Australian performance poetry
Encyclopedia
Australian performance poetry is not a recent phenomenon
in English
-speaking Australia
. It would not be beyond credibility to identify Henry Lawson
as Australia's first professional performance poet, but there had been many performance poets in Australia prior to Lawson (real name Larsen, Norwegian father) from the First Fleet onwards. In fact prior to 1890 most poetry in Australia was received orally. The Sydney Bulletin began a campaign of publishing Australian poetry in the 1890s,
It is generally acknowledged in most of the histories of Australian literature from H. M. Green
's in 1962, to the most recent The Oxford
literary history of Australia, 1998, that the Bulletin Bush poetry, in its nationalist mission to be Australian, over-zealously mythologised the nature of the Australian identity and that it promoted that ideal long after Federation
(1901) and even long after Lawson and Paterson. A. B. Paterson's Waltzing Matilda is probably the most performed Australian poem ever, and has become somewhat of an unofficial anthem of Australia (in sports particularly). The words of Dorothea Mackellar
's My Country
, 1908, are probably present in the minds of every Australian, even if they have never seen it written down.
The sound of that early Australian bush poetry is firmly embedded in the national psyche
. The largest selling poetry volume in Australia,. C. J. Dennis
's Sentimental Bloke in 1915 was poetry to be performed, and was performed. But the voices in that poem and others by C. J. Dennis are character voices, often over exaggerated, of stereotyped Australian voices comically represented. Maybe something akin to Paul Hogan
's stereotyping of Italians with his 'luigi' or Mark Mitchell's comic representation of the Greek Australian
'Con the fruiterer', CJ Dennis was also humorously reflecting changes in the Australian voice and cultural identity
.
The Jindyworobak poetry movement of South Australia was very much into sounds and introducing Australian sounds into Australian poetry, the sound of the land and the people that had been dispossessed. But this was an unnatural appropriation of aboriginal culture and plagued by dubious political associations. Kenneth Slessor
in the 1940s , and Bruce Dawe
and Thomas Shapcott
, in the 1950s, introduced the sound of everyday Australian voices, incorporating the vernacular
and the colloquial language of Australia as part of their poetry. Their voices as heard on the Audio anthology "Australian Poetry : Live (Page, 1995)" are devoid of the BBC
British radio announcers accent often used by Australian poets like R. D. Fitzgerald
, A. D. Hope
and James McAuley
when reading verse (even Dylan Thomas
discarded his Welsh accent for the BBC British radio voice.) They speak in the Australian vernacular, the common language of the street. The Commonwealth
Literary Fund, which in the 1950s toured Australian poets on reading tours of their works, e.g. Roland Robinson
, provided another way in which sounded poetry was promoted by that organization. Oodgeroo Noonuccal
(Kath Walker) also emerged as an Aboriginal
-Australian voice in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In the 1960s poetry readings were associated with the great poetry explosion that was happening globally but also particularly in Australia due partly to the challenging of the self proclaimed establishment of university poet-professors led by A. D. Hope
. A D Hope strangely enough, due to strict censorship laws and due to sexually explicit nature of his poetry, was more likely to have been heard than read as he didn't publish his poetry until the early 1960s. I t seems public readings were not the preference of academia
at the time, as Tasmanian poet Tim Thorne
writes in his personal memoirs,
International poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko
, Ted Hughes
, Adrian Mitchell
from the UK, Allen Ginsberg
and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
from the USA, came to Adelaide
Arts Festival
Writers' Week in the late 1960s and early 1970s and gave great, as reported in the newspapers, public performances to town hall's full of people. Postmodernist Hedwig Gorski
coined the term "performance poetry" after the strong influences of performing Beat poets like Ginsberg and John Giorno
who produced audio recordings of their print poems.
Geoffrey Dutton
wrote in the Bulletin
: "Maybe Yevtushenko is the man who will give the relation between poet and public in Australia the tremendous lift it badly needs and so easily might achieve". Bruce Dawe believed that Yevtushenko's visit would "help to establish in people's minds that poetry is not necessarily and forbiddingly long-hair or academic". (Starke, 1998) That is one of the lasting influences of performing and performance poets.
By the 1970s there was a great push in Australia
for the voices to be heard that were other to the Anglo-centric male dominated majority, i.e. women, migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds, indigenous Australians, differently abled and gendered persons. For many the poetry reading was the place to be heard. There were many poetry groups and much performance activity in the 1970s. Andrew Taylor, a foundation member of the Friendly Street poetry readings in Adelaide wrote in the Number Ten Friendly Street poetry reader; acknowledging the cultural as well as literary value of poetry readings;
Very early in the 1970s University of Queensland
Press released a series of 12 poets on vinyl 45 rpm 7" records, featuring older and newer Australian poets reading their work. This was a milestone publication in Australian poetic culture, the first commercially available sound recording of twelve of Australia's most prominent poets of the time.
As early as 1973 Eric Beach
had started to work as a full-time, grossly under-paid poet, conducting workshops at schools and performing and was a recipient of a grant from the newly formed Australia Council for the Arts. Ania Walwicz
, Vicki Viidikas
, thalia, Sylvia Kantazaris, Anna Couani
, and Pi O
emerged as strong non-anglo voices in performance poetry, and Kate Jennings
's anthology of women writers Mother i'm rooted, 1975, highlighted the lack of women in Australian poetry anthologies. Most of the new women writers had engaged with poetry through the activity of poetry readings and not the formal anglo-centric male dominated academic poetry of the universities. In 1976 the Poets Union
was formed, identifying that poetry was indeed work and workers needed to be represented by a union to negotiate their demands. New readings, often centred around performance were held in Sydney by the 'militant' Poets Union there and were the genesis of the later pub poetry in that city. Chris Mansell
and Les Wicks
, among others, were prime movers in this new movement, organising readings and publishing Compass and Meuse (with Bill Farrow) respectively. The Poets Union pushed for better conditions for poets at the Sydney Festival, which then included writers, and successfully gained recognition and payment.
