My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

C LOS ELlS TEN I N G 293
slippage among tones, dictions, accents, and registers in polyvocal performances
in which different voices are evoked using performative cues
rather than alphabetic ones. The potential here is to create rhythms and
voicings that are not only supplemental to the written text but also at odds
with it.
Such poetry is more usefully described as polymetrical or plurimetrical
than as "free"; still, our technical vocabulary strains at accounting for more
than a small portion of the acoustic activity of the sounded poem and there
are a number of performative features that are only available in readings
(in both senses) since they are not (readily) scorable in the lexical text.
Ernest Robson, going steps further than Hopkins, developed an elaborate
and eccentric system for scoring pitch and stress in the written texts of
his poems. 15 Among the most resourceful attempts to designate acoustic
features of performed poetry has been Erskine Peters's, in his work-inprogress
Afro-Poetics in the United States. Peters, together with an associate at
the University of Notre Dame, J. Sherman, has developed a "special font
to document the sounds, rhythms, and melodies of the Afro-poetic tradition."16
The sixty characters in Peters's system designate such acoustic figures
as accelerated line pacing, accented long and short stretches, blue
noting, bopping, calibrated stagger, call-response, chant, crypting, deliberate
stutter, echo toning, extreme unaccented, falsetto, field hollering,
gliding or glissando, glottal shake, guttural stress, humming, moan, ostinato,
pegging, pitch alteration (heightened and lowered), quoting, riff,
rushing, scatting, slurring (three versions), sonorous chant stretching,
sonorous inhaling, sonorous moaning, sonorous tremor, spiking, syllabic
quaver, tremolo, and ululating rhythm.
One reason that Hopkins figures so prominently in Close Listening is that
he initiates, within the English tradition, a complex prosody that requires
performance to sound it out. With rational metrics, the "competent" reader
could be presumed to be able to determine the poem's sound based on
well-established principles. With complex prosody and polymetricality,
however, the performance establishes the sound of the poem in a way not
necessarily, or not easily, deducible from the text.
Despite these many examples, many poetry performances tend to submit
to, rather than prosodically contest, the anesthetized speech rhythms
15. See Ernest Robson's I Only Work Here (1975) and Transwhichics (1970), both from his own
Primary Press in Parker Ford, Pa. On Robson, see Bruce Andrews's ''The Politics of Scoring", in
Paradise and Method, Poetics and Practice (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), pp.
176-77.
16. I am grateful to Professor Peters for providing me with relevant sections of his manuscript.
In a chapter entitled "African-American Prosody: The Sermon as a Foundational Model",
he provides detailed descriptions for each of the prosodic terms he employs.