IF YOU'RE NEW TO SOULSPEAK, YOU MAY WANT TO CHECK OUT THE GUIDE TO SOULSPEAK 
IF YOU'RE NEW TO SOULSPEAK, YOU MAY WANT TO CHECK OUT THE GUIDE TO SOULSPEAK 
This is a book about the history and spiritual nature of preliterate oral poetry and a contemporary version of it called SOULSPEAK.
This is a book about the early human consciousness, the psychic roots of poetry and the early Mother Goddess cultures
This is a short memoir of my mysterious encounter with the poetry of the Australian aborigine Eldred Van-Ooy which was published in 2011 as MIRRORS
This is the story of an extraordinary Nubian female
shaman/leader whose face becomes the face of the Sphinx in 6000 B.C.. 
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| CRITICAL BOOKS IN UNDERSTANDING NOAH'S ARK, UFOS and ALIENS, ATLANTIS, AND ALL PRELITERATE MYTHS |
("Very briefly and accurately, Mr. Spring."), I’d like to think I would have popped back: "It is a highly visual poetry of common but highly angled images; in short, it is a poetry of attitude." Whether that would have done the job or not, I don’t know, as everyone is in such a hurry these days, especially your stick-up artists.
ten document out loud to an audience, which is a different kettle of fish from speaking to them in a truly intimate way. It can be close, but it is never quite there; and both parties know it, especially those who are listening. So I had two choices: continue to commit a lie, and by doing so, dishonoring both myself and my listeners in a very essential way; or begin moving toward a poetry that would allow me to speak to my listeners in a way that would allow me to honor both them and myself, a way that would create a communion between us in the most real, immediate and intimate way possible.
So just how do you go about making a spoken poetry? Can you just start to speak it out? The answer, of course, is Yes and No. Yes, you can achieve a spoken poetry by speaking it out, but No because it won’t last or be worth anything unless there’s also an inner desire to speak to others publicly and openly. But how does one unlearn writing? One way, and the only way I know, is simply to obey your impulses.
As a first step toward creating a spoken poetry, I would ask you to imagine you are composing a poem that must exist in riffs in order to coexist successfully with an imagined trumpet. Then locate a repeated phrase that can take any form: I want, I need, Think about, I love, I don’t want, I have a dream, etc., as long as it’s in the form of I to YOU/first person, because that’ the way we speak. What happens after that depends on your willingness to completely unconscious as to what you are saying so as to let your natural speech mechanisms take over and handle the surge of the poem. Once that is accomplished, and I can assure you it is the simplest of tasks if you just let go of writing, the next step is never, never write the poem down unless it is absolutely finished. This applies to long as well as short poems. Thematic memory will handle that just as it enables us to retell stories and jokes. After all if it was good enough for Homer, it’s good enough for us.
On the whole, it has been quite unsettling to see how quickly poems have begun to form for me, and how close to the bone they are, so much so that I feel if there is any inherent danger in speaking poems, it is they will tend toward the small rather than the grand. My approach here has been simply to discard them as small talk if they don’t meet my artistic expectations of a truly urgent speaking. Think of it this way: there’s no need for a wastebasket.
I don't think it is any secret it is the task of each generation of poets to recast its songs of love and death in a language unique to that generation, but we are failing miserably at that task because our poetry culture is continuing to value a poetry that is increasingly out of touch with the sea of language we are all being forced to swim in: a language that wants to be spoken and heard, rather than written and read.This is equally true for poems that are spoken in nature rather than written. The whole structure of the poem changes, it begins to have those qualities that have defined oral poetry since time immemorial: it is more direct in structure and tone, more narrative, less elaborate in imagery, more immediately engaging. In short, there is more of a sense of "being there". And that is precisely the kind of poetry our times are calling for.But it was the revolution of the printing press that essentially changed poetry from a written to a spoken art and caused poetry to drop its historical alliance with music and movement and to begin its long wrestling match with an artistic prose, a match that resulted in poetry's written form rapidly dominating its oral/musical form until recently. And although we can't go back to the exact oral poetry of the past, we can allow ourselves to be pulled back to something similar to it. I would prefer to call this new oral poetry "spoken" poetry, in order to distinguish it from the oral traditions that preceded the printing press. After all, our speaking has been altered forever it's influence, but more especially in our times by the influences of the telephone and radio and the movies, and yes, let us not forget it, television.What I am saying is that poets should open their sensibilities to what is happening around them. Besides living in a culture that is rapidly becoming an oral one, we are also living in a profoundly musical culture, one dominated by popular song. And if some of us tend to put our nose up in the air at the mention of pop music maybe we should remind ourselves that if that form of poetry was good enough for Shakespeare, who wrote over 400 songs, then maybe we should pay some attention to it as well. Maybe not just include music in our readings as background, but as an essential element, and maybe even write a few lyrics for the blues and jazz and rock that define our times and lift the art even higher, or maybe go back to the earlier chanting/musical traditions of oral poetry and take a chance or two winging it like Homer did, but with the musical instruments and forms of our time.On the other hand, we at the Sarasota Poetry Theatre pack a local cafe four times a month with a poetry audience of ALL ages whose size and attentiveness have astounded visiting poets. The trick is a simple one: we perform only those poems from the past and present that fall into what I have defined as a spoken poetry. And when it makes sense, we collaborate with dancers, musicians, singers, translators and actors to emphasize and reintroduce the rhythmic and musical components of poetry it has been divorced from for so long. This goes for both classic and contemporary poetry. The result is somewhat tribal: very full-blooded, highly electric, and right on the money. I'd say it's quite close to what goes on in the poet at the moment of conception but it's been given public face: a face that is updated but quite close, I believe, to that which it had prior to the printing press. To put it more simply, we are doing what poets did for thousands of years before Gutenberg helped turn poetry in on itself.
