Брой 4
Tom Clark
Abstract. Uses of poems and extracts from poems for ceremonial or ritual purposes within civic discourse reveal the inherently aesthetic nature of all political language. We can read in these civil and stately appropriations of poetry a desire for validation or embodiment of the aesthetic qualities of the events they embellish, and of the public and political agendas those events carry. It illustrates that proposition by a critical comparison of excerpts from Australia’s annual ANZAC Day dawn service and from the oath of office ceremony for USA president Barack Obama in 2008.
Keywords: ANZAC Day; Barack Obama; Elizabeth Alexander; political rhetoric; poetry; poetics.
Публичният поезис: теоретизиране на съвременното ползване на поезията в гражданския живот на Австралия и САЩ
Абстракт. Употребата на стихове и извадки от поеми за церемониални или ритуални цели в рамките на гражданския дискурс разкрива вътрешно присъщата естетична природа на политическия език. Можем да разпознаем в тези граждански и държавнически заемки от поезията желание за валидизация или въплъщение на естетическите качества на събитията, които те красят, и на обществения или политически дневен ред на тези събития. Това допускане се илюстрира чрез критично сравнение на извадки от ежегодния Ден на Анзак в Австралия и церемонията по полагане на клетва от президента на САЩ Барак Обама.
Ключови думи: Ден на Анзак, Барак Обама, Елизабет Александър, политическа реторика, поезия, поетика.
Introduction
This paper explores aspects of the use within contemporary civic and mainstream communication of poems and extracts from poems. Poetry is an element frequently present in contemporary public communicative performance, typically deployed for ceremonial or ritual purposes. It has drawn curiously little attention from the literature on contemporary public communications, however, which tends to overlook it as something other than “the main game”. It has drawn even less attention from literature on contemporary literature, which also seems to regard it as of little value. And yet, used in set-pieces, as intentionally scheduled ceremonial or ritual moments of the discourse, we can hear and read in civic appropriations of poetry a desire for validation or embodiment of the aesthetic qualities of the events the poems embellish, and of the public and political agendas those events carry.
The leading proposition for this paper, and a key tenet of the research project from which it emerges, is that poetry as public language reveals how public language is poetry. In other words, to the extent that ceremonial poems validate and embody political aesthetics, they also reveal the inherently aesthetic nature of all political language. This poetic-political nexus has always been in evidence, and of course, it has drawn scholarly comment for as long as historical records can discern, but a survey of current scholarship suggests it draws far greater attention in studies of exotic anthropologies and ancient literatures than in studies of the politics and creative output of occidental postmodernity.
The present discussion illustrates its leading proposition by a critical comparison of certain indicative examples from modern Australian and American ceremonial rhetoric. It aims to show how these two quite different rhetorical cultures are responding to essentially equivalent pressures in the emphasis that each places on the aesthetic validity of its civic culture, an emphasis that is most clearly observable in highly ritualised and ceremonial moments of civic discourse. I conclude by extending an insight drawn from functional linguistics, that political discourse displays situation-specific grammatical characteristics, in this paper proposing that a given political situation entails a prosody – a set of rules about the aesthetic arrangement of language – for the discourse it contains, which poems deployed in civic discourse are ideally figured to reveal.
Foregrounding the aesthetics of rhetorical performance
A piece of music is played on a brass instrument by a lone man at dawn. It is a trace of rhythmic energy, an almost perfect sine-wave emerging from a body and entering every sympathetic, permeable body in the listening host, which, in its life-movement, alternates inside and outside, self and Other, sound and the whisper of breath. The sound swells, other forces come together and intensify into something that might be called an event, perhaps a ritual. Its performance is designed to ensure cultural growth, or at least instill a structure of feeling. And as the final tone of the “Last Post” fades on the breeze, there is hardly a dry eye at the Shrine of Remembrance.
