Maybe you want ketchup, maybe vinegar, maybe mayo for your F's so I'm asking a few questions below; take your pick. Though I do hope you'll address the last question (i.e., mention an individual poem or two).
(I will save my questions on Hollander for class but feel free to discuss his essay; his ideas on refrain might be pertinent to the below.)
Northrop Frye associates lyric on the one hand with music and on the other with the "pictorial," which (it seems) can refer either to the visual appearance of the poem or to the imagery it uses. He uses the words "babble" and "doodle" as shorthand for the two "boundaries" of lyric. (As a poet, I can't help feeling slightly infantilized. Goo ga.)
Between these boundaries is "purely verbal" "cantillation," or chant (rhythmic speech). We might read the title of the section of Anatomy of Criticism I gave you, "The Rhythm of Association: Lyric," as a reference to his attempt to locate the crux of lyric at the crux of music and image. (Elsewhere, he calls lyric "the union of sound and sense," which sounds like it doesn't map onto "music and image" but perhaps does if we understand "image" to refer to language's representational aspect.)
I'd like to know whether we can figure out how song would differ from lyric for Frye.
Couldn't we locate song at the crux of music and sense, just as we can for lyric? (Argue with me.)
Can we think about the difference in terms of genre -- which for Frye has to do with the relationship between author and audience? Here are Frye's definitions of the two genres I think are pertinent to this discussion:
* epos - presents "author/minstrel as oral reciter" with audience listening -- author speaks directly to audience
* lyric - "characterized by assumed concealment of the audience from the poet and by the predominance of an associational rhythm distinguishable both from recurrent metre and from semantic or prose rhythm" ["overheard"]
Perhaps he'd say song would count more as "epos," because in song, obviously, there's a performer and an audience.
A lyric poem that calls itself a song, then, is what?
A song without audience? A silent or silenced song? (Argue with me.)
Could there be a relationship between the silencing of the performative aspect of song and what Frye calls the dreamlike paronomasia (wordplay) of lyric?
Do any of the lyric/song poems in the coursepack offer a way of thinking about performance and/or audience that we might relate to Frye's definitions of epos and lyric? do they support his definitions? refute them? complicate them?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I can't believe that Northrop Frye worked "babble" and "doodle" into an academic article. I have a new role model.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how well this translates, but as I read about babble, sound associations structured around what Frye calls rhythmic initiative (musical boundaries), and doodle, "the fresh or surprising image" (pictorial boundaries), I couldn't help but think of songs that seem to touch these boundaries. No doubt I'm creating an easy binary here, and please, someone feel free to complicate me here, but when I read about babble, I recalled an interview in which Aerosmith's Steven Tyler admitted that the lyrics to "Walk This Way" arose after the group had already written the song's defining rift. The memorable refrain "Walk This Way" was chosen largely because it fit into the space already created by the song's structure. On the other hand, when I read about doodle, I thought of songwriters like Leonard Cohen and Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows, who create extremely memorable images in their songs. Of course, there is no way to know, but both of these artists strike me as perhaps writing the lyrics before writing the music. So a song like "Anna Begins" pushes the boundaries of conventional song structures to create room for the lyrics. It seems that in the previous examples, the word is married to the sound, the image is married to its representation through song, but there seems to be a spectrum that places spoken word songs with no music on one end (ex. Tracy Chapman's "Behind the Wall") and songs that rely greatly on the music alone on the other (ex. The Champs' "Tequila"). Then again, some of the most powerful instrumentals, for example, Santo and Johnny's "Sleepwalk," seem to work primarily because the music itself, void of any lyrics, creates a sound that allows listeners to create their own images. In this way, I could imagine song as a crux, though with as many dimensions as the ethos vertices of our rhetorical triangle. I'm not sure—can we extend "doodle" and "babble" to conceive of the relationship between song structure and text? Could we create a doodle/babble spectrum?
As for the course readings and their relationship to Frye's notions of epos and lyric, I find it interesting how second-person point of view "you" works to engage the audience because it has a "hey you, listen up" effect. In contrast, because the page creates a distance between text and reader, it also creates an opening to identify with the speaker and imagine the person who fills his/her conception of "you" or to create our own subjects who occupy the "you" spot. For example, Hughes's "Bad Luck Card" opens by addressing "you" (Cause you don't love me), creating the possibility of epos, but then establishes the lyrical quality of this piece by turning the "you" around at the end to stand in for the poet's speaker. In this instance, Hughes allows the readers to overhear a conversation the speaker has with a gypsy. For me, this example seems to confirm Frye's definition of the lyric, especially in the sense that it is overheard.