Dorothy Porter
and Robert Adamson, Sydney poets, refused to attend the 1976 Writers' Week of Adelaide Festival because they were not going to be paid for their invited readings. (Starke, 1998) In 1978 a contingent of poets' union members attended the Writers' Week in Adelaide and Pi O
claims in his anthology of performance poetry (PiO, 1985) that the term 'performance poetry' was coined at a seminar where David Malouf
was speaking. But this is not the first time the term was used outside of Australia. This event definitely marked the beginning of the use of the term 'performance poets' as Ruth Starke notes in Writers, readers and rebels, 1998. However it was not the first instance of the call for the performing of poetry. The coinage of the term that matches with the commonly accepted definition of performance poetry is credited, however, to American poet Hedwig Gorski
, who used it in fliers and posters in the mid-1970s. The term was used to describe Gorski performances in the Austin Chronicle
almost two decades prior to the reported use of the term in the 1998 publication by Ruth Starke. Performance poets write poems only for performance and not for print. Performing poets are those who use theatrics when presenting their print poems to an audience. The description below clearly points to performing poets reading their poems written for print:
The performing poets, in 1978, were recognised as a group, or movement, or new cultural formation, separate from published poets for the first time. Jenny Boult
in Adelaide had also attained professional status as a performing poet by the end of the 1970s. There were many other semi-professionals, like Ken Smeaton, Geoffrey Eggleston
and Shelton Lea in Victoria, but the majority held full-time jobs and did their performing as a secondary activity.
The 1980s saw a greater development in performed poetry, with more professional poets earning their living by poeting, Geoff Goodfellow
joined Jenny Boult
in South Australia, komninos
, Myron Lysenko
, Liz Hall, Billy Marshall Stoneking
, Lauren Williams, Kerry Scuffins, Kerry Loughrey, Carmel Bird
, in Melbourne, Grant Caldwll, Chris Mansell
, Les Wicks
and Steven Herrick
in Sydney and others in other states. The mid 1980s also saw major literary events enter the public sphere. Literary readings were usually restricted to academics, publishers, writers and readers and Writers' Week programs, although in Sydney there were readings in Balmain, notably in the Cafe L'Absurd where poets such as Nigel Roberts, Chris Mansell
, Cornelius Vleeskens and Rae Desmond Jones
often performed and were joined by interstate and international readers on occasions. Later Cafe L'Absurd moved to Newtown
and became known as New Partz where it became the centre of Sydney performed poetry and attracted performance and so-called page poets. In Melbourne Readings Bookshop and Mietta's Hotel held a regular Sunday afternoon reading that attracted 200-300 people. Later, in Sydney Writers In The Park, had weekly events at the Harold Park Hotel in Glebe
, supported by local book-seller Glebebooks, the writing programs of UTS and UNSW, the feminist performance poetry groups of Newtown, Paddington and Surry Hills, attracting up to 400 people a night (Christie and O'Brien, 1986). In Brisbane, Talk it down, at the Storey Bridge Hotel at Kangaroo Point had weekly readings that drew large mixed crowds of poetry lovers and public bar drinkers alike. Readings had a renewed boom in the mid-1980s and regular readings have since been held in all capital cities and many towns in Australia.
A notable manifestation of Australian performance poetry occurred in Sydney in early 1991, when ten poets, including Pi O
, Billy Marshall Stoneking
, Amanda Stewart
, Jas H. Duke
, and others, teamed up with jazz musician Jenny Sheard, to create, direct and produce the first ever, poet-performed/directed and produced, dramatic verse play ever presented. Entitled CALL IT POETRY/TONIGHT, the show was made up entirely of the poems of the poets who were performing and involved unusual presentations of their work, including a kind of cinema noir voice-over rendition of Grant Caldwell's "famous" letter poem as well as several poems broken up into dialogues between the poets themselves. Rehearsals as well as the actual show were archived on broadcast-quality video, which was later edited and screened - as CALL IT POETRY - round the world. In the television production, several of the performances were presented as "concrete poems", with video graphic overlays, including Jas H Duke's legendary DADA Poem. Copies of the program as well as all the rushes are available through the Librarian, Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra, ACT.
Until the mid 1980s poetry readings in public places had been the domain of well paid international poets from the USA, Russia and the UK. Les Murray
wrote in Quadrant in April 1977, that he would never be asked to read in the Town Hall during Writers' Week, "when the overseas heavies come around, we are shown our true place in the estimation of our cultural establishments. We are just about good enough to sleep on friends' floors and read our work in a tent." (Starke, 1998) But the performing poets had been having small readings in public places, hotels and coffee lounges, since the early 1970s. By the mid 1980s Les Murray and the performing poets were sharing large public stages in Sydney
, Melbourne
and Brisbane
.
The sounding of poetry in Australia has always been present but in most historical accounts it has not been emphasised as an activity, always assumed to be a supplementary activity to the industry of print publishing. Even when the oral transmission and aural appreciation of poetry dominated the aesthetics and poetics of Australian poetry and in the absence of sound recording devices, our record of these works remain as printed texts. The texts contained the 'sound' of the poems in their metre and rhyming patterns. Charles Bernstein
's Close Listening, published in 1998 was the first attempt to present a collection of essays from American sound poets and performance poets that treated the field as a worthy topic of research. Bernstein borrowed Gorski's term (1978) to describe her poems written only to be spoken and recorded. It had by the publication of Bernstien's book in 1998, been extended in popular usage to include other types of spoken word texts featured in the anthology.
Unlike the USA, Australia lacks any real academic discourse in the field of performance poetry or poets; there are no prizes, no courses of study at universities, no peer-reviewed journals, no histories, no national anthologies, nothing that could be considered a body of information for the study and analysis of performance poetry. All there is are reports that have appeared in the daily presses and on radio and television, and the memories of readings attended. In the USA, Def Poetry and Slams are the legacy of performing poets like Allen Ginsberg
and the Beats
, and those like Hedwig Gorski
who eschewed writing for print and publishing their poems in books in favor of recording and radio
broadcast. Academia associates the American performance poetry movement to a history of African American
oral culture in its current manifestation as Def Poetry and Slam. Australia has yet to examine how aboriginal oral culture and classical oral traditions fit into the history of 'soundings.'
