And if you want to complete the circle, the soul’s stories can be seen as portrayals (or imitations) of God’s story. What we have are those endless, concentric, intertwining circles and curves we see everywhere in tribal art. Tribal man had no trouble in portraying the essential mystery of our existence: we are stories within stories within stories.

The Soul’s Stories

The soul can’t stop making itself up.

What is the soul attempting to do by endlessly expressing itself every hour of our existence? Who is it talking to, and why? We can’t really say. It is a mystery—so much a mystery that just one aspect of it, dreaming, has baffled science. There is constant talk about dreaming being the way the brain reorganizes its memories, but it is clear to anyone concerned with matters of the soul that science is only scratching the surface. And why not, since the only source of awareness science recognizes is the mind, completely dismissing the soul. To have a real understanding of the nature of our dreams, we have to accept that we have two centers of awareness. One of these centers of awareness, the soul, is utterly mysterious and beyond the knowing of science. All science can do is describe the effects, like REM, the rapid eye movement that occurs when we dream. Or what happens to us when we are deprived of dreaming for long periods. (We become emotionally unbalanced.) One aspect of dreaming that makes it so mysterious is that the soul doesn’t seem to care whether we consciously partake of our dreams or not. It’s as if we were composed of two different sets of consciousness. As if we were living two lives. Us and not us. We all know people who go through entire lifetimes swearing they never dream. We know this isn’t true, but what is true is that they somehow manage to completely ignore their dreams. Like talk at a cocktail party.

Yet the soul never stops dreaming. It can’t stop. It is the essential nature of the soul to express itself. The ancient Jewish mystical teachings of the Kabbala tell us that the soul is an actor. This has many implications, one of them being that the soul has many faces, many voices. Strange though it may seem to those who think of the soul as one, it was not strange to tribal man. Only when the act of writing emerged and man became self-conscious (capable of daydreaming) did we see the self gaining control and forcing a unity upon the unknowable. One God. Prior to that, tribal man experienced the unknowable as many gods, not one. And just as the concept of many gods was accepted without question by tribal man, the idea of multiple souls, or multiple portrayals of the soul, was equally accepted. Tribal man accepted without question that it is the soul’s nature to express itself continually through its endless stories of love and hate and life and death and fear and joy. What we have to learn from tribal man is that the soul can’t stop making itself up. Nor can we. Nor can God.

In the Many Voices section of the CD accompanying this book, there is a speaking called “Prisoner of Time” that celebrates this continual expression. It is not a speaking from thirty thousand years ago, but a contemporary version of that art form I call SOULSPEAK.

(Note: There are many other speakings on the CD. Begin listening to them, like background music, whenever you can.)

First close your eyes and listen to it in its oral, multi-voiced, musical form. It loses its power when reduced to a written, single-voiced, non-musical state. Here are some transcribed phrases, however, to give you an idea of its content:

God can’t stop making us up.

And everything we touch.

We are the sound of God speaking.

God only speaks in time.

We are the prisoners of time.

And we are most us when we are

standing on the glittery edge

where God is making us up and we

are making ourselves up

at the same time.

This speaking is concerned primarily with the mystery we call God. All we can truly know about that mystery is what the character Pip (for example), in Great Expectations, knows about Dickens: nothing. Pip exists for Dickens, but Dickens doesn’t exist for Pip. Fate (a blindly felt moving force) does, but not Dickens. Dickens is outside of Pip’s world—of Pip’s ability to imagine, to know—just as God is beyond ours. We can only guess at God’s nature by witnessing the effects of that nature. Like the French philosopher, Descartes, if we look at these effects hard enough, and long enough, a pattern emerges. That pattern, when you reduce it all down, consists of endlessly repeated forms of creation and destruction: birth and death. Everything else is really a subset of those two primal forces. We can also sense that they are linked in some primal way, which in tribal art takes the form of the snake eating its own tail. Those circles again.

How do we make sense of these inter-linked cycles of creation and destruction? We make sense of it through stories. Stories imitate that huge, intuitively sensed but essentially unknowable story of unending birth and death we call God’s story. The exact intent and structure of God’s story is never clear to us. We sense the story only indirectly. We have no idea of the plot, the characters, the words. How could we? After all, we are only the sound of God speaking.

The relation of novelist to hero is an apt one because Dickens’ intent is never clear to Pip. It can’t be. If anything, Pip feels what we feel: that something larger is guiding us, but we don’t really understand what, or why. Again,

We are the sound of God speaking.

Not the words. Not the text. The sound. The vibration. The feeling. Because of this, the best we can do is imitate the mystery through art: the snake eating its own tail. And when we create stories that successfully imitate this mystery, we immediately recognize them as intuitively true, and beautiful:

And we are most us when we are

standing on the glittery edge

where god is making us up and we

are making ourselves up

at the same time

Keats was right: Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty. This then, the portrayal of mysteries, is the essential function of art. Everything else is secondary—runoff from the mainstream.

In this text two terms have been interchanged: art and stories. This is because art is, in its most essential form, a story. It is a story, however, created from a deeper level than mere gossip, or jokes, which make up the bulk of our stories. Music is the one art where the story has to be emotionally, almost intuitively grasped. There are no characters, only emotional progressions, and in that sense music is extremely close to the nature of the soul’s stories. Although there is no way of knowing, my feeling is that the soul’s stories (or God’s story) are something like pure emotion or music or sound or smell—nothing like the self’s detailed stories of notes and words and shapes and colors.

We are the prisoners of time.

Up until modern times, all the arts took the shape of stories, reflecting the triadic structure—beginning, middle, and end—that Aristotle deemed necessary in order for art to be successful. In our times, however, we have learned to make art without stories—non-narrative art, or art that violates the triadic principle. We can see those experiments most noticeably in contemporary painting and poetry. While never completely non-narrative, they come close, as in the case of a poem or a painting that attempts to imitate an emotional state, such as we see in Mark Rothko’s paintings of bands of pure color.

We could say that Rothko’s colors create an emotional state—death or loneliness or desire—but it would be more accurate to say Rothko’s bands of progressive color somehow reflect (or imitate) an emotional state already deep within us. That emotional state, however, never exists on its own. When Rothko’s work brings up that remembered state, it’s always intertwined with one or more of the countless stories that make up our sense of who we are: Mary’s broken porch, That winter afternoon. And those stories are attached to others. Our lives are nothing more, nothing less, than an endless collection of stories we inherit, create, retell, remember, and forget. Those endless concentric, intertwining circles again. The depiction of the stories that make us up as circular may seem strange to those who think of a story as a simple straight line: beginning, middle, and end—a story with no ancestors and no children. Tribal man, however, had a better grasp of the truth: we are composed of many stories—each giving birth to another, and all of them constantly wheeling through our consciousness as the stars wheel through the heavens. Some are rising, some are falling. Some are dying, some are being born. Quite simply, stories are the way we make sense of the world. We know no other way. We are, in some very real sense, a menagerie of stories. And we are never without them, because without them we would collapse. We would cease to exist as humans. We would be like the terrifying theoretical case of the man born without senses or memory. There is hardly a word dark enough for such a condition, as Oliver Sacks has reminded us in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.

Stories are at the heart of SOULSPEAK. Unless we appreciate their essential grandeur and mystery and how they are interwoven into our very nature, we may tend to dismiss them as being ordinary. Indeed, we may fall into the same trap as that of much of contemporary literary thought: seeing narrative as unsophisticated, old-fashioned. For me, however, stories are at the very heart of who we are and how we express ourselves. They mirror our lives. Like us, a story begins, moves through time, and ends. Then another begins. Our lives are an endless cycle of stories that rise and fall within us like waves in the ocean. Waves we sometimes allow to race beyond us onto the shores of the world, where they eventually dissipate, leaving nothing but a faint, momentary tracery of salt. What is even more beautiful about the stories we call art is that they imitate the essential movement of the mystery we call God. These collaborations of self and soul—these stories we call art—imitate God’s story. Think of those wonderful Japanese prints of giant, curling, finger-like waves made up of hundreds of little finger-like curls. They say it so wonderfully: art is the little curl on the edge of the one great curl.

Or think of it another way: fractals. Fractals are mathematical, graphic representations of one of the essential mysteries of nature: that larger structures, such as snowflakes, are made up of smaller, identical snowflakes as far down as we can see. When we look at the edge of a snowflake closely, we see it is made up of an exact but smaller imitation of the larger flake. And when we look at the edge of that smaller flake, we see an even smaller imitation of it, and so on as far as we can see. Those endless, concentric, intertwining circles again. When we begin to see the stories we call art in these terms (terms, by the way, that would make perfect sense to tribal man, who thought only in stories) we can see how incredibly sensitive tribal man was to the mystery that dominates our lives. We can also see why art dominated his life. It was the way he celebrated the mystery of life. Everything else was a waste of time. It never occurred to him to do anything else. And of all the art forms practiced by tribal man, speaking from the soul, or tribal poetry, was the essential art form he used to imitate and celebrate the mystery of creation and destruction.

Even though sound is the first sense we use (babies move to sound in the womb) and the last to leave us (I heard a fly buzz when I died), we pay more attention to sight. It is the dominant sense in our literate, visually oriented culture. Because of this, it may not be immediately clear to us why the art of speaking had such a powerful influence upon tribal man. But once we realize that tribal man lived in a world of sounds, it begins to make sense. Think about it. In a dense forest, sound (more than sight) alerted tribal man to danger—told him which animal was just beyond the trees. He not only imitated what animals looked like, but even more what they sounded like. Sound, as Walter Ong has pointed out in The Oral Tradition, was at the center of preliterate life. Many creation stories, including an alternative translation of Genesis, start off: In the beginning, the voices created heaven and earth.

It should not surprise us then to find out that not only did a tribal speaking celebrate God’s story, but it also imitated the sound of God speaking. Because what we hear in a speaking is not just a story composed of words, but the sound of the soul speaking. This may seem a mouthful to some, but it goes to the heart of this book. If you were able to relax and really listen to The Prisoner of Time on the CD, you should have heard something of what tribal man heard. Because what you hear in SOULSPEAK (which is a contemporary version of a tribal speaking) is not only the story—the words—but the sound of beauty and the sound of truth. It is precisely this—the sound—that gives SOULSPEAK much of its unique power. It is also why I sometimes say SOULSPEAK is beyond poetry as we know it today. Because contemporary poetry, even if it is spoken out, is created by the solitary act of writing, not communal speaking. They are two different beasts, and their effects are quite different.

Seeing art as portrayals of the soul’s stories also allows us to see that the labyrinthine novels of Kafka are, in intent, identical to the startling, yellow bird-masks of New Guinea tribesmen. They are portrayals, or imitations, of the soul’s stories, but in different human terms. We all know that those terms are determined by the times and culture of the artist. But in the case of preliterate man, the terms are also determined by the nature of the self. Something happened with the advent of writing that changed the nature of the self forever, and we have to take that into account if we want to understand why tribal art (and speaking from the soul), came so easily to tribal man. It is tribal man that we have to learn from.

It would be easy to assume that the fifteenth-century painter Michelangelo, the thirteenth-century painter Giotto, and the self-decorating, preliterate tribesman had the same experience of self, but that would be a mistake. Giotto and Michelangelo may have portrayed things in different terms because they lived in different times, but they shared a sense of self—a self much different from that of tribal man. That is why Michelangelo’s use of dynamic movement and perspective may be the exact opposite of Giotto’s flat, frontal way of looking at things, but we can still easily recognize and appreciate their art as belonging to us. But this is not so when we look at tribal art. It seems different from us. That difference can be accounted for only if we recognize that tribal man had a different sense of self. He lived closer to his soul. His portrayals used a vocabulary closer to the soul than the self. This closeness makes all the difference when it comes to speaking. If we can find some way of simulating, or stimulating, or creating, that closeness, of bringing the whale closer to the boat, we too can begin to speak almost effortlessly.

The Effect of Writing on Consciousness

“Speak, Muse, and through me tell the story . . .”

Before I show you how to bring the whale closer to the boat and speak, I want to take a side trip into the consciousness of preliterate man. Much of what I’m going to say has been gleaned from Julian Jaynes’ Origin Of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind. I first encountered Jaynes’ book in the early stages of my attempts to create a spontaneous oral poetry. As I progressed in oral composition, Jaynes’ book somehow appeared and opened all the remaining doors. This book should be read by anyone interested in the nature of poetry and the arts in preliterate times, as well as by anyone interested in the true impact of writing on our culture.

It is apparent to me (as an oral poet) that in our literate, technological world, speech is often seen as a sloppy, unreliable version of the written (printed) word. One might say this attitude first emerged when Moses came down from the mountain with written commandments. It was a signal that things were about to change. It was a signal that speech (the miracle that separated man from the animals and allowed men to communicate with each other and the gods) was about to lose its primacy to the act of writing—a product of the necessities of trade. When Moses delivered a written contract to his people to assure them of God’s intentions, it symbolized, among other things, the change from a wandering, tribal culture to a more centralized one that was taking place throughout that part of the world. But in another sense, and perhaps an unconscious one, it intimated that the spoken word couldn’t be trusted. Even the spoken word of the gods.

In a related, inverse sense it also symbolizes our unconscious realization that we were beginning to lose our ability to speak from the soul. Or as Jaynes puts it, we were beginning to lose our ability to hear the gods correctly. After all, the two acts are different phases of the same moon. We are reminded of this relationship by Homer, our greatest preliterate poet (and to my mind the greatest poet of any period), when he says, “Speak, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending . . .” because in that opening statement he is equating the act of speaking to the gods speaking through him (i.e., of hearing the gods). Two sides of the same moon. The invention of writing was going to have a huge effect on us. In a very real sense, we were going to lose that moon, and get a paper one in its place.

As Jaynes intuited, the invention of writing brought about a very rapid change in our consciousness—our sense of ourselves. That change is symbolized by another biblical story—the story of our expulsion from the Garden of Eden into the world of knowledge, of self-consciousness. It symbolized our expulsion into the endless, forward-gazing, backward-looking, second-guessing world that grew within us and that now occupies all of our anxious, waking days. When we learned to write, we lost much of our ability to float in the sea of is, the very same sea that gives us access to the soul—the very same sea where the gods speak to us. This didn’t happen overnight. It took centuries. This “leaving of Paradise” is still going on in remote parts of the world: there are still some small, remnant cultures in the deep interior of Africa and New Guinea that exist in a true tribal, preliterate state. And that is where we want to go, if only symbolically, to learn more about how tribal man spoke from the soul. To learn more, we are going to have to look at preliterate poetry, because that is the distant ancestor of SOULSPEAK.

Preliterate Poetry¾A Primer

Preliterate poetry is not literature, but an intensely human art.

Earlier, the focus was on the visual art of preliterate tribal man because that is what has survived. We are lucky to have that, because as we know by looking at contemporary tribal art, most of it is fashioned from wood or bone or feathers, not metal or rock. Preliterate man was not overly concerned with the historic importance of his art. It was something he lived and died with, not something he donated to museums for tax write-offs and subsequent eternal life in the Metropolitan catalogs. While these ancient tribal pieces do provide an important window into his world, they are not quite enough for our purposes. But of the arts that were equally important to him, if not more so—his poetry and music and dance—we have nothing. Well, almost nothing. The music and dance, of course, are completely lost. But in the Western world, we do have the translated, transcribed versions of preliterate poetry at its most developed. It is no longer tribal poetry, but it is close enough in many respects to give us a window. I am talking about David’s Psalms and Homer’s epics. Of course, they are not quite what you would hear if David or Homer were around to chant them, but they give us some idea of what that poetry was like.

There is a short but detailed exposition of the nature of ancient preliterate poetry in the latter half of this book. Despite some scholars’ (and poets’) ideas of how that poetry was composed and how it sounded, there is no doubt in my mind that the poems were chanted spontaneously, without premeditation, to slow rhythmic music and that they were responded to in the same manner. Only lately are scholars (and poets) beginning to understand the communal (speaker/responder) nature of all oral poetry. This is because they have tended to interpret and describe it based on the only poetry they really know: written poetry. Except for its impulse and result, however, written poetry is a completely different poetry, being single-voiced and written in private, without music. One is an oral/aural art designed for the ear and one is a written/visual art designed for the eye.

This is an important distinction. Especially so since one of our objectives is to use ancient oral poetry as a means of bringing you into a contemporary version of it called SOULSPEAK. Being a poet who creates poems in both the written and oral mode, the scholarship on preliterate poetry makes me wince at times, much as an athlete might wince at a sportswriter’s description of a game. For example, my assertion that listeners responded to David and Homer will make many scholars and poets leap up in objection. Yet these were public poems spoken to others. One has only to actually practice the art or visit a black church to see the truth of this assertion. After all, African-American churches are a visible, true remnant of a once-vibrant tribal culture. In fact, what takes place at black churches is close in spirit to what took place when David and Homer chanted their poetry. And don’t forget that Phemios, Homer’s alter-ego in the Odyssey, is chanting his songs in the midst of the continual gaming and whoring and drinking of the suitors, hardly the counterpart of a reading at the American Academy of Poets.

