Oral poetry
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Oral poetry is a form of poetry that is composed and transmitted without the aid of writing. The complex relationships between written and spoken literature in some societies can make this definition hard to maintain.
Background
Oral poetry is sometimes considered to include any poetry which is performed live. In many cultures, oral poetry overlaps with, or is identical with,
Oral poetry differs from
An influential movement in the study of oral poetry, both because it helped to bring oral poetry within the realms of academic literary study and because it illuminated the ways in which poetic form and orality interrelate, has been the oral-formulaic theory developed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord. This theory showed how stock phrases could enable poets to improvise verse. One consequence of Parry and Lord's work is that orally improvised poetry (as opposed to poetry which is composed without the use of writing but then memorised and performed later) is sometimes seen as the example par excellence of oral poetry. Examples of orally improvised poetry are the epics of the Serbo-Croatian guslars studied by Parry and Lord, Basque bertsolaritza, and freestyle rap.
Much oral poetry, however, is memorised verbatim – though the precise wording, particularly of words which are not essential to sense or metre, do tend to change from one performance to another, and one performer to another.
Regional and national traditions
Poetical improvisation is a living tradition in many parts of the world. Regional traditions may include but surely are not limited to:
- The payada in Argentina
- Basque bertsolaritza
- Maltese għana[2]
- The canto a braccio of Lazio, Italy[3]
- The improvvisazione in ottava rima of Tuscany, Italy[4]
- The stornelli and other local traditions in other parts of Italy
- hip hopgenre of American music.
See also
References
- ^ Rubin, David C. Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
- ^ Għana Spirtu Pront, in Maltese Wikipedija, accessed Apr 2011
- ^ Festival Regionale di Canto a Braccio, Borbona (RI) in Italian, accessed Apr 2011
- ^ Accademia dell'Ottava Archived 2011-06-28 at the Wayback Machine in Italian, accessed Apr 2011
External links
Media related to Oral poetry at Wikimedia Commons- What is Oral Poetry?