Muecke’s description (Muecke 2004) of the ANZAC Day dawn service is unmistakably academic in its syntax and vocabulary, but nobody would call it a dry or unfeeling account of Australia’s most widely and deeply felt secular holiday. The metaphors (e.g. “an almost perfect sine-wave emerging“, “its life-movement“) and the selections of facts to report (e.g. “a piece of music is played on a brass instrument by a lone man at dawn“, “hardly a dry eye at the Shrine of Remembrance“) capture a moment and a use of space which re-emerge as nationally important in every place that this ceremony occurs, and every year in which it has occurred.
We can frame analysis that another way, asking which Shrine of Remembrance does Muecke mean? Which year’s dawn service? To both questions, he means any of them and all of them. Such elements mark the three classical dramatic unities: the time, place, and characters of this scene remain constant even as the ceremony spans years, specific sites, and the individuals involved. To those three unities, Burke (1962) might add a fourth. Every ANZAC Day dawn service taps into – more precisely, it recalls, recreates, and sustains – a unity of motive that binds its performers and audiences across the years and yawning miles, a motive best captured by that famous clause from an English Imperial poem: “lest we forget“.
Just like the solemn and solitary trumpeter at dawn, all public speakers perform orally to audiences who evaluate their efforts according to aesthetic standards. They do this according to stage or broadcast norms of performance and reception, yet Australian traditions of rhetorical commentary have generally appraised public speaking as though it comprises written texts answerable to literary standards of logic and coherence (for recent cases, see e.g. Fullilove 2005; Curran 2004; Warhaft 2004; counterexamples in the Australian context have tended to come from the field of Cultural Studies, e.g. Morris 1992).
This marks a rupture in the praxis of public communications, a disconnection between what practitioners do and how critics analyse it. For there is no doubt that the professional advisors who develop and complement public speakers’ knowledge of the craft – the press secretaries, strategic advisors, media skills trainers, and so on – are themselves extremely conscious of the performative challenges and opportunities that confront the speakers they work for. This is conspicuously evident throughout the commentary from practitioners in the United States, people such as James Carville and Mary Matalin (Matalin, Carville, and Knobler 1994), Dick Wirthlin (Wirthlin and Hall 2004), Frank Luntz (2007), and Luntz’s academic bête noir George Lakoff (2005).
Typically unconstrained by the referentialist and literarian bias that affects many commentators in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia, those American practitioners tend to be unequivocal about the importance of aesthetic features as a determiner for communicative success. As Luntz says, “It’s not what you say; it’s what people hear”. We could include in that doctrine all the paralinguistic information that audiences feel, see, and smell as well. Likewise, the public speakers who know their craft are keenly aware of the performative dimension and its demands. Witness this journalist’s rare theoretical quote from that most consummate of orators, Barack Obama (Davies 2009):
“When you have a successful presidential speech of any sort, it’s because that president is able to put their finger on the moment we’re in“, Mr Obama said.
In other words, the success of political speech depends on a capacity to create momentous performances, performances whose audiences are carried by the power of the moment, thoroughly attuned to the speaker and her or his message. Obama’s sometime mentor, Jeremiah Wright, once gave a sermon penned by the jazz writer Stanley Crouch, whose phrases poetically embodied this aesthetic principle of political performance in the same moment as they explained it (Crouch and Wright Jr. 1999):
When a majestic sound takes the field, when it parts the waters of silence and noise with the power of song, when this majestic concatenation of rhythm, harmony, and melody assembles itself in the invisible world of music, ears begin to change and lives begin to change and those who were musically lame begin to walk with a charismatic sophistication to their steps. You see, when something is pure, when it has the noblest reasons as its fundamental purpose, then it will become a candle of sound in the dark cave of silence.