Preliterate poetry is not literature, but an intensely human art. Another indication of how bound oral scholarship can sometimes be to the act of writing is seen in the fact that scholars have never developed a good term for preliterate poetry that corresponds to the term “literature” for written poetry. But if they had actually practiced the art, the term “speakings” would probably come to mind, because that is how it feels to both speaker and listener. Not “talkings,” or “oralture,” but speakings. The term intimates that something extraordinary is happening—something that separates it from ordinary talk. The term speakings also emphasizes the often-disregarded fact that preliterate poetry sounded like speech. It might have been chanted, and employed certain idioms from time to time, but the syntax and structure were identical to speech. One has only to read a strict translation of Homer to see this. Indeed, it can’t be any other way, because, in essence, we can only spontaneously speak in one way: the way we speak to each other, in stories. There is, however, a major difference between speaking and everyday speech. Speakings come from a deeper level than our normal speech. That is what distinguishes it from our everyday speech. Poetic speech is ordinary speech in structure. Its authority is internally generated. It has a cadence—an authority—we instantly recognize, because what we hear in a speaking is the sound of the soul speaking rather than the self. That is the authority we hear. Everyone knows the difference once they’ve heard it. Or, more to the point, spoken it.

Now let’s take a closer look at tribal poetry. We have seen that tribal man had a poetic, unpremeditated speech (like ordinary speech). It had the same syntax and structure as ordinary speech, but was cadenced and spoken to rhythmic music. And it was responded to in the same manner. Cadence is nowadays understood as any one of a number of metrical schemes the poet can adopt to give rhythm to his writing. But the cadence of a speaking comes from an internal source—from the soul, our very deepest self—not from some book on metrics. The soul (or as Jaynes would have it, the right brain) speaks in cadence. It is a cadence over which the poet has no control—a cadence that establishes, in part, the authority we hear in a speaking. It is my belief that this cadence—though coming from a deep internal source—is shaded by the language being spoken. Jaynes, on the other hand, believes that the cadence consists of dactyls (a stressed sound followed by two unstressed sounds, e.g. “higgledy, piggledy”) regardless of the language, and cites Homer’s work and the apparent rhythm of speaking in tongues as evidence. Well, maybe he’s right, and maybe he’s not. What is important is the realization that the cadence is internally generated. And powerful.

But what does all this have to do with SOULSPEAK? Everything. Because the poetry just described is an exact description of SOULSPEAK. Well, almost. Because I haven’t told you what that ordinary speech consisted of: Stories. Only stories. The soul only speaks in stories.

God only speaks in time.

All preliterate poetry consisted of stories—sometimes very long, sometimes very short (as in the case of refrains), but stories nevertheless. We dream in stories, so why should the soul speak any differently when we’re awake? If the simple beauty of this isn’t immediately apparent, it may be because the task seems too complex. You’re probably saying to yourself: not only do I have to speak (in cadence) to rhythmic music, and to a responder, but I also have to make up a spontaneous story at the same time. Now how in hell am I going to do that? Well, the answer is, relax, you don’t have to do anything. Your body will do it for you. With a little help from the soul, which is never far from the body.

I believe the body contains an instinctual memory of the mindset of tribal man, especially with regard to the art of speaking. Tribal man was just like us but not quite. “Not quite” because he had a very quiet consciousness by our standards—there was very little separating his surface self from his deepest self, or soul. The whale was just beneath the boat all the time. This conscious state could be likened to a state of meditation, or as Jaynes suggests, the semi-hypnotic state that sometimes occurs when you’re driving on the freeway. You somehow make all the right logical, physical decisions to get from point A to point B but have no idea or memory how you did it. Amazing. Someone was driving, but not the conscious you that’s always so busy controlling your every move (or so you’d like to think) by projecting your future and second-guessing your past. By thinking. But as our freeway trip just proved, you can go about your life completely tuned out to that busy consciousness. That semi-hypnotic state is perhaps as close as we can come to understanding how tribal man went about his life. In other words, it was all done without the busy self-consciousness that drives our lives. Tribal man simply didn’t have to contend with that kind of consciousness, he lived close to his soul, and because of that, speaking came very easily to him. It simply possessed him. And when it did, he spoke to the gods. In stories. Just like you’re going to do when you learn how to move your whale beneath your boat.

Citing the Psalms and Homer as examples of late tribal poetry may be misleading. They are, but at its most developed state. They occurred just before, or during, the period when writing was invented. This was a time when tribal/feudal cultures were changing into more centralized trading cultures. By that time, singular poets had started to emerge—men with extraordinary gifts such as David and Homer. This is the beginning of a court poetry, in which the communal, or antiphonal, nature of tribal poetry began to change. Responses had an etiquette now—they were no longer the spontaneous, passionate, soul-driven responses of early tribal man. They were more mannered. They deferred to the leadership of the lead speaker. At times they’d sound something like the responses in a contemporary black church, and sometimes they’d be more like crowd responses at a hotly contested ballgame. But they weren’t the organic, interwoven responses of early tribal poetry, when both speaker and responding speaker had equal weight.

Because of this, the poetry of David or Homer is not quite the best model for SOULSPEAK. We want to go back to the earliest state of poetic speech. We want to go back to the time when everyone was a poet—when everyone participated in creating a speaking, because that is the true Galapagos of poetry. It is there we can clearly see the nature of oral, antiphonal poetry and use it to help us understand the contemporary version called SOULSPEAK. One way to get back to that time is to turn on the TV and trail along behind the latest National Geographic camera crew filming a contemporary, preliterate tribe in Africa or South America or New Guinea. Then all we have to do is wait until the tribe begins to celebrate a victory or death or birth or drought or defeat or harvest. I say celebrate because that is the exactly correct word. No matter how sad or joyous the event, it was to be celebrated by the tribe, made into art in the form of a story. There was to be a speaking. We sometimes forget that tribal man was a constant artist. He was constantly celebrating the mystery of creation and destruction. We, on the other hand, would only think of celebrating the act of creation, or birth. We have thought our way into that position. Tribal man was more artist than thinker. While he mourned and wept at the death of a fellow tribesman, he instinctively understood that destruction and creation are co-equal, inter-linked forces. This is why animals (and even people) were sacrificed: to imitate the mystery of destruction and creation in God’s story. It was a praise act. A celebration.

So here we are, poised to watch a celebration, a speaking. But first, take a quick side trip into early, tribal Greece, to see what the Greeks had to say about all this. After all, we know the Greeks were very exact. The most ancient word they had for what I call a speaking was “poein,” which means, “to make.” That was their earliest word for poetry: to make. Not make words, images, similes, metaphors, stanzas, stories, music, lines, chanting, just: to make. What does this say to us, that this exasperatingly exacting culture chose to be so concrete and simplistic in describing the very art that dominated their lives? This root is archaic, and therefore must describe poetry at a very early stage, the tribal stage, many hundreds if not thousands of years before Homer. And that poetry was very similar (in structure) to what we are about to see in our National Geographic TV special on tribal life. What we are going to see is a poetry that is everything: music, speech, costume, and movement. A celebration. And it’s going to take place all at once.

What’s more, there are no specialists involved. Instead, each tribe member is going to simultaneously incorporate several art forms into his speaking. In this light then, we begin to see the aptness of the Greek root, poein. The simplicity of the root refers, in part, to the fact that poetic speech, or a speaking, seems to come out of us. It makes itself. But the root also refers to the fact that there is no need to describe what in particular is being made, because poetry at this stage is made of everything. It is composed of every way in which we can express ourselves: speech, music, dance, and costume. The arts had not yet separated into the seven Muses, a separation that ultimately took place with the advent of writing. In this early poetry, everyone expresses themselves through multiple, interconnected portrayals of their souls. It is art at its most human and most potent.

Witnessing a true speaking, we’re going to be a bit puzzled, perhaps dazzled. We won’t understand the language, but we will detect a speaking, responding pattern. What we are hearing is oral, antiphonal (“to return the sound”—again the Greeks were very accurate about it) poetry. It is being chanted, or cadenced, to rhythmic drums and/or simple wind/string instruments. But what is really strange to us is that everyone seems to know what to say, and we immediately assume that everyone has memorized their lines, like actors, through verbatim memory. But they haven’t. There may be some phrases that are tribal clichés¾phrases that have become so important and valued by the tribe that they are used over and over. But everything else is unpremeditated improvisation, for both speakers and responding speakers. This is also true for the music and movement and costume. There is no centralized authority, no director dictating what should take place.

What governs the celebration is an unconscious agreement on what is to take place for a particular event, say the death of a tribe member. But the agreement is constantly open to improvisation. This is difficult for us to understand, with our regimented and scripted dramas and ballets and operas and movies, but improvisational collaboration is at the heart of tribal poetry. We immediately think that such freedom would lead to chaos, but we have to remember that these cultures moved very, very slowly. And so did the act of improvisation. If anything, it was prompted by a change in the group soul, because we also have to understand that there are no individuals in the tribe, only members. Consensus thinking and feeling were the prized attributes. Individuality, as we know it today, was a menace and quickly eliminated. It’s equally important to realize that these improvisations took place in the midst of performance and were quickly adopted or denied on the spot. No thinking was involved. The improvisation simply rose up from the shared, emotional mainstream of the celebration like a backward-moving wave in a rapid stream.

There were no scripts for this poetry. But how, then, do twenty tribe members respond identically to something the lead speaker(s) has just improvised? There are several answers, the first being that the response was most often an echo. The second is that there were often lead responding speakers, tribe members others looked up to because of the power of their responses. These leaders would, from time to time, improvise a response that was immediately picked up and echoed by the others. The third answer is that the members knew what the response should be because of custom, i.e., they were responding to a cliché on the part of the speaker. And the last answer is that the members sensed what the response should be. After all, the role of antiphonal poetry is to unify the tribe, to eliminate individuals, to reinforce everyone acting as one body, one thought, one emotion. In a poetry like this, we are dealing with responses from a very deep level, a soul level, a level where we are all ultimately connected. Our problem is that our busy consciousness prevents us from getting through to that level. But tribal man had no such problem. What seems a superhuman occurrence to us was an everyday event to tribal man.

SOULSPEAK as a Participatory Art

Everyone’s in prison, but no one knows it. That’s the problem.

What does it feel like emotionally (and physically) when you create your own speakings? It’s going to feel something like a small orgasm—like a birth—as the soul rises up through the body and emerges into the world as a story. You will experience this story as beautiful and true—physically and emotionally. This is because you have allowed the soul to display its truth—a truth like no other. The soul is not trying to prove anything. Rather its truth comes from a display of opposites—yin and yang—of what it means to be human. The soul’s display is a fractal of God’s display.

There is no answer as to why we find the soul’s display to be true and beautiful, just as there is no answer as to why we find the mind’s truth (which is a display of logic) to be true and beautiful. The mind’s truth, however, is but a shadow of the soul’s truth. It is a thin truth, despite the fact that it fuels our modern civilization, much as the soul’s truth fueled preliterate cultures.

Somehow or other, in our modern times, the soul’s truth has been all but discarded. We consider it useless, or at best frivolous. We want something that will fuel our technological society at any expense. Even at the expense of our own lives. As a poet who works with children, most often children at-risk, and who often depends on outside funding to carry on that work, I can’t tell you how appalling it is to be asked to prove that practicing SOULSPEAK (or any art) can improve the lives of these children. And this is by concerned, well-meaning people. At times I find myself thinking: are these people crazy? Don’t they understand that by allowing the soul to display itself, we become truly human? The answer, of course, is No and Yes: No, they’re not crazy, and Yes, they don’t understand. The real problem is that these well-meaning people have been brought up in a dim cave, a cave of technology and reason. They find the cave well lit and extremely comfortable, even if they do have excruciating nightmares. This is what happens to us when we are deprived of the experience and practice of art. We become like those confined in prisons: we adjust to it, become less human. We even learn to enjoy it.

As a society, we have become satisfied with being less than human, and often without even knowing it has happened to us. Many of us don’t have the slightest idea that another life exists outside of the one we are living—a life made luminous by art. Because of this, we have to endure the grotesque spectacle of leaders at every level proudly telling us they’ve achieved everything they’ve ever wanted (and that we should want) without really being involved in the arts. What we need is more industry, rotary clubs, thrift, wealth-building, economic partnerships. More dim lights for the dim room. The Greeks, by the way, were pretty mean penny counters themselves, but they had no such delusions about the role of art. To the Greeks, art was as necessary and beautiful as breathing. Not to partake in art would be less than human.

How have we allowed this to happen? It is ironic that here in America, a land bursting with wealth and leisure time¾two crucial elements necessary for the creation of art, or so anthropologists tell us¾we should be so barren of art’s benefits. (How anthropologists explain the caves at Lascaux, which hardly bespeak either wealth or leisure, I have no idea.) Perhaps this inability to explain Lascaux may be due to the fact that we no longer see art as a human activity—a participatory act—but only as an act practiced by specialists. Specialists we passively observe. Specialists we have the time and money to see. But that is a very narrow view of art. Yet, even if it is a very narrow view of art, we are creating it at a frantic pace. One has only to turn on the television and radio and experience the gigantic collaborations we call movies and pop music to realize that “art” is being created on a scale greater than ever before. A scale that dwarfs anything the Greeks and Romans and Egyptians produced, even on a per capita basis. But is it equal to or better than their art? Sometimes, but not very often, because it is an art created by vast collaborations of economic and artistic interests, and the economic part of it wants to make money. Not live reasonably well, but make money. Profit. Big bucks.

It is the “make money” aspect that is the worm in the apple, because corporate art—art directed by large institutions—is nothing new. After all we can see corporate art in the ancient ruins of Dynastic Egypt. But it was art for purposes of displaying the soul, even if it was also used as a massive display of power. Dynastic Egyptian art may be too uniform, conforming to too many stylistic restrictions, but it is still beautiful, and true. It is the key to truly understanding what it meant to be alive in that time.

God only speaks in time.

In America we are feverishly creating an art meant to appeal to the greatest number of purchasers (who, by the way, are all in prison but don’t know it). Is it any wonder that this art is usually mediocre—nothing but simplistic propaganda—something to keep the prisoners happy? After all, art reflects who we are, how we see ourselves. This is not to say that the producers of art are outside of the prison, pulling diabolical strings. They aren’t. They’re in prison too. In fact, everyone’s in prison, but no one knows it. That’s the problem.

The problem of corporate art is a difficult one because it is so intimately linked to our capitalist way of life. But it is really just an extension of what has been happening since we emerged from a tribal, preliterate state. Writing made it possible to pass elements of the art being created to those skilled in performance so that they could re-create it. In tribal states, of course, there were always some who were more skilled in certain aspects of the all-consuming art called tribal poetry. But the idea of passing on something to someone else for a future performance simply didn’t occur. You did it when you felt it, was the attitude of tribal man. It is only after the invention of writing that a mind space occurs in which the person creating art can see (in his mind) that it can be passed on to others (through the act of writing) for future re-creation. But the true value of that re-creation lies in the fact that it can be directed at something entirely new: an audience.

Audiences came into being as tribal cultures emerged into division-of-labor cultures. As that change took place, it was only a matter of time before artistic collaborations designed for passive audiences began to occur. Dramatic theater is an example of a very early collaboration. It is first seen in the Greek culture three or four hundred years after Homer. In European culture, symphony, opera, and ballet are examples of early, large collaborations. Today, we have reached the stage of gigantic collaborations, movies being the prime form. It is the logical outgrowth of what occurs when we become literate, commercial cultures: art changes from something spontaneously created by individuals—from a participatory art—into something created for a passive audience.

Collaborative art makes it possible to create art of a high order. That collaboration is often superior to what can be achieved individually. Early tribal poetry, for example, was a powerful, spontaneous collaboration that displayed the group soul, something of immense power and beauty. What separates tribal collaborations from our modern collaborations (outside of the methodologies employed) is that modern collaborations are intended for a passive audience. It is an art form that occurs once a tribal culture develops into a culture where there is division of labor. Quite simply, there’s less time for art. Goods have to be produced and sold. Records kept. Then the art can be done. By comparison, in tribal cultures, art was done all the time. There was no separate time for art. What’s more, everyone participated. Thus, in almost every way, our immensely passive twenty-first century art forms are the direct opposite of what took place in tribal times.

Well, what’s so bad about that you might say: I love watching La Boheme on TV. And so do I. That’s not the problem. The problem is twofold. One is the diminishing number of La Bohemes on TV, and I take that opera only as an example of good art, art that reflects the soul. The other problem with corporate art is that (in today’s interlinked world) it not only determines the quality of the collaboration, but also the channels of distribution, which is perhaps the more critical of the two problems. Good art, after all, is always being produced somewhere. But if you can’t get to the art—to hear it, to see it—it doesn’t matter how good it is. This is a critical problem for our culture, and a very complicated one to solve, because corporate art is woven into the very economic fabric of this country. Some hope the Internet will offer a solution, and maybe it will. But the window it offers art may eventually be co-opted and diminished by the same overwhelming cultural and economic forces that are behind corporate art.

