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FOLK POETRY 15-1, 1993
Pauline GREENHILL George W. LYON Richard Allen BURNS Roger de V. RENWICK Vera MARK Karen BALDWIN Stephanie KANE
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Shakespoke1 : Pauline GREENHILL
The study of folk poetry, variously defined and termed, is not new.2 Even this special edition has a predecessor; nearly 20 years ago Southern [folklore Quarterly devoted a double issue to monologues and recitations (Goldstein and Bethke 1976), to which two of the authors here — Karen Baldwin (1976) and Roger Renwick (1976) — contributed. Thus the "Shakespoke" texts — from African-American toasts, to English folk poetry, to Canadian newspaper verse, and beyond — are generically familiar in the field. Similarly, the approaches taken by the writers are based in analytical perspectives with which most folklorists will be acquainted. Using theoretical traditions from literary, linguistic, and anthropological scholarship, the contributors provide new insights on material they feel — despite its deceptive simplicity — demands analytical consideration. We might also note that nearly everyone has been influenced — at least indirectly — by Roger Renwick’s work on the subject. His English Folk Poetry: Structure and Meaning (1980)—among many other contributions — helped to make folk poetry, particularly its English language written forms, somewhat respectable as a subject for folkloristic investigation. The definitional parameters of this otherwise broad range of expressive culture are only that the works have some kind of poetic form (rhyme and/or rhythm being the most obvious characteristics), and that they are clearly not intended to be sung. Otherwise, they vary: some texts are primarily oral, while others are orally performed — at least on some occasions — but apparently composed in writing; some are prepared for private family or small group circulation, while others have found publication in local newspapers and histories or have been performed in folk festivals or University folklore classes. But these disparate kinds of folk poetry also share features that seem particularly vital and central to folk poets and to their originally intended audiences; and some that their folklorist, anthropologist, and literary scholar audiences find significant. Of the latter, one unifying feature is the fact that folk poems raise problems for their scholarly audiences. Forms of "vulgar" traditional and popular culture from ballads to comic books have gained some measure of academic respectability, but many scholars still seem to find it singularly difficult, for example, to escape their ethnocentrism and deal in a non-trivialising way with vernacular poetry, particularly when it is in their own first language.3 Although folk poetry has a few sympathetic readers both inside and outside the discipline of folklore, it also seems to stimulate some literary scholars, particularly, to dismissive sarcasm. Michael Taft rather optimistically commented in a review of True Poetry: Traditional and Popular Verse in Ontario (Greenhill 1989) that I was "overly defensive in support of [my] subject — anticipating critics who might not actually exist" (1990: 251). However, there was something of a rally among Canadian literary journals to assert the low quality of the verse I considered. The sentiments expressed, as much or more than the technical qualities, were clearly problematic for some literary scholars. And as Karen Baldwin suggests, folklorists too have commonly been more comfortable with the expressive forms than with the contents of traditional culture. "Those of us who write about traditional poets and verse are caught in a double bind: the content is not politically correct and the form is not ‘artistically correct" (Baldwin 1992). Thus, folk poetry only rarely finds a sympathetic audience, even among folklorists; North American cowboy poetry seems to be the exception.4 This double bind, I’d suggest, leads to a second common quality of folk poetry as problematic; its relation to the construction of selves and others. This issue is equally enigmatic and of concern to folk poetry’s creators and indigenous audiences, and to the academics who analyse it. And the positions of self and other are continuously juggled, alternated, and transferred between members of those three groups. Those of us who write about folk poetry, then, can be faced with difficult alternatives. Do we defend contents we may find distasteful, even offensive? Do we take them for granted? Do we ignore them in favour of more palatable, or more prominent topics? These kinds of questions have implications not only for the personal relationships between folklorists and the folk — doing fieldwork — but also for how we analyse what we find — doing folkloristics. I’ll try to address both these issues. The self/other issue is often negotiated by academics in the domains of race and gender. Scholars who examine material which is racist and/or misogynist — like some of the folk poetry examined here — face a situation in which previous ways of explaining it away have been superseded, but other options have not replaced them. The suggestions, for example, that misogynist and racist jokes are a benign way of familiarising the unfamiliar, or