Am thinking of Pope’s assertion that sound “must seem an echo to the sense,” which sets up a hierarchy of poetic components: first meaning, then sound. But I think we all know this not to be true, especially concerning song—and Frye seems to agree (“union of sound and sense.”) In fact, to shakily align “sound and sense” to “music and painting” (eek,) he opines that the isolation of one without the other is the hallmark of experimental writing… which seems to be said derisively.
ReplyDeleteThe invocation of charm is an interesting one; I’m not extremely familiar with practices of the occult, but from what I understand, intention is more important than materials (?) So “going through the motions” (opsis, perhaps,) accompanied by “intention” (dianoia?)—maybe even “belief” or “purpose”—is ultimately more important than what’s done. I mention this because “babble” and “doodle” aside, the terms Frye assigns to lyric melos and opsis are still simplistic: “charm” and “riddle?” I wonder why he’s oversimplifying these terms (instead of doing what everyone else does: picking the same word in another language to aggrandize the idea.)
The use of “babble” and “doodle” imply an unlearned start of something, right? Then, “when babble cannot rise into consciousness, it remains on the level of uncontrolled association.” I’d say he means on the part of the reader, but then, why “babble?” I think this is partially what he means by “dreamlike paronomasia” of lyric—the uncontrolled association that occurs from the combination of sounds and images.
The lyric, being both “overseen as well as overheard,” must sing from the page—in some ways, this is a privileged position: the musicality of the language can be more complex; the visual patterns of the language are noted; the song can be “sung” over and over again, if it’s singing itself; it endures (Harkening Walker’s idea that written-down=important.)
I think we can see examples of the lyric “singing itself” easily in the metered, rhymed song poems; it’s also easy to spot in Whitman’s anaphoric “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,/ Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly,/ Twenty-eight men…” which makes me tempted to say that repetition—whether of sounds, sense, images, whatever—is a key component of the lyric, but I’m not sure. Hollander gives many reasons and effects of repetition/refrain, from the “purely musical” to the “density of reference,” but concludes finally that refrain must “therein, therewith propound its own parable of the device itself, its etiology, or its effect, or its emblematic reading. In a sense, a new meaning of the concept of refrain must arise, along with a new application.” Good Lord.
But I’d like to examine a free-verse song poem: “September Song.” Frye reminds us to distinguish the “third rhythm” of free verse (as opposed to metre and epos, or perhaps metre and prose.) That said, Geoffrey Hill’s poem combines many of Frye’s components for the lyric, though, since it’s not written in a conventional “form,” may seem more discreet—calling then, for uncontrolled association maybe?
“September Song” isn’t a dirge or lament, but it is a death-song, a memento mori. The meter of the first line (I feel it fair to scan the line, since we’re discussing it in the context of both songs and the lyric) forms a pattern: 3 anapests which then reduce to 2 iambs; the next line enjambs with a dactyl then immediately breaks down. The second line, as I’ve scanned it, is dactyl/spondee/anapest; the third line, iambic tetrameter. Metrically, this poem seems to take a deep breath, pronounce its first line, burst into tears, then compose itself again. Admittedly, the poem’s not even in sprung verse, but it is interesting to parse the changes in stress throughout the poem; notably, the last line’s “This is plenty. This is more than enough.” would scan as three anapests (recalling the first line,) save for the word, “plenty.” Because of plenty, there’s an additional unstressed syllable—which, of course, reflects the idea of plenty: the line itself is too much to be contained in regular meter, just as the grief is too much to be contained within the speaker (hence, song.)
ReplyDeleteInternal rhyme, repetition, assonance, alliteration, etc. are all present: “[Un]desirable you may have been, [un]touchable/ you were not.” Then the “you were not. Not forgotten” in the second line, with “not repeated immediately and the sound repeated two syllables later in “forgot.” Passed/proper.
Then, “As estimated, you died”—succinctly devastating, then followed with, “Things marched,/ sufficient, to that end.” Frye doesn’t say anything about punctuation, but that comma after “marched” does so much work, I tried to bold it: there’s a bit of hope, things are marching comma then qualifier: “sufficient”—to that end. Not only do these two lines set off as a couplet give the reader the image, visually and imagined, “marching to the end (death,)” which is, of course, after the death described in the poem—the comma stilts the action of the verse. It interrupts the enjambment and breaks syntactically and, in a surprising way, semantically. (Side note: last line of second stanza=iambic trimeter.)