As if it weren’t enough that we have become passive feeders at the trough of corporate art, we have also forgotten that art is a human activity. It would be difficult for most of us today to remember that just a hundred years ago, our great grandparents were still gathering with neighbors to make art of some kind. Sometimes it was original art, sometimes it was merely performing a version of a song or dance, something they’d heard or seen. But they were participating, even if it was merely telling stories to one another. This idea of participation may seem startling to many. Are we supposed to make art? Isn’t that what artists do? The answer is: to be human is to be an artist. Tribal man understood this; somehow we have forgotten it. It is time to step back and reclaim the artist within by rediscovering the so-called primitive art forms. SOULSPEAK is one way to do this, but there are many others. Let me give you an example.

A visual artist with whom I often collaborate makes collages. The collage form is very close to the tribal art forms of costume (mask, body paint, dress) in that they both work primarily with arranged found objects. Forget about the fact that some come from magazines and some from the feathers of birds. They’re still found and rearranged to suit the mood of the artist. This collage artist told me of her work with advanced Alzheimer patients. In this project, she patiently shows them pictures and words until they signal her (through eye contact or pointing) that they like one of them. She then positions the word or picture on a board until they signal her that the position is one they like. This process continues until the collage is created. In talking to her about this, she told me that their emotional and physical health seemed to improve as a result of their collages. But she couldn’t quite explain it as the result of making art, because in their deteriorated condition she couldn’t quite bring herself to say they were actually creating art.

She told me she thought their improvement was due to the fact that the visual/spatial activity was somehow exciting their right brain, and therefore their entire nervous system. That may well be, but I asked her to think about the fact that everyone can be an artist given the right “primitive” forms. And that creating a collage was extremely “primitive” in the way it worked. I asked her to consider that somehow the need to create—to display the soul—is so strong within us that it worked its way through all that faulty mental machinery. I suggested to her that the resultant truth and beauty of the collage was what was enlivening the patient, not just some random nerve excitement. You might think about this as well: that the need to display the soul through art is as strong and as necessary as food and sex and that if we don’t fulfill that need we will die a nice slow death and never really know it.

Part II

Preparing to Speak

The Communal Nature of SOULSPEAK

SOULSPEAK is a poetry of soulsharing, of empathy, of communal celebration.

One of the major themes of this book is that tribal art was a human activity, and that contemporary versions of that art, like SOULSPEAK, allow us to reclaim that communal part of our heritage.

First we need a partner, at least one. The most natural partner for SOULSPEAK is your current partner: husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, best friend, mother, father, lover, daughter, son, grandmother, grandfather. It’s the person you most like to be with—that you are most comfortable with. This is because you want to practice SOULSPEAK with someone who is a soul mate in every sense of the word. It’s about as close as you’re going to get (in this day and age) to a fellow tribe member. SOULSPEAK is a poetry of soul sharing, a poetry of empathy, of communal celebration.

Now is the time to listen to the speakings on the CD. It is the only way to reawaken your body to the art of speaking. The art of SOULSPEAK will seem like just so many words until you begin to absorb it by listening to it. Play all the tracks that contain speakings as you would play music: in the car, cleaning, walking. It doesn’t have to be a big event. Just play them as background. Your body will get the message.

You also have to prepare yourself for the fact that speaking is much easier when done with a partner. To attempt it alone is to choose a more difficult and less fruitful path. Creating poetry with someone else may go against everything you know about poetry, but this is a different poetry¾a very human poetry that wants to be done with others. This you will only understand after you have created a speaking with a partner. It will be an awakening.

SOULSPEAK is a communal poetry that (in its essential form) has no passive audience. The participants are the audience. The only people who need be present are those actively participating. No observers, at least at this point. This means that SOULSPEAK should be done in the same way that tribal man did it, as a communal celebration of the mystery of life—as a way of speaking to the gods. Approach SOULSPEAK as a celebration of the mystery of who you really are. Don’t think of it as an academic or therapeutic exercise, both of which are deadly to art. Think of David dancing wildly before the Ark of the Covenant, the most sacred “Holy of Holies.” Or of Ray Charles at his most inspired. Either will do. Similarly, when asked to consider SOULSPEAK as “a way of speaking to the gods” or as Homer would have it, to the god within you (“I am one who can sing before you as to a god.”), abandon all the ways you hide from yourself. After all, you can’t hide from the gods. This is a time for speaking. Not a time for hiding.

If you still feel you’re not quite ready to speak with your partner, play the CD section called First Speakings. They’re by people of all ages and backgrounds—just like you. Listen to them. Play them while you’re walking around the house—while you’re driving. Don’t worry if you don’t get every word, they’ll find their way to you eventually. When you feel ripe, you’re ready to do your first speaking.

SOULSPEAK as a Journey

I was in the wrong skin, but didn’t know what the right skin was.

When people describe their first speaking with a partner, it’s usually something to the effect that it felt powerful, or strange, or deep, but good. And that it just seemed to happen, of its own accord. There is a sense of awe in their eyes. A couple once said to me that it felt as if they were both giving birth to the same entity. This communal creation of many voices and yet one is SOULSPEAK in its most natural and most potent form. It is the form you should always strive to achieve if circumstances allow it. This may seem strange, but it is the way the body wants to speak: with others. In either case, you quickly become aware that speakings, by their nature, are physical as well as spiritual events. You can feel the body allowing the soul to take form. It is a primordial experience and one that leaves us in a state of wonder. That sense of wonder often leads to an awakening.

Sometimes that awakening is announced by no more than a whisper. Sometimes it can be quite forceful. In either case, a door will open. You can choose to walk through it or turn away. If you walk through it, you will begin a journey. Where that journey will take you no one can say, but it will be uniquely yours and it will be filled with moments that will feel beautiful and true. That journey will be filled with moments when the body will stop, and turn towards the sun, or the moon, and allow the soul to speak, to display itself. This may seem a strange journey, as many of our writings on the soul advise an inward journey, often a solitary one. What I am suggesting, however, is that there is an alternative direction, and that is allowing the soul to display itself outwards, communally, through art.

It is always difficult to say where journeys begin. We think we know, but as our journeys progress, we become less sure. In my own case, I find it more and more difficult to say where SOULSPEAK began for me. If you were to ask me today, I would tell you it seems to have begun long before I came into this world. I would tell you today that it feels as if something very ancient, something not of this time, a presence, is working its way out through me. And though it is not of this time, it is a presence that most definitely wants to be here, on this earth. It is a presence that is very persistent in its desire to speak. It is a presence that keeps telling me we have become lost—that we have forgotten who we really are. But it is also a presence that keeps telling me we can find ourselves. Knowing who we really are can be accomplished through an art that is truly within us, sleeping, waiting to be awakened. That art, the art to which I have been led, and to which I am leading you, is SOULSPEAK.

That is a large claim to make for any art form. There are undoubtedly others, but SOULSPEAK is the only one that has made itself visible to me. That visibility, by the way, came in stages, and is still occurring. When I tell you that I am continually unsure where my journey began with SOULSPEAK, I can also tell you, without reservation, that I have absolutely no idea where it is taking me, or why. All I know is I am doing what I should be doing: the world is leaning with me. It is equally clear to me that coming face to face with an art form as primal as SOULSPEAK can’t help but affect you in some fundamental way. It has affected my life and the lives of the poets I work with, but it has also affected many ordinary people, of all ages, who have taken it up. It becomes a way of life. This may not be immediately apparent at first, but at some stage, SOULSPEAK becomes as necessary and as beautiful as breathing.

Perhaps the only way to prepare you for the journey you may take is to describe my own journey as best I can. Not that my journey is especially significant. It may interest some and not others. The impact speaking had on my life and work is significant, however. What impact it will have on your own life is hard to predict.

If you are but a casual reader of this book, with no interest in actually trying to speak, the art of speaking will have little or no impact on you. But if you succeed in creating a speaking and continue to do so, even on an intermittent basis, it will probably alter your life in an important way. This is because speaking is the most profound, elemental, human way we have of communicating. Simply by learning the art you will have shown a desire to communicate on the level of the soul. You will have displayed your soul to others, through art. The truth of that display is beautiful and makes us less alone. It says to us: This is what it means to be human. When an art like SOULSPEAK enters your life, your life has to change—if for no other reason than you have found a way (that is already within you) of touching others with the soul’s truth. That act is beautiful and healing to both speaker and listener. Where speaking will take you is up to the gods, but it will take you somewhere.

The Journey Begins

Something in me said, “Keep doing it this way.”

As for my own journey, I’ll have to start somewhere we both can recognize, so I’ll start with my decision some twenty odd years ago to sell my half of a computer company I had started. Although the company was prosperous, my partner had become unbearable. I wanted out. That world held no more interest for me: whatever skills I had in that area had long ago been exhausted. It wasn’t really a life for me. It never had been. Rather it was something I had stumbled into, for better or worse, on my way to being a poet. I remained a poet, but one who wrote very little poetry. In effect, I put my life on a shelf. When I took it down some twenty years later it was unrecognizable.

As to where I was going, and what I was going to do, I had no idea. I wound up in Florida, in Sarasota, not really knowing why. Oh, I could have given you a lot of reasons, but they would all be wrong. Then, one day, a poem came to me. It was a celebration of my marriage to the woman who had helped me save my life. It had been some time since I had written a poem, but I knew it was a poem, a real one, not just words. A door opened. More poems followed. Years passed, but very quickly. I felt like I was in one of those science fiction movies where the hero goes through many physical changes in a matter of minutes. That’s how fast the poems were changing. I held on for the ride. It was as if someone inside me knew what they were doing. Someone who was very impatient. I was getting published, receiving honors. I sensed the poems were good, I just didn’t know how good. I approached a well-known poet my brother knew. He was kind. He told me I could continue to be clever, or I could begin to take risks. Emotional risks. I could begin to be a poet. I didn’t like that, but I knew it was true, and I have always tried to honor the truth, no matter how painful. I allowed myself to change. To become more open. The poems also changed, became more real. I began to read my poems at poetry readings. They were good, but for some reason, they still didn’t sound right. Not only that, they didn’t feel like me. I felt uncomfortable. I was in the wrong skin, but didn’t know what the right skin was.

I went to a writer’s conference. I needed direction. On the way, in New York City, a thief stole my car. It was recovered, the thief arrested. I was immediately thrown into the labyrinth of the New York City Justice System. I thought I’d never emerge with my car. I was going nuts. My son, a writer, suggested I use it as material, in that offhand, patronizing way sons have. On one of my endless subway rides back and forth to the Criminal Courts building, a long poem began to simply wend its way out, a different poem. It was me, talking. Almost without effort. I’ll give you a taste:

Stolen Poems

For Dixon Toro,

who stole my very old maroon

Chevrolet in NYC. It was recovered,

and Dixon arrested, 6 days later

in the Pelham Gardens Motel

at 2 in the morning.

Two years on Rikers, that’s

heavy time Dixon.

You’re going to get it too.

Glucksman says so, he

showed me your record.

Like a bill of lading,

he said.

Crack probably,

that’s what Glucksman thinks.

I remember listening to him

in the Criminal Court Building

nodding, Yeh, crack. But it

wasn’t crack Dixon,

it was something else,

the way I’d babied it,

that’s what I think, the way

it gleamed beneath the vapor

lights. That deep maroon.

You should’ve kept walking

Dixon, punched a Porsche

instead, got high for a week,

bought earrings for Lydia,

plantanos for her kids.

It must have been the envelope.

The way it lay there on

the seat, crisp, like money.

Dixon, listen, I know

you read my manuscript,

my twenty poems. I found

them on the back seat floor.

With the cans and wrappers.

And then, Consuela. Ah yes,

Consuela. Who lived downstairs.

Who went to Hunter. Who did

the books at Hector’s bar.

Who smoldered. Who was unfuckable.

Who was always reading,

who couldn’t take her eyes

off you, who liked your friend’s

poems, who didn’t know

you were thinking of leaving,

of writing poetry, that

the crack was killing you,

that Justin was sleeping one

off, that you had his car,

that Lydia was not your wife,

that her kids were driving you

crazy, that you had always

wanted her, and Yes,

Consuela, that he would slide

down your belly, his tongue

like a swollen animal,

the motel door open

and the traffic streaming by

like rifle tracers and you

moaning, No, Dixon,

Dios, no, favor..

Listen, Dixon, it wasn’t

the poems. That they weren’t

yours, that you used them

on Consuela. I’ve done that,

maybe worse. Everyone has.

It’s what you didn’t do.

You should have called, sent me

a card, put a Personal

in the News, told me some

were shit, some made you shiver,

that Consuela had unfolded

like a wet flower,

that she tasted like smoke,

like a forest. You should’ve

told me how it felt

Dixon, lying there,

pressing her nipples,

when it all came down.

Somebody, you should have

told somebody, Dixon,

anybody: the guy

across the cell from you,

the one the jailer just

brought in, the bookish one

with all those poems. Look

at him. He’s on to you,

and not amused. He can’t

believe you’ve got the nerve

to hit him up for cigarettes

then flop down on your bunk

like that, your arms outstretched,

and tell him that you’re doing

time, You swear to God,

Your mother’s grave, for something

that you didn’t do.

When I looked at the poem afterwards, I realized why it had felt different from anything I had done. It was an unabashedly narrative poem. It was me, telling a story. When I realized that, something in me said, Keep doing it this way. I let the storyteller loose. It didn’t matter to me that narrative poems were often held in disfavor by my fellow poets. The poems felt right. They felt true. The skin felt more correct. Around that same time, a series of pidgin monologues suddenly burst out in the persona of an Australian aborigine, Eldred Van-Ooy. The language was a Melanisian pidgin, called Tok Pisin, that I had been drawn to for some unknown reason. Like a magnet. I began studying a Tok Pisin phonetic dictionary prepared by linguists. Then, one day, I began writing in a language that was only spoken. The poems came out of me as if I were talking, or maybe it was the aborigine, Eldred. I couldn’t tell which. I’ll let you judge. Here’s a sample:

Drimtaim (Dreamtime)

Baimbai ol waitman i-singawt long mi: “Eldred.”

Eldred then became my name.

long skul, em i-singawt: “Van-Ooy.”

Van-ooy at school.

Behain mi go long haus, em i-singawt: “Abo.”

“Abo” when the day let out.

Yar kam na go.

The years passed by.

Olsem san. Olsem mun.

Like suns. Like moons.

Drimtaim i-kam. Drimtaim i-go.

Dreamtime came. Dreamtime went.

Na ol waitman i-no tokim mi em i-saevi Drimtaim.

But no one spoke of dreams to me.

Em i-tokim nem bilong olkain samting.

They only spoke of naming things,

Em i-tokim: wan, tu, tri, wan, tu, tri, tasol.

And numbering.

Wantaim long skul mi tokim drim bilong mi.

One day at school I spoke of dreams.

Tisa i-tokim mi olsem; “Mi nogat saevi.

The teacher asked

Yu tok Drimtaim long mi, orait, Drimtaim i-stap olsem,

If dreamtime always stayed the same,

Drimtaim i-no stap, olsem de?”

Or changed, like day?

Mi tok: “Drimtaim i-stap olsem de:

Dreamtime is the same as day I said:

olsem em yu, dispela tebal, dispela buk, dispela skul

Like you, this desk, this book, this school,

olsem olgeta samting i-stap hir

Like everything that waits me here

olgeta taim mi wek long dispela rum.

Each time i wake inside this room.

There was no doubt in my mind that something momentous was happening. I just didn’t know what. It was as if something within me was trying to get out, speak on its own terms. Oh, I had plenty of explanations, but they were all wrong. A year or two later, on a visit to California, I became very restless. My father was on my mind. He had died a few years before. We had been estranged. I was slowly erasing him. I knew it was wrong, that I had to right it, bring him back. I began to pace my motel room. I couldn’t be contained. I went outside and started to walk on the grass next to the freeway. The noise was deafening. I began to think about our lives. I opened my mouth and started to speak to some imaginary listener about our life together. As I started to speak, I had the sensation I had just entered a hotel with many rooms. I entered one of them. I saw my father and myself. I was twelve. Whatever had happened then, happened again. And as it did, I told the story. As soon as I finished, I suddenly found myself in another room. A different time and place. I saw my father and myself again. Whatever had happened then, happened again. And as it did, I told the story. I went from room to room for over an hour and then it stopped. It was one of the most wondrous and most powerful events of my life. I knew I had created something unlike anything I had done before. Not only had I honored my father, I had honored something in myself. I had opened a door to something very deep within me, that’s how it felt.

At the time, however, I didn’t really know what that door had led me to. All that I knew is I could recreate that story whenever I wanted, simply by walking into that imaginary hotel. The doors to each room would open all by themselves. It would simply happen again. I told the story publicly twice and then I stopped telling it. I had set things right. I sent a video of a performance to the poet who had advised me to change. He told me something interesting, something I’d sensed but hadn’t quite put into words. Or maybe I had. He told me there was a cadence to the stories. Something like poetry, he said. I didn’t know it then, but I had rediscovered the art of oral poetry. I was doing what Homer had done thousands of years ago. It had just come out of me, without my knowing how or what I was doing. I became more obsessed with speaking poetry. I wanted my poetry to become more and more speech-like. I wanted to speak to people, not at them. I founded a poetry theater where I could work with musicians and actors and other poets interested in performance. I began speaking my written poems to music, to create intertwined duets of the written poetry of my own and others. But I was still writing my poems. Despite my earlier experience with my father’s story, I hadn’t put the two together. I hadn’t put the act of unpremeditated, narrative speaking together with poetry. Then, one day, a series of short poems came to me that were very mysterious. They were so speech-like, I immediately called them “Speakings,” but I kept typing “Spaekings,” like old English. Here’s a sample:

Third Spaeking (Speaking)

The men looked across the river at the women.

