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The Mexico Interview (Part Two)

© Billy Marshall Stoneking

Charles Hasty: I'd like to go a little further into this idea of picking up on everyday speech and incorporating that speech into poems. What about everyday writing? Letters, for example. I mean there are letters from the past century written by soldiers, farmers, slaves, men and women, from all sorts of backgrounds, which are very moving, genuine statements.

Billy Marshall Stoneking: Indeed. All those wonderful letters. At least the ones I know of... I'm thinking of those that were read on that series, The Civil War... letters and diary entries, and so forth. I always thought, "My god! This is pure poetry!" The language, the emotion! When I thought about it, I realized these people had one thing in common. The King James Version of The Bible. The language of these letters is not what one would expect from farmers and merchants, husbands and sons. But there it is. And it is a language that is very much in the style of that translation. So these ordinary folk from mid-19th century America are the heirs, the direct heirs, of an Elizabethan English. A language they would've heard in their churches. They would've read it or had it read to them, sitting round a table at night. A lot of the soldiers would've had Bibles with them which they would've read between engagements, waiting for the next battle to happen. Perhaps they believed this was the sort of language you used because it was full of power and emotion. Certainly, they found their own expressions and way of conveying their most profound sentiments, but they must have drawn on the inspiration of the language they found in their Bibles. That's my theory, anyway. The point is, they lived in a far more oral culture than we do. Remember, in those days, there were people going round giving talks; storytellers were very popular. Instead of going to the movies or the video shop, you'd go to the theatre or town hall, and someone would tell a story of their adventures in the West or their travels in Europe. So people were tuned to the conventions of oral presentation.

CH: How significant is the oral dimension generally? I mean for people who simply don't read poetry or actively avoid it?

BMS: Very significant, very important. The problem is: how to translate those black squiggles on the page into meaningful sounds? We talk all the time, all the time, about literacy. We have problems with literacy - literacy this and literacy that. But the big problem is one of translation. You put a text in front of a kid and you get him or her to read it aloud and even though they can read the whole passage with ease, there is nothing in the voice. I mean the child doesn't know that what is going on is more than word identification. It's about SOUNDS as well, and rhythm, and timbre, and all those musical aspects of language that are mute on the page. The big problem is not literacy but oracy - the inability to lift the print - translate the print - into sound, to give it meaningful voice. Reading aloud is, after all, a translation of text - an interpretation of what is written and the skill to reveal it, to create an aural experience which does justice to the poem, story, or whatever is being voiced. This is something which is not usually taught in schools, not in Australia at least. My role as a reader of poetry, or a performer of poetry, is to alert people to the fact that there are ways that poetry can actually have an impact on their lives and that a lot of the problems people have with poetry are due to the fact that they just can't HEAR it!

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