Am beginning to think that I sound like a poem-conspiracy theorist. (It’s all here! In front of your very eyes!) Moving along, there’s assonance in “Zyklon” and “cries,” I think, and a play on “patent leather” to keep the reader constantly surprised and making those perhaps not-so-“uncontrolled associations,” then a beautiful parenthetical phrase: “(I have made/ an elegy for myself it/ is true.)” The odd break on “it” seems to spring from an unwillingness to let “it is true” be a line, a choice that could have been made for many reasons; I’ll say that the refusal to let that simple, declarative statement exist as a whole in the poem is analogous to the suppressed grief the poet expresses.
The penultimate stanza gives images that, after images of Zyklon, terror, and cries, seem welcoming and domestic. But these are images of impending death—fall, vines ripened, flaking roses, smoke, fires; and though metrically, the poem seems to try to become “righted” again, it shows its cracks: an omission of “the” in “fattens on vines” prohibits the line from scanning as iambic tetrameter; a stressed “flake” opens the second verse, preventing iambic trimeter; the last line of the stanza scans 3 iambs and an anapest. (Note: when I say “righted,” it’s not because I believe iambic meter to be more “right” than another; I just mean that the poem tries to make sense of itself by making sense of its metrical composition.)
Okay, this is plenty, this is more than enough.
I’m not sure if we can ‘sense’ the genres, but when reading through these poems, I found myself instinctually trying to determine what ‘felt like songs’ vs. which words ‘felt more like poems.’ I am in no way saying that my instincts (or yours) are all it takes, but I did find myself reacting as if that decision was being made. For instance, after reading Rossetti’s ‘Song,” I labeled it as such. I’m wondering if this has to do with how ‘clean’ the rhymes and rhythms were? Or maybe it’s because I almost heard the tune. Reading it over, it’s quite easy to set to music—the tune almost jumps out at me. I’m sure there’s a technical reason for this, and I apologize, but I’m feeling like a dumb prose writer today…
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, ‘The Ruined Maid” (Hardy) didn’t seem as ‘clean.’ The 6th line, for instance, contains a pause that breaks up its rhythm: “Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks.” This could also be set to music (I’d welcome the task) but it would be more challenging because the rhythm varies a bit more.
[Again, I do apologize that I’m not able to use proper poetry terms when describing these. I’m really impressed by Jackie’s post in that regard.]
Going back to Rossetti’s ‘Song’—I thought this might be a good example of thinking about performance and audience. The opening line: “When I am dead, my dearest” gives it an intimate setting—‘My dearest’ works similarly to Mandy’s ‘You.” But as an audience member, an outsider, I’m able to see right through Rossetti’s message. Or at least, I think I can. She’s telling her ‘dearest’ not to be sad at her death, but the words are so depressing—“Sing no sad songs for me,” she says. It’s like she’s saying, ‘don’t mourn me when I’m dead, I’ll be too dead to care,’ an idea that in itself, is tremendously sad. Maybe it’s the way the trimeter rhythm (goodness I hope that’s correct) leaves that slight pause at the end of the line, like a cut-off, a moment to feel the punch in the gut. Not to mention the sad imagery: “I shall not hear the nightingale/Sing on, as if in pain.” So, I saw this song as an example of Frye’s theory at work—I saw both images and rhythm create meaning.
One last thought—as far as complications go--Frye’s statement that when a poem is sung, music takes over the rhythm (175) made me wonder about where Stephen Sondheim fits in--he’s a Broadway composer who centers his songs around speech patterns. This makes them extremely difficult to sing, and he’s been critiqued as having no melodies, or forgettable songs. Here’s a couple examples of Sondheim lines:
“How can you know what you want
till you get what you want
and you see if you like it?” (Into the Woods)
“Hey, old friend,
Are you okay, old friend?
What do you say, old friend,
Are we or are we unique?
Time goes by,
Everything else keeps changing.
You and I,
We get continued next week.” (Merrily We Roll Along)
I suppose hearing the music is important, but hopefully you can sense what I mean. I think he complicates Frye’s idea because it’s almost like Sondheim is writing ‘anti-songs.’ Some of the songs, anyway (as opposed to much of the Sweeney Todd score, which is probably his most melodic, save a few songs: “We all deserve to die. Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why”).
