The Laughing Goat Closes for Winter Solstice

The sign on the door to the Laughing Goat says the café is closed for the winter solstice. This little detail gives a clue to the culture of the cafe. Here, the pagan holiday is celebrated, not Christmas. The closure suggests the café's client base of hippies are in tune with cosmic, celestial events.

Solstice Blogging, A Typically Post-Modern, Self-Conscious Examination of Blog Language

Tonight is the longest night of the year, so it's uncannily appropriate to examine how TIME affects the language used in blogging.

The blog as a genre of writing has specific rules inherent in the form. The rules expressed in the format of a blog help us know what to do with the information being communicated. The blog, like it's predecessor, the log, requires an entry date marking the post's arrival in the public realm, much like a journal entry is typically preceded by a date. The difference between the journal and the web log is that the blog is always destined for the public domain. The journal or diary carries within it something of the writer's privacy. (That's why Anais Nin's journal was so titillating when it was published. The genre of the private transgressed boarders into public domain and excited the readerships' sensitivity to privacy taboos.) The revelation of a diary entry is assumed to be an exposure of innermost secrets. Something of the personal, casual language of diaries has carried over into the style of language typical to blogs. Check out some of the blogs highlighted under the "My Blog List" bar to the right for other examples of blog style.

There is something of the diary style to be acknowledged as essential to blogging. Blog's are typically in the first person, recounting experiences had by the blogger: a public persona integral to the creation of the entry. The blogger-persona’s subjective connection to everything reported in the blog makes time an essential element in the blog format. The dated entries give order and a framework for the presentation of otherwise random experiences. Topics of entries can bounce around without a clear, logical progression, other than the progression that is evident in the passing of time.

Time's relevance to the blog is evident in stylistic elements drawn from diary entries. Have you ever kept a journal or diary as a kid and started the entry like this:

Dear Diary,

It has been soooo long since my last entry.

I've started journals this way and then spent oodles of pages trying to catch up on everything of note that happened since the previous entry.

There are discussions and commentaries online about the lameness of blog entries like the mock diary entry above. Especially berated are the blog entries trying to recount excuses why other entries have not been made consistently. The fusion of academic and bloggy writing styles that here culminates as the Boulder C.O.P.A. removes the necessity of regular entries and assuages any guilt that might still be lingering in me from my grade school experiences of inconsistent journaling. This longest night of solstice entries and the once-in-a-lifetime deadline of a school project eradicates my shame for being an inconsistent blogger. I've got to post it all tonight!

An epistolary is another genre of writing that has inherent rules and, as a stylistic predecessor to the blog, influences blog language. The audience/reader of a letter is usually named specifically in the salutation. As a reader of epistolary, one understands his or her role at the start of every letter: either addressee or eavesdropper.

You, blog reader, are not quite a specific addressee, nor an eavesdropper. You are anonymous, floating through the blogosphere and landing like a bee on a flower with pollen you can use. That's why websites offering tips on how to write a blog (http://www.blog.mrfire.com/) emphasize the importance of giving the blog reader information they value, so they subscribe to the blog and keep reading. If you have landed here at the Boulder C.O.P.A. Blog and keep reading, one may assume you are likely educated, of a class of people who can afford the technology necessary to access the web, and hopefully, are interested in something to do with Boulder, oral poetry, cafe culture, language or some hodge podge of all of the above.

Finally, there is another stylistic element present in the Boulder C.O.P.A. Blog. The academic term paper as a genre makes use of a formal citation style. Citations are important for accuracy in scholarship and so, are relevant in this fusion project. Fortunately, here on the web, all information is linked. You'll find references highlighted in the text instead of the MLA or Chicago style of citations. Hyperlinks replace footnotes and shape the casual, smart style.

To entertain and enthrall the semi-random audience of strangers and poets that visit this blog, the language used here must hover somewhere between two different kinds of usage. The cross-genre challenge: to use an easily accessible, casual style of writing that behooves blogs while expressing complex, academic ideas about language and culture, especially within the field of contemporary American folklore.

Well, that's where the beauty of the blog's flexibility as a new kind of writing comes into play. Blogs are typically built in little doses over many months of entries. This longest night of entries gives the blog a heavy dose of Insta-Blog Miracle Grow, something that might make the blog less authentically a blog when contrasted with the lovingly cultivated blog of long record, but the longest night of entries ads to the experiment of cross-genre blogging. The Boulder C.O.P.A. Blog is both instantly published public information and an academic project that I am submitting to help me finish grad school, truly an experiment in cross-genre writing. This blog is unusual in that it has an audience consisting of random web surfers interested in oral poetry, Boulder, or any other Google search words that might draw them here AND the audience of at least one very important faculty member at CU, my professor (Hi Mike!).

Intercultural Exchange

Imagine you've come from another culture and you want to know, "What is an open mic poetry reading in Boulder Colorado like?" You might appreciate a description of the details. The Laughing Goat cafe is dark in the back, but has a big windows letting light in along the street front. There are many details to recount: the looks of the barista’s (a curly locked young lady with hippy jewelry and her pierced, bobbed co-worker, or the handsome tattooed man leaning on the counter). There is an altar at the entranceway to the cafe. With an outsider's eye, we may note comparisons and contrasts to other situations we've experienced. We can make some assumptions about the values of the group of individuals we observe via the physical details of their context, details like setting, actions, use of breath, the sound of the voices, the movements of the crowd and the body language of the poet.

