“Writing and Reading Kaddish; An Exploration of the Soundscape(s) of the Poem”
Résumé
The paper deals the poem “Kaddish” by Allen Ginsberg and the links between poetry, performance, mourning and identity in the poem. Firstly, the paper focuses on the role of music (Ray Charles Blues, the fugue, Jewish liturgical chant, etc.) in the composition process of "Kaddish" -- as source, model, and line base -- to wonder whether Ginsberg’s speech-rhythm prosody cannot be interpreted as a method of notation (with staccatoes, thus focusing primarily on the text itself. Secondly, it explores the oral performance of the poem as the development of “an extreme rhapsodic wail.” Among Ginsberg's poems, “Kaddish” was probably one of the less read or performed, perhaps because of its intimate reference to family matters and an act of mourning the memory of his mad mother, perhaps also because in the poem the poet had publicly exposed himself, his memories, his history, his being. Eventually, the paper completes this exploration of the poem by tackling the issue of reading it to an audience over time and space to examine how the different readings help dig into the acoustic soundscape of the poem to explore the link between rhythm and intonation and their meaning-enhancing effects and between tone and volume as an index of the vocalizer-poet’s state of mind over the different readings. Comparing the readings will also help show how gradually these deal differently with informational and emotional saliency, and reveal how over time the readings of the poem have partaken in a process of voicing out memories, mourning a loss, performing the mourning ritual, memorializing the subject and archiving the poem.