Sorry if you have no idea what I’m talking about!
Looking over Cathy's questions, I am of the mind to respond that song would differentiate on the basis of audience, and yeah, I think fall under the umbrella-ella-ella of epos. That is, I think if I am thinking strictly of Frye-ian (how the hell do you do that, btw? Fryian?) taxonomies, song would be grouped as epos. Although I tend to enjoy some of Frye's ideas, I do think that this teasing apart of song/lyric with no real relocation of song is problematic. Either let them fade into each other or give them both distinct place aloing this strata.
ReplyDeleteI read Langston Hughes' "Song For a Dark Girl" and I can't help but think that this is a song. And I can't help but think that it is a lyric. For whatever reason, my desire to pigeonhole this poem (which I tend to avoid doing, but will try for the sake of the question) has to be based on something more than simply concealment of audience and predominance of rhythm. This poem/song/lyric obfuscates Frye's boundaries for me. One thing that I'll mention is a lack of acknowledgment of how these poems work culturally. Hughes' poem really blurs the lyric/song divide by invoking not only certain poetic conventions but also musical genre (the blues). What do social conventions say about song and lyric? What IS the role of the composer/author in all of this?
Oh, Northrop. Help me out here, mang.
Also, reading Meg's response above got me thinking of a passage in Frye that I am still wrestling with. I paused at Frye's assertion on the bottom of page 275 where we read: "We can see from the revisions that poets make that the rhythm is usually prior, either in inspiration or in importance or both, to the selection of words to fill it up. This phenomenon is not confined to poetry: in Beethoven's notebooks, too, we often see how he knows that he wants a cadence at a certain bar before he has worked out any melodic sequence to reach it."
To me this seems like a suspect sort of zero-sum mentality that I think is ultimately untenable. I am curious about what the poets in class think/thought about this. How does rhythm figure into your approach to writing a poem? Is it (rhythm) cognitively mapped prior to any sort of idiomatic attachments, or does the idea for your poetry normally begin from a concrete foundation (an image, an experience, a word) that then adapts a rhythm?
To reflect on Cathy's comment that perhaps Frye would say song counts "more as "epos," because in song, obviously, there's a performer and an audience." I don't know that I wholly agree. I'm thinking specifically about Langston Hughes and maybe I am totally wrong here. But although he seems to tell a story (to the audience, perhaps) I hear more of a lyric poet. He writes, in "The Weary Blues", "I heard a Negro play./ Down on Lenox Avenue the other night/ By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light/ He did a lazy sway.../ He did a lazy sway.../ To the tune o' those Weary Blues./ With his ebony hands on each ivory key/ He made that poor piano moan with melody./ O Blues!"
ReplyDeleteHis refrain here (O Blues!) seems to be his own calling to the man he saw playing out late, not to the audience. Hughes turns his back on the audience in order to reflect on the experience he had in watching the man on Lenox Avenue. And his refrain is not for the crowd as much as it seems to be his own “moan” to singing the “Weary Blues.” It is also the way in which Hughes ends the poem, “The singer stopped playing and went to bed/ While the Weary Blues echoed in his head./ He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.” I recognize this does not need to be an actual occurrence for Hughes to write about, but the fact that he imagines both that the man went off to sleep and how he slept, is information not for the audience as much as Hughes himself. What I mean is Hughes seems, again, reflective of the situation/man and in doing so has to distance himself from the audience. He might be telling this story to other people, but he doesn’t need them to be present. He is reflecting on his connection with the “Weary Blues” and this seems more to be daydreaming or self-reflection than performance.
Don’t know that this will tie in as tightly to the dream-poems that Frye says have an “insistence on hypnotically recurrent sound patterns,” but I did say (day)dream(ing) (277). So here goes. In the first section of the “Indian Woman’s Death-Song” there is a sort of trance in the writing. Words like “broad,” “wilds,” glooms,” “canoe,” “rose,” “alone,” and line 15 “Wafting a wild proud strain—a song of death” that pull the poem seemingly out of an undertow, or maybe, back and forth from one, as the story is told. It is the hollow sounds that seem to lull the audience into a dream-like state of meditation, even though we know the woman is going to drop off the top of a waterfall with her four children. So then, why does it feel so easy to listen to the poem? Why so calm for such a selfish act? It is both the visually stocky beginning stanza (looks to me more like a river or a tree) and the repeating “o” sounds that create this kind of vessel (maybe that’s too easy) for the story. Actually, as I’m looking at it now, the first stanza seems to be the river and the quatrains following, the currents themselves, as the Indian woman calls out, “Will he not miss the bounding step that met him from the chase?/ The heart of love…/ The hand that spread the hunter’s board…/ He will not! Dark foaming stream, on the better shore!” Is it the set up of that first stanza that allows us to hold on as she laments about temporary pain? As her audience, yes, I think that is all I need. The beginning the cradle, the quatrains to rock against the boat.