d that same question asked, by poets and critics alike, as if the asking itself might somehow prevent poetry from slipping completely beneath the horizon of our consciousness. But let's face it, poetry is irrelevant. Nobody cares. Listen, if you haven't heard, everybody's too busy going to the movies or watching television or listening to Top 40. Poetry is getting killed at the box-office, as they say.
These startling messages from the soul that began by naming things, and which in time grew into still longer, more intricate stories, are still with us today. We call these messages the same thing we did in ancient times: poetry, which is itself derived from the ancient Greek root, poiein: "to make". Not to write lines, meter, rhymes, stanzas, but simply to make something where there was nothing before. Indeed those momentous speakings, or poems, still have somewhat the same effect upon us today, even if they don't bubble up quite as easily as they did in the past, when everything was poetry. Yet, when they do come to us, we instinctively know that something profound has occurred. Indeed, despite the fact that everyone knows poetry is dead, when our own poems come to us, we treat them as sacred events. No one has to tell us to do that, we automatically do it, because every fiber of our being knows we have received something akin to grace, that the soul itself has spoken to us, and for us.This is why poets will climb all over each other if you ask them to speak their poems. Even if it means boring you to death for hours. To do less would be a sacrilege: after all, the speaking must be passed on. W.H. Auden's take on all this was his rather arch reminder that bad poetry is always sincere, as if we needed reminding. He could be nasty, that one. But there is a truth imbedded in Auden's wit, for even if the soul, in speaking to us, alters us in imaginable, and unimaginable, ways, there is no guarantee we're going to pass that speaking on correctly. This is why producing poetry has always been a very tricky proposition: like Moses coming down from the mountain but with only two and a half commandments and those barely legible. Audiences can be pretty fickle at times like that, and really, who's to blame them. This is why poets should maybe take a little time and look at the tablets before rushing down the mountain.
here's the second half: it is usually irrelevant to others unless it is true to its time both in form and content. Unfortunately, while the content of our contemporary poetry may be true to our time, its form, in some very real sense, is completely out of touch with it. I say this not as a Yahoo, but as a poet who has spent a major part of his life writing and publishing poetry; because the inescapable fact is that poetry, in its traditional written form, is out of tune with our time, a time where it has to compete with audio/visual forms unimaginable in Homer's time, or if you really want to know, in any other time. But just as Homer had to fit his divinely-inspired song into the vocabulary and dactyl- hexameter rhythmic/musical measure of ancient bardic Greek, and just as Shakespeare had to shake off the academic theatrical forms of his age in order to create a dramatic poetry truer to his time, so we must find a form that will make poetry come alive for our time. Of course, this is only important if the poet wants his work to be meaningful to others. It's every poet's choice, really, and who is to say that the making of the poem is not enough for some of us?
can happen through poetry readings, but we are in a bit of a dilemma here, because most of our poetry has become so dense and introverted that it has completely lost its sense of song, or for that matter, its ability to communicate except when read silently by the most persistent and dedicated of readers. And as written poetry hasn't had a true, public (read non-academic) audience since the fifties, any attempt to speak it aloud usually results in something not only incredibly boring but incomprehensible as well. The almost non-existent attendance at readings is a good indication of how poor they are as a solution to the problem, and even the wiser heads among us have pretty much stuck their heads in the sand about this, having come to the inescapable conclusion that contemporary poetry, with some exceptions, simply doesn't speak that well. At all. And our academic poetry culture, which by its very nature is always fighting a rear guard action, doesn't seem at all capable of encouraging the necessary changes.