a non-problematic way of working through implicitly understandable aggressive tendencies against underclasses and marginalised groups have deservingly lost favour.5 Yet few alternative views of such materials have emerged. I hope that, if nothing else, this collection clearly indicates that we don’t need to view all folklore through rose-colored glasses, nor every informant as intrinsically good — no matter how we may personally feel about them as a person; nor every traditional text as a charter for a better world. For example, the poetic output of socially and culturally marginalised groups, as represented here by African-American toasts and prison verse, presents definite challenges; misogyny is particularly common. How does a white woman (Stephanie Kane) deal with a black man’s toast which denigrates a black prostitute? How does a white man (Richard Burns) who has never been incarcerated deal with poetry by black — and by white — prisoners? The problems Stephanie Kane and Richard Burns encounter extend beyond relatively simple issues of ethnographic participant/observation or emic understanding, and their modes of addressing the tacit problem of the writers’ worldviews, as reflected in their poems, are distinct. Richard Burns resolves his participation in the dissemination of such material implicitly in terms of the fact that it reflects a manifest reality; so, perhaps, must I as editor. Stephanie Kane, however, takes Loki’s toast in a different direction, quoting it selectively to use it as a mirror not so much for his reality, but for hers. We should note, too, that it’s not only those marginalised by race or gender whose ideas, advocated in verse, lack "political correctness"; most Ontario folk poets, for example, seem to hold predominantly conservative points of view. Women are authored in much folk poetry as "others", and not only in material, like the toasts, which is obviously misogynistic. The virgin/whore and princess/virago oppositions seem to reign generically. Where they are considered, women are rarely realistically — as opposed to symbolically — portrayed. As some of George Lyon’s examples show, most often those realistic portraits are written by women. Yet the articles here also show that one need not search out women’s folk poetic texts exclusively (see for example Greenhill 1984) to find positive images of women. For every woman who, as in Johnny Baronets text discussed by Richard Bums, is directly responsible for most of the evil in a man’s life, there may be women like the matron and nurses in Ephraim Mugglestone’s poetry — considered by Roger Renwick — or Rheva Solley poetically worshipped by her husband Roscoe Solley — described by Karen Baldwin — who admirably combine strength with nurturance. Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect balanced perspectives to emerge from the conventions of a folkloric genre. Yet I think male folk poets do try to create unified visions — such as Roger Renwick’s collected self — in their work. And they are part and parcel of some folkloric genres, like the women warrior or transvestite ballads (see Dugaw 1989) which give decidedly alternative, unconventional images of women. But race and gender are not the only self/other dichotomies worked out in these papers. With the exception of Vera Mark — an American looking at Gascon verse in France — the contributors look at poetry in their own first language — English.6 Yet even for those who look at such evidently close stuff, a training in folklore, anthropology, and/or literature is not the only culturally distancing aspect. National, ethnic, linguistic, and class as well as gender differences between authors and subjects also abound; only Karen Baldwin looks at the truly proximate—her own family. These essays are presented, in fact, in a decreasing order of social and rhetorical distances taken by the authors from the poets’ work. George Lyon, Richard Burns, and Roger Renwick analyse the poetry they look at from literary/linguistic academic perspectives; Vera Mark is a kind of borderline case since her analysis is primarily textually-based, but some of the poetry she examines was in fact written to her; and Karen Baldwin and Stephanie Kane — though in fundamentally different ways — are clearly located within the analysis and the ethnographic contexts of the works they examine. This focus on the selves of the authors might seem a bit solipsistic, but when we consider that the vast majority of the poetry we examine is similarly engaged in a search for identity, and that one of anthropology’s current concerns is for reflexivity, this view seems less anomalous. The issue of gender’s incorporation in identity seems particularly problematic for folk poetry. If women really are the "other" (Trinh 1989), then Karen Baldwin, Stephanie Kane, and Vera Mark are ironically female "others" writing about male "selves" (as Richard Burns, George Lyon, and Roger Renwick are male "selves" writing about other male "selves"). This is most clearly the subject of Stephanie Kane’s paper. That is, she reverses the self/ethnographer/author to other/informant/subject dichotomy, integrating herself into her subject. She uses the misogynist toast given to her — a Jewish-American woman ethnographer — by Loki — an African-American man with whom she worked in a Chicago AIDS intervention project — as a way of understanding gendered and racial images. She suggests, of course, that Loki’s toast authors women — explicitly but not exclusively African-American women — in a particularly determined mode, but she presents as a counterpoint three situations in which other men author her, the ethnographer, as a prostitute, and thus as a counterpart to the toast’s female subject. Stephanie Kane’s discomfort with her collection and analysis of the toast comes in part from the fact that Loki’s toast may — or may not — be "about" her as well; that they are friends; and that his text is a gift which he is eager to share, and which she enjoys and chooses to accept. The complexity of patriarchy’s interaction with race make the power dynamic of their relationship relatively egalitarian; this fact, too, is perplexing, as her analysis shows. Stephanie Kane’s implicit conclusion, I think, is rather pessimistic; the patriarchal gendered association of women with prostitution in the toast cannot be constrained by its textual boundaries. That is, the implication that women — ALL women — are (like?) prostitutes ruthlessly crosses racial and class boundaries; it’s pervasive whether or not we acknowledge or even recognise its presence. Yet, as Stephanie Kane says, this fact doesn’t make the toast any less wonderful, although it brings guilt into our appreciation and understanding of it. Women are often central to the creation and communication of folk poetry. Some of the verse that Pierre Sentat composed was for Vera Mark herself (just as Karen Baldwin’s Uncle Roscoe composed poems for her). Though Pierre Sentat spoke to several other local women through objects and poems in order to rehabilitate himself, it was especially the good opinions of men such as Gaston Thore and the mayor, for example, that might redeem the poet in his region. Clearly, Pierre Sentat was initially suspicious that Vera Mark, as an outsider, might condemn his actions. In fact, the opposite was more the case. Vera Mark was so fond of Pierre Sentat as a person that her perception of him was, as his poems suggest, as a nice family man, proud of his language and his community. Ironically, she implicitly condemns Pierre Sentat to the judgements of others merely by drawing attention to him and situating him, even if partially, in the socio-political context of his former activities. Where Pierre Sentat perhaps expected that the audience Vera Mark would create for his work in North America would know him as she did, the academic audience knows him instead — perhaps even more than his community does, because we have no personal contact with him — more as collaborator than as cobbler. But Pierre Sentat’s negotiation of community through poetry was a lifelong project; Vera Mark’s acts of collection were part of this man’s broader negotiations of place in society. Karen Baldwin’s discussion of her Uncle’s verse, in contrast, reflects both her place as a family member and her opportunity to find the poet a more extensive audience. Her tribute to Roscoe Solley could only come from one who was uniquely situated as both a family member — and thus more or less above suspicion — as well as a folklorist, who cultivated a close and warm friendship over an extended period of time. As is appropriate to the roles she had to negotiate —as great-niece, friend, and folklorist — she mentions but does not elaborate on those of Roscoe Solley’s topics which occasionally generated heated discussions between them (Baldwin 1992), though she details his community’s periodic negative responses.7 But Karen Baldwin’s Uncle, thanks to her, had an opportunity to create the persona he wanted. He had chances to test out his materials on a variety of local and national audiences — some of whom sided ideologically with him, others of whom did not — and to polish his self-presentation. And in fact it’s not difficult, given Karen Baldwin’s presentation, to understand why her students and his other audiences felt so close to him. There is something profoundly compelling about his poetry’s view of the world. We find we like Roscoe Solley too, and can even be carried into a nostalgic view which privileges the best of his milieu — as he saw it. Whether we take the verse as a whole, or selectively, we may find admirable, even model qualities and actions advocated there. As a woman connecting to a male relative — audience, support, and appreciator — Karen Baldwin carefully constructs a view which is appropriately centred upon Roscoe Solley, rather than on her own feeling; yet the result is profoundly affecting for the reader precisely because we begin to understand how close they were. The women’s papers share a perspective which engages their own ethnic graphic presence; the men’s manifest more detachment. Each of the latter, in its own way, discovers a kind of heroism reflected in folk poetry. Heroism is apparent in George Lyon’s topic — verse about pioneers and settlers — as well as in his perspective — based upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s distinction between epic and novel modes. Yet both Roger Renwick and Richard Burns, because the folk poetry they consider approaches burdensome realities — incarceration and community tragedies — find the folk poets