Since the 1960s, when regular rhyme and rhythm in poetry became replaced by a more freestyle expression, and the public soundings of these works relied less on familiar rhythms and more on the political, social and psychological interpretation of the words, sounded poetry, has been appreciated for many other qualities. The sound of words and word combinations, fragments of sentences, repetitions, mirroring within the text, alliteration
and assonance
and even internal rhyming became devices in the writing, and the line the basic unit of the poem, the breath determining the rhythm. The performing poets in 1978 drew attention to themselves as a new cultural formation and to the fact that there were poets dedicated to the sounding of poetry as their primary poetic activity and that poetry could be written not only for print, but exclusively or primarily for sounding. Obviously the print poets who were being asked to present their work to public audiences at State Writers' Festivals in the 1980s, must have felt intimidated by the performing poets that they shared the stages with, but history tells us they also had much to learn from them as well.
Attendance at any Writers Festival in any State these days will confirm the quality of sounded works, and the emphasis placed on the importance of soundings by authors of their work in public. The new Australian poetry made poetry readings central to poetic culture: at Friendly Street (Adelaide), La Mama
(Melbourne) at New Partz and later at Harold Park (Sydney). "Readings have now become ubiquitous for Australian poets." (McCooey in Webby, 2000, pg169). Local poetry groups and organisations have increasingly turned to performing poetry alongside, or instead of publishing it. The Red Room Company
has made this combination the basis of their public poetry projects, commissioning and presenting staged performances of work, often within spatial installations.
As well as sounded poetry that explores the phonic qualities of words and lines and stanzas, there is also Sound Poetry, a small but worldwide movement of the late 1960s that experimented with the sonic quality of the sounds that make up spoken language. Sound poetry with practitioners in the UK, the Filkingen group in Sweden, the Fluxus
and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and the second wave Beats
of the USA, the French sound poets Henri Chopin
, Bernard Heidseik, etc. was represented in Australia by some exceptional sound poets that received international recognition in this field. Jas H. Duke
and Ania Walwicz
, in Melbourne and Amanda Stewart
and Chris Mann
in Sydney, were influential, great performers and unique in style and content. Sound poetry remained very much a fringe activity of Australian poetry until the mid 1980s. But an international festival of Sound Poetry, SOUNDWORKS curated by Nicholas Zurbrugg and Nick Tsoutas at Performance Space as part of the Sydney Biennale in 1986 highlighted the intensity of the activity in Australia over the previous 15 years. (Zurbrugg and Tsoutas, 1986)
Phenomenon
A phenomenon , plural phenomena, is any observable occurrence. Phenomena are often, but not always, understood as 'appearances' or 'experiences'...
in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
-speaking Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
. It would not be beyond credibility to identify Henry Lawson
Henry Lawson
Henry Lawson was an Australian writer and poet. Along with his contemporary Banjo Paterson, Lawson is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period and is often called Australia's "greatest writer"...
as Australia's first professional performance poet, but there had been many performance poets in Australia prior to Lawson (real name Larsen, Norwegian father) from the First Fleet onwards. In fact prior to 1890 most poetry in Australia was received orally. The Sydney Bulletin began a campaign of publishing Australian poetry in the 1890s,
"The 'nationalistic' element fostered overtly at times by Stephens and the Bulletin is indicated in Stephen's review on 15th February 1896, in which he joined Lawson with Paterson as two writers who, 'with all their imperfections' mark 'something like the beginnings of a national school of poetry. In them, for the first time, Australia has found audible voice and characteristic expression'." (Perkins in Bennett and Strauss, 1998)
It is generally acknowledged in most of the histories of Australian literature from H. M. Green
H M Green
Henry Mackenzie Green was a journalist, librarian and literary historian born in Sydney, Australia.In 1921 Green succeeded John Le Gay Brereton as librarian at the University of Sydney.In 1944 he married Dorothy Auchterlonie....
's in 1962, to the most recent The Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
literary history of Australia, 1998, that the Bulletin Bush poetry, in its nationalist mission to be Australian, over-zealously mythologised the nature of the Australian identity and that it promoted that ideal long after Federation
Federation
A federation , also known as a federal state, is a type of sovereign state characterized by a union of partially self-governing states or regions united by a central government...
(1901) and even long after Lawson and Paterson. A. B. Paterson's Waltzing Matilda is probably the most performed Australian poem ever, and has become somewhat of an unofficial anthem of Australia (in sports particularly). The words of Dorothea Mackellar
Dorothea Mackellar
Isobel Marion Dorothea Mackellar, OBE was an Australian poet and fiction writer.The only daughter of noted physician and parliamentarian Sir Charles Mackellar, she was born in Sydney in 1885...
's My Country
My Country
"My Country" is an iconic patriotic poem about Australia, written by Dorothea Mackellar at the age of 19 while homesick in England. After travelling through Europe extensively with her father during her teenage years she started writing the poem in London in 1904 and re-wrote it several times...
, 1908, are probably present in the minds of every Australian, even if they have never seen it written down.
"I love a sunburnt country,
a land of sweeping plains,
of rugged mountain ranges,
of floods and droughts and rains."
The sound of that early Australian bush poetry is firmly embedded in the national psyche
Psyche (psychology)
The word psyche has a long history of use in psychology and philosophy, dating back to ancient times, and has been one of the fundamental concepts for understanding human nature from a scientific point of view. The English word soul is sometimes used synonymously, especially in older...
. The largest selling poetry volume in Australia,. C. J. Dennis
C. J. Dennis
Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis, better known as C. J. Dennis, was an Australian poet known for his humorous poems, especially "The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke", published in the early 20th century...
's Sentimental Bloke in 1915 was poetry to be performed, and was performed. But the voices in that poem and others by C. J. Dennis are character voices, often over exaggerated, of stereotyped Australian voices comically represented. Maybe something akin to Paul Hogan
Paul Hogan
Paul Hogan, AM is an Australian actor best known for his role as Michael "Crocodile" Dundee from the Crocodile Dundee film series, for which he won a Golden Globe award.-Early life and career:...
