Addendum To The Beat Goes On

In rereading my post, I realize that I didn't quite say all of what I meant, and that I probably didn't say it was well I should have, even if there's nothing ultimately I would retract per se. Do I think that a lot of the forms of music in the past several years have been 'tinning' our ears? Yes, I do-- though the same can be said of commercials, of the world of the news-byte, of the general assaults against poetry in the past ninety years (partially the result of changing aesthetics, partially the result of the Modernist tendency to make poetry 'difficult' and perhaps unapproachable, partially the result of a series of misconceptions about poetry and its literary and social functions). There are lots of factors.

I wanted to make clear that I wasn't really blaming the kids for not knowing accenting and such, but in rereading it, I do see how that intention may not have been crystallized. The fact is this: kids these days very often aren't taught at all the minutiae of poetic process and poetic reading. Goodness knows, most teachers in high schools avoid these things like the plague, and so the kids never learn it, or are never made aware of it; but one needn't handle such matters specifically in terms of trochees and spondees and dactyls, as my kids learned yesterday. A lot of the time it's just about doing the reading out loud and listening and figuring things out -- and more often than not, such things are instinctive in the final analysis. This stuff, though, used to be drilled into you in elementary and high school, and probably still is in the early (e.g., kindergarten) stages-- in the days of "Hickory Dickory Dock" and "The Cat In The Hat," the rhythms and music of I think every English speaking child understands.

But people tend to lose these things, just as they tend to lose languages (as my French, for example, has so badly dwindled) for lack of attention and practice. And they're horrible things to lose, in part because we lose something about verbal intuition, but also because we lose a lot in the way of the 'joy' of language. We lose, in the end, the child's love of making sounds with words, and making what we mean link up to the sonic and musical qualities that will best 'drive home' what we mean.

For too many reasons, many of which become justifications, we supplant that child-like impulse with supposedly 'more adult' notion of 'understanding' and 'getting the point' and 'reading in between the lines.' Yes, these things are important, but *just* as important is knowing how sound changes everything.

Great writers very often indicate the 'sound' of things they write, their verbal 'intentions,' so to speak. The reader has to be patient and attentive, has to figure out how the words should sound in order for their meaning to be clear-- the reader has to figure this out by attending to issues of context and source and speech patterns and so forth. Actors know this very well. They have to.

I guess in the end, I lament that most people today tend not to think of these things, and that even most literature students manage to get through a great deal of their career without learning some of the key 'nuts and bolts' lessons that will so aid them in their studies. The stuff about rhythm and meter used to get burned into our heads, and now it seems it's almost as rarely taught as Latin.

I don't blame the kids for not knowing this stuff, though I won't exonerate them for not knowing it; so much of it we do know because we enact it so often and so instinctively in our own speech from the time we are children. Deep down, we know there are countless ways of saying the word 'fuck,' depending on how we mean it-- and we know how to apply that knowledge when we need to. But the same kind of instinctual understanding has to be applied to reading the words of poets and novelists and so forth.

Unfortunately, we've become used to the flat-toned sounds of sound-bytes and so forth, and we tend to convince ourselves that if we figure something about a text that we then 'get it,' and can thus move on.

And, most of the time, yes you can move on, and it won't 'hurt' you if you do. But you're likely missing something, or simplifying it or reducing it to suit your own purposes, rather than seeing what's really there. And, as Mr Eliot puts it, we can have the experience but miss the meaning.

It'd be nice if I could spend all the time necessary to flesh out these things for my kids-- to show them how thoroughly, for example, rhythms and stresses are things most of us know innately, and that, by such standards, The Waste Land isn't as far removed from Green Eggs and Ham as we may initially think.

It's the old truism: the things we most often overlook are the most obvious, the things we take for granted-- but if we do overlook such things, we can misunderstand things entirely.

Northrop Frye was right, I think: all literary theory that cannot be taught at the kindergarten level is probably useless. And, after all, the child's eyes and ears are so much more attentive than ours tend to be.

To think that a hundred years ago in Ontario, (some of, anyway)Shakespeare's sonnets were taught in grade three. Grade THREE. Go figure...