Public and Spoken Word

     Silent reading was first documented by the venerable Saint Augustine in Confessions. A fourth century AD Father (Of course)-- Father Ambrose entertained Augustine so much with his non-speaking that it drove him to documentation, “…his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent, his tongue was still.” What a crazy notion. Silence.  A goat-teed Ambrose, tea and cigarette, pondering, lips moving over Latin gold, finally slamming his calf-skinned novel shut extinguishing his tallow candle. But he was one of a few literates, maybe: http://thriceholy.net/literacyf.html


     Orators and public plays had always captured the varied imaginations of peasants, nobles and aristocracy alike, as they do today, until Gutenberg’s 15th century movable type press was imbued with 19th century steam power and the flooding of the masses began, with pulpy Beadle dime novels of ill and consumptious repute. Public readings of prose continued as always, in salons and coffee shops and college campuses, but it will never regain its prominence as a viable source of entertainment and information.

     That is why the readings which occurred on The University of Pittsburgh satellite location in Greensburg during the third week of March were an occasion for the celebration of spoken word. It is not an unpleasant experience to hear the sentences that many an hour have occupied in the author’s head. To hear the diction and timing of words broken from the source grants the imagery electricity. Let us not forget the act of showing up and sitting in a metal chair and how this interacts with the words, with author and audience. During Gerald Stern’s moving hour of poetry the rain poured night crawlers the size of squirrel intestines down upon the campus and a tornado siren whirred distantly. Who among the crowd would have not been ashamed to die that night during a reading of “The Dog” http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/gerald_stern/poems/18058
or singed their shoelaces during the five minute fire alarm preceding Joseph Bathanti’s scathing reading of The High Heart.

     It is down-right shame that spoken word, poem or prose, is not valued like stock in our society. That it is cornered off into small enough room. What I would pay to hear a public (and not a subscriber station- it is just not the same) radio station announce: “Coming up after the break a two-fer as John Cheever takes us swimming and Hemingway tells us about a Lion Hunt that goes all wrong. First, Laura with the hyperbole traffic report: ‘The end times are nigh, Chuck’.” Any day now, I am sure. (http://shortstoryclassics.50megs.com/cheeverswimmer.html)

     At last, it is a good thing that people continue to try. That a professor named Lori Jakiela invites us to come along on her voyage to bring culture and experience to a suburban campus. To sit still and listen. To applaud and admire. To be.

--The author borrowed history notes from the incredible Reading Matters Book by Catherine S. Ross, et. al.