They wanted the women, but what they

really wanted was the part that flowered

when they touched it.

Some men wanted the part that flowered

to be colorless. The women refused.

These men became women.

Other men wanted the part that flowered

to be red. Like blood. When it wasn’t

red enough, they crushed the women

to make them bleed redder.

There was no doubt in my mind that something was trying to get out. But again I had no idea what. I just knew it was very old. SPAEKINGS. One thing, however, struck me quite strongly: the poems were immediately memorable. I could recreate them orally on the spot, just like I could my father’s story. That just doesn’t happen, by the way, with written poetry. Which is why poets have to read from a text, or memorize verbatim. I was very close to something, but I still didn’t know what. That problem was solved one night at the theater when I began rehearsing a poem I had written specifically for a talented but irksome young trumpet player. After a few takes, he threw down the trumpet, told me to change my poem, and wrote down some idiotic lines that ended the session. Later that night, as I was walking, I realized what he was trying to tell me: that the trumpet wasn’t like the guitar, that I had to riff to accommodate the phrasing of the trumpet. The light went on: a refrain poem, short riffs. The door opened wider. I started to actually create the poem by speaking it. It was a refrain poem, a poem of tiny one-line stories with a repetitive hook. And like the poems in Speakings, and my father’s story, it was instantly memorable. It became a part of me. It went like this:

Think of the loneliness of whales.

Think of the loneliness of their journey.

Think of the cavernous dark

They must travel through

With nothing to guide them

But the sound of their own singing.

Think of the loneliness of their mating,

The soft dark wall of one

Brushing against

The soft dark wall of the other.

And then think of my loneliness,

Standing here, singing this to you.

I had walked though the looking glass. Poetry and my father’s story had come together. I knew instinctively that I could create poems orally. I told my partners in the theater that I’d discovered the key. I told them all you had to do was wait for a poem to start to come to you and then speak it out as you would a story. That was the key. Only stories. Like you were talking to a friend. Spontaneously, without premeditation. It was a momentous evening. If it sounds simple, it was and it wasn’t. What I didn’t realize was that we would eventually have to forget everything we knew about written poetry, that this was an oral/aural poetry with completely different aesthetics. What we also didn’t know was that it was going to be a long hard journey, and with no one to guide us—only the sporadic scholarship on preliterate poetry that I eventually discovered. I didn’t know it at the time, but the form of oral poetry that had come to me was the very earliest form of oral poetry, a simple refrain that was improvised upon. Whatever was emerging in me was starting way back. At the very beginning. Another indication of our going way back to the beginning, although again it wasn’t clear to me at the time, was that for some reason we began to respond to each other’s refrains. We didn’t know it then, but antiphonal poetry (or communal poetry) is at the very heart of oral poetry—its earliest expression. Later, as I studied the scholarship on oral poetry, it became clear to me that our progress in oral poetry was approximating the manner in which ancient oral poetry developed. As we began to trust the act of unpremeditated, narrative speaking, we advanced from refrains and responding to refrains to creating straight narrative. But we still found ourselves wanting to respond to what was being said. We sensed the true communal nature of oral poetry.

We had no idea why except that it felt correct. And sounded right. We were learning to trust our ears, not our eyes. And our instincts. We also began to work with musicians in a different way. We found that oral poetry was so flexible we could easily adjust the cadence of our speech to what was happening in the music. Later we became so confident in the act of speaking we were able to let the music take our speakings to places we never imagined. After a number of years, it seemed as if we had accomplished what we had set out to do: to create a more speech-like poetry that spoke to people, not at them. It seemed to me that we had also created a poetry that was more in step with our times, a poetry that created a true communion between poet and audience. Someone gave it a name, but it really named itself: SOULSPEAK. Well, the name was correct but we were completely wrong as to what we had really done. We didn’t realize that, however, until we began to perform SOULSPEAK.

My Own Journey Continues

We were essentially blind to the true nature of SOULSPEAK.

Well, when we first performed SOULSPEAK for an audience, some people got it, and some people didn’t. We didn’t really understand why. Speaking had always seemed to us to be the most accessible, most generous form of poetry we had ever encountered. It was meant for everyone. Why, then, wasn’t everyone getting it? There could be lots of reasons, we told ourselves. It was totally new. It was multi-voiced. It was too different. It was too deep for everyday audiences. It was a poetry that required we be good performers and we weren’t all that great. The list seemed endless. Needless to say, they were all good reasons, but they weren’t the right ones. What’s more, to complicate matters, many poets disliked it, almost sight unseen. We were astounded by their inflexibility. After a while, it became clear to us that most poets wanted to hold on to what they knew. It seemed as if they intuitively sensed the risks involved in speaking and chose not to take them for as many reasons as they could think of. Perhaps these poets would eventually catch up to us, but maybe they wouldn’t. At any rate, there was no sense waiting. We knew we were creating a real poetry, even if it was radically different. We also knew that our path was correct and there was no turning back.

Over a period of time, however, as we began to teach a specialized version of SOULSPEAK to at-risk children, our success with the children made us wonder if SOULSPEAK was really meant to be performed for a passive audience that knew nothing about it. Maybe it was just too strange, too different. Our success with children, however, was telling us that people would get it if they did it first. We were finding that they could really hear SOULSPEAK once they created a speaking themselves. Doors seemed to open of their own accord. Thus, doing SOULSPEAK enabled one to truly hear SOULSPEAK—to hear the multiple voices more easily, and also to hear its sound, its peculiar beauty. This led us to wonder if the primary form SOULSPEAK should take was not as a performing art, but one where everyone participated, a true communion of souls, just like its ancient counterpart. This realization didn’t occur immediately. To tell you the truth it took years. We were essentially blind to the true nature of SOULSPEAK, namely, that it was to be performed in the same manner as tribal poetry: no audience, only participants. It could be performed for a passive audience, of course, but for a general audience to truly “get” SOULSPEAK, we found it is much easier for them if they have already created a speaking. You could see it in their eyes. People got it after they did it.

All this should have been apparent to us from our work with children. For some reason, we simply ignored the fact that once the children created a speaking, they took to SOULSPEAK immediately. At the time, we thought there was an essential difference between the version of SOULSPEAK the children were doing (which used seed words) and the SOULSPEAK we were doing, which didn’t use seed words. But there wasn’t. The seed words were just catalysts. I don’t know why we were so blind to it. Maybe it was a kind of snobbery, because the only difference was the manner in which we brought the whale underneath the boat. After years of speaking, the poems would just happen for us. The whales were always underneath us. The children, of course, were a different matter. They were complete strangers to SOULSPEAK. The use of catalysts had allowed us to bring the children into the world of SOULSPEAK immediately. We could have a group of twenty children doing spontaneous, oral antiphonal poetry in a matter of minutes. And the poems weren’t nonsense. They were profound. Everyone in the classroom knew it too. Nobody had to be told that these were real poems. You could hear the gasps of recognition. Even from kids who had refused to participate, who told us they hated poetry.

Sometimes the poems were so deep that some teachers became concerned the children might not be able to handle the emotions that were brought up. Until they realized the children loved it. That’s because the children were way ahead of them. No matter how dark, or sad, their speakings were, they were also incredibly beautiful and healing. It felt good to do SOULSPEAK, that’s what the children knew. Their bodies knew it. At this point, we realized that the teachers had to be brought into the circle. While many of them were thankful for what the process had done for their students, some seemed awed by its power. The only solution was to have the teachers participate on an equal level. This frightened many teachers at first, but like the children, they soon learned that SOULSPEAK not only allowed them to say who they really were, but it also felt good. No matter how dark or sad their speakings were. Not only that, but their participation allowed the children to respect them in a new and more profound way. And these were children with severe emotional and anger management problems. Classroom discipline and respect was a constant concern among the teachers. Yet they found that expressing their emotions through SOULSPEAK only strengthened their authority. It gave them a new kind of authority. A human authority. I called it “Oprah Authority.” The teachers liked that. They knew immediately what I was talking about.

We finally realized what SOULSPEAK was all about after our therapeutic work had expanded to such a degree that there was no ignoring the communal environment in which it truly blossomed. People got it if they did it together. That was the overwhelming evidence. We were working not only with hundreds of at-risk children of every age and description, but also with hundreds of adults: severe depressives and schizophrenics, sexually abused women, recovering alcoholics, family groups. The results were so striking that it became obvious that if we just created a true communal entity where SOULSPEAK could blossom, it would. Just as it had for us. But we were poets. These were ordinary people. That’s what was so overwhelming. In fact the results were so impressive that the local educational channel created a series on SOULSPEAK to educate anyone who was interested.

From this point on it became clear to me that even though SOULSPEAK could be performed for a passive audience, it was best if the audience had a working knowledge of it. We saw, moreover, that SOULSPEAK was not really a performing art as we know it today. Rather, like its ancient counterpart, it was a true participatory art form that would allow anyone to display their soul. We had also found out that no matter how defective or broken the mental or emotional machinery of the participants, the urge of the soul to display itself was so strong as to overcome all obstacles in its way. When a poet I admire read one of my essays on SOULSPEAK and quipped back in a note: “Ah, so the soul speaks English now!” I almost wrote back “The soul can do anything it wants to.” But I never bothered. He’d get it eventually. Hopefully. But the fact of the matter is the soul can do anything it wants to. My experience with SOULSPEAK has shown me that. It’s just that we never know how it’s going to do it. Or why. Or when. As someone once said, readiness is all.

We are the sound of God speaking.

And we are most us when we are

standing on the glittery edge

where God is making us up and we

are making ourselves up

at the same time.

Part III

Creating a Speaking

The problem is not the shape of the soul but the shape of the self.

To create a speaking, we have to bring the whale beneath the boat. In order to do so, we’ll need a catalyst. There are many types, but seed words are the catalysts we’ll use first. Right now, what is more important is the shape of the boat. It must be a hull shape that fits the rising whale perfectly. Thus, it should be concave, not convex. This would be an odd-shaped boat by conventional standards, but we have to remember what this boat is for: speaking. After all, we have a very troublesome self that we’re asking to partner with the soul. The problem is not the shape of the soul but the shape of the self. Or more correctly, the shape of our much too busy consciousness, which at this moment is trying to figure out what’s going on, how it can stay on top. This is why I suggest you listen to the First Speakings track on the CD before reading this chapter. I want you to forget your current shape and become concave, a receiver, not a resister. This is for a number of reasons. First, since SOULSPEAK is an oral art, I want your body to begin to reawaken to the sound of the soul speaking by listening to it and then imitating it. Mimesis, remember.

Second, I want to wean you from the world of writing and the self-consciousness it helps maintain. The act of writing produces a thing, a string of characters that can be examined, second-guessed, manipulated, allowing our much-too-busy self-consciousness the opportunity of feeding on itself. Just what we don’t want. I want to deprive your consciousness of that opportunity so you can create a spontaneous, unpremeditated speaking. This is absolutely essential to success. To do that you stop hiding. In every way. Then begin listening to the First Speakings tracks on the CD again. As you do, begin leaning with them. Open yourself to the fact that your body knows what to do. Allow yourself to get out of the way and let your body tell a story. Open your mouth and celebrate your luminosity by telling a story you know absolutely nothing about.

Just before you open your mouth, however, there are a few things you must do. First, remember that you’re going to tell a story, and you’re going to tell it exactly as you would to a friend. This means you must forget everything you know about poetry and poetic diction: rhyme, inversions, lines, meter, stanzas, everything. Remember, this is a poetry you already know, and it has completely different rules. Play the SOULSPEAK Music track on the CD. Put it on repeat, so it will keep playing. Relax, listen to the music playing, and as it does, lean over the side of the boat and chum the waters a bit. With seed words. Whale bait, if you like. Your partner, with eyes closed, will act as an echo and repeat everything you say, just like what you heard on the First Speakings track on the CD. It may help if you and your partner also listen to the Introduction to Responding track on the CD before proceeding.

Here are the seed words we’ll use as catalysts:

Mother

mountain

love

arms

window

cold

green

You chum by looking at the seed words. Let your eyes wander over them until you notice yourself looking at one of them more often than the others. Don’t be self conscious about it, just do it. If one of them isn’t sticking out slightly, look away quickly, then look back. Do it several times. The word your eyes keep going back to is the one with the most mojo. Forget about the others. And don’t get serious on me. Remember, this is a celebration. You should be light-hearted, happy-go-lucky. Like a dare-devil. Just keep your eyes on the mojo word, because you’re going to have a good time with it. The time of your life, if you want to know the truth.

Start out exactly as you’ve heard on the First Speaking track: Sometimes in my dreams, I . . . and then connect “I” to the mojo word. Don’t worry how, or what words you’re going to use. Your body will take care of all that. And don’t think. Just allow your body to say what it wants and to visualize what’s taking place, exactly as it visualizes what’s taking place when you gossip. Let your body go as far as it wants with the mojo word. That may be one phrase, or two, or three. Then, when your body pauses (because it doesn’t know where to go), let your eyes jump immediately to another seed word in the list. Let your body use that new word to advance the story. When your body pauses again, let your eyes jump to another word and keep going until you’ve used up all the words or the story simply stops. Either way, you’ll know when the speaking is finished, becaus

class=Section4>

e your body will know. It will simply stop. Welcome to SOULSPEAK.

In the event you became confused and didn’t quite enter the world of SOULSPEAK as we had both expected, it may have been because you didn’t quite understand what I meant by looking at a seed word and letting your body advance the story with that word until it can’t go any further. Let me illustrate by creating a simulated speaking in written form. I’ll indicate where my body stopped speaking by an (*). The next phrase will be the result of my scanning the seed word list until my eyes select another word (which I’ll italicize so you can follow my progress). The mojo word I’m using for this speaking will be “window,” as this is the one my eyes kept going back to. Don’t force this operation of selection—don’t go crazy with your eyes. Let your body select the word. The correct word is simply the one you’re drawn to, the one that’s leaning with you. As always, I’ll start out with the incantation: “Sometimes in my dreams, I . . .”

Mother

mountain

love

arms

window

cold

green

Sometimes in my dreams,

I am a window.*

Love cannot come through.*

I am cold to the touch.*

I am green in the morning light.*

My mother is outside,

Trying to look through me.*

She sees the mountain of my impatience.*

No arms can reach me.*

Love cannot break through.*

Here is another one. This time, the mojo word is MOUNTAIN:

Mother

mountain

love

arms

window

cold

green

Sometimes in my dreams,

I am a mountain.

I am far above the earth*

My mother is somewhere in the valley.*

She is sitting by a window*

It is cold in the valley.*

Everything green has vanished.*

There is nothing but snow.

She is holding her arms out to me,

But there is too much distance between us.*

Too much distance for love to cross.*

Too much distance to come down from the mountain.*

Here’s another one, using GREEN as the mojo word:

Mother

mountain

love

arms

window

cold

green

Sometimes in my dreams

I am in a green place.

It is peaceful,

With only the sound of birds.*

My arms are at my sides.

I am unable to lift them.*

Love is calling me from the mountain.*

It is my mother.*

She is holding her arms out to me*

I can feel a cold wind blowing.*

Something in me says, “shut the window,”

And I do.*

Now the wind is outside, like my mother, waiting to come in.*

Waiting for me to open the window.*

Waiting for me to say I love you.*

These speakings were all created exactly as you see them. There was no editing, no going back, no thinking. I just let them happen. Although not exceptional speakings, that’s not the important thing. The important thing is to let yourself speak. How high you soar is up to the gods. The only modifications I made to what you see were some spelling corrections (as I try to write as quickly as the words come to me) and the creation of line breaks at the place where a natural pause had occurred, so that you could get a sense of my rhythm.

Although these speakings were created by writing them, the oral form is the true form, the one that invokes all the buried power present in your body. It will provide the true channel for the soul to speak. When you create a speaking by writing it, you must simulate the act of speaking, and like all simulations it is never quite the real thing. The true, original channel to the soul will not be opened, only partially opened. This is because you will unconsciously invoke a whole series of attitudes associated with the act of writing, and possibly, if you are a poet, a whole series of attitudes associated with the act of writing poetry.

If you wish to simulate a speaking by writing it, this problem can be easily solved if you first create a series of speakings orally, because oral composition invokes a completely different set of attitudes in creating a poem. Oral creation bypasses all you know about writing and writing a poem. Thus once you’ve orally created a poem, you’ll really know in your bones that the creation of a poem can exist completely outside of the act of writing. Once you’ve experienced that feeling, it’s much easier to temporarily let go of all the attitudes associated with writing and writing poetry. This is what you have to do if you want to write a speaking that accurately simulates the act of oral creation. The only reason you would ever create a speaking in written form is for the convenience of giving it to someone. The simulation of a speaking is but a shadow of the real thing. It’s like kissing someone through a sheet of paper.