“Couldn't we locate song at the crux of music and sense, just as we can for lyric? (Argue with me.)”
ReplyDeleteOkay, I know this is a bizarre connection to pull out, but in reading this prompt, I remembered a review I once read of Gone with the Wind, written by Richard Shickel, which begins, “One measure of a movie's quality is to ask yourself what you retain from it years after seeing it.” I can’t say I entirely agree or disagree with this statement, but there may be something to it, and I might direct a similar criterion toward song. I’m certainly not concerned with what I recall years after hearing a song, but I do feel comfortable saying that most of the songs I rank among my favorites have struck me as memorable after one listen, and enduringly memorable after many. And here’s why I, same as Joe, get grumpy at the idea of the “teasing apart of song/lyric with no real relocation of song” (well put, Grifter, well put): it seems to me that such memorability (not a word? it is now) works through simultaneous appeal to multiple senses—normally sight (imagery), hearing (music) and hearing again (musicality of lyrics).
Let’s look at “Auld Lang Syne,” since it’s included in the readings. The song, for me, achieves its little “‘sudden glory’ of fused metaphor” (Frye 281) via the phrase “cup o’ kindness,” which conjures maybe a confusing image, but it works, makes you smile, sticks with you. There’s your visual. Moreover, it rolls off the tongue well in two trochees and lends itself well to the surrounding poetic framework. There’s the linguistic musicality. But—and I think most would agree with me here—what makes “Auld Lang Syne” click the most is it’s beautiful melody. Without that, I’d say, “cup o’ kindness” is merely cute—sort of memorable, but nothing I’d repeat to myself. In turn, though, the melody, catchy as it is, lodges more readily in one’s mind because of the lyrics, most notably, for me, “cup o’ kindness.” Put simply, it’s nice to have some words to sing. I think of it as a sort of symbiosis between lyric and song.
I’m building a framework here that’s too shabby to hold up time and again, I know, but I think it’ll hold up often. So, sorry, Cathy, I didn’t really argue with you. Maybe someone wants to argue with me?
I think I am trying to build on what Ben (and therefore by blog family tree Joe) is saying. If I’m not, then so be it. I am large! I contain multitudes!
ReplyDeleteI like and agree with the look that Ben took on “Auld Lang Syne”. My main question going into this class is what makes the more modern ‘song poems’ songs. It is easy to see how the early lyrics and ballads are considered songs. They are rhythmic, metered and rhymed. They very well could have been sung and accompanied with music as opposed to written on the page. Even Langston Hugh’s song was rhythmic and rhymed. What about the songs that aren’t? What about Walt Whitman’s songs?
I think that the earliest ‘modern’ song lyric poem is “Song of Myself”. Before that, the lyric poems could easily have been lyrics transcribed from a musical song. Song of Myself is an unrhymed free verse lyric poem that still carries the title of ‘Song’. It still carries song characteristics, though. It has a performer and in audience: the narrator (sorry, workshops forbid me to acknowledge Whitman as the actual narrator) is the performer and the reader is the audience. Beyond that, it seems that the narrator strives for America to be the audience. It uses repetition in the same way that some of the earlier folk songs we heard did. While the phrases aren’t usually repeated throughout the entire piece, there are sections of repetition that form a musical phrase. “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore, / Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly; / Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome” While there’s no large section that is returned to as a refrain, these sections of repetitions act as that refrain.
So even though “Song of Myself” isn’t a stereotypical song that one would hear on the radio (although I’ll bet Joanna Newsom could do a pretty rocking version) I think it can still be considered a song and not teased apart into solely a lyric poem. Since most to all 20th-21st Century poets are in some way descended from Whitman, this can probably be seen as a precursor to the later songs as well.