's stereotyping of Italians with his 'luigi' or Mark Mitchell's comic representation of the Greek Australian
Greek Australian
Greeks are the seventh-largest ethnic group in Australia, after those declaring their ancestry simply as "Australian". In the 2006 census, 365,147 persons declared having Greek ancestry, either alone or in conjunction with another ethnicity....
'Con the fruiterer', CJ Dennis was also humorously reflecting changes in the Australian voice and cultural identity
Cultural identity
Cultural identity is the identity of a group or culture, or of an individual as far as one is influenced by one's belonging to a group or culture. Cultural identity is similar to and has overlaps with, but is not synonymous with, identity politics....
.
The Jindyworobak poetry movement of South Australia was very much into sounds and introducing Australian sounds into Australian poetry, the sound of the land and the people that had been dispossessed. But this was an unnatural appropriation of aboriginal culture and plagued by dubious political associations. Kenneth Slessor
Kenneth Slessor
Kenneth Adolf Slessor OBE was an Australian poet and journalist. He was one of Australia's leading poets, notable particularly for the absorption of modernist influences into Australian poetry. The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry is named after him.-Life:Slessor was born Kenneth Adolphe...
in the 1940s , and Bruce Dawe
Bruce Dawe
Donald Bruce Dawe AO is an Australian poet, and is considered by many as one of the most influential Australian poets of all time.-Early life:...
and Thomas Shapcott
Thomas W. Shapcott
Thomas William Shapcott AO is an Australian poet, novelist, playwright, editor, librettist, short story writer and teacher.- Biography :...
, in the 1950s, introduced the sound of everyday Australian voices, incorporating the vernacular
Vernacular
A vernacular is the native language or native dialect of a specific population, as opposed to a language of wider communication that is not native to the population, such as a national language or lingua franca.- Etymology :The term is not a recent one...
and the colloquial language of Australia as part of their poetry. Their voices as heard on the Audio anthology "Australian Poetry : Live (Page, 1995)" are devoid of the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
British radio announcers accent often used by Australian poets like R. D. Fitzgerald
R. D. Fitzgerald
Robert David FitzGerald III AM OBE was an Australian poet.-Biography:FitzGerald was born in Hunters Hill, New South Wales, a third-generation Australian of Irish extraction, and studied science at the University of Sydney. He left before graduating, however, and followed in the footsteps of both...
, A. D. Hope
A. D. Hope
Alec Derwent Hope AC OBE was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic.-Life:...
and James McAuley
James McAuley
James Phillip McAuley was an Australian academic, poet, journalist, literary critic and a prominent convert to Roman Catholicism.-Life and career:...
when reading verse (even Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
discarded his Welsh accent for the BBC British radio voice.) They speak in the Australian vernacular, the common language of the street. The Commonwealth
Commonwealth
Commonwealth is a traditional English term for a political community founded for the common good. Historically, it has sometimes been synonymous with "republic."More recently it has been used for fraternal associations of some sovereign nations...
Literary Fund, which in the 1950s toured Australian poets on reading tours of their works, e.g. Roland Robinson
Roland Robinson (poet)
Roland Edward Robinson OAM was an Australian poet and writer.Robinson was born in County Clare, Ireland in 1912. At the age of 9, in 1921 he was brought to Australia...
, provided another way in which sounded poetry was promoted by that organization. Oodgeroo Noonuccal
Oodgeroo Noonuccal
Oodgeroo Noonuccal was an Australian poet, political activist, artist and educator. She was also a campaigner for Aboriginal rights...
(Kath Walker) also emerged as an Aboriginal
Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....
-Australian voice in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In the 1960s poetry readings were associated with the great poetry explosion that was happening globally but also particularly in Australia due partly to the challenging of the self proclaimed establishment of university poet-professors led by A. D. Hope
A. D. Hope
Alec Derwent Hope AC OBE was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic.-Life:...
. A D Hope strangely enough, due to strict censorship laws and due to sexually explicit nature of his poetry, was more likely to have been heard than read as he didn't publish his poetry until the early 1960s. I t seems public readings were not the preference of academia
Academia
Academia is the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.-Etymology:The word comes from the akademeia in ancient Greece. Outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning...
at the time, as Tasmanian poet Tim Thorne
Tim Thorne
Tim Thorne is a contemporary Australian poet.Thorne lives in Launceston, Tasmania. He is the author of ten volumes of poetry, the most recent being Best Bitter in 2006 and I Con in 2008....
writes in his personal memoirs,
"I remember my first public reading, as an undergraduate in the early 1960s. It was organized by James McAuley and it consisted of him and me reading our own poems and those of Vivian Smith and Gwen Harwood. Gwen and Vivian were allegedly too shy to read their own. Both, however, were in the audience, and I was acutely aware of their presence as I hoped I did their poems justice. Having got to know Gwen much better in later years, I am amazed that she could have offered such an excuse." (Thorne, 2003)
International poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko is a Soviet and Russian poet. He is also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, actor, editor, and a director of several films.-Early life:...
, Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes
Edward James Hughes OM , more commonly known as Ted Hughes, was an English poet and children's writer. Critics routinely rank him as one of the best poets of his generation. Hughes was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath, from 1956 until...
, Adrian Mitchell
Adrian Mitchell
Adrian Mitchell FRSL was an English poet, novelist and playwright. A former journalist, he became a noted figure on the British anti-authoritarian Left. For almost half a century he was the foremost poet of the country's anti-Bomb movement...
from the UK, Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...
from the USA, came to Adelaide
Adelaide
Adelaide is the capital city of South Australia and the fifth-largest city in Australia. Adelaide has an estimated population of more than 1.2 million...
Arts Festival
Festival
A festival or gala is an event, usually and ordinarily staged by a local community, which centers on and celebrates some unique aspect of that community and the Festival....
Writers' Week in the late 1960s and early 1970s and gave great, as reported in the newspapers, public performances to town hall's full of people. Postmodernist Hedwig Gorski
Hedwig Gorski
Dr. Hedwig Gorski is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as American Futurism...
coined the term "performance poetry" after the strong influences of performing Beat poets like Ginsberg and John Giorno
John Giorno
John Giorno is an American poet and performance artist. He founded the not-for-profit production company Giorno Poetry Systems and organized a number of early multimedia poetry experiments and events, including Dial-A-Poem. He became prominent as the subject of Andy Warhol's film Sleep...
who produced audio recordings of their print poems.
