The Love Letters: ethnopoetics and echoes of the past in a Danish spoken narrative of personal experience

Abstract In developing ethnopoetics as an approach to the interpretation and analysis of oral performance, Dell Hymes controversially insisted that spoken narratives should be heard and read as poetry rather than prose. Although ethnopoetics is cross-culturally intended, only a few studies in a limited number of languages have so far been conducted. This article provides an analysis of a Danish spoken narrative of personal experience that supports Hymes’s contention that narratives are patterned in lines, that verses constitute the units that organize lines, that relations among verses are measured, and that parallelism is a pervasive feature of everyday storytelling. Verse analysis is unique in demonstrating the expressive force, poetic sophistication, psychological complexity, and aesthetic quality of spoken narrative. The article discusses the methodological implications of moving between text and performance, a static object and a dynamic body, the spatial distribution of written symbols and the temporal organization of orally expressed language.