Some Additional Tips on Speaking

Remember, this is a poetry of many voices.

My best advice at this point is don’t go on to the next chapter until you’ve created an oral speaking with a partner. Unless you do, the remainder of this section will be just words. When you create your first true speaking, you’ll go through a change. You’ll recover a lost part of yourself. It will be worth it, so relax, and keep at it until you’ve finally achieved a speaking. You’ll know when you have¾your body will feel like it’s breaking into blossom.

If You’re Still Having Problems Orally Creating . . .

• Try Writing One First

If you’re still having difficulty creating a speaking orally after several tries and would like to try writing one first, use “stream of consciousness.” You’ll have to do without the support of a partner when you write. but that may be the only way to get you over the hump.

Note: It is best to abandon the written mode as soon as you have succeeded. If you don’t, you’ll miss the boat.

To create a simulated speaking through writing, forget everything you know about poetry: no inversions, no elaborate diction, no rhymes, no line breaks, no stanza breaks. Just let it happen as if you are talking to your best friend¾the one who always understands you. No hiding. No thinking. Just let it go. It will help if you are in as dark a room as possible.

• Read it Out Loud

When you’ve finally experienced a speaking in this manner, read it out loud. Record it if possible. If it doesn’t slip trippingly off the tongue, like speech, lighten up and try again.

When you think you have it, ask a friend to “echo respond” to your reading of the poem. If you have simulated the patterns of speech, the responder should be able to respond without stepping on your feet, as there are natural pauses in speech that signal when to respond. After all, that’s what makes conversation possible. If you’re still using the matrix of writing, however, to create your speaking, the phrases will be much too long, the pauses non-existent or artificial, and the responses won’t work. That means you haven’t surrendered to the immediacy of speech, even simulated speech.

If you are still hitting roadblocks at this point, you may find yourself saying you simply can’t give up how you write. Nonsense. The real problem is that you’re afraid to give up conscious control. You are still hiding. And thinking. Trying to stay on top. You are at a crisis point consisting of danger and opportunity¾more afraid of life than hungry for it. Keep trying until you create a good simulation, in writing, of a speaking. You’ll know when you do it. Now let’s get on with producing a true, oral speaking.

If You’re Ready to Orally Create . . .

• Study the Texts of the Speakings in Chapter 11

Before you attempt to create that first true, oral speaking, look at the texts of the speakings printed in Chapter 11. Notice that the first speaking consists of one phrase per seed word (except for the seed word “mother”). This will most likely be the type of speaking you will create your first few times. Most of the speakings on the First Speakings track are like this.

Later on, as you loosen up, you may find yourself creating two or three phrases per seed word (see the second and third speaking examples). It will happen all by itself, so don’t try to force it. Generally, the speaking will close when you use the last seed word. It just happens. Sometimes, however, it will close on the sixth or fifth seed word. You’ll know it. The speaking will just stop and you’ll feel a sense of completion. If the speaking hasn’t closed by the time you use up all the seed words, and it’s not headed toward a closing all by itself, go back to the seed words and use them until the speaking closes. When it closes, your body will simply stop and there will be an emotional sense of completion.

• Visualization Helps

If you let your body visualize what you are saying (much as you do when you create a piece of gossip), that visualization helps to move the speaking forward. If you visualize your mother at a window, you may next see her doing something: waving, or screaming. That’s your next phrase. When your visualization stops, search for a new seed word to move the story forward. Continue the process until the speaking closes.

• Listen to First Speakings

Listen to the First Speakings track to get your body in the groove. Then turn on the SOULSPEAK Music track and create an oral speaking with your partner.

Well, if the gods were with you, you flew. If you didn’t, go back and try again. Relax. It may be uncomfortable for you to relinquish control, but that’s the idea. If you already know what you’re going to say, it isn’t poetry. If you want to make poetry, you have to let go.

If when you create your first true speaking you don’t feel something like a tiny, wild orgasm rising up inside you¾if you don’t feel you’ve given birth to something beautiful and true¾some part of you was still thinking. Don’t think. Feel. Imagine.

• Let Your Body do the Talking

Your soul knows what it wants to say and your body knows how to say it. Remember, a speaking is a celebration. Now go back, relax, and start again. If you still feel self-conscious, you may have to create complete privacy for yourself. Go to a room where no one can hear you. Dim the lights as low as you can and still see the seed words.

• Find a Partner

If you still don’t have a partner, look for one, even one who knows nothing of SOULSPEAK other than the few things you’ve told them. Ask them to respond with simple echoes, like those you’ve heard on the CD. Responding creates a bond. You’ll be less alone¾stronger. Remember, this is a poetry of many voices. It’s natural to be a little nervous, by the way. Remember that the Chinese character for “crisis” is made up of “danger and opportunity.” Take advantage of it.

• SOULSPEAK, a Communal Art

This predicament of finding a partner at the right time, by the way, is one of the reasons I resisted writing a book on SOULSPEAK for a long time. It is best introduced orally, in a communal setting. In that environment, it’s easy to bring people together and demonstrate how to create a multi-voiced speaking. This is very important because working with a partner is the most powerful form of SOULSPEAK. It is also the most natural form and the easiest to learn. Speaking is by its very nature a communal art. You listen, then imitate with a partner. You really don’t need any didactic teaching. You simply have to experience it to learn it.

The realities of contemporary life being what they are, however, a book will most probably be the way most people will be introduced to SOULSPEAK. Because of this your first oral speaking will most probably be solitary. But there are ways to compensate for that. After you have created your first speaking, you can partially experience what it’s like to work with a partner by simply finding someone you’re at ease with. Sit down with your partner (who may know absolutely nothing about SOULSPEAK) and tell them you want them to respond every time you say something. Tell them you’re going to create an oral poem that requires a responder, and it will be fun (which is what art is by the way—divine fun). Then play Introduction to Responding on the CD. As you’ll see, the very first responses are simply echoes (or partial echoes) of the main speaker. As the CD indicates, something will eventually come up which is not a direct echo. The responder’s body will know how to do it. No thinking, please. When you’re both ready to go, play the SOULSPEAK Music track on the CD.

If your new partner enjoys the act of responding, you should be able to continue for as long as you want. “But,” you might ask, “How can I do that? Don’t I need some new seed words?” No. Just pick a different starting word—a different mojo word. Once you do, you’re ready to create another speaking. As you’ll see, if you don’t think, you’ll create a completely new speaking. You can repeat this process for as long as the words interest you. In fact, you may find that when you go back after a while, and use the exact same starting word, the speaking will be completely different. After all, time has passed. You’re no longer who you were thirty minutes ago.

We are the prisoners of time.

Take advantage of it.

Speaking and Responding

What you will hear is the sound of the soul speaking.

You’ve now progressed to where you can create speakings orally and with a responding partner, at least in echo mode. Perhaps you’re also recording some of your speakings. What you want to do now is more fully engage your responding partner. This is because the responder must also speak to create a true communal speaking. Asking your partner to respond by echoing is a start, but at some point you want the responder to begin to reply spontaneously—to say whatever comes into their heads (without thinking). The best way to do this is to listen to the Introduction to Responding tracks and the First Speakings tracks on the CD. Don’t try to figure out the responses (there is no figuring them out in the conventional sense). Just catch the spirit. You will quickly sense that the antiphonal part of a speaking is only as powerful as the spontaneous empathy of the responder. You will also find that you and your responding partner are creating something beautiful without really knowing how you are doing it. What’s more, it will become clear to you that the joint speaking is a fugue, and that there is no main melody, there are just simultaneous melodies that support and feed each other.

This feeding is not done in a conventional sense by listening and then responding as we do in our everyday conversation (although there is always that element at work in SOULSPEAK), because both partners are speaking to an imaginary listener, not each other. I have come to the conclusion that there are various levels of responding we are capable of, just as there are many levels of listening. Many of them can’t take place in normal conversation, they can only take place in art. And after all, SOULSPEAK is an art form, not everyday conversation. Thus what takes place in SOULSPEAK is not speaking and responding in the conventional sense. Rather, both parties are jointly addressing a third, imagined party and if you give it free rein, you will create what amounts to simultaneous speakings, like a second story that is being formed by the responding speaker in a way that is almost inexplicable. You will hear examples of that on the CD track called Many Voices. When you reach that level of responding, the speakings somehow fit together like the light and dark side of the moon, and in so doing they display the full world of the soul. This normally takes place with two people, but I have done it with three, and, like operatic groups, this could probably be pushed to four or five.

All you need are compatible spirits. At some point the person you have asked to be a responder will become a speaker, because there is no difference once you get down to it. Not only are the roles interchangeable, they may even change within a particular speaking. Switching roles between main speaker and responding speaker is one of the joys of SOULSPEAK. In my experience, whoever feels stronger at the moment generally starts out as main speaker, with the responding speaker being more passive. But as in sex, this power relationship can change quite often. It just happens. And the result is a speaking of extraordinary tones and shadings. One last thing should be said about partners. They should be players—generous and courageous, willing to take risks. Look for people who want to partner—who instinctively understand the rules of partnering. They should be people who had friends when they were kids. Not a lot necessarily, but enough. This is not to say your partners can’t be idiosyncratic or have strong opinions about their art. After all, the worst thing is a wishy-washy partner. What is required is someone who understands that communal art is not the same as solitary art—you have to skinny down to accommodate the others. They have to be people who like to play in the same sense that children like to play. We don’t want those kids who wanted it all their way in the sandbox. They never change their ways, believe me. I think this is important to understand when you approach a communal art like SOULSPEAK, because in the right atmosphere of trust and play, a simultaneous multi-voiced speaking will happen. Just like that.

Expanding SOULSPEAK

There is really no end to the shapes SOULSPEAK can take.

If the gods were with you, your first speaking allowed you to enter a world in which you briefly became aware of the genius within you—of who you really are. As simple as SOULSPEAK is, however, there are a number of things you should know for a more complete understanding of its potential. One of the things you should be aware of is the kind of catalysts that can help you achieve your speakings. Seed words are the most common, but visual and musical stimulation are also quite powerful. These catalysts stimulate the right brain, the hemisphere of synthesis. Jaynes believes that preliterate poets created poetry in their right brain, not only because it was chanted in a musical way, but also because that was the way preliterate man heard the gods: “ Speak Muse, and through me tell the story of that man. . . .” Today, that hemisphere, while it still has the potential of creating words, has become dormant in that capacity, with the left-brain usually controlling all word formation. Nevertheless, I have found that the more right-brain stimulation you can achieve, the greater your chances of success with SOULSPEAK. After a while, though, you may not require catalysts at all. Once you’ve listened to some speakings on the CD and created a few yourself using seed words, you may ju

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st take off. Don’t be surprised. It happens.

External catalysts are useful but not absolutely necessary. Equally important is the hull shape of the boat. Receptivity is also a catalyst (albeit an internal one) and the most powerful way of increasing your receptivity is to speak with a partner. The mere act of gathering together is a powerful act. The gatherings may be only a speaker and responder, but it’s the start of a tribe. A communal spirit is created in which SOULSPEAK will erupt all by itself. The larger and more receptive the group, the more powerful the spirit. The ideal partnership, once you’ve mastered speaking to recorded music, consists of a singer, musician, speaker, and responder. All of our MANY VOICES albums are created this way. The albums consist of spontaneous, multi-voiced speakings, with each partner improvising a separate thread or voice. This may seem impossible, but remember, just a short time ago you probably thought speaking itself was impossible. There are no rules as to how to create a multi-voiced speaking with a live musician and singer. It may happen the very first time, or it may take a number of tries until everyone is comfortable. Here are some suggestions. Once you and your partner are able to spontaneously create a speaking to recorded music with relatively little effort, you may want to try working with a musician. But only one, please, because there is only so much improvisation that can be easily accommodated. I suggest either guitar or keyboard. The guitar is easier to start with, but today’s multi-functioned keyboards offer a great deal more in the way of sound, and sound is what is going to get your speaking going. I suggest you work with various musicians who like to improvise until you find one who also likes SOULSPEAK. They may not completely understand it, but it is important that they like it as an art form. The best way to start out with a musician is to let them improvise what they like, but in a tempo that is speakable. Don’t ask them to play like so and so. Let them be who they are, just like you want to be you. Whereas you may have pre-adjusted the nature of your speakings to the recorded music you have, that luxury won’t be available to you in live improvisation with a musician. You have to learn to relax and let the music enter you, and then let go. You’re going to have to learn to surf the waves as they come up.

Improvising like this will influence your speaking, so don’t be surprised if something entirely new in the way of a speaking comes out of you. That is what’s supposed to happen. The same thing goes when you incorporate a singer. By a singer I mean someone who likes to improvise wordless melodies. Find a singer who likes to improvise melodies to the music you’re working with. As with the musician, the singer doesn’t have to understand SOULSPEAK, only like it. You don’t need a singer who only sings Barbra Streisand or Nina Simone. Once you’ve found the right musician and right singer, let them begin to create a layer of sound and then join in—main speaker first, then responding speaker. Don’t wait too long to jump in, after all, this is a collaboration, and it helps to know where the other players are, even if only on an unconscious level. Don’t worry how it’s going to fit together. If everyone is leaning together, you will hear the sound of the soul speaking.

Although we have been talking about incorporating a live singer or musician, most likely, they will happen along much later in your development as a speaker. Because of this, an important element to consider is the recorded music for SOULSPEAK. The music on the enclosed CD, SOULSPEAK Music, is what we use for our own speakings on our Many Voices albums. Each piece of music was created as one of the spontaneous threads for a particular speaking and later brought down through our multi-track recording system. It wasn’t created in a vacuum and is thus extremely conducive to the spirit and rhythms of speaking. You may choose to create your own music for speaking, but work with the music on the CD before you go off on your own. It was our intent from the beginning to try to imitate the essential form of the music used in preliterate times. That ancient music, as best we know, was extremely simple in structure. Most probably it was created with a simple plucked instrument, and was relatively slow in tempo, with just enough musicality to support the chanting of the speakers. Certainly the music used was nothing like the sophisticated forms of music we have today. Most contemporary music, except for some forms of jazz and new age, is very difficult to use—too complete, too fat, too fast to allow speaking to take place. What we needed was a slow, skinny music that gave the speakers plenty of room.

Eventually we gravitated toward creating an eclectic, relatively simple, wave-like music that supported the tempo of our speakings. This may not always be the right music for the speakings of others, but we have found it to be almost universally acceptable. Use it until your body moves you towards something else. Music is a right brain activity and that is the portion of the brain we want to excite as much as possible, but not in a way that is contrary to the formation of a speaking. We have found that the right music will have a profound effect on your speaking. If you’re working with recorded music, you should not begin a speaking until you have found a piece that is leaning with you. To help you in this, we have created several CDs of SOULSPEAK Music (see Appendix) that should give you plenty of variety.

Story-telling Memory

This is why you can tell the same nasty piece of gossip over and over.

As you are well aware, any speakings you have created up to now have simply gone up in smoke. You felt something happening, you heard the words and the music, but you can’t really recall what you said outside of the fact that it was beautiful and true. You can’t recall it verbatim, because that memory facility (not used in oral poetry) is really an extension of writing. What you do recall is what you recall after gossiping: the general theme, the characters, the flavor. There is a way, however, to solidify your speaking so that you can repeat it over and over to an audience, as preliterate poets did in the later stages of tribal culture. Immediately begin again, using the same starting phrase. Don’t worry about the rest, it may change a bit (it may not), but after three or four passes the speaking will solidify through “story-telling memory.”

Story-telling memory works through visualization. It is the way poets like Homer (or for that matter, all bardic poets) worked. They visualized what was happening in much the same way as you when you gossip about a particular event. The gossiping genius in you takes care of the rest—finding the right words to describe what your body is visualizing. That visualization is not a Cinemascope movie in which you describe every element on the screen. It doesn’t happen that way. Think about what happens when you gossip. Something in you selectively visualizes the story you are creating on many levels (sight, feeling, sound, smell) and then somehow finds the words to describe it. In a speaking, that something in you is a marriage of the self and soul, but otherwise the machinery is the same. Thus, your speaking can solidify itself in the same way that your spontaneous gossip solidifies itself. This is why you can tell the same nasty piece of gossip over and over in the blink of an eye and never

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really know how you did it. Think about it.

I have found, however, that over time, solidifying my speakings has become of relatively little interest to me. I far prefer the first time—it is more exciting, more fulfilling. I think this is true for most improvisational artists. It is the way we record all of our Many Voices albums. We come in, turn on the machinery, and let it happen. One take, that’s it. I think that unless you have the talents and the drive of a performing artist, you’ll probably feel the same way. If you have little interest in solidifying your speakings, you’re left with two options: let your speakings go up in smoke, or record them. I do both, depending on the circumstance. Sometimes when I create a speaking for someone, just for them, they’ll look at me as if to say, “What happened to the poem?” As if it only could have validity if you can handle it, look at it, check the spelling. I usually tell them we both have it now, inside us. Just us. After a moment’s pause they get it, they really get it. After all that’s what poetry is all about isn’t it? A communication from one soul to others.