Geoffrey Dutton
Geoffrey Dutton
Geoffrey Piers Henry Dutton AO was an Australian author and historian.Dutton was born in Kapunda, South Australia in 1922 and died in September 1998...
wrote in the Bulletin
The Bulletin
The Bulletin was an Australian weekly magazine that was published in Sydney from 1880 until January 2008. It was influential in Australian culture and politics from about 1890 until World War I, the period when it was identified with the "Bulletin school" of Australian literature. Its influence...
: "Maybe Yevtushenko is the man who will give the relation between poet and public in Australia the tremendous lift it badly needs and so easily might achieve". Bruce Dawe believed that Yevtushenko's visit would "help to establish in people's minds that poetry is not necessarily and forbiddingly long-hair or academic". (Starke, 1998) That is one of the lasting influences of performing and performance poets.
By the 1970s there was a great push in Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
for the voices to be heard that were other to the Anglo-centric male dominated majority, i.e. women, migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds, indigenous Australians, differently abled and gendered persons. For many the poetry reading was the place to be heard. There were many poetry groups and much performance activity in the 1970s. Andrew Taylor, a foundation member of the Friendly Street poetry readings in Adelaide wrote in the Number Ten Friendly Street poetry reader; acknowledging the cultural as well as literary value of poetry readings;
"In 1975 we had all (Richard Tipping, Ian Reid and Andrew Taylor) recently returned to Adelaide from various extended periods overseas, including time in the United States where small, public poetry readings were very popular and frequent. Many of these were held in bookshops or bars – unelaborate, even casual occasions whose value was to be found as much in the opportunity they gave people to get together with a purpose as in the poetry that was read. Why we asked was nothing of this kind happening in Adelaide?" (Harris and Josephi, 1986)
Very early in the 1970s University of Queensland
University of Queensland
The University of Queensland, also known as UQ, is a public university located in state of Queensland, Australia. Founded in 1909, it is the oldest and largest university in Queensland and the fifth oldest in the nation...
Press released a series of 12 poets on vinyl 45 rpm 7" records, featuring older and newer Australian poets reading their work. This was a milestone publication in Australian poetic culture, the first commercially available sound recording of twelve of Australia's most prominent poets of the time.
As early as 1973 Eric Beach
Eric Beach
Eric Beach, born 1947, is a New Zealand and Australian poet, playwright, and short story writer.-Biography:Born in New Zealand, Beach has lived in Tasmania and in Victoria since 1972...
had started to work as a full-time, grossly under-paid poet, conducting workshops at schools and performing and was a recipient of a grant from the newly formed Australia Council for the Arts. Ania Walwicz
Ania Walwicz
Ania Walwicz is a contemporary Australian poet and prose writer, and visual artist.Ania Walwicz spent her childhood in Poland, coming to Australia in 1963 where she attended the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. Her writing tends toward an impressionistic, stream of consciousness...
, Vicki Viidikas
Vicki Viidikas
Vicki Viidikas was a twentieth century Australian poet and prose writer.Vicki Viidikas was born and grew up in Sydney, Australia. Dropping out of school, she encountered the Balmain New South Wales poetry scene in the late 1960s. There she encountered, among others, Ken Bolton, John Forbes, Martin...
, thalia, Sylvia Kantazaris, Anna Couani
Anna Couani
Anna Couani is a contemporary Australian poet and teacher.Anna Couani was born and grew up in Sydney. She studied architecture at the University of Sydney, then took an MA in Teaching English as a Second Language from the University of Technology Sydney...
, and Pi O
Pi O
П. O. is an Australian, working class, anarchist, poet of Greek origin.Born in Katerini, Greece, П. O. came to Australia with his family around 1954. After time in Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre, the family moved to the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy.П. O...
emerged as strong non-anglo voices in performance poetry, and Kate Jennings
Kate Jennings
Kate Jennings is an Australian poet, essayist, memoirist, and novelist.-Life:Jennings grew up on a farm near Griffith, New South Wales. She attended the University of Sydney in the late 1960s, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree with honours...
's anthology of women writers Mother i'm rooted, 1975, highlighted the lack of women in Australian poetry anthologies. Most of the new women writers had engaged with poetry through the activity of poetry readings and not the formal anglo-centric male dominated academic poetry of the universities. In 1976 the Poets Union
Poets Union
The Poets Union is a not-for-profit organisation representing Australian poets, founded in Melbourne in 1977, it is now Sydney based. Its aim is to advocate the role of poetry as a major art form in Australia. Every second year it presents the Australian Poetry Festival and the Union organises...
was formed, identifying that poetry was indeed work and workers needed to be represented by a union to negotiate their demands. New readings, often centred around performance were held in Sydney by the 'militant' Poets Union there and were the genesis of the later pub poetry in that city. Chris Mansell
Chris Mansell
Chris Mansell is an Australian poet and publisher.Born in Sydney, Chris Mansell grew up on the Central Coast of New South Wales and in Lae, Papua New Guinea, later studying economics at the University of Sydney...
and Les Wicks
Les Wicks
Les Wicks is an Australian poet, publisher and editor. He has a long list of achievements in writing, publishing and broadcasting. This includes the publication of eight books of poetry.-Life:...
, among others, were prime movers in this new movement, organising readings and publishing Compass and Meuse (with Bill Farrow) respectively. The Poets Union pushed for better conditions for poets at the Sydney Festival, which then included writers, and successfully gained recognition and payment.