Couldn't we locate song at the crux of music and sense, just as we can for lyric? Frye (sort of/indirectly) suggests one way we might answer this question on the bottom of page 273:
ReplyDelete“The history of music shows a recurrent tendency to develop elaborate contrapuntal structures which, in vocal music, almost annihilate the words. There has also been a recurrent tendency to reform and simplify musical structures in order to give the words more prominence. This has sometimes been the result of religious pressure, but literary influences have been at work too. We may take the madrigal, perhaps, as representing something close to a limit of the subservience of poetry to music… we may find long passages filled up with nonsense words, or the whole collection may bear the subtitle “apt for voices or viols,” indicating that the words can be dispensed with altogether.”
The above passage suggests that music has the power to annihilate words by taking away their prominence and/or by stripping them of sense. The fact that Frye describes the madrigal as representing the limit of the subservience of poetry to music suggests that a certain amount of sense-making is required of the poem, but not necessarily of the song (I guess because the music/musical structures relieve the song of this sense-making task). Or maybe we could just say that sense-making operates differently in the song vs. the poem. I’m thinking, then, that a lyric poem that calls itself a song might be a place where the poet can play with signification, or loosen the bonds of sign/signifier, or think about sense-making and its implications/assumptions. For example, in Housman’s poem “Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now,” the tree seems to be a way for the poet to confront aging/mortality through the beauty/purity of the natural world, but in Langston Hughes’s poem “Song for a Dark Girl,” the tree cannot signify in quite the same way; the tree in Hughes’s poem cannot be the beautiful tree with blooms along its bough because, though trees are lovely in spring, they’re also used for lynching. Last class, Cathy mentioned a conversation she had with another poet about poetry being a place of freedom from signification… Thinking through the various significations of “tree” – how the tree cannot be a pure or apolitical representation of nature or life or mortality because of its use in lynching and execution – makes me want to agree that, yes, we need spaces like poetry to think about the implications of representation and signification. I don’t think absolute freedom from signification is ever possible in the printed poem, but I think the poem can take some steps in that direction. I’m also fascinated by the idea Cathy posted in the prompt about the lyric poem as silent song. This idea, I think, is so interesting because it allows us to think of the music as absent from the lyric poem. So the lyric poem becomes a space for thinking about and speaking about silence and absence. It’s interesting to think about the ways silence might be manifest in the language of the poem or even in the performance of a poem. The one poem we read that really got me thinking about silence was “My Lute Awake!” The poem is constantly looking ahead to its own silencing, to the end of the utterance. Furthermore, the sound of the lute, though referenced constantly, is palpably absent (because the poem is printed on the page), so it’s as if the poem is sort harboring muteness or creating a mute space. It’s weird and it's really awesome.
I suppose my introduction to the idea of “song” as something other than the hymns we sang in Sunday school growing up came from an old, well-loved copy of Tennyson. The Lotus Eaters provided me with a new definition of “song:” a lyrical expression of an internal rhythmic emotion, using words rooted in imagistic, sensational experience, not necessarily incorporating notes and chords and cadence, but alliteration, rhythm, and rhyme—perhaps somewhat freed from the additional structure of music. Perhaps, however, that is an unfair definition, as I still rely on “lyrical.” Then I must again consider my later interactions with “song.” Everybody know that Nickleback mash up of Someday and This is How You Remind Me? Talk about babble...
ReplyDeleteI am unsure that the idea of a song-poem as a song without audience is a fair assessment. I believe that song-poems create a different, new, and potentially deeper awareness within their audience of the intentionality in the “lyrics.” Limited by the lack of minor and/or major keys and determined speed within the beat (though, as ever, that is dependent upon individual performance) to convey emotion, lyrical poems nonetheless possess their own emotive power. Each word has connotation—why shouldn’t I play on the root “note” in connotation and denotation? Nor, however, could I call lyrical poems silent; we have already mentioned performativity. [And I just spent the last week trying to convince my students that the most effective way for them to work on their writing is to read it aloud. Kate Ronald in our Writing and Place is determined that the most important element in a writer’s style is a “sense of sound” (37).]
As our Western idea of song has been developed from the old sceops in Anglo-Saxony, we have (but this may only be a personal impression) been inherently aware of the connection between poetry and song... perhaps the middle ground lies somewhere within our concept of old minstrelsy and harp music merely accompanying poetry. With this in mind, I think that Frye’s definition of lyric maybe problematic. This “concealment” not only disassociates a performer from himself as an audience (arguably allowable) and at the very least from an imagined audience (we’ve been over this in my ENG 111 as well) but, much more importantly if we consider this minstrel background, disassociates epos and lyric to an unnecessary extent.