• Some Recording Considerations

There are times that you may want to record what is taking place, just so you can hear what it sounds like, or perhaps let others hear it. Even though SOULSPEAK is a participatory art, you’ll find that many people are drawn to its sound, as strange as that sound may seem initially. We have also found that some of them eventually try SOULSPEAK. This is the reason, by the way, that we record our own speakings, which we call MANY VOICES.

The equipment used for recording can be as simple as a dual cassette boom box with a built-in microphone. Just let the music play from some other source (or from one of the tape drives, if possible) and record the total result on the other drive. The quality may be a bit fuzzy, but the spirit will be there. The next step up is to use a good karaoke box with external microphones. These boxes always tend to be heavy on bass (as they’re used primarily by screaming drunks who want to be stars), so you’ll have to adjust the treble/bass balance to get a good, sharp sound. Other than that, they’re excellent for a home-type sound. I use them every day. If you want to create a sound more in keeping with today’s professional standards, so that you can get air-play, or send them to friends, you’ll find yourself in the recording business. That’s not as daunting as it used to be. There are plenty of excellent portable recording platforms that are easy to use and available at a reasonable cost. Regardless of the technique, the essential beauty of a recording is that you can re-experience the speaking. It is food for your soul. It will continually remind you of your luminosity, because what you will hear is the sound of the soul speaking. It is a sound like no other.

• Expanded Forms of SOULSPEAK

There is really no end to the forms SOULSPEAK can take because the original model is so rich. Preliterate, tribal poetry (the ancient model for SOULSPEAK) is a poetry of many elements in which the participants displayed their souls in a variety of ways: speech, costume, movement, and music. The result was a spontaneous communal poetry of many faces, many voices, many souls. There was no director. Only instinct and custom (which is another word for group instinct) decided what each participant did. This is because within the broad outlines of what was appropriate for a given occasion (for example, a speaking celebrating the death of a tribe member) each individual created his own costume (masks, body paint). They then joined in the group’s highly improvisational rhythmic movement, rhythmic music, and rhythmic speech.

Before you become overwhelmed, or the opposite, begin deliriously putting together all you know about the various art forms that comprise tribal poetry, understand first that the art forms must be in their most basic, reflexive state. To attempt to put together modern versions of the various forms is impossible. Like the verbal/musical parts, the movement and costume must be automatic and instinctual. No thinking is allowed. Isolating what is automatic (for you) in the various forms is not an easy task. The major part of this book is dedicated to doing just that for the verbal/musical forms. So go slowly. Trust your instincts, because the forms you are naturally (and strongly) drawn to will determine the shape of SOULSPEAK that is possible for you.

We are the sound of God speaking.

Thus if you are someone who loves to dance, begin to feel your way toward what is essential in your own moving. Maybe it’s a simple clapping, or stepping, or swaying, or some combination. It’s for you to decide. Your moving has to be automatic in you, and when it is, it will be the moving of your soul. The same goes for mask or costume.

If you are going to use masks, it is best to approach them as tribal man approached them—not theatrically (which is the kiss of death in this case), but as a display of the soul. The utter truth. To do this, you have to stop thinking, and let the body assist the soul. One of the keys to reaching this state of revelation is to let your body be directed by examples. The best way to do this with masks is to go to your local library and get all the picture books you can on tribal masks and face painting from as many cultures as you can. American Indian masks, for example, are as extraordinary as those from Africa or New Guinea or Polynesia, but are not widely known. Go through the pictures, find the ones you are attracted to. Make color xeroxes of those masks and paste them on your walls. Live with them for a few weeks or months. Dream them. One of the things about tribal art is that it is automatic, or reflexive. By reflexive I mean that the first paintings were face paintings. They were an inborn recognition that the face is a display of the soul. This is what looking at the masks will remind your body. Secondly, tribal art requires no technical talent of the kind we normally associate with art. The soul will tell the body what to do. Just do it: yellow line here, red circle there, black ribbon here, silver spangles there.

Although the advice is simple, your actual journey towards achieving your sense of SOULSPEAK may be a long, meandering one. That’s OK. After all, the journey is what it’s all about. Because the journey never ends, it just becomes more fulfilling and strange and beautiful. The important thing is to always follow your instincts as to how to display your soul. If costume or masks or body painting or movement doesn’t really appeal to you, then don’t follow those paths. Let your body guide you, not your mind, not your ego. The “path with heart,” as Castenada reminds us, is the essential one. Or as Campbell would put it, “Follow your bliss.” Both were saying: Follow what your body wants, that makes music in your heart.

• Other Things to Focus On

Another thing to continually focus on in your journey is the communal nature of SOULSPEAK. Even though there are oral and written versions of SOULSPEAK that can be practiced in isolation, they are merely shadows of the true SOULSPEAK, which is communal in nature. In this sense, SOULSPEAK is the opposite of meditation, which is practiced in isolation. Meditation has had an immense appeal in a culture in which we are becoming increasingly isolated from one another.

Our increasing isolation from one another is an essential movement in our culture. Where it will take us no one really knows, but its force is almost irresistible. No wonder that we have continued to follow its movement through the practice of meditation. After all, if the river is swift and powerful, go with it, but find an eddy where you can live spiritually. But we are social animals. We need to touch and be touched. All the electronic devices that are both the effect and cause of this isolation (and which in turn are simultaneously held up as cures) are not going to put Humpty Dumpty together again after a certain point. Or, if we somehow manage to do it, it’s going to be one very strange egg.

We need to have spiritual countermeasures that bring us together. SOULSPEAK is one of those countermeasures, taking the opposite path of meditation. If meditation brings us to the timeless place that is the soul, SOULSPEAK takes the opposite path and moves the many voices of the soul outward into the world of time.

God only speaks in time.

The act of meditation and the act of speaking are both valid activities of the soul. Up until recently, most of us knew nothing of meditation, but it has been going on for thousands and thousands of years. We simply had to rediscover it. The same is true, I believe, for the art of speaking.

Other SOULSPEAK Catalysts

What we want to do is bring the whale beneath the boat.

Earlier on, I mentioned there were other catalysts besides seed words. Before I show them to you, however, I want to say something about the use of seed words. Once people get to know a bit about SOULSPEAK, one of the first things they assume is that seed words determine the nature and content of the speaking. Although I can understand their thinking this, given the mysterious way in which the speakings materialize, nothing could be further from the truth. They simply act as catalysts that allow the soul, which already knows what it wants to say, to emerge into the physical world as a speaking. The soul is always singing. But like the singing of whales, we are never aware of it. The whale is too far beneath the boat. We need to bring the whale just beneath the boat and let the vibrations come up through us as a speaking. To do this, we can either wait for the whale to come under the boat or we can induce it into coming under. Catalysts, such as seed words, are the inducers, the chum that will bring the whale up. But catalysts aren’t always required. Sometimes SOULSPEAK just happens. The use of catalysts is akin to a Caesarian (or induced) birth. The baby is there, we just want it now. One of the effects of catalysts such as seed words is that you can produce poetry on demand. And it’s not cheap poetry either. I can tell you as a poet, that despite the fast food connotation, the poems can be as shatteringly beautiful as anything I’ve produced without them.

Seed words are the most convenient form of external catalyst. The object in creating seed words is to produce a group of words that are related in some way, and that allow the soul to emerge and grab onto the world of the self, in the same spirit as a rock climber who grabs onto handholds and traverses the sheer cliff face in front of him. If he is lucky, he’ll find handholds exactly where he needs them in order to traverse the cliff in a movement of extraordinary beauty. Similarly, the correct seed words will allow the soul to find the handholds in the self to complete its extraordinary song. But how does one create the correctly placed handholds? The first answer is, You don’t know. And the second answer is, Intuition. In other words, you’re on your own. But not quite, because there is an easy technique for deriving seed words. Let me tell you how I discovered them.

The idea of seed words first occurred to me after I began working with at-risk children. The idea was to let them use SOULSPEAK in a direct therapeutic manner to help them express their fears and conflicts. After a few examples the children could sometimes create speakings spontaneously (with no outside catalysts) but often they couldn’t. My theory was that SOULSPEAK should come out of them as quickly and as easily as ordinary gossip. In theory it was right, but in practice something was missing. Then one day, the idea of seed words came to me. Although as I learned later, seed words are often used in writing workshops to help direct the writer’s attention to certain areas, I was ignorant of the technique. The idea came to me as a way of eliminating the unknown roadblock the children were encountering. But to tell you the truth, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I just had a feeling that the seven words I put on the board would help them create their speakings, and they did, even though I didn’t know how, or why.

The seven words continued to work and the children were able to produce speakings almost on demand, which made the therapeutic use of SOULSPEAK an extraordinary success. Thousands of at-risk children of all ages and backgrounds have participated in the program since that time. I never understood why seven seed words was the correct number, but it turns out it is. Use more, and the speaking tends to degenerate into simply a story, gossip. Use less, and the speaking never gets off the ground. No matter what group of children I have worked with (and they have ranged from slow learners to children with severe emotional and anger management problems to young boys and girls in juvenile justice facilities), the technique has worked so that every child has been able to create a speaking. Not only does it make them feel gifted but its communal nature helps break down the walls of isolation that surround them. It was when I saw what was happening to the children that I began to dimly realize that SOULSPEAK was meant for everyone. And that catalysts such as seed words were a way to bring SOULSPEAK to them.

Seed words are by far the most popular catalyst. At first, I developed lists of seed words that I handed out. Some were for general use. But some were for specific purposes, as it soon became clear to me that seed words could be developed to direct the unconscious attention of at-risk children to specific areas such as physical and sexual abuse. Some of those lists, by the way, are contained in the Appendix. More importantly, it became clear to me that seed words could be created by anyone. All that was needed was a general rule. Rules, of course, are meant to be violated, and the Seven Categories Rule that I eventually came up with is no exception. Nevertheless, experience has shown it to be remarkably useful.

The Seven Categories Rule

Categories Examples

Family member or loved one Mother, father, sister, grandfather, God, pet, boyfriend, wife, uncle.

Color Yellow, black, purple, white, red

Positive emotion or feeling Warm, love, comfort

laugh, happy, peaceful,

serene, light, smile

Negative emotion or feeling Cold, hate, sharp, cry, sad, stormy, angry, dark, frown.

Structural part of a house Roof, floor, stairs, wall, window, door, attic, cellar, hall

Part of the body Face, eyes, mouth, lips, nose, arms, belly, lungs, heart, brain

Something in nature Dog, sky, moon, stars, river, parrot, lake, mountain, leaf

Here’s how the Seven Categories Rule works. Look at a particular category in a very relaxed way. Write down the first word that comes to you, no matter how lightly it comes or how foolish (or dangerous) it seems. Do it quickly. No hiding. No thinking. It’s okay for someone else to create a seed word list for you, especially your SOULSPEAK partner. Try it.

OTHER TYPES OF CATALYSTS

► SPECIALIZED SEED WORDS/GREAT POETS SOULSPEAK

There is a specialized way of developing seed words that revolves around a version of SOULSPEAK for children, called: Great Poets SOULSPEAK. It works well with middle and elementary school students. The idea is to bring every child in the class immediately into the world of poetry, and that means every child and immediately. This is done using the SOULSPEAK process along with seed words taken from a great poem.

The poems of Robert Frost are an excellent source because they are simple in vocabulary, narrative in form, and (although they are truly great poems) they can be understood on some level at almost any age. Generally, the children write their speakings (in stream of consciousness form) because the objective is to use the SOULSPEAK process to bring them into the great world of written poetry.

After they have created their SOULSPEAK poems, they are shown the Frost poem from which the seed words were taken. It brings them into the big leagues immediately. They know how to ride the bike. Maybe they don’t know how it works, what the brakes are for, or the gear changer, but they know how to ride. When they are shown the Frost poem they see what he did with the same words, or the feelings represented by the seed words.

You should see the intensity on their faces as they read the Frost poem. They learn more about great poetry in those few moments than they could ever learn by more didactic methods. The Frost poem is then used to illustrate the mechanics of written poetry, i.e. the rules for line break, stanza break, and so on. The children rewrite their written, stream of consciousness speakings to conform with these rules. What makes it so powerful is that the poems created by the SOULSPEAK process are not trivial poems. Frost would be proud of them. And the kids know it. Their bodies know it.

► VISUAL CATALYSTS

At the current time, three forms of visual catalysts are used in the SOULSPEAK process: masks, paintings, and videos. The masks and paintings are used to create a set of seed words through a specialized extraction technique. These seed words are then used to create a speaking that is related to the mask or painting. In the video technique, the speaking is created spontaneously from the changing images, which are particularly powerful catalysts. They also allow you to marry your speaking (as a soundtrack) to the video image.

► Soulmasks

A mask is created (or a picture of an actual primitive mask is chosen) by the potential speaker. The speaker then asks the following questions of the mask and writes down the answers:

• What season of the year is this mask worn?

• What color in the mask is most appealing?

• Who does this mask remind you of besides yourself?

• What is the main emotion the mask is feeling?

• What is the opposite of that emotion?

• Where is this mask worn?

• What animal does the mask remind you of?

You will wind up with a good set of seven seed words close in composition to the Seven Categories Rule. You then create a spontaneous speaking, not as yourself, but as the persona of the mask, i.e., you speak as the mask would. I call this process SOULMASK. There is an imaginative freedom resulting from the speaker becoming the mask. I’ve had sixth grade children create poetry of such a complex texture you’d swear it came from adults.

► Paintings

Use a painting or photograph by the potential speaker, or chosen by the speaker. The painting or picture should be narrative and not abstract in any way. It should revolve around a figure or figures. If the picture has been made by the speaker, quality is not important. Otherwise, the painting (or picture) should be a masterpiece. This process is called SOULART. The questions asked are as follows:

• Which color is the most appealing to you?

• What emotion is the main figure feeling?

• What is the opposite of that emotion?

• Who (member of your family—including yourself) does the main figure remind you of?

• What time of day is the painting taking place?

• What thing or object in the painting is the most appealing to you?

• Where is this painting taking place?

When you have a good set of seven seed words, create the speaking in the persona of the main figure.

► Videos

The following technique is best used with a narrative painting or collage that is extremely dense in construction. If the artist who made the visual is available, ask them to create a video of it at extremely close range so as to reveal only one or two elements at a time as the camera travels slowly through the work. Otherwise, do it yourself. How the camera travels through the work is up to the cameraman, but the idea is to create a new work of art, one that reveals itself in a river of time. When the video is finished, play it back and create a soundtrack speaking using the images as “seed words.” This process is called SOULVIDEO.

NOTE: In our studio, we do this all at once, improvisationally, adding the cameraman/artist as a fifth member to our normal four-person SOULSPEAK group, MANY VOICES. This way the cameraman can react to what the four other members are doing and vice versa. Try this after you have mastered all the other catalyst techniques. It is extremely powerful, directly stimulating the right brain as you speak.

You now have a variety of CATALYSTS to get you speaking. All of them are easily accomplished.

As you can also easily create a video that includes both the visual and audio portions of the various visual forms of SOULSPEAK, you can create an album of visual speakings of extraordinary beauty. We have also found that is a good way to introduce others to SOULSPEAK. After all, we live in a highly visual culture. One of the problems I’ve experienced in introducing people to SOULSPEAK is that they want something to look at. They find it difficult to just listen, which, by the way, becomes much easier once you start to do SOULSPEAK. Still, why fight traffic? Since the visual forms of SOULSPEAK offer a convenient doorway through which strangers can experience its beauty, why not use it? And what makes it particularly intriguing is that the visuals are so intimately related to the speakings. When you view or create a SOULSPEAK piece using visual catalysts, you begin to sense what tribal man experienced in his multi-faceted portrayals of the soul.

I consider SOULSPEAK to be an evolving art form that can be used by anyone, and I literally mean anyone. What forms it may take and to what ends it may be used are up to those who learn it. I do know this: SOULSPEAK will change your life if you let it. By this I mean once you create a speaking, and most especially a speaking with others, a door will open within you. You may choose to close that door forever or walk through it, but, either way, you will never be the same.

SOULSPEAK as an Aid to Writing Poetry

The self makes verse; the soul makes poetry.

This chapter is intended for those who are writing poetry but having difficulty composing their poems. SOULSPEAK can be of immense help if your poems are coming in little bursts, or pieces—like static-filled, incomplete radio broadcasts that you then try to stitch together. This happens to all poets in the very beginning. But quite soon, if they are poets of genius (or after many years of work if they’re not), a breakthrough occurs and the poems begin to come quite easily—almost completely formed. This happens when you stop bouncing between the self and the soul as the poem comes to you. You stay in the zone of the soul and forget what the self is saying to you. The self always wants to play it safe. It gets scared and wants to pull you up from the deep dive of the soul. What you wind up with then is little bursts of poetry between big slices of self. Nobody wants that sandwich.

Another way of describing that eventual breakthrough is to say that the channel between self and soul somehow changes from an on again/off again dirt road to a four-lane highway. Once that happens, it’s hard to go wrong. As shown in workshops conducted for developing poets of all ages, the SOULSPEAK process can affect that breakthrough in a matter of hours. All you need is the courage to throw away everything you know about writing poetry for a few hours and create some speakings. The act of speaking automatically creates a very wide channel between the self and the soul—re-opening a buried channel. The feeling associated with being on this new, wide channel will remind you to stay off the dirt road when you return to writing poetry. You’ll know what it feels like to be on the expressway. When you go back to writing, not only will your poems begin to form quite easily, but also an alarm will go off whenever you start to slip off the expressway. You’ll feel it.