Dorothy Porter
Dorothy Porter
Dorothy Featherstone Porter was an Australian poet.-Early life:Porter was born in Sydney. Her father was barrister Chester Porter and her mother, Jean, was a high school chemistry teacher. Porter attended the Queenwood School for Girls...
and Robert Adamson, Sydney poets, refused to attend the 1976 Writers' Week of Adelaide Festival because they were not going to be paid for their invited readings. (Starke, 1998) In 1978 a contingent of poets' union members attended the Writers' Week in Adelaide and Pi O
Pi O
П. O. is an Australian, working class, anarchist, poet of Greek origin.Born in Katerini, Greece, П. O. came to Australia with his family around 1954. After time in Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre, the family moved to the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy.П. O...
claims in his anthology of performance poetry (PiO, 1985) that the term 'performance poetry' was coined at a seminar where David Malouf
David Malouf
David George Joseph Malouf is an acclaimed Australian writer. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000, his 1993 novel Remembering Babylon won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1996, he won the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award in 2008, and he was...
was speaking. But this is not the first time the term was used outside of Australia. This event definitely marked the beginning of the use of the term 'performance poets' as Ruth Starke notes in Writers, readers and rebels, 1998. However it was not the first instance of the call for the performing of poetry. The coinage of the term that matches with the commonly accepted definition of performance poetry is credited, however, to American poet Hedwig Gorski
Hedwig Gorski
Dr. Hedwig Gorski is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as American Futurism...
, who used it in fliers and posters in the mid-1970s. The term was used to describe Gorski performances in the Austin Chronicle
Austin Chronicle
The Austin Chronicle is an alternative weekly, tabloid-style newspaper published every Thursday in Austin, Texas, United States. The paper is distributed through free news-stands, often at local eateries or coffee houses frequented by its targeted demographic...
almost two decades prior to the reported use of the term in the 1998 publication by Ruth Starke. Performance poets write poems only for performance and not for print. Performing poets are those who use theatrics when presenting their print poems to an audience. The description below clearly points to performing poets reading their poems written for print:
"'If poets are going to perform in front of large audiences, then they ought to learn how to project their voices, or how to use a microphone; otherwise they should introduce the poem and let someone else read it,' wrote Geoffrey Dutton (ABR, April, 1970), after the 1970 Writers' Week." (Starke, 1998)
The performing poets, in 1978, were recognised as a group, or movement, or new cultural formation, separate from published poets for the first time. Jenny Boult
Jenny Boult
Jenny Boult , also known as MML Bliss, was an Australian poet, playwright, and editor.-Biography:Jenny Boult was born in Warwickshire, England in 1951 and migrated to Western Australia with her family in 1967...
in Adelaide had also attained professional status as a performing poet by the end of the 1970s. There were many other semi-professionals, like Ken Smeaton, Geoffrey Eggleston
Geoffrey Eggleston
Geoffrey Eggleston , more usually known as Geoff, was an Australian poet, prominent in the performance poetry scene. He was the original organizer of the Montsalvat Poetry Festival at the Montsalvat artists' colony in Eltham, Victoria. He and Paul Smith edited the Whole Earth Sun-Moon Review which...
and Shelton Lea in Victoria, but the majority held full-time jobs and did their performing as a secondary activity.
The 1980s saw a greater development in performed poetry, with more professional poets earning their living by poeting, Geoff Goodfellow
Geoff Goodfellow
Geoff Goodfellow is associated with early wireless email ventures. In 1982 he posted a message titled "Electronic Mail for People on the Move" in an arpanet mailing list called Telecom Digest. In the early 1990s Goodfellow attempted to commercialize this concept in a product called RadioMail...
joined Jenny Boult
Jenny Boult
Jenny Boult , also known as MML Bliss, was an Australian poet, playwright, and editor.-Biography:Jenny Boult was born in Warwickshire, England in 1951 and migrated to Western Australia with her family in 1967...
in South Australia, komninos
Komninos Zervos
Komninos Zervos is a Greek-Australian performance poet and teacher.-Life:Born in Melbourne in 1950, Komninos Zervos currently lives in Melbourne, Australia.Komninos' poems are a playful combination of social commentary, autobiography and farce...
, Myron Lysenko
Myron Lysenko
Myron Orest Lysenko is an Australian poet of Ukrainian parentage. His parents migrated from Lvov to Bonegilla shortly after World War 2. He was educated at St Paul's Primary School and Newlands High School in Coburg.- References :...
, Liz Hall, Billy Marshall Stoneking
Billy Marshall Stoneking
Billy Marshall Stoneking is an Australian-American poet, playwright, filmmaker, and teacher. His son C.W. Stoneking is a musician.-Childhood and education:...
, Lauren Williams, Kerry Scuffins, Kerry Loughrey, Carmel Bird
Carmel Bird
-Life:Carmel Bird is an Australian novelist. She lives in Central Victoria, having grown up in Tasmania.She has written nine literary novels and six collections of short fiction. She has also written three...
, in Melbourne, Grant Caldwll, Chris Mansell
Chris Mansell
Chris Mansell is an Australian poet and publisher.Born in Sydney, Chris Mansell grew up on the Central Coast of New South Wales and in Lae, Papua New Guinea, later studying economics at the University of Sydney...
, Les Wicks
Les Wicks
Les Wicks is an Australian poet, publisher and editor. He has a long list of achievements in writing, publishing and broadcasting. This includes the publication of eight books of poetry.-Life:...
and Steven Herrick
Steven Herrick
Steven Herrick is an Australian poet. Writing mainly free verse, Herrick has published eighteen books of poetry for adults, young adults and children....
in Sydney and others in other states. The mid 1980s also saw major literary events enter the public sphere. Literary readings were usually restricted to academics, publishers, writers and readers and Writers' Week programs, although in Sydney there were readings in Balmain, notably in the Cafe L'Absurd where poets such as Nigel Roberts, Chris Mansell
Chris Mansell
Chris Mansell is an Australian poet and publisher.Born in Sydney, Chris Mansell grew up on the Central Coast of New South Wales and in Lae, Papua New Guinea, later studying economics at the University of Sydney...
