Foley examines four forms of oral poetry and the variations in each of these forms in order to demonstrate that oral poetry is “endemically plural” and “naturally diverse” (60).   This is largely due to the fact that “any oral poem, like any utterance, is profoundly contingent on its context” (60).  If an oral poem is removed from its context then elements of that poem are lost.  These elements include “the performance, the audience, the poet, the music, the specialized ways of speaking, the gestures, the costuming, the visual aids, the occasion, the ritual, and… other aspects of a given poem’s reality” (60).

The first type of oral poet that Foley examines is a paper-singer from Tibet.  Foley provides an image of Grags-pa seng-ge taken by Yang Enhong.  The picture shows Grags-pa seng-ge holding pieces of paper.  Foley explains that at first glance many readers would assume that verbal cues and/or notes are on these sheets of paper but Foley reveals that this is not the case.  Grags-pa seng-ge is illiterate and uses the sheets of paper and other texts as “a talisman, a symbolic piece of his singing equipment” (3).  When the poet focuses on an object during his performance, “the story of King Gesar appears in his mind and he is able to compose the stories fluently” (3).  Foley also discusses the essentials of North American slam poetry and provides details about the sophistication entailed in the creation of this form of oral poetry.  Slam poetry utilizes “complex arrays of rhyme, alliteration, and other sound-play; formulaic patterns of speech and intonation; coded gestures of all sorts; electric and continuous exchange between poet and audience; and not least the withering force of silence” to demonstrate what life is like in America since 2000 (5).  Foley next describes the practices of South African praise-poets or iimbongi.  He explains that the iimbongi used to be responsible for “creating and maintaining the reputation of the tribal chief via the medium of oral poetry” and were able to do so “without fear of reprisal” (5).  In contemporary South Africa, the praise-poet’s “responsibilities have shifted” towards “various brands of social activism and ceremonial functions with new and wider audiences, contexts, and implications” (5).  Foley then explains how the rediscovering the oral tradition can enable us to “reconstruct the context of Homer’s oral-derived poetry” (10).  Homer’s “now-silent texts” have been misunderstood but if we “learn the bard’s specialized language, or register” then “…we can start to interpret his recurrent phrases and patterns as the idioms they really are” (10).

Foley argues that an oral poem cannot be effectively analyzed using traditional textual analysis.  This is still the case when an oral poem has been written down because “the textual representation of an oral poem can and cannot imitate the experience it seeks to codify and transmit” (35).  Foley poses and answers three questions in order to answer the larger question that the title of his book, How to Read an Oral Poem, asks:

• What is oral poetry?
  • oral poetry is “endemically plural” and “naturally diverse” (60).
• What is reading?
  • “To read is to decode, to generate meaning from signs.  We don’t need an alphabet or even a text to do that” (80).
• What is an oral poem?
  •  “any oral poem, like any utterance, is profoundly contingent on its context” (60)
• What do we mean by “how”?
  • “the ‘how’ must involve a variety of perspectives, not one but many nontextual approaches” (81)

Foley suggest that we use the following three perspectives to analyze oral poetry:  Performance Theory, Ethnopoetics and Immanent Art.  I will return to Foley and these perspectives of analysis in correlation with other theorist and performers in future posts.