Crouch’s phrasing is staggeringly ambitious, but the transcript fades almost to blandness when compared with the sermon as Wright performed it. Not only does the choice of words change as it gets spoken (for example, when pronouncing the passage just quoted, Wright uses the word “regions“, not the “reasons” that Crouch scripted for him), but additionally the musicality of voice – Wright’s timing, intonation, dynamics, and texture – is so heightened that a transcript cannot possibly do it justice. And that is not even taking into account the “musicality” of its backing music, through which the Wynton Marsalis Trio underscores, explores, and embellishes the spoken rhetoric.
Remembrance poetics
The ANZAC Day dawn service raises many questions of interpretation, including questions of poetic interpretation. The best known of these is a verse, the so-called “Ode of Remembrance“, whose recitation features in the annual ANZAC commemoration (and in military remembrance ceremonies in several other countries):
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
This verse is an extract from a poem, “For the Fallen“, that the English poet Laurence Binyon published in 1914 (Binyon 2008). Most Australian children grow up hearing these words from time to time, never realising their link to a parent text. I can distinctly remember my shock when I first learned of it: the complete version of Binyon’s poem is so trite, so derivative and parochial in its melancholy, so politically complicit in those horrors of war it purports to lament. This ill-remembered talisman of imperial attitudes past jars like that second verse of Australia’s national anthem, as originally published, which most Australians conveniently do not know and most Australian institutions are in no hurry to remember (McCormick 1879):
When gallant Cook from Albion sail’d,
To trace wide oceans o’er,
True British courage bore him on,
Till he landed on our shore.
Then here he raised Old England’s flag,
The standard of the brave;
With all her faults we love her still,
’Brittannia rules the wave!’
In joyful strains then let us sing,
“Advance Australia fair!“
Another revealing comparison is with the Elizabethan poem, “There is a lady sweet and kind“, by Thomas Ford (1968). In 1963, the recently retired Australian prime minister Robert Menzies famously quoted its third and fourth lines in the remarks he gave at an official reception for Queen Elizabeth II (Menzies 1963). The original is a classic example of courtly love poetry in Tudor England, three four-line stanzas in rhymed couplets that range from romantic idealism to light-hearted irony and self-deprecation. Menzies managed to pluck two lines, out of context, and deploy them so sycophantically that he may have forever overshadowed any hope future Australians might have had to enjoy the original on its own terms:
I did but see her passing by,
And yet I love her till I die.
By contrast with the sanitised official anthem (which remains direly tepid at best) and with Menzies’ sycophancy, what Australia’s Returned Services League has achieved by quoting Binyon’s four lines out of context, as it were, sheds so much of the unfortunate baggage. Used in their excerpted form for the ANZAC tradition, these are words of great emotional point; they aspire to channel as much of the poignancy in the recollection of war as each audience member will permit them to. While they clearly do reflect a political fealty (as all language must), it is the fealty of participants in the ceremony to the ceremony itself, not to politically alloyed concerns.
That such a valourising of the ceremony itself is a function well-suited to the aesthetically heightened language of metrical verse hardly needs pointing out, although it is as well to be aware of the grounds for such an obvious proposition. The prosody of the RSL’s verse vignette is such that it is extremely hard for a fluent English speaker to fail in the recitation. Even without the aid of a script, that same prosody and the contrastive syntax help to make its phrasing memorable enough that the designated performers can recall it on cue, more or less verbatim. Additionally, most Australian residents have heard it often enough that the audience is also cued to respond, both to listen and to emote. That we have experienced the emotions before is no obstacle to repeating them. It is particularly this link between ritual performance and ritual emotion that attracts comparisons between the ANZAC commemorative tradition – which has been intentionally secular in the design of its rituals, as of its architecture – and many religious ceremonies. It is conventional to regard both as types of public observance, or a “sacrament” as Dening (1996) describes it:
The [ANZAC Day] march never ended in any assembly or parade. The different units simply marched to the Shrine, turned left and quickly dispersed to their various reunion places. This was the occasion for which the organising committee had spent so many hours planning. Sometimes they prepared special entertainment, bagpipes, or had a special guest. Always at some stage they broke off into the formal procedures of a parade-ground or a quarterdeck to listen to some words from their officers, or have a message mediated by a sergeant major. There would be reminiscences and banter. There would be a reminder of already known histories. In another rhythm, with another lilt, these histories could have been a chanted legend or a mythic genealogy. These formulaic narratives had their cultural operators, too, not blunted by repetition. None of it was blunted by repetition. Repetition of set forms liberated the group to make sacramental sense of the occasion. For the most part, it was sacramental of a sort of military common sense. There was not much rhetoric, but much realpolitik about how the world really works.
