POETRY AND OCCIDENTAL MICROAGGRESSION
It is not news that traditional American scholarship favors
minimal audience participation and maximal stylistic restraint. Objectivity demands the absence of passion,
although passionate engagement of one's topic or subject matter is deemed
acceptable. In this sense, Marit J.
MacArthur's "Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound
Studies," PMLA 131.1 (2016):
38-63 is a fine example of dual transgression.
MacArthur's effort to make a case for the overwhelming fear of
theatricality and embrace of sincerity associated with strictly academic poetry
readings exposes a retreat from forthright confrontation with human appetites,
an exposure that traditional scholars might not welcome. On the other hand, the article commits
Occidental microaggression: a
stereotyping in asserting "many ethnic poets, including African
American poets who trace their root to the black arts movement, favor audience
participation and an expressive style" (59). Many black poets and critics who are their
cousins assiduously deny rootedness in the black arts movement; we have yet to
find convincing evidence that Chinese
American poets, for example, champion
palpable audience participation. Thus,
in reading MacArthur and other Occidental critics (including ourselves) , we
should attend to transgressions which may be accidental.
MacArthur's main topic is the favored neutral style in the
performance of poetry readings, and we do need to note who so favors the style
and distance ourselves from such people.
As MacArthur accurately suggests,
these people embrace monotonous incantation or high church style that
apes an elevated sense of religious expression.
Silence or constipated emotion is
truly golden. Although we (those of us
who refuse to deny the innate properties of our ethnicity, including Jewish
Americans) might tend to applaud MacArthur's transgressions initially, we are
stopped in our tracks by the method of analysis. MacArthur uses ARLO (Adaptive
Recognition with Layered Optimization) to measure the intonation or pitch
patterns of audio recordings by Louise Glück, Juliana Spahr, Michael Ryan, and
Natasha Trethewey. Audio recordings?
Even the most sensitive instruments of technology ( and ARLO is not one
of them) can't produce the kind of evidence produced by the human ear's hearing
and feeling of live performance. Much to
her (I hope I'm using the proper gender pronoun) credit, MacArthur does signify on the limits of
digital humanities in the sonic domain.
Nevertheless, the limits of the instrument used to arrive at deliciously
tentative conclusions about the church context of neutral style is not
sufficiently acknowledged in the article. And by the standards traditional
scholarship sets for objectivity, we have to say the sample of four poets is
severely wanting.
MacArthur's effort to expose the anti-humanism of academic
poetry readings has, to be sure, a certain nobility. But it only deepens my common sense belief
that the human ear is superior to any mechanical device in determining what is
what in the performance of poetry. We
still have a far way to go before we can say with certainty who are the saints
in non-academic poetry readings and who are the sinners in the zones of the oppositional
academy. MacArthur's article is a
valuable learning moment.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. April 22, 2016