, Cornelius Vleeskens and Rae Desmond Jones
Rae Desmond Jones
Rae Desmond Jones is an Australian poet, novelist, short story writer and politician.Jones was born in the mining town of Broken Hill in the far West of New South Wales. Although many of his poems and stories are concerned with urban experience, he has always felt that desert landscapes are...
often performed and were joined by interstate and international readers on occasions. Later Cafe L'Absurd moved to Newtown
Newtown, New South Wales
Newtown, a suburb of Sydney's inner west is located approximately four kilometres south-west of the Sydney central business district, straddling the local government areas of the City of Sydney and Marrickville Council in the state of New South Wales, Australia....
and became known as New Partz where it became the centre of Sydney performed poetry and attracted performance and so-called page poets. In Melbourne Readings Bookshop and Mietta's Hotel held a regular Sunday afternoon reading that attracted 200-300 people. Later, in Sydney Writers In The Park, had weekly events at the Harold Park Hotel in Glebe
Glebe, New South Wales
Glebe is an inner-city suburb of Sydney. Glebe is located 3 km south-west of the Sydney central business district and is part of the local government area of the City of Sydney, in the Inner West region....
, supported by local book-seller Glebebooks, the writing programs of UTS and UNSW, the feminist performance poetry groups of Newtown, Paddington and Surry Hills, attracting up to 400 people a night (Christie and O'Brien, 1986). In Brisbane, Talk it down, at the Storey Bridge Hotel at Kangaroo Point had weekly readings that drew large mixed crowds of poetry lovers and public bar drinkers alike. Readings had a renewed boom in the mid-1980s and regular readings have since been held in all capital cities and many towns in Australia.
A notable manifestation of Australian performance poetry occurred in Sydney in early 1991, when ten poets, including Pi O
Pi O
П. O. is an Australian, working class, anarchist, poet of Greek origin.Born in Katerini, Greece, П. O. came to Australia with his family around 1954. After time in Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre, the family moved to the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy.П. O...
, Billy Marshall Stoneking
Billy Marshall Stoneking
Billy Marshall Stoneking is an Australian-American poet, playwright, filmmaker, and teacher. His son C.W. Stoneking is a musician.-Childhood and education:...
, Amanda Stewart
Amanda Stewart
Amanda Stewart is a contemporary Australian poet and sound/performance artist.Amanda Stewart began writing and performing poetry in the 1970s and has since produced a wide array of sound, video and multimedia work. In the 1980s she worked for ABC radio as a producer...
, Jas H. Duke
Jas H. Duke
Jas Heriot Duke was a cult figure in the Australian performance poetry scene. He worked much of his life in Melbourne Board of Works and began writing poetry in 1966. He was influenced by Dada, Expressionism and experimental movements...
, and others, teamed up with jazz musician Jenny Sheard, to create, direct and produce the first ever, poet-performed/directed and produced, dramatic verse play ever presented. Entitled CALL IT POETRY/TONIGHT, the show was made up entirely of the poems of the poets who were performing and involved unusual presentations of their work, including a kind of cinema noir voice-over rendition of Grant Caldwell's "famous" letter poem as well as several poems broken up into dialogues between the poets themselves. Rehearsals as well as the actual show were archived on broadcast-quality video, which was later edited and screened - as CALL IT POETRY - round the world. In the television production, several of the performances were presented as "concrete poems", with video graphic overlays, including Jas H Duke's legendary DADA Poem. Copies of the program as well as all the rushes are available through the Librarian, Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra, ACT.
"There are now poets who write primarily for performance rather than the page and, whereas good readers were once more scarce than good poets, these people are very much 'performers' rather than just 'readers'." (HaskellHaskellHaskell may refer to:*Haskell , a standardized pure functional programming language with non-strict semantics* Haskell Indian Nations University, a four year degree granting university in Lawrence, Kansas which offers free tuition to members of registered Native American tribes in the United...
, 1998:275)
Until the mid 1980s poetry readings in public places had been the domain of well paid international poets from the USA, Russia and the UK. Les Murray
Les Murray (poet)
Leslie Allan Murray, AO , known as Les Murray, is an Australian poet, anthologist and critic. His career spans over forty years, and he has published nearly 30 volumes of poetry, as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings...
wrote in Quadrant in April 1977, that he would never be asked to read in the Town Hall during Writers' Week, "when the overseas heavies come around, we are shown our true place in the estimation of our cultural establishments. We are just about good enough to sleep on friends' floors and read our work in a tent." (Starke, 1998) But the performing poets had been having small readings in public places, hotels and coffee lounges, since the early 1970s. By the mid 1980s Les Murray and the performing poets were sharing large public stages in Sydney
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
, Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
and Brisbane
Brisbane
Brisbane is the capital and most populous city in the Australian state of Queensland and the third most populous city in Australia. Brisbane's metropolitan area has a population of over 2 million, and the South East Queensland urban conurbation, centred around Brisbane, encompasses a population of...
.
The sounding of poetry in Australia has always been present but in most historical accounts it has not been emphasised as an activity, always assumed to be a supplementary activity to the industry of print publishing. Even when the oral transmission and aural appreciation of poetry dominated the aesthetics and poetics of Australian poetry and in the absence of sound recording devices, our record of these works remain as printed texts. The texts contained the 'sound' of the poems in their metre and rhyming patterns. Charles Bernstein
Charles Bernstein
Charles Bernstein is an American poet, theorist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein holds the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the Language poets . In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American...
's Close Listening, published in 1998 was the first attempt to present a collection of essays from American sound poets and performance poets that treated the field as a worthy topic of research. Bernstein borrowed Gorski's term (1978) to describe her poems written only to be spoken and recorded. It had by the publication of Bernstien's book in 1998, been extended in popular usage to include other types of spoken word texts featured in the anthology.
"Since the I950s, the poetry reading has become one of the most important sites for the dissemination of poetic works in North America, yet studies of the distinctive features of the poem-in-performance have been rare (even full-length studies of a poet's work routinely ignore the audiotext), and readings no matter how well attended are rarely reviewed by newspapers or magazines." (Bernstein, 1998)
Unlike the USA, Australia lacks any real academic discourse in the field of performance poetry or poets; there are no prizes, no courses of study at universities, no peer-reviewed journals, no histories, no national anthologies, nothing that could be considered a body of information for the study and analysis of performance poetry. All there is are reports that have appeared in the daily presses and on radio and television, and the memories of readings attended. In the USA, Def Poetry and Slams are the legacy of performing poets like Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
and the Beats
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
, and those like Hedwig Gorski
Hedwig Gorski
Dr. Hedwig Gorski is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as American Futurism...
who eschewed writing for print and publishing their poems in books in favor of recording and radio
Radio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
broadcast. Academia associates the American performance poetry movement to a history of African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
oral culture in its current manifestation as Def Poetry and Slam. Australia has yet to examine how aboriginal oral culture and classical oral traditions fit into the history of 'soundings.'