What if you were from a place that didn't have same-sex cafes, or a place where there are no distinctions between music and poet's language? What if the only poetry performances you had witnessed was language inevitably intertwined with Allah?

The concrete details might warrant some interpretation in order to better understand the values of the participants in such a strange language ritual as poetry at a Boulder cafe open mic.

Choosing a Representative Cafe

I want to give an impression of what an open mic poetry reading in a Boulder café is like, so I'll start by describing one Boulder cafe. Eventually I'll ad descriptions and recordings of open mic poetry in cafes across Boulder, but for the purpose of organization and grounding this project in specific details, I will focus on The Laughing Goat, a cafe on the Eastern end of the Pearl Street Mall, the major promenade at the heart of Boulder. I've chosen The Goat because it brings together many of the elements that I consider quintessentially Boulder-liscious. I'll be covering those different elements in more detail in future posts.

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.

Ways of Speaking and a Sense of Place

I'm sitting in the cafe of the Boulder Public Library, watching the grey water of the creek below. This is the only cafe I have ever visited that also serves as a bridge over a creek. No doubt, the architecture and ambiance of this beautiful building is a part of what makes Boulder uniquely Boulder.

Bruce Springsteen (younger readers, imagine an old school Chris Smither) is playing on the sound system and New Jersey is on my mind. My flight home for the holidays has been delayed by weather warnings, so I've time to muse about how language changes when used in particular contexts.

It is more than synchronicity that Bruce Springsteen is playing on the stereo in this special Boulder cafe... Springsteen, a.k.a. The Boss, is a New Jersey icon. He has reached my ears as I sip my tea and wait out my flight delay. I was scheduled to return to my family home, to a place where we are known by our language. Have you ever heard a Jersey accent? My language changes according to my context: oral language shifts in the form of accents as I move from Colorado to Jersey, written language shifts in the form of styles as I move between the context an academic paper to the context of a web log, and another change occurs when I shift to the magical use of speech I love best... the Poetry buried in the messy layers of my migratory my life.

Shifts in the varieties of ways of speaking are happening all the time, usually without our conscious recognition. Shift are noticeable in the ways of speaking used by participants in a dually-present conversation where two people sit at a nearby cafe table. The couples' way of speaking contrasts with the way of speaking used by a cell phone conversant. The difference I'm noticing is not in the words used, but in the way they are spoken. The cell phone conversation sounds different. It's louder than the duet conversations that buzz all over the cafe, possibly because the cell phone user's voice is directed into a device that relays the message over long distances.

One may notice a pattern or a generalization to be made about how the sound of a cell phone user 's voice grabs attention, even over the din of a room full of conversations taking place between two physically present people. What is it about the cell phone conversation that SOUNDS different? It is in this subtle, audible shift in the voice that we may detect one of the various ways we use our language differently according to context.

The subtleties of language that I am chasing after lie somewhere between the concept of ritual and the accents of my hometown New Jersey neighbors. If you listen with a trained ear, you can hear in the voice of Donna, my best friend's mom, that she is from Jersey City. You can hear something of her identity in the way she speaks, and even notice that she is proud of the distinction she reveals when she deliberately contrasts her speech patterns with others. If you're not from Jersey, you might miss some of the subtle information communicated in the way she talks (as a quality separate from the actual words she says). Donna's accent is subtly different from the Appalachian hinted speech of the Northwest Skylands of New jersey. Donna is a transplant from Jersey City to the more rural area of Lake Hopatcong. When she is out on the deck at a summer party overlooking the lake, you might overhear her laughing, holding the wrist of her long-time friend Patty, and repeating the words "Tanks a million," just so she and Patty can hear the difference in the way she says it, the contrast between her way of speaking and her neighbor's way of speaking. Her way of speaking connects her to a specific place.

A sense of place is inevitably interwoven with poetic language. The origin of poets, their stories, their identities, are inseparable from the places they have moved through and the patterns of speech they learned to communicated with there. Springsteen’s sound, the way he speaks, is as essential to his identity as are the lyrics he's made about goings on in New Jersey. Boulder, a sense of place, this library cafe, the details that make up the context for oral expression: All influence the ways of speaking that will be used in the poetry performances here.

Cultural Context Affects "Ways of Speaking"

There is a phrase in Pidgin English (Nigerian: Yoruba), that translates as "I am very glad to meet you."* This phrase, to me, sounds like poetry:

My mind sweet
well,
Well wen a take
see yu.

It sounds like a song. The meaning (this phrase signifies a greeting) comes through with a unique flair. The cultural context of the language, here a translation for an American, English reading audience with an attention to alliteration and line, take it out of the context of everyday speech and give it the qualities of a different way of speaking. This "different way of speaking" is noted by socio-linguist Dell Hymes. It is a quality of oral poetry to be explored in this blog.

*101 Languages of the World © 2002, Transparent Language, Inc.