To understand some of the more theoretical literary interpretations of how oral poetry can relate to my work, I plan to use several of the points made in Antony Easthope’s Poetry as Discourse.

One of the passages I’d like to focus on first of all is a quote taken from Alan Bold. In it we can see the divisions separating out oral poetry and poetry that has been ‘written for the page’. He writes:

“The single rhymes, the incremental repetitions, the obligatory epithets, the magical numbers, the nuncupative testaments, the commonplace phrases, the reliance on dialogue, the dramatic nature of the narrative: these make the ballad easier to remember, easier to memorise. Literary poetry, written for the page, depends on the unexpected phrase, the ingenious rhyme, the contrived figure of speech. Literary poets like to invent, oral poets depend on formulas.”

Having considered imposing a rhyme scheme on my project, I’m now facing the decision of whether I want my work to “depend of formulas” (potentially wonderful for showing the passage of time, basing my poems on real story sources etc.) or allow my work to run where it may, making use of the “unexpected phrase.”

The ‘unexpected phrase’ is a key factor of all of the free verse poets that I’ve so far investigated in my research process. Authors such as Maira Kalman (The Principles of Uncertainty) rely on the unpredictability of form and the unconstrained narration as a crucial aid in the story-telling process. To research the ballad form (which plays a big part in all the articles I’ve read on oral-style poetry) I had to take a look at the more traditional ballads (from The Faber Book of Ballads) to help me understand the form I wanted to experiment with. Although the ballad format must have a musical memorability to it, sources differ greatly on the actual structure. Because of this, the ballad I’ve attempted below may not be structurally correct, but I gave it a go.

Because I’m uncertain (still!) if the ballad is right for how I want to structure my work, I did a few attempts at taking some of my pre-gathered information and making it into free verse and then a ballad.

The first example below is a free verse musing on my great grandmother’s house, using only a few details.   

Dust hangs off the mantelpiece edge,
fine white beads, strung up as lights.
Weak fingers of sunlight pry through the curtains,
a mid-day caress of the threepenny-bit jar.
Unfurling like memories on a wet day,
the wallpaper undulates.  
Age sits in her corner and inhales deeply from a cup
– this, she says, takes her back.
Back where, I think, but we already know
it’s the fold-away country
where intervals live.
Rest rests there, in that republic,
the motherland of the interlude.

Then I attempted, with great trepidation, to mould this into a loose representation of the ballad:

Dust hangs off the mantelpiece edge,
light ripples on threepenny bits.
Weak fingers of light, with timeless respite,
make the light bulb of age start to flicker in fits.

Age sits in the corner and knits
a tapestry time won’t allow.
Gaps rest in the holes on her wrists
and draw out the wet from her brow.

Blood leaks from our family face,
the wound where our memories lie.
Republic of place, in a black-and-white space,
in speaking we cannot quite die.

So, as you can see, it definitely needs some work! This is not one of my actual project poems however, or even part of one of my poems. It is simply a few jotted lines to get me into the spirit of constrained lines.