Since the 1960s, when regular rhyme and rhythm in poetry became replaced by a more freestyle expression, and the public soundings of these works relied less on familiar rhythms and more on the political, social and psychological interpretation of the words, sounded poetry, has been appreciated for many other qualities. The sound of words and word combinations, fragments of sentences, repetitions, mirroring within the text, alliteration
Alliteration
In language, alliteration refers to the repetition of a particular sound in the first syllables of Three or more words or phrases. Alliteration has historically developed largely through poetry, in which it more narrowly refers to the repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to...
and assonance
Assonance
Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse. For example, in the phrase "Do you like blue?", the is repeated within the sentence and is...
and even internal rhyming became devices in the writing, and the line the basic unit of the poem, the breath determining the rhythm. The performing poets in 1978 drew attention to themselves as a new cultural formation and to the fact that there were poets dedicated to the sounding of poetry as their primary poetic activity and that poetry could be written not only for print, but exclusively or primarily for sounding. Obviously the print poets who were being asked to present their work to public audiences at State Writers' Festivals in the 1980s, must have felt intimidated by the performing poets that they shared the stages with, but history tells us they also had much to learn from them as well.
"Indeed, the value of the poetry readingPoetry readingA poetry reading is a performance of poetry, normally given on a small stage in a café or bookstore, although poetry readings given by notable poets frequently are booked into larger venues to accommodate crowds...
(sounding) as a social and cultural form can be partly measured by its resistance, up to this point, to reification or commodification. It is a measure of its significance that it is ignored. That is, the (cultural) invisibility of the poetry reading is what makes its audibility so audacious. Its relative absence as an institution makes the poetry reading the ideal site for the presence of language for listening and being heard, for hearing and for being listened to." (Bernstein, 1998)
Attendance at any Writers Festival in any State these days will confirm the quality of sounded works, and the emphasis placed on the importance of soundings by authors of their work in public. The new Australian poetry made poetry readings central to poetic culture: at Friendly Street (Adelaide), La Mama
La Mama Theatre (Melbourne)
The La Mama Theatre is a theatrical venue located at 205 Faraday St, Carlton, Victoria. It opened in a former factory building on 30 July 1967 and still operates today under the direction of Liz Jones....
(Melbourne) at New Partz and later at Harold Park (Sydney). "Readings have now become ubiquitous for Australian poets." (McCooey in Webby, 2000, pg169). Local poetry groups and organisations have increasingly turned to performing poetry alongside, or instead of publishing it. The Red Room Company
The Red Room Company
The Red Room Company is a non-profit organisation based in Sydney, Australia. Its aim is to "create, promote and distribute poetry by new and emerging Australian writers to the public in unusual ways." It was established by Johanna Featherstone in 2002, emerging from the Red Room Radio Show, which...
has made this combination the basis of their public poetry projects, commissioning and presenting staged performances of work, often within spatial installations.
As well as sounded poetry that explores the phonic qualities of words and lines and stanzas, there is also Sound Poetry, a small but worldwide movement of the late 1960s that experimented with the sonic quality of the sounds that make up spoken language. Sound poetry with practitioners in the UK, the Filkingen group in Sweden, the Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and the second wave Beats
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
of the USA, the French sound poets Henri Chopin
Henri Chopin
Henri Chopin was an avant-garde poet and musician.-Life:Henri Chopin was a French practitioner of concrete and sound poet, well-known throughout the second half of the 20th century...
, Bernard Heidseik, etc. was represented in Australia by some exceptional sound poets that received international recognition in this field. Jas H. Duke
Jas H. Duke
Jas Heriot Duke was a cult figure in the Australian performance poetry scene. He worked much of his life in Melbourne Board of Works and began writing poetry in 1966. He was influenced by Dada, Expressionism and experimental movements...
and Ania Walwicz
Ania Walwicz
Ania Walwicz is a contemporary Australian poet and prose writer, and visual artist.Ania Walwicz spent her childhood in Poland, coming to Australia in 1963 where she attended the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. Her writing tends toward an impressionistic, stream of consciousness...
, in Melbourne and Amanda Stewart
Amanda Stewart
Amanda Stewart is a contemporary Australian poet and sound/performance artist.Amanda Stewart began writing and performing poetry in the 1970s and has since produced a wide array of sound, video and multimedia work. In the 1980s she worked for ABC radio as a producer...
and Chris Mann
Chris Mann
Chris Mann is an Australian composer, poet and performer specializing in the emerging field of compositional linguistics, coined by Kenneth Gaburo and described by Mann as "the mechanism whereby you understand what I'm thinking better than I do."...
in Sydney, were influential, great performers and unique in style and content. Sound poetry remained very much a fringe activity of Australian poetry until the mid 1980s. But an international festival of Sound Poetry, SOUNDWORKS curated by Nicholas Zurbrugg and Nick Tsoutas at Performance Space as part of the Sydney Biennale in 1986 highlighted the intensity of the activity in Australia over the previous 15 years. (Zurbrugg and Tsoutas, 1986)
"One way or another, all of the artists performing at the SOUNDWORKS festival splice cut, heighten, release and more or less transform the creative potential of words, sounds and gestures, be these live, recorded, filmed, projected, or various combinations of all these possibilities." (Zurbrugg, 1986)
See also
- Australian literatureAustralian literatureAustralian literature is the written or literary work produced in the area or by the people of the Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding colonies. During its early western history, Australia was a collection of British colonies, therefore, its literary tradition begins with and is linked to...
- List of performance poets (Australia)
- List of Australian poets
External links
- The Australian Bush Poet's Association http://www.abpa.org.au/
- Bush Poetry http://www.bushpoetry.org.au/