Telling Tales with Words
Chapter 3 explores the twenty-first-century turn to orality exemplified in the works of poets such as Kate Tempest, Titilope Sonuga, and Alice Oswald. Engaging with Graeco-Roman epic in their work, these poets do so via a mode of performance that bears similarities with that of the Homeric bard. But this is not the composition-in-performance that Milman Parry and Albert Lord posited as the mode of Homeric performance; rather, these poets compose what John Miles Foley termed ‘Voiced Texts’. Such works hold the written and the spoken word in tension, denying primacy to the written even in our literacy-obsessed age, and making space for a new kind of orality that meets the demands of the contemporary era, while retaining the composite role of composer/performer that is a hallmark of oral traditions. Key to the popularity of this approach is the capacity of oral poetry to merge myth and history (as Jack Goody and Ian Watt argued), and to constantly rewrite its stories, even those that have been staunchly canonized, as the Graeco-Roman epics have been. The chapter concludes by exploring the ways that narrative podcasts, such as Serial and S-Town, evoke epic and mark another route along which the performance of epic is now being developed.