The Role of Paratext in Poetry

In performance poetry, the stage serves the role of a page and transforms poetry readings into theatrical events. While poetry is a natural part of our lives, over time and for different reasons we have become alienated to it. Paratext is a literary interpretation concept. Poetry has a language (Jansen, 2014). The way in which poets breathe supply oxygen to their bodies and also to their poems. The way in which poets walk and talk are inherent to poems. Poems body languages are also shaped by those scripts that are used in writing. For those poems that are recorded, background sounds, breathing patterns of poets and their tones of voice are all resurrected in poems. It is right saying that poems have tones, melodies, choreographies and even orchestrations. Poems could employ metaphors and when that happens, the metaphors become integral to the deliverance of artwork. Poetry also talks through its body parts. Whenever poets choose lines with numbers of vowels that are extraordinary the lines sound different distinctly from lines that have consonant counts. The presence of a lot o`s and e`s creates the musicality effect in poems. It could be said that the flesh and bones of poems are the vowels and bones of poems.

Body language is communicated by movements and positions which include facial expressions, speakers and listener’s relative positions and gestures. Body behaviours have the potential of modifying the meanings that are suggested by verbal texts. The contribution of both verbal and non-verbal behaviours to the process of communication are invaluable.

The ways in which poets deliver poems may or may not reveal the poems when they come to their individuals minds. Poems could be declaimed, which means that they could be given with rhetorical panache and could even be recited. That means that the energy necessary to fetch from memories are present in sounds.

Different paratextual elements of live poetry are not separable from one another materially just the same way as elements in and out of books. It could be argued that epitext and peritext distinctions can only be upheld on temporal levels. As such, peritext could be considered as the paratext that is produced during the course of representation of proper literary work while epitext refers to those paratextual comments that come about from temporal distances to respective events. The main text that authors publish is surrounded by other materials that are supplied by publishers, printers and editors, all of which are widely known as paratext. It is these additional elements that form a frame for the main text and which have the potential of changing the reception of texts and their further interpretation by members of the public. There are other editorial decisions that can also fall into these categories of paratexts and these include typography and formatting. As a result of the close association with text, it appears that it is necessary that authors are accorded the final say on paratextual materials.

In analysis of paratext in performances of live poetry, it is important to study the elements in question as that facilitates the identification of the position they hold in relation to the poem and even events, their perceived functions and their originators. Literary works are made up essentially and exhaustively of texts which implies that they are just lengthy sequences of verbal utterances which have little meaning. These texts, however, never appear in their naked states without accompaniments and reinforcements of several types of productions, themselves whether verbal or not like the name of the author, prefaces, illustrations and titles. People are not always aware of whether they should give consideration to texts or not.

It is worth noting that at no point should paratextual comments be viewed as mere add-ons to poems and that is because they have the potential of having considerable effects on the experiences of live poetry. The poem Jesus is not just for Christmas, is with no doubt a bit of craftsmanship that is quite astonishing. It is the type of things that makes humans want to give up trying to be funny and just walk away.

Another central textual element of interpretations is tone. Acquiring reading tone is regarded as being one of the hardest textual interpretive tasks. The tone in the recorded poem by John Hegley entirely lacks clarity. It is also, not entirely grammatical and listeners soon become aware of this even though they do not expect missing parts of speech and subjective disagreements in used verbs. It is not tenable to separate the reading of texts as they are voiced, from poetry performances whereby, spectacles, competent co-creations, communalities and hearers expressions.

There are many different subjects in these verses by Hegley that are seemingly light-hearted. The wordplay in the poem plays a very important purpose because control is exerted through playing with language. One of the most powerful ways through which we can be able to shape our worlds is through manipulating, owning, reworking, ruining and even reusing languages. John Hegley`s mention of Jesus, while having the potential of making audiences twitchy, he manages to refrain himself from appearing too much as a preacher. The way he writes is funny and likeable and injects humour to the poem. Through the writing of Christianity, while being evangelical, Hegley avoids pushing his religion and beliefs on audiences.

Paratextual aspects of poems as performed during live performances are apprehended by audiences in the poet`s prefatory remarks. The applicable phonotexts include the totality of sounded significations which imply the meaning that is made by the actualisation of poetic voices, texts as scores and poems incarnated scripts often presented as ortality, ambiental noises that are accidental which members of the audience make and also the noises made by the room, signs of technological mediums themselves and vocal interpolations that are made by the poet that are never part of text-as-score delivery even though they seem to be.

The performances and recorded sounds of poems first lines regardless of their poetic dictions verge on commentary. When audiences are able to sharpen their discernment of different paratextual elements, they grow more iteratively experienced in hearing tonal, phrasing, vocal pitch and diction differences. Listening to the narration of ‘Jesus is not just Christmas,’ one gets to experience an increasing acumen. When individuals listening to live readings that are recorded become less aware of iterative experiences, the disappearance of poems audio graphical facts as reproduced technically, recopied digitally and disseminated, are extended to those problems that are presented by different paraphonotextual elements.

It is worth noting that these there is a specific role played by these extrapoetic factors for listeners in their responses to poems and with time, aural literary tracings come about trying to establish how the responses of poets encourage the mid-performance alteration of poems. However, at that point when audiences began responding with verbal encouragements, applauses and empathetic laughter’s, performances are observed to be observed to become falsely plaintive and become even broader, more antic and parodic.

Adjacency is critical for para-phonotextuality. Poetry readings and poems become paratactic if they are apprehended as entire performances (Chatsiou, 2014). Listeners with proper experience are able to hear the voices and that is not always from the texts themselves but also from the poems that are summoned for purposes of serving as tonal and topical transitions and even as lighter moments between pieces that are heavier. During events, poems are assigned their roles by voices. Voices, their separation fundamentally through the technologies used to record them, have the potentials of enhancing rather than disabling the sense in the audience of juxtaposition of and between texts and paratexts. These technical separations, are otherwise, secular miracles. When recording readings, a sort of metadata if provided by adjacency and ordination.

The work by different scholars collaborating to create the SpokenWeb project insisted that categorical rigor was absent in most critical and pedagogical responses towards the emergence of poetry recordings that are now ubiquitously available together with the increased institution of audio recordings as resources used for teaching in different parts of the world (Projects, 2020). The current world of literary pedagogy is still largely, dominated by the SpokenWeb project (Davey, 2015). A total of 13 universities and 3 community partners came together fpr the SpokenWeb project with the intention of building a nationally networked archive of creative audio and literacy recording through technical advancement, cultural research, technical advancement and pedagogical innovation programs.

The paratext of poems influences how audiences receive it. There is a larger likelihood that people would take more seriously poems that are printed on good papers with high quality covers than those that are printed on shoddy papers with cover arts that are cheap.

References

Chatsiou, O., 2014. Lord Byron: paratext and poetics. Modern Language Review, 109(3), pp.640-662.

Jansen, L. ed., 2014. The Roman Paratext: Frame, Texts, Readers. Cambridge University Press.