Public observance entails public purpose. The RSL uses and sustains the “Ode of Remembrance” not simply to recreate a communal aesthetics of emotion; it also aims to sustain public awareness and acceptance of the importance of war-sorrow, in order to valourise its place in Australian public life. Indeed, even that “its” invites further deconstruction, because what gets valourised is both the putatively important emotion and the putatively important institution (the RSL) that exists largely for the purpose of sustaining the valourisation. This is an outstanding example of the recursive praxis that guides both ideology and organisation in politics (e.g. Crozier 2008; Crozier 2007). Since the vehicle for this strategy is a verse – since the public purpose of the dawn service ritual is demonstrably better-served by using verse than by some verse-free alternative – it is clear that public language has a public purpose for the using of verse, at least in this instance. When we survey the quotations and recitations of verse in public language throughout the world’s majority-literate cultures, we find many similarities with the ANZAC Day example. Poems and, moreso, excerpts from poems tend to feature in explicitly ritualised events. In this guise, their functions generally include either or both of two uses:
(1) As set-piece moments of the event – in other words, epitomising the event’s ritual nature.
(2) As self-consciously deployed invitations to engage with heightened language aesthetics.
Obama and the presidential poetics of the United States
We can explore countless examples that display both the above purposes. Politics, even formalised Australian politics, are an endless supply of them (think, for example, of the weary but unperishing rituals of parliamentary practice). For a strikingly confident example, though, we may turn to another flourish associated with Barack Obama’s remarkable career in rhetoric: the poem that Elizabeth Alexander composed and performed for the 20 January 2009 ceremony to inaugurate Obama as 44th president of the United States of America (Alexander 2009):
Praise Song for the Day
Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky. A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin“.
We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road“.
We need to find a place where we are safe; we walk into that which we cannot yet see.
Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; the figuring it out at kitchen tables.
Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self“.
Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.
What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.
In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp – praise song for walking forward in that light.
It is becoming customary for the inaugurations of USA presidents from the Democratic Party to incorporate a verse element like this. First was John F. Kennedy, then Bill Clinton (for both his investitures), and then Obama. That means, the last three oath of office ceremonies for presidents from the Democratic Party have adopted Kennedy’s example. It is a fair speculation that Republicans may begin to follow suit. In this nascent tradition-of-ceremony, the president-elect chooses a poet who will compose a poem that befits the swearing in of her or his presidential patron. We may call such commissioned poems “set pieces” because of this emergent regularity. In other words, the inauguration poem is becoming a quasi-grammatical requirement of the ceremony, for one party at least, and so it serves to define and amplify that ceremony’s ritual nature. Such a poem demarcates itself as language outside the mundane realm of conversational exchange. It is very clearly a moment of language that steps outside of routine political transaction. What is more, its aspirations to communicative finesse imply that this stepping-outside, however institutionally driven it may be, is an aesthetic improvement on the everyday.
