Poetry in Performance

This dissertation refuses the assumption that poetry is a dying art form. In this study, I focus on poets Marc Smith, David Hernández, Patricia Smith, and Bob Holman. I place the work of these four poets within the context of the contemporary performance poetry movement and argue that from their position on stage, in the recording studio, or in front of the camera, they use the performance to forge bonds across racial, ethnic, class, and gender divides. Throughout this study, I trace the evolution of the contemporary performance poetry movement from the local to the national, the embodied to the virtual. I combine original research on public poetries such as the poetry slam, the poetry-music ensemble, and video-poetry and synthesize a variety of critical approaches, including cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and ethnomusicology. I analyze specific elements of the performance-the voice, music, the body on stage, and the dialogic relationship betwee performer and audience-and discuss how these poets use the poetry event to articulate a poetry-community-in-the-making. Throughout this study, I argue that these poetry events demand our active engagement with the performance and use emergent technologies to document and analyze this poetry community. As such, "Performance" ultimately demands that we not only rethink the relationship between these poets and their communities, but that we rethink the place of poetry in contemporary American culture.

World Literature Today, 2008

2003

""" Slam poetry, which first came into being in Chicago in 1986 as a competitive form of performance poetry, is only the latest development in a series of poetry movements in the United States that radically turned away from the written-to-be-silently-read to a written-to-be-performed poem. The book investigates contemporary American performance poetry as a continuation of poetry as an oral and social medium that finds its cultural realization in an interaction between the poet, the poem and the audience. After a survey of the historical development as well as different performance movements in the United States, the author provides an analysis of representative audio and visual poems of these movements by Jerome Rothenberg, Allen Ginsberg, Gil Scott-Heron, Ntozake Shange, Laurie Anderson, and Patricia Smith. The book is highly recommended to teachers who want to take poetry ,,off the written page in their classroom and engage their students in a multimedia experience with poetry, but will be of interest to anyone who wants to know more about this particular performance genre. """

Over the past decades, the poetry performance has developed into an increasingly popular, diverse, and complex art form. In theoretical and critical discourse, it is referred to as performance poetry, spoken word poetry, and polipoesía; some theorists argue that it is an independent poetic genre, others treat it as a contemporary manifestation of oral poetry or of the poetry recital. The essays collected in this volume take up the challenge that the poetry performance poses to literary theory. Coming from a variety of disciplines, including Literary Studies, Theater Studies, and Area Studies, contributors develop new approaches and analytical categories for the poetry performance. They draw on case studies from a variety of contexts and in several languages, including Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Catalan, English, French, Galician, and Spanish. Essays are organized in three sections, which focus on critical and theoretical approaches to the poetry performance, on the mediatic hybridity of this art form, and on the ways in which the poetry performance negotiates locatedness through engagements with space and place. The structure of the volume intersperses essays on theory and analysis with self-reflexive essays from performance poets on their own performance practice.

Arcadia, 2006

The theory of the performative – in its initial version by J.L. Austin and in its poststructuralist revisions – allows us to explore speech acts within C.P. Cavafy's poem as well as how his poems themselves can function as performatives. Performativity in these poems functions along four interrelated planes of performance, all of which are central to Cavafy's poetry: the erotic, the theatrical/public, the historical, and the linguistic. Recurring instances of “infelicitous” performatives in Cavafy's poems, especially unkept promises, reveal the critical and creative potential of this infelicity. The repeated failures and communicative gaps in the poems nevertheless work towards a notion of a felicitous poetic event, in which failure is transformed into a critical act and a motivating force for practices of constant revaluation.

Spoken Word in the UK (eds Lucy English and Jack McGowan), 2020

Performance is increasingly important to the poet, which is evidenced by the growing numbers of videos and audio recordings online including YouTube, the National Poetry library, and Poetry Archive. As a result, there are greater opportunities to engage with poets reading their own work and consequently, there is a need to move away from thinking of poetry as primary something that takes shape on the page. Furthermore, by refocusing attention to poetry as an oral artform, in particular to poetry performance, different ways of understanding the value of poetry come to the fore. The live poetry performance, I argue, offers an attempt to reclaim the personal individual expression of language in contemporary society and demands attention by the audience because of the role of voice and body in the performance. Through awareness of 'uniqueness of voice,' the performed poem becomes a site of collective meaning making with individual identity intact as a shared endeavour between performer and audience, and necessarily resists appropriation (in the sense that the words experienced cannot be divorced from the performer or the performance space to serve as a proxy for meaning elsewhere). This chapter therefore makes an argument for the need to engage with spoken word and performance poetry in the live performance space.

2021

The Moving Body. Teaching Creative Theatre is the third English edition of Le Corps Poetique: un enseignement de la creation theâtrale by Jacques Lecoq, originally released in France in 1997. This edition includes a foreward by Simon McBurney, an introduction by Mark Evans and an afterword by Fay Lecoq. It presents Lecoq’s philosophy and pedagogical ideas on dramatic mime, through the account of his personal aesthetic journey and of his teaching methods. The book’s structure parallels the students’ program at Lecoq’s Parisian school and is divided into four parts, describing the progression from the exploration of movement to its application to different dramatic territories to creation. In a very accessible language and with clear exemplifications and illustrative drawings, Lecoq shades light on a vision of mime considered as training for theatre and for life. Though its real substance is beyond words, its documentation finds in this book a reference point for theatre students and...

Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov belonged to a literary and artistic counterpublic that emerged in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union beyond the reach of the state culture system and developed its own forms of aesthetic existence. Known as samizdat, this encompassed not only finished artworks but also the process of the works' production, presentation, and discussion. Literary texts not authorized by the state censorship were circulated in handwritten and typewritten copies; the typewritten manuscript was one of samizdat's chief production and distribution mediums. In addition to typescript literature, the unofficial cultural milieu attached particular importance to the oral recitation of poems in front of a close-knit audience of friends-poets, artists, theorists, and critics.

2021

Performance Poetry and Cultural production In the year 1917, Amy Lowell deplored the entrapment of poetry on the printed page. "Poetry is as much an art to be heard as is music, if only we could get people to understand the fact. To read it off the printed pages without pronouncing it is to get only a portion of its beauty, and yet it is just this that most people do" (Lowell 1917, 46). Lowell was drawing attention to the acoustic quality of poetry as an essential layer of signification. It is no exaggeration to say that in the past century, performance poetry has come to exceed Lowell's ambition. Performance poetry has chartered a new path for poetry, parallel to the printed page, albeit embedding the aesthetics of performance. The poem's meaning broke free from the confines of the printed page to include the poetperformer's physical presence, his/her interaction with a live audience as well as the paralinguistic and paratextual elements of the performance mode. The genre of performance poetry has come to be regarded as "one of the most significant developments in English-language poetry" (Novak 2011, 30). Julia Novak (2011) places performance poetry as a subgenre under the broader umbrella of live poetry (33) which includes the traditional poetry readings (62). She states that: