Physical Details

What is Orality? Language that evolves from the body, a breath into the lungs, vibrations in the larynx, and exhalation creating sound received through the ears. The oral poet communicates with a variety of physical qualities. These qualities can be tools of the poet's expression as much as the codex with which a poem is built. At the Laughing Goat cafe, Mumbles, a traveling poet, remarked that the people ther had a "respect for the word." This is an interesting reflection of the character of the Boulder Open Mic scene.

Mumble's observation must be put in context in order for it to have more meaning for the person trying to understand what culturally influenced styles of language were characteristics of the poetry scene that night at the Laughing Goat.

The visiting poets did not read from paper. They cleared the podium from the stage and gesticulated with dramatic poises. The poets who where considerably more local than the traveling troupe were, generally, poetry readers more than they were poetry performers. They sometimes were inaudible because of poor ellocuition and rarely projected their sound as well as the more dynamic, visiting poets.

To say the Boulder poets have a "respect for the word" acknowledges something positive in the local poetry, a praiseworthy quality different from the performance skills they obviously lacked. The visiting poet was politely acknowledging the attention the Boulder poets directed towards diction as superior to delivery.