Some contend11 that Alexander’s poem was forced (and similar claims have been made against other inauguration poems down the years). Whether fair or not, to some extent this perception is an inherent function of the institutionalised process for commissioning the piece, and of the institutional environment into which it is delivered. Additionally, the partisan nature of American presidential politics means some people will always be inclined to give the disbenefit of any doubt. Alexander’s performative moment cannot be completely devoid of significance, though. Microsoft Corporation offered her an endorsement contract after the inauguration, citing the recognisability this moment had given to her face and voice, and implicitly buying into her public association with Obama’s political agenda. That is notwithstanding an extreme division of opinions, judging by commentary across the blogosphere, on whether she “read it well”. Importantly, the existence of such a debate goes some way to proving that audiences are every bit as motivated by the aesthetic properties of these moments as the performers are.
Writing and then performing a poem without meter, whose rhythm traverses between essayists prose and mundane conversation, Alexander begins by talking up the haphazard and ad hoc nature of human and material circumstances. She says that all around us is noise, then notes that “someone is trying to make music somewhere” out of the noise-making detritus that surrounds American (and, more generally, human) lives. Making music is this poem’s representative, its synecdoche, of that pursuit of form, clarity, pattern, which occurs at the root of ideology. Because America elected a fine-sounding president in Obama, it is particularly apposite to the moment of his inauguration: Obama embodies the hopes of Americans that, in him, they may have found a music to tame all the noise (see especially Berlant 2009): of climate change, of economic crisis, of worldwide blowback from years of steadily escalating military adventurism, et cetera.
Alexander then switches the focus from sound-music to writing-grammar with a teacher urging students to take out their pencils and begin, and the “words spiny or smooth” that permeate and govern the rest of this poem. While there are two reprises of the sing/song concept and a command to “say” words, from the teacher’s command onwards these are clearly words within a documentary culture, hence of legacy value. That is true of the poem overall, for while the ceremonial moment required oral performance, Alexander read it from a script – rather obviously at points, reminding us that there was nothing abnormal about relying on written words to guide the spoken words. Indeed, the absence of any counterexample within the American tradition of presidential inauguration
1 In describing the critical response to Alexander’s poem, I summarise discussion across a range of news websites and blogs. The positions outlined here are held and refuted by large numbers of contributors, so I have not selected individual examples for quotation.
ceremonies suggests that an unwritten poem would be quite extraordinary, perhaps even contrary to the rules that govern this situation.
Continuing this speculation, it seems likely that a president elect and her or his minders would be nervous about associating their inauguration with a poem they could not vet prior to the event. That Robert Frost in effect recited the first inauguration poem from memory serves counterintuitively to reinforce the standing of this rule. The poem Frost recited, The Gift Outright (Frost 1961b), was the one Kennedy had previously seen and discussed with him, whereas prevailing weather conditions (there was a strong wind in Washington that day) forced him to abandon the script of the poem he specifically wrote for the occasion, Dedication (Frost 1961a), which Kennedy had not read or heard.
On another level, words govern more than just the poem; they govern the entire event in which it transpired, for words were the medium through which government occurred in this situation, as in so many. The second stanza of Obama’s speech, which he delivered immediately after his swearing-in, is a very straightforward exposition of this governmentality of language, as he understands it (Obama 2009):
Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.
Obama’s logic revolved precisely around the powers that words have. A president commences office by the speaking of oath-words – a scripted oral performance – which are predicated on founding documents – a written canon of law-words. Reprising the words-words relationship of the oath it follows, the speech itself is a scripted performance of words that set an agenda for four years of government to come, and which will themselves govern the words of lawmakers and government officials throughout that period. Thus a scripted oral performance, which is crafted and delivered once, amplifies a scripted oral performance that aspires to eternal repetition – and this timeless performance (the oath) always entails amplification through a president’s swearing-in speech, more recently through a commemorative poem as well.
Obama’s inauguration speech acknowledges the dangers and responsibilities that accrue to the wielders of word-power. In that, his speech amplifies the president’s oath “to preserve, protect and defend“, as well as amplifying other similar oaths of custodianship – certain marriage vows spring to mind. Alexander’s poem likewise amplifies the custodial obligations of Obama’s oath, reminding listeners of debts to generations past, as well as rehearsing three versions of political ethics:
Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self“.
Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.
In a word, the oath, the speech, and the poem are all an effort to emulate one another. Each one aspires to embody and amplify the values of the other two. Alexander seeks to capture the political potential of her patron in the last two sentences of her poem, while at the same time trying to uphold the ceremony’s aspirations towards timelessness. Obama’s speech seeks to match the poem’s epic perspective on political history, while at the same time trying to affirm the oath’s solemnities about power and responsibility. The oath is forever seeking to frame the political validity of each newly elected president’s agenda, while at the same time trying to amplify each poet’s (institutionally guaranteed) devotion to the written-spoken word that gives it currency.
From this, we might argue that the presidential oath of office aspires to a “poetic” quality, just as Obama’s speech does. Certainly it has many of the qualities we associate with the sorts of poems that opinion poll respondents say they enjoy. If Alexander’s poem is a template, then the oath of office (United States of America 2009) seems to be a prose-poem that shares important stylistic and thematic concerns with hers:
I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
The leading purpose of Alexander’s poem, as with all presidential inauguration poems, rests with its commissioner rather than its author. The main functions of “Praise Song for the Day” are praise of Obama and validation of his authority. This is where we begin to see the difficulty of separating the categories of “poem” and “political speech”. Some portion of Alexander’s poetic praise and some portion of her validation are aesthetic values, as we know, rather than analytic, but they are expressly intended to reflect on aesthetics critical to the success of the politician.
Obama’s campaign for election was successful in identifying his policy agenda (“change”) with stylistic qualities of his phrasing (sophisticated) and of his performative delivery (unflappable). Arguably, this sense of connection between policy, phrasing, and performance was equally true of his predecessor, George W Bush, whose 2000 and 2004 presidential election campaigns prevailed by emphasising his brevity and quickness as a favourable contrast with the wordy indecisiveness of his opponents, particularly Al Gore and John Kerry (Luntz 2007). Additionally, Obama stands apart from most of his peers because it is so common to celebrate precisely his aesthetic qualities. Indeed, from the outset of his career, people professed admiration for Obama’s stylistics to such an extent that contrasts between his rhetoric and his policy achievements had become a cliché of the commentary about his presidency long before the inauguration occurred (Clark 2010).
Conclusion: public language entails public prosody
What Obama generally did well is what all speakers do, whether well or otherwise. Like any speaker, he crafted messages and he stayed on message in response to situations that merited public communication. A “message,” taken in the broadest sense of the word, is always inherently in response to the situation that prompts it. That is to say, the imperatives of a situation govern what a speaker may or may not say, and how or how not. Occasionally they recommend the quotation of verse, most often for ritual purposes. Invariably, though, they recommend the uses of particular phrases, particular themes, particular media – and even more, they recommend particular uses of those phrases, themes, media.
One of the stereotypes about Obama is that his speeches were “poetic” – some more so than others. It is the qualification after the dash that gives the lie to this analysis. Situations create rituals, which demand certain verses and certain styles or forms of verse. That is self-evidently true for the ANZAC Day dawn service, as discussed. The point of comparison between Obama’s inauguration speech, the American president’s oath of office, and Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day” is to recognise that situations themselves are verse-forms, replete with rules (or prosodies) about what should (and should not) be said and how (or how not) to style it. These include rules of timing, of phrasing, of topic selection and arrangement, of written layout, of spoken delivery, and so forth. In this respect, Obama was the rule; not the exception.
In other words, even where there is no “recognisable” (i.e. conventional) verse-form – an argument that some conservative literary and political critics have mounted against “Praise Song for the Day” – a civic situation still recognisably entails a prosody that governs every speech, any public discourse. It governs in the same sense that we may say a verse-form governs a conventional poem: imposing norms on what may or may not be said, and on how or how not – and arguably intensifying the creative impetus behind the speaking voice accordingly.
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