Foot, Mouth and Ear

Abstract

Using work done by the poet Douglas Oliver in Poetry and Narrative in Performance on the ways in which any reading ‘performs’ poetry, this essay opens up a meditation on the poetic foot and its entailment in bodily repetitions and established performance behaviours. Oliver's motivating interest in the relation of beat and flow and the importance of this relationship to a phenomenology of time are revisited and suggest the need to distinguish beat from foot. The characteristics of a poetic foot are sketched. A very simple marching chant – ‘Left, left, left-right, left …’ – chosen because of its significance for a particular mode of repetitive foot-movement – provides the central example for this first part of the argument. The constituent sounds and their groupings into a ‘line’ are considered in some detail, with the help of a spectrogram taken from an example of the chant. Etymologies of some of other terms used to designate parts in poetry such as verse, stanza and strophe are briefly considered as part of a speculation that, since a strophe originally named a movement in one direction across the performance space, it is plausible to speculate that foot designated a single step within that movement. The final section of the essay considers some of the implications for poetry reading – whether aloud or silent – of the term performance: within a typology of performance modes, what is specific to reading of poems which are not designed for theatricalised recitation. In this form of reading the material (written) text is usually manifestly present and it is as though the performer is attempting to relay a hearing, perhaps based in syllables, of this otherwise mute script.