The reason poets get stuck initially on the dirt road is due to the “Lorenz factor.” When you write your first poems, you’re very much like the newly hatched goslings the naturalist Hans Lorenz observed attaching themselves to the first moving body they saw. In Lorenz’s experiments, he made himself the first body his newly hatched goslings saw, so that they immediately (and permanently) locked on to him as if he were their real mother. They followed him around everywhere, despite his lack of feathers. Similarly, when our very first poems come to us, we unconsciously (and perhaps consciously) assume many of the forms and poses and attitudes of the poet (or poets) who first awakened the spirit of poetry in us. It happens to everybody. Poets of genius soon slough that costume off and create their own. But everyone else has to work on it.

One of the reasons your poems may be coming to you incompletely is that you’re still trying to fit your soul into someone else’s costume. This may have worked for your first few poems (which are probably more Lorenz’s than yours anyway), but as you grew, the Lorenz costume became more and more in conflict with who you were becoming as a poet. Doing SOULSPEAK for a few hours is the easiest way to stop following Lorenz around. It requires you to (temporarily) forget everything you know about written poetry, and that automatically includes your Lorenz costume. This “unlocking” happens, because, compared to written poetry, SOULSPEAK is a relatively formless poetry. It contains none of the forms and poses and diction and attitudes associated with written poetry. When the speakings come to you they will use an entirely different route to get out—a route that bypasses the instinct to automatically follow Lorenz.

You will emerge not clothed in your Lorenz costume, but somewhat naked and very close to the real poetic you. (This will occur, by the way, only if you have followed the instructions about forgetting everything.) Once you’re naked, you can begin writing your poetry again, but this time you won’t be following Lorenz. If you listen to your body, something in you will retain the parts of your Lorenz costume that are still useful, and slough off the parts it no longer needs. You’re on your own after that, but you will have taken a tremendous jump. More importantly, your body will know what it feels like to be on a highway all the time as compared to those dirt roads. This body knowledge is important because you’ll have a tendency to get on those dirt roads again when the ferocity of the expressway starts to scare you. But this time around, your body will signal you, like an alarm. The trick is to stay on the highway (no matter how scary) and not take those dirt roads where the poem bounces between the self and the soul. This is why your poems have been so uneven. Let the soul make the poem, no matter what the self thinks you should be doing. The self makes verse; the soul makes poetry. Get rid of the self. Of course, once you’ve tasted SOULSPEAK, you may find it so attractive you may begin to use both it and your usual written composition process. You may even give up writing poetry altogether. What will actually happen to you is up to the gods. At any rate, don’t worry about it. It won’t be a conscious decision anyway. Your soul will let you know the path to take.

Part IV

Some Final Thoughts on SOULSPEAK

The art of speaking offers each of us a way of becoming

the mysterious, luminous beings we really are.

The chapters that follow this one are intended primarily for poets. If you are not a poet, the last half of this book may not be of interest. It may have some relevance for you, however, if you have succeeded in creating a few speakings, because by that act you have become a poet: you have entered that world. Of course, by entering that world so directly and so naturally, you have created a different poetry. SOULSPEAK is a poetry so human and powerful and direct that it doesn’t really suffer from the same problems and concerns that contemporary written poetry does. Because of this, you may find much of what I have to say to be somewhat academic, maybe even beside the point. But it may also allow you to appreciate the true value of speaking in allowing you to fly without having to strap on a set of cumbersome wings and all the gears and pulleys and levers and pedals needed to make them flap fast enough. Ask Leonardo if you have any doubts.

I fully expect that many poets will disagree with my observations on the beauty and power of speaking, especially those who have not been able, or willing, to orally create a speaking despite the simplicity of the SOULSPEAK process. For those who have actually created a few speakings, however, the power of oral poetry should have become much more tangible and something not so easily dismissed. If I have accomplished only that, then there is reason to hope that some of us can begin to take advantage of what oral poetry can teach us. How much those insights will influence the direction of our current poetry culture is difficult to say. Most probably it will choose to continue on its own difficult, isolated path. I hope that as a result of this book some of you will continue to speak on a continuing basis (much as people currently practice meditation) simply for the luminosity it brings to your life. There is no way of predicting in what manner the art of speaking will affect you. That mystery, after all, is at the heart of all journeys. I also hope some of you will choose to pass it on to friends, informally, much as the practice of meditation is often passed on.

All it takes to give someone a taste is a few words about the general idea of SOULSPEAK, followed by some friendly encouragement and an example. Then, if you actually take ten minutes and create a few speakings with them, they should be ready to try speaking on their own. It doesn’t matter in what form you pass the speaking on: single voiced, multi-voiced, even writing the speaking. The important thing is to pass it on in the form most comfortable for them and for you. The rest is up to them. Your job is to plant the seed, just as I’ve planted it within you. If they’re intrigued, perhaps reading this book would be a helpful next step. It depends on how easily they catch fire. This is an art that is within us, easily reawakened simply by doing it with others. There really is no need for formal workshops, although some people may find them helpful, especially if they have difficulty in reaching the emotional state necessary for speaking to occur. Learning how to speak is much easier in a true communal environment. Once people begin to speak, they’ll be entirely capable of developing the art to whatever level is correct for them. All they have to bring to the table is courage and generosity.

The real function of the art of speaking is to give each of us a way of displaying our soul, a way of turning ourselves inside out, of feeling how mysterious and luminous we really are. Unless we have some way of doing this, we are in danger of becoming slowly de-humanized. Don’t get me wrong. We’ll be very civil about the whole thing. We will simply become dim creatures in dim rooms and not even know it. I don’t think there is any way of stopping this movement. The best we can do is to create isolated pockets where we can become momentarily luminous. Some may find this outlook far too pessimistic, but I see it as realistic. It’s what is in store for us whether we like it or not.

We are becoming dimmer for many reasons. For one thing, we are racing away from pain at an alarming rate—a rate so fast I sometimes think we are in danger of exceeding the speed of light. Yet we know from our greatest teachers that the acceptance of pain is the way to become fully human. Indeed, one of the functions of art is to help us accept this paradox. Every Greek, down to the lowliest son of a hide-tanner, went to the annual tragedies. To not attend was to admit to being less than a man. We have no such role for art in our society. Much of our art (and especially corporate art) is structured to ignore pain. Life, however, is pain: the pain of death, of birth, sickness, loneliness, failure, even the most ecstatic and piercing love has an element of pain. Unless we find some way to help us come to terms with this paradox, we will live increasingly de-humanized lives and not even know it. That is what is so terrifying.

When I say we are racing away from pain, I don’t necessarily mean through the drugs of all descriptions that increasingly dominate our lives (although they play a role as they always have). Life has always been painful and people have always taken drugs to numb or enlighten themselves. Whether we are more drugged than in other times is hard to say. Certainly we have a greater variety. What is unique in our times is not drugs but the fact that we are the first society that has figured out a way to avoid the pain caused by personal contact. We didn’t plan it this way, or at least I don’t think we did. Rather it seems to be a by-product of the technology that has allowed us live isolated lives and yet still communicate with each other efficiently. Too efficiently. In a recent TV interview, I heard a marine general state that he trained his men the way he did so they could handle the immense fear war causes. He said he didn’t mean the napalm and the lasers and the bombs they had to face, but the terrifying moment when they had to look in the eyes of a man a few feet away intent on killing them. That, he said, is the real fear they have to learn to handle, and that everything else pales by comparison.

The general was right, of course. It’s what we go through every day, in the office, at parties, making love, shopping, arguing, and playing. Because what we are dealing with in those situations is a human being capable of harming us in every way we can possibly imagine. The fact that it seldom happens doesn’t make any difference. Deep inside we know what we are capable of doing to others—and what they are capable of doing to us. That is the real danger we face, and have always faced. Not pollution, or unsafe cars, or global warming (at least not as far as our psyches are concerned). Our psyches have their antennae out all the time—the same antennae that constantly feed our dreams—and they are telling us (among other things) that we live in a constant state of potential pain. After all, humans are magnificent, weird, beautiful, bristly, dangerous creatures. We’re not at the top of the food chain for nothing.

Our technological prowess has given us a way to minimize that potential pain of contact. We do it by contacting each other electronically. I do it. You do it. Whether we do it to avoid pain or just for convenience, doesn’t really matter. The effect is the same. We block out a part of someone’s humanity and lose a part of our own in return. Even if we are innocent of this intent (like Pavlov’s dog), we soon sense the advantage of being out of reach and hit the button. I know some idiot is going to pipe up, “Not to worry, we’ll soon have holographs as real as us.” As if we were only a collection of biomechanical parts and not the luminous beings we truly are. One has only to sit in one of those thousand dollar massage chairs to realize once and for all that nothing substitutes for the miracle of being touched by another human being.

And like the hands of another, nothing substitutes for face- to-face encounters, as volatile as they potentially are. When we avoid the bristly, dangerous parts of each other, we also lose those that are warm and loving. You can’t have only one side of the moon. You lose one side of the moon, you lose both, simple as that. You become dimmer. It’s so insidious, and so attractive, I see no way of stopping it. If you sit back and think about it, our increasing dimness (or numbness) explains why our young people have difficulty working with others and are so attracted to acts of self-interest, self-mutilation, and meaningless sex. Compare it to the sixties. It’s not a cycle. The next generation will be even worse. After all, men have been searching for a release from pain since the beginning of time, and here it is right at our fingertips. Finally.

In a recent C-SPAN panel on de Tocqueville’s sense of the American spirit, someone put forth a proposition of de Tocqueville’s that Americans were obsessed both by the spirit of self-interest and the spirit of religious practice, and that the two kept each other in balance. And if religion, with its emphasis on something larger than the self, were to disappear, the vital American democracy would simply devolve into a bureaucratic arrangement to facilitate self-interest. This is what is happening to us today. Although we are still one of the most religious modern nations, religion’s ability to influence our spiritual lives is rapidly waning. The statistics may or may not show that we are losing our religion, as the song says, and more people than ever may be going to church, but it is often to churches whose teachings are no longer concerned with man’s relation to the unknowable, but to a disguised form of self-interest. Give to God, get double your money back. New cars. Money in the bank.

In the meantime, our government is becoming exactly what de Tocqueville predicted. Although he was primarily concerned with what would happen to our political institutions, I find his observations almost a parallel to my own sense that our humanity is slipping into a very dim state. We are just coming at it from different vantage points. Where we join is in the observation that something larger than the self is required to balance our lives. Religion, for de Tocqueville was the way to keep our rampant spirit of self-interest at bay, and keep our society vital. But it is also the way we learn to make sense of pain. Once religion loses its power to convince us, we are set adrift in a sea of confusion and hopelessness. What we do then is learn to push the button that limits the pain. It is a completely painless operation. Dim boys in a dim room.

Although it is a large claim that art can replace religion as a guiding force, it is the only viable candidate. The Greek theater (and specifically the tragedies) played something of this role for the Greeks. If we were to look for a counterpart today both in terms of potential artistic power and universal accessibility, it would be the movies. I don’t think it’s going to happen. The forces of corporate art are simply too strong. Although there may be many who see things much as I do, there would have to be a counter-movement of immense size to even begin to change the course of the dry river that is sweeping us away.

Of course there is another problem, and that is the nature of our art forms. The form of the Greek theater was quite close to its tribal ancestor in that it was both a religious and aesthetic experience for the audience. The two hadn’t become separated as they have in our times. One can hardly compare the intensity and sense of awe of a Greek audience at the Tragedies to our own level of expectation as we approach our neighborhood movie house. While we might be able to approach the aesthetic level of the Tragedies, our arts are no longer part of our spiritual lives. That relationship could change. But it would require a massive change in the nature of our culture. It may happen, but the forces against it are immense. One can only hope.

There is another way to resist this dimming of our lives, and that is with individual action. It is what some of our ancestors did to survive the dark ages. Today, there are any number of small counter-movements that focus on things we can do as individuals to protect our humanity and spirituality. These usually involve teachings of some kind, but some, such as meditation, don’t have any particular set of teachings to espouse. SOULSPEAK is also a neutral type of activity. It simply teaches you how to do something. That something, of course, is the act of speaking. What makes it particularly powerful is that it is based on an art form that was used when art and religion were not separate entities but the same thing. Speaking was the way tribal man spoke to the gods. It was the way he praised the gods by imitating the essential mystery of creation and destruction.

That was very long ago, when we lived in a tribal state. We can’t go back to that time, but we can learn from it. We can learn how to speak. That act is timeless. It is also, by its very nature, both a spiritual and aesthetic experience. We simply have to reclaim it, because speaking is a very human way to align ourselves with the immense mystery that surrounds us. The art of speaking, however, doesn’t guarantee happiness or success. Art doesn’t offer that, doesn’t even pretend to. It simply allows us to know, in a way that is beyond logic, what it really means to be human. It allows us to understand, on a blood level, that we are a part of something that is impossibly beautiful and impossibly true. Beyond that we are on our own. After all, life is a dangerous and beautiful business. The only true guarantee we all have is that one day we will die. Until that time, the art of speaking offers each of us, if only for a few moments, a way of becoming the mysterious, luminous beings we really are. In the light of that luminosity, everything makes sense: love pain death birth. That is what I am offering you. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Part V

A New Call for an Older Poetry

Introduction to Part V

We know it existed, but we wish it didn’t.

For those of you who are curious about the poetry of preliterate times and how it relates to the poetry of today, I thought it would be useful if I shared my thoughts on these matters in this half of the book. Although one would think there would be a good fund of knowledge about preliterate poetry, there isn’t. Except for some specialized scholarship, there is general ignorance of the subject, especially among poets themselves who find it hard to accept that a valid poetry exists outside the act of writing. The best way to sum up this general attitude is: we know it existed, but we wish it didn’t. For most poets, poetry and writing are viewed as coterminous events. Anything that existed before the act of writing is simply shoved aside as a kind of embarrassment. After all, it’s not literature. Oh, we’ll accept Homer, is the general view, but let’s get on with a poetry that really means something. Who needs a primitive, unsophisticated, spoken poetry?

I knew very little about oral poetry before SOULSPEAK began to unfold itself within me. All I had were rumors. The more involved I became with the art of speaking, however, the more aware I became of the fact that oral poetry was anything but primitive. Not only did I become convinced that it was a poetry of immense power (perhaps even beyond that of written poetry), but that it could help us look at the nature of poetry in a new way. It became increasingly clear to me that it could shed some light on why poetry—the most human and most profound of our arts—has ceased to be a meaningful influence in our lives.

There was very little interest, however, in the insights I had gained from oral poetry. Our poetry culture, which has become hopelessly intertwined with our academic culture, simply wasn’t interested. Forget that poets themselves had problems with a spoken poetry, a more serious problem was that the poetry culture had taken up many of the values of our academies—values that often run counter to the true interests of poetry. After all, academies are scholarly institutions. Poetry is an art. There is an inherent conflict. Scholarship is always looking to the past. Art is, by necessity, on the edge of what is. But that conflict is a problem for all types of poetry—written and spoken. With spoken poetry, however, there is an additional problem. This is because spoken poetry (and especially oral poetry) is not literature, and our academies have no place for poetry outside of literature. It’s a Catch-22. Literature departments function best when they perform their historically accepted role of studying, explicating, and preserving written documents. How can you do that with an oral poetry? It is even difficult to do with performance poetry, as there is often much more to it than words on a page. There would have to be a radical change in the structure of literature departments to accommodate the field of spoken poetry. This change, of course, would be difficult. Our academies preserve better than they innovate.

It’s going to be a long time before our poetry culture begins to open itself to forms other than the written. Whatever spoken poetry has to teach us will have to take place outside our academies. And while I sometimes feel that our poetry culture will eventually catch up, it is just as likely that it never will. This half of the book, an extension of my essay, “A New Call for an Older Poetry” (available on our webswite), documents the insights I gained from my practice and study of ancient and contemporary oral poetry. It has become a point of reference for those who feel, like myself, that poetry has to become increasingly spoken if is to make a difference in our lives.

The State of Contemporary Poetry

Language today more and more wants to be

spoken and heard, rather than written and read.

I don’t think you’d get much argument today that poetry, as an art, has ceased to influence our lives in any meaningful way. Yet there are some poets who will tell you that poetry is doing very well thank you, as well as it ever has. But the evidence suggests this simply isn’t so. There are other poets, however, who will agree that poetry has lost its way. Some even suggest that poetry had its last high mark in the thirteenth century, or the seventeenth, or the early twentieth. But none can seem to come to any consensus on the matter, let alone suggest a remedy. This is because their time frame is too small to see the true curve of decline. If you extend it back to the emergence of man as an artistic being, say around 30,000 B.C., you can quite easily say that the decline of poetry began with the emergence of writing around 1500 B.C.