themselves implicit heroes in their ability to deal with their experiences. These three authors see folk poetry preparing a charter for dealing with obstacles, and, in Roger Renwick’s case at least, for considering more global difficulties, particularly the alienation of individuals from societies. George Lyon, rather than using the poets’ personae as his focus, takes the poems’ manifest intentionality to heart, and discusses the view they present to — and of — their communities. Given that folk poets notoriously, even definitionally, attempt to deflect their texts away from themselves — as discussed by Roger Renwick — George Lyon’s method is a particularly respectful one. Yet it’s equally obvious from the other works (especially Vera Mark’s) that in communicating with others, folk poets say a great deal about themselves. The poets George Lyon discusses show some self-glorification — and neighbour- and community-glorification — yet they seem to speak if not from experience, at least from family and community knowledge. The fact that George Lyon found these poems in community histories, among other locations, indicates collective approval of the poets’ points of view; they are selves talking to selves. George Lyon, I suspect, finds the folk poets’ view of Alberta as a frontier, pioneer location more acceptable, as well as more realistic and truthful, if no less creative and inventive, than that of the "boosters". The poets he writes about, like Ephraim Mugglestone in Roger Renwick’s work and the prison poets in Richard Burns’, are portraying adversity which most have certainly seen at first hand. Women are also included, both as poets and as subjects, and seem to be incorporated relatively unproblematically in the discourse of heroism. Along with men, they comprise the frontier both personally and symbolically. But the peoples’ included are mainly of European origin; absent, to a large extent if not entirely, are contributions of the indigenous peoples and of non-white immigrants. Women are much more remote in the social context of the all-male prison poetry Richard Burns discusses, and they are represented — where they’re considered at all — in a very negative light. Yet unremarked upon, but surely remarkable, is the lack of racism in these works; the poets seem equally willing to see white and black convicts as worthy subjects, even models. Realism is evident here, too, as the poets — including Johnny Barone himself — describe the convict’s character in less than flattering terms, though they do, of course, maintain his innocence of some of the crimes for which he is jailed. The location of common cause among white and black Americans occurs, of course, in a context where they share antagonists in the prison system and the straight world. Its utopian qualities are more than somewhat mitigated by the fact that there is clearly no room for women, and that death is the longed-for release. Roger Renwick’s utopia is more explicit; he, along with the poet Ephraim Mugglestone, advocates the collected self and the community. Ephraim Mugglestone is perhaps more other-directed than even Roscoe Solley; yet he had fewer opportunities (and perhaps less personal motivation) to find an audience outside his local area. Where he might wish to take issue even with outsiders— the manufacturers of dangerous cars, the bosses who oversee unsafe mines, and so on—he instead locates both power and responsibility in the collected self. It is up to working men and women themselves to find and implement the solutions to their problems. Though we might differ with this manifestly non-radical, liberal perspective, the ideas of and the vision for a better world are laudable. Clearly folk poetry cannot be dismissed as the assertions of what political scientists would call "special interest groups". Though many poets do counter what they see as mainstream perspectives — whether a Texas prisoner maintaining his lack of responsibility for his crimes, or a rural Pennsylvanian composing an anti-abortion polemic — the dialogic quality of their work must be recognised. Most folk poetry would never be written if its composers did not feel either that the prevailing opinion was against their point of view and they needed to persuade others, or that there was a danger that the prevailing opinion would ignore, forget, or dismiss their point of view and they needed to persuade others. This is true even of less obvious examples: ostensibly humorous works like Roscoe Solley’s "The Bugs" teach the listener about age and its consequences; examples like the toast assert in extremely strong terms the dominance of African-American men. The dialogic aspect of folk poetry isn’t only present in those works which are explicitly persuasive. The relationship between a self — poet/presenter — and other — audience — is crucial to folk poetry’s very creation, and is the fulcrum for its performance. Most writers of folk poetry are moved to communicate in this form because it is an expression of personal views in a form which becomes memorable for others. Some of those others are ethnographers; the negotiation between "selves" and "others" becomes central to the ideas being presented in these papers, not only because the issue of representation of peoples and cultures has become so problematic (see for example Clifford 1988), but also because the ethnographers themselves are often the poets’ actual interlocutors. Perhaps because they base their writing in personal, emotional, deeply-felt connections, postmodern uncertainty and fragmentation is not a common stance for folk poetry scholars;8 the authors of these papers speak of real connections between real people. Yet most also see that in trying to say something authentic and true about folk poetry and folk poets, they ultimately implicate themselves and the project of ethnographic analysis and description. Uncoincidentally, I think, every contributor to this issue describes individual pets in terms of how their poems reflect upon their lives, though the reflection is more indirect in George Lyon’s piece. These are not postmodern perspectives, but the poems, too, seek modernist unified visions to cope with splintering postmodern realities. What these texts say about their audience and culture is also implicit in most of the essays, but except for George Lyon, the writers focus quite directly on what the poems say about the poets, and implicitly (though more explicitly in the case of Stephanie Kane’s paper) readers can see as well what the poems say about their collectors/analysts. What do these papers, then, suggest about the praxis of folklore? The most basic reflexive issue here in fact speaks to the uses to which texts are put. As long as folklorists claim their work reflects some kind of reality, authenticity, or truth, that it reflects the individuals, groups, and societies they encounter — and surely that remains a primary aim of social sciences and humanities — they will have to face the fact that this is hardly an ideal world. Where we have charters for alternative perspectives or a better world (such as Roger Renwick advocates in his description of poet Ephraim Mugglestone’s view of the "collected self") we should by all means point them out. But when we are working with a cobbler judged for collaborationism who is trying to justify his past actions (as in Vera Mark’s paper), or with a misogynist statement (as in Stephanie Kane’s paper), we should have the courage to face our material, our own feelings about it, and what effects we may have in presenting it. So "Shakespoke" — folk poetry and folk poets alike — turns out to be important not as a reflection of the anaesthetic sentimentality of community (the literary view) or even as the positive statement of utopia (its own view). Shakespoke foregrounds central issues in the writing of folkloristic and ethnographic description. While Richard Burus, George Lyon, and Roger Renwick perceive Shakespoke in the realistic, even functional qualities of the verse they choose to examine, Karen Baldwin, Stephanie Kane, and Vera Mark implicate themselves in analysing the relationship between action and context in Shakespoke’s (re)production and reception. The audience, including readers as well as researchers, is called to locate and perceive the works and people as Shakespoke. Folklorists must recognise their roles as (re)producers, not only as voyeurs.
1. "Shakespoke" is a tag given bye Roscoe Solley (the folk poet featured in Baldwin’s article) at the end of a recitation. I thank the contributors to this volume for their indulgence of my pickiness for their hard work, and for their unique insights. I’m particularly grateful to Karen Baldwin, Stephanie Kane, and Vera Mark, whose critical and incisive dialogue on the introduction pushed me to rethink it in fruitful ways. I thank former Dean of Arts and Science Michael McIntyre and Vice President (Academic) David Gagan of the University of Winnipeg for financial support of this publication. I also thank Wendy Trask for word processing assistance and K. O. Krebs for computer support. And, on behalf of all of us, I dedicate this issue to folk poets. 2. Historical and definitional work on the topic may be found in, for example, Goldstein (1976), Greenhill (1989), and Renwick (1980). 3. Even the encyclopedic Handbook of American Folklore (Dorson 1983) scarcely notes the existence of folk poetry, so named. None of its nearly 70 articles is devoted specifically to that topic, and only three citations—on a total of five pages—are found in the index. The more recent Folklore, Cultural Performance, and Popular Entertainments (Bauman 1992) has an entry on oral poetry, but nothing on the kinds of material discussed here. 4. See for example Lyon (1991). Literary scholars tend to dismiss folk poetry as doggerel, and folklorists tend to find it insufficiently "traditional". 5. For a brief discussion of some particularly offensive misogynist material, and a polemic against conventional academic responses to it, see Greenhill (1992). 6. Mark’s paper also shows a clear alignment with the anthropological tradition of studying—and appreciating—vernacular verse from other linguistic and sociocultural groups, in the tradition of Fernandez (1986), Slater (1982), and so on. 7. In addition, both Baldwin and Mark realise the need to be fair to men "who can no longer give [their] side of the argument" (Baldwin 1992). 8. See for example the various works in Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler’s excellent text Cultural Studies (1992).
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