Prior to the advent of writing, poetry was everything. Anyone who argues with that is ignorant of history. After the advent of writing and the splintering of the arts, poetry began its slow decline. If you were to graph that decline, with the horizontal X axis indicating time (1500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.) and the vertical Y axis indicating influence on our lives (0% to 100%), you would have a gradually declining line. You might notice, however, a particularly sharp decline setting in around 1500 A.D. and then again around 1920, accelerating rapidly in that same direction after 1950. These little anomalies correspond to the widespread introduction of the printing press (1500); the phone, radio, and movies, (1920); and then, finally, television (1950). These anomalies may seem senseless to some, but the first date (printing press) corresponds to the decline of oral poetry and the subsequent rise of written poetry as the dominant form. The two latter dates correspond to the decline of written poetry as we began our very rapid change into a semi-oral society—a society where speaking began to replace writing as the dominant form of artistic, social and political communication.

All this may make you think that poetry is indeed in a terminal state. Well, it is, but it can be resurrected quite easily. It simply has to change form from the written to the oral. This may seem impossible, but it’s not. It just takes time. And courage. After all, poetry has changed form before. When writing emerged, poetry changed from oral to written of its own accord. At the time there was probably much debate against that happening, but it happened. Simple as that. And as we change more and more into a semi-oral society, I sense something equally potent is waiting in the wings for poetry today. Because what is slowly emerging from the clubs and cafés and theatres outside our academies is not a new form of written, “speech-like” poetry (although variations will leak out from time to time as they always have), but various forms of lyric, spoken poetry based on the principles of oral (not written) composition.

I should make some distinctions between spoken and oral poetry, as they mean slightly different things. Spoken poetry is a general term I use for any poetry that is created to be spoken and which may be accompanied by music. Such a poetry may be initially created by the act of speaking alone, in which case I would classify it as a true oral poetry, or it could be created by writing, or some combination of writing and speaking, in which case I would classify it as performance poetry. Most rap poetry, slam poetry, and jazz poetry fall into this latter category. From my own point of view, I see them as approximations of a true oral poetry. They are attempts to create an oral poetry without having to give up entirely the act of writing. Oral poetry, on the other hand, is a much rarer bird. It is a term I use specifically for a poetry that is composed without any use of writing or its mental analogues. SOULSPEAK is an example of such a poetry. It is composed (in principle) exactly as preliterate poetry was: by unpremeditated, narrative speaking. Although performance poetry is by far the more widely practiced today, I believe oral poetry is the Galápagos that holds the true key to understanding how poetry can survive as a meaningful art.

We are living in an age where speech is rapidly replacing writing as the major form of artistic communication. If this is so, it makes sense for poets to screw up their courage and take a long, hard look at oral poetry and the oral creation of poems. Just about every poet I have spoken to about this observation has viewed it as the equivalent of a UFO sighting. Just the idea of speaking out a poem at the moment of creation (rather than writing it) seems to them not only deranged but impossible. And horribly backward. And frightening. And yet, having made the transition from a written, to a performance, and (finally) to a truly oral poetry, I can say that, while my own journey was difficult at times, I have found the oral to be one of the most immediate and natural forms for poetry to take.

Oral poetry existed for thousands of years prior to the emergence of a written poetry. What’s more, oral poetry continued to exist side by side with written poetry until the force of the printing press eventually extinguished it in all but the most remote corners of the world. But reading and writing are on a head-on collision course with our electronically connected culture: we are returning to a new form of oral society in which a major portion of social, political, and artistic communication will be accomplished by speaking rather than writing. This change has already effected a corresponding change in the structure of our language and our expectations of it. It is a change that has been taking place since the late twenties, when the effect of the telephone and radio and talking movies first began to be felt by our culture. But it was our old friend television, in the fifties, that accelerated the change to the point where it can no longer be ignored. And because poetry is so intimately connected to language, it took the biggest hit, notably the loss of its natural, non-academic audience, after just a few generations of the telephone and movies and radio and television.

This loss should be no surprise given the force of these new instruments. But it is a surprise the way poets still ignore or deny the possibility of creating a viable, contemporary, spoken poetry while at the same time continuing to solely champion a written poetry that, no matter how magnificent it may be, is increasingly out of touch with the sea of language we are all being forced to swim in today—a language that more and more wants to be spoken and heard rather than written and read. To ignore this fact is to ignore the obvious, something our poetry culture can be extremely adept at. If there are barbarians at the gates, they will simply do what they have always done when threatened: pull up the drawbridge and settle down to passing manuscripts among themselves.

This is happening today; because even though slams and black rap have already established a vast, non-academic audience for a poetry more spoken than written, our poetry culture has remained all but blind to their existence. My own experience with the oral creation of poetry, and in particular the contemporary version of antiphonal poetry I call SOULSPEAK, has convinced me that out of this counter-Gutenberg revolution (of which slams and rap are only a very crude beginning) a new generation of poets will eventually emerge who will create a lyric, spoken poetry linked in many ways to the ancient, oral traditions of the preliterate world. How long this will take is anybody's guess, bound as our poetry culture is to the act of writing. Much of it will take place outside of our academies. But there is no doubt that we will eventually see more and more poets choosing to create not only a performance poetry, but a true oral poetry.

Whether we like it or not, we are all being pulled back to a poetry that wants to resemble speech (because that has always been a reoccurring eddy in the river of written poetry), but also to something entirely new to our times: a true oral poetry. Not a performance poetry, but a lyric, oral poetry that uses rhythmic music and the matrix of speech to realize itself—an unpremeditated, narrative speech, the kind of speech that takes place spontaneously between friends (and enemies) when matters of the heart are discussed. This is because unpremeditated, narrative speech is the only engine that can drive a true oral poetry. It is the very engine that drove the oral poetry of the past and gave it such power. While such a poetry can be approximated by writing it (or writing and then performing it), the result is never quite satisfactory because the act of speaking is fundamentally different from the act of writing. For poetry to regain its audience, it must become more spoken. That is the only face of poetry that our new, continually distracted, orally tuned culture is going to pay any attention to.

What Oral Poetry Brings to the Table

If the Psalms, orally composed narratives chanted

to rhythmic music, still appeal to us today in their desiccated, written form,

imagine how powerful they were when originally spoken!

There are ways that written poetry can profit from the inherent attractiveness of spoken (and oral) poetry in this semi-oral age of ours. Some significant part of written poetry will become more speakeable and hearable as a result of honoring the principles of oral composition. And yet, having created a good number of poems in both forms, I can say that I have almost lost my taste for writing poems. Compared to oral creation, it's like making love by remote control. I feel the same way when I listen to or read written poetry, including my own.

This personal experience with oral creation has lead me to believe that only poems that are orally composed can fulfill the potential of a language that increasingly wants to be spoken (and heard). This may be a difficult apple for many poets to swallow, but it is what the gods have placed on a low-hanging branch for us. When poems are truly orally composed (i.e., when the poet completely surrenders to the act of unpremeditated narrative speech), the whole structure of the poem changes. It begins to have those qualities that have defined oral poetry since time immemorial. The poem is more direct in structure and tone, driven by narrative, more married to music, less elaborate in imagery, more immediate, and finally and most importantly, intimately linked to the changing structure of our language.

Oral poetry brings something else—something unexpected—to poets lost all their lives in the silent, private world of writing. Oral poetry brings something immensely spiritual, both to speakers and listeners. It brings the sound of the soul speaking. This may seem a bit over the top for many, especially those who are more at home with the silent, printed word. But it is the only way to describe the peculiar effect of a true oral poetry when it hits the mark—especially multi-voiced oral poetry, which is the true, essential form of oral poetry. It is a sound both human and divine. It is the sound of beauty and the sound of truth, with a pacing and authority that come from a deeper source than the self. We can begin to see why oral poetry had such power for our ancestors. Great written poetry also brings us this sense of authentic speech, but not as a physical sound. Rather it brings it about through a corresponding, or analogue, interior sense inherent in the act of writing. It is not quite the same sound, however. Even when great, speechlike poets (like Frost) speak their poems, something of the sound of oral poetry is produced, but not all of it.

Whether spoken poetry is welcomed and allowed to enlarge and nourish our poetry culture will depend on whether it is viewed as an alien or familiar form. To understand spoken poetry (and oral poetry in particular) it is important to take a look at the history and nature of written poetry, and not just accept it as a given since the beginning of time. After all, it is just one form of poetry, not the only one. (And in the grand scheme of things, a relatively new one at that.) Written poetry's genius is that it produces the unique moment of awareness we call poetry, a moment both impossibly beautiful and impossibly true, solely through the arrangement of alphabetic symbols on the page. Written poetry answers the question: how do you make a poetry when you're denied the structural elements that gave ancient oral poetry its peculiar power? The answer is that you do it by approximating those elements through the "forms" of written poetry: meter, rhyme, line, stanza, and all their restless and endless permutations. It is sometimes difficult for us to imagine that our transcribed and translated versions of the Psalms and The Iliad were, at one time, orally composed narratives chanted to rhythmic music. And if they still appeal to us today in their desiccated, written form, imagine how powerful they were when originally spoken.

One measure of how powerful they were lies in the fact that they were orally maintained for hundreds of years before being written down as sacred texts. By way of comparison, Shakespeare's plays weren't treated with even half that kind of devotion by his contemporaries. Indeed, if it weren't for the belated efforts of a few of Shakespeare's fellow players, the plays would have been completely lost to us. So we shouldn't be so ready to dismiss oral poetry as simplistic and not worthy of our attention. After all, at one time, it caught everybody's attention. I realize this slight rearrangement of written poetry's place in the scheme of things runs directly counter to the beliefs of our poetry culture, which sees the only poetry being a written poetry. It is a position that it holds with all the tenacity of revealed truth. But having started out on the written side of poetry a lifetime ago only to end up on the oral side for reasons I still don't fully comprehend, I can say that although their surfaces are different, the unique moment of awareness that only poetry brings is present in both forms.

We Have Mistaken the Totem for the God

Most poets have given up the ear for the eye.

It is a sad fact that poetry has closed itself off from all but its academic audience. There are those who will tell you that poetry's audience has always been more or less academic (or elitist), just as poetry itself has always been (in large part) private, dense, elaborate, and un-speechlike. To some degree they're correct, because the very act of writing allows (and often encourages) such tendencies. But we shouldn't mistake writing's tendencies for poetry's true north, because the poetry we have valued over the centuries clearly proves poetry's desire to speak clearly and to communicate on the most human of levels.

Shakespeare is proof of this, as are Homer, Donne, Marvell, Herrick, Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Yeats, Hardy, and, to name a few contemporaries, Sharon Olds, Philip Levine, Stephen Dunn, and Gerald Stern. It is only in an age where poetry has become so confused by the scholarly needs of the academies that house it that such an exclusionist argument would even be considered. Or that poet after poet could seriously tell you that poetry doesn't need an audience. Or that they write only for other poets. Or that the act of poetry is enough by itself.

While all these positions have validity, we shouldn’t forget that poetry is our most human and most profound form of communication. It is the way the soul speaks. Poetry is an act of communication—the real news, as Pound once said. If it’s not, why bother to show it to others? Or even write it down. Why not let it just run through our heads like smoke?

There is nothing more dangerous for poetry, or any art, than its current isolation. It bespeaks a selfishness and lack of generosity that no art can endure for long. Oral poetry is one path to take to remedy that situation—if we have the courage and heart. Similarly, by honoring the inherent nature of oral composition (in the same way as much of the great written poetry of the past), we can substantially alter the course of some part of written poetry so that it will be more responsive to the audience struggling to find it.

We have truly begun to mistake the totem for the god—mistaking literature for poetry. We are becoming more writers than poets, and all this at a time when exactly the opposite is being called for. If poetry is to thrive, we must become more poets than writers. We must return to poetry's ancient, spoken, songlike roots, if not to practice that form of poetry, then, at the very least, to honor its principles in our writing. To see just how far we have strayed, we merely have to look at the bête noir of contemporary poetry: the line break. Once we do, we should realize we have become more concerned with poetry's effect on the eye than the ear, because that is always the direction writing takes us.

A cursory examination of the line breaks being used today (and the rationales behind them) should convince us we are losing our sense of song—of true, musical cadence. Some of these rationales, if they can be called that, can be found in A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (Longman Press, 1980). Today, in place of the traditional line break, we have (both consciously and unconsciously) taken up a kind of typographical scan/beat line break that works on the eye rather than the ear, bumping the eye from one line to the next in a rhythmic way. And it can work quite well if done correctly. The line breaks of Sharon Olds’ poems often fall into this modern format. The following is an example from a wonderful poem, I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror:

Backwards and upside down in the twilight, that

woman on all fours, her head

dangling and confused, her lean

haunches, the area of darkness, the flanks and

ass narrow and pale as a deer’s and those

breasts hanging down toward the center of the earth

like plummets, when I

swayed from side to side they swayed, it was

so dark I couldn’t tell if they were gold or

plum or rose. I cannot get over her . . .

When the poem is spoken, however, and her line breaks observed as true rests, with the speaking of the line itself culminating in a slight rise in pitch, or tone, the result is awkward music at best. And poets know it. At many readings poets mercifully ignore their own line breaks. But you can't have it both ways. Either the line break is the equivalent of a rest, and is to be observed as such, or it isn't. If composers scored their works the way our poets do, we'd have chaos in the orchestra pit. If you write the break one way, you should read it that way: silently or aloud. Or else give up the pretense that contemporary poetry is meant to be spoken out loud, or have any relation to its spoken roots.

Poets experienced a similar problem, but in reverse, in the late fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. They were trying to accommodate the speech-cadenced rhythms still bumping around in their heads from the semi-oral age that preceded the introduction of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century. Skelton's (b.1460) sometimes uneven, odd, three-stress line has always bedeviled scholars because it has none of the ease of the ballad measure or the majesty of pentameter, but anyone who has worked orally knows it speaks quite well, and especially to rhythmic music. And Skelton, if anything, was a talker.

To Mistress Isabel Pennel

By Saint Mary, my lady,

Your mammy and your daddy

Brought forth a goodly baby.

My maiden Isabel,

Reflaring Rosabel,

The flagrant camomel,

The ruddy rosary,

The sovereign rosemary,

The pretty strawberry,

The columbine, the mept,

The jelafen well set

The proper violet;

To hear this nightingale

Among the birdes small

Was bling in the vale,

Ding, ding

Jing, jing

Good year and good luck!

With chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck.

A hundred years later, those oral rhythms were still bothering John Donne, who scored his poems with special accent and slur marks in an attempt to introduce a speech-like quality to his iambic pentameter line. After all, how things sounded was important to men like Donne and Shakespeare. The oral arts were still very much in the air all around them. Donne’s markings, of course, have gone the way of the typesetter's wastebasket. We don’t care what it sounds like. We want our poems to be composed in a written language, not some crazy oral/written hybrid. This pursuit of a solely written aesthetic has gone so far in our times that we are now unconsciously hell-bent on removing any reference to the oral tradition. And the one major oral reference still left in written poetry is the spoken pause created and inferred by the line break. Line breaks, of course, came about as a way of written poetry imitating the inherent cadence and rests of oral poetry. Today, however, it bedevils our poets to no end because they no longer truly see poetry as an oral/aural art. They may pay lip service to the act of speaking poetry, but in reality, most poets have given up the ear for the eye.

The Encroaching Sea of Orality

It is the task of each generation to recast its songs

in a language unique to that generation.

This is not the first alarm sounded that something has gone wrong with our art. Other bells are being sounded all the time. Some time ago Dana Gioia received somewhat of a drubbing for doing so. And yet his observations on the state of written poetry (in the May, 1991 Atlantic Monthly) are on the mark, as are most of his suggestions on how to correct the situation. But no matter how much you adjust, as he suggests, the way written poetry is criticized and brought to the public, or how many different ways you vary the format of poetry readings and deal with the phenomenon of MFA programs that produce hundreds (if not thousands) of very good writers we are accepting as poets but are often not (they are simply just very good poetic writers), the problem still remains: we are producing a written poetry today that is simply out of touch with a culture that is becoming increasingly oral.

It is the task of each generation to recast its songs in a language unique to that generation—a language that speaks both of, and to, that generation. But even putting the question of oral poetry aside (focusing only on written poetry and its ability to accommodate an increasingly oral culture), it is clear that not only are we failing at the task of recasting our songs, but we are also abominably slow in recognizing it. Even if we take the school of poetry we have today which sees itself as immediate and speechlike (and indeed it has some of these qualities), it is the exquisite end result of a tradition which calls for the writing and silent reading of a poem as its way of creation and appreciation. It is also a tradition which is directly opposed to the type of spoken poetry our times are calling for. The poetry coming from our more "immediate" and "speech-like" school (for example, Godine's New American Poets of the 90s) is just as “written” as its formalist counterpart. When spoken, these poems are so dense and unlike speech as to be almost incomprehensible after a few minutes. The ear simply refuses to work. Here are a few examples from that anthology to illustrate this point. If you have any doubts about being able to hear these poems easily, read the selections (the opening lines of each poem) out loud to some friends and see how long they sit still.

Brother of the Mount of Olives (Paul Monette)

Combing the attic for anything extra

missed or missing evidence of us I sift