Performance poetry
Encyclopedia
Performance poetry is poetry
that is specifically composed for or during a performance
before an audience. During the 1980s, the term came into popular usage to describe poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution.
The term "performance poetry" originates from an early press release describing the popular 1980s performance poet Hedwig Gorski
, whose audio recordings achieved success on spoken word
radio programs around the world. Her band, East of Eden Band, was described as the most successful at music and poetry collaborations, allowing cassettes of her live radio broadcast recordings to stay in rotation with popular underground music recordings on some radio stations. Gorski, an art school graduate, tried to come up with a term that would distinguish her text-based vocal performances from performance art
, especially the work of performance artists, such as Laurie Anderson
, who worked with music at that time. Performance poets relied more on the rhetorical and philosophical expression in their poetics than performance artists, who arose from the visual art genres of painting and sculpture. The Austin Chronicle newspaper, printing Gorski's bi-weekly "Litera" column, first published the term "performance poetry" to describe the work of Gorski with composer D'Jalma Garnier
III as early as 1982. She began using the term, however, to describe a 1978 "neo-verse drama" and "conceptual spoken poetry for five voices" titled Booby, Mama! that employs the cut-up method made popular by William Burroughs and conceptual art
methods.
The National Endowment for the Arts
categorized performance art within the visual arts judging panels; it placed performance poetry within the category of literature. Since many performance poets did not have publications, the latter classification made performance poets categorically ineligible for the NEA fellowship funding or recognition. Their audio cassettes were not acceptable sample material for literature grant consideration; unfortunately, their performance poems translated into text on paper could not compete with poetry written for print publication. The NEA makes no exceptions to this date for the varied presentation of samples in the poetry category of grants. Performance poetry with music peaked during the 1980s just as performance art peaked in the 1970s.
During that time, San Francisco and New York were the centers for this type of activity; however, Austin, Texas
(The Third Coast) also had a thriving scene during the 1980s with a coterie of unique characters. Some of the best original Austin performance poets and performing poets who went on to national and international notoriety include Raul Salinas, Konstantyn K. Kuzminsky
, Joy Cole, Hedwig Gorski
, Roxy Gordon
, Ricardo Sanchez, Harryette Mullen
, who was nominated for the National Book Award. The Austin Poets Audio Anthology Project, a public arts project, recorded them for radio broadcasts. There were many others, though, and Hedwig Gorski once wrote in "Litera" that some were "eerie", a word used by one newspaper reviewer to describe Gorski's vocals on the East of Eden Band track "There's Always Something That Can Make You Happy". Other performing writers in the robust literary scene of the Austin area during that time when performance poetry turned into a school of poetry included Pat Littledog, Eleanor Crockett, Jim Ryan, Chuck Taylor, Greg Gauntner, Albert Huffstickler
, W. Joe Hoppe
, Andy Clausen, Isabella Ides and David Jewell (poet)
; most recorded on Hedwig Gorski
's audio anthology project.
Jewell deserves special mention as a transitional figure, younger than the aforementioned, and one not especially rooted in the Beats like Gorski, who has strong connections to Ginsberg
, Corso, Gary Snyder
, and others. By the 1990s the general poetry public just was not that into the Beats. They were looking for something fresher, newer, hipper, more in touch with the times in which they were living than with a style out of the 1950s and 1960s. Performance poets established clubs, cafes, and media as venues that later became stages for the emerging slam poetry scene. Unlike Gorski, who with East of Eden Band, began broadcasting live performance poetry on radio
and distributing the recordings of these broadcasts in place of publishing in print, Jewell and slam
poets were more interested in small live audiences. Venues like Nuyorican Poets Cafe
in New York
City and mass media formats, like Gorski's and John Giorno
's, form the two lines of influence leading to Def Poetry
on HBO.
Performing poets/writers and especially performance poets excelled in the ability to put the event of oral literature into the primary social/communicative function for literature. The plurality of the literary performance is under the control of the poet/writer, and the performer never minimizes the participation of the audience
members. It is important to remember that performance was the primary distribution method for poetics since tribal times and ancient Greece
. As Gorski often states, broadcast and technology surpass books in reaching mass audiences for poetry, and just as writing poetry for print made poetry a completely different artform since the invention of the book
, "mediums influence the way poets write just as they do painters and sculptors".
, rhyme
and kenning
s to facilitate memorization and recall. The performer "composed" the poem from memory, using the version they had learned as a kind of mental template. This process allowed the performer to add their own flavor to the poem in question, although fidelity to the traditional versions of the poems was generally favored.
in verse
and occasionally, for example in the cases of the Elizabethan
madrigalists
or Robert Burns
, as texts for singing. Apart from this, the performance of poetry was restricted to reading aloud from printed books within families or groups of friends.
and Louis Zukofsky
called for a renewed emphasis on poetry as sound. Bunting in particular argued that it the poem on the page was like a musical score; not fully intelligible until sounded. This attitude to poetry helped to encourage an environment in which poetry readings were fostered. This was reinforced by Charles Olson
's call for a poetic line based on human breath. Clive Sansom
devoted much of his life to gathering and contributing poetry and drama particularly suited to performance by children.
During the 1950s, the Canadian poet Cid Corman
began to experiment with what he called oral poetry. This involved spontaneously composing poems into a tape recorder. Allen Ginsberg
was to take up this practice in the 1960s. David Antin
, who heard some of Corman's tapes, took the process one step further. He composed his talk-poems by improvising in front of an audience. These performances were recorded and the tapes were later transcribed to be published in book form. Around the same time, Jerome Rothenberg
was drawing on his ethnopoetic researches to create poems for ritual performances as happening
s. Perhaps most famously, the writers of the Beat generation
were noted for performance events that married poetry and jazz
. Also in the late 1960s, other poets outside San Francisco and New York City were experimenting with performance pieces. Notable among these was David Franks, at the time a faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art
. Franks' work was not poetry recited to a musical counterpoint but literary pieces in which the performance was a necessary and integral part of the work itself.
In Britain
, sound poets like Bob Cobbing
and Edwin Morgan were exploring the possibilities of live performance. Cobbing's groups Bird Yak and Konkrete Canticle involved collaborative performance with other poets and musicians and were partly responsible for drawing a number of the poets of the British Poetry Revival
into the performance arena.
Meanwhile, many more mainstream poets in both Britain and the United States
were giving poetry readings, largely to small academic gatherings on university campuses. Poetry readings were given national prominence when Robert Frost
recited "The Gift Outright" from memory at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy
. After that event, spoken word recordings of Frost and other major figures enjoyed increased popularity.
This leaves three types of poetry performance, poems written specifically for performance on the Jerome Rothenberg
model and poems like those of David Antin
that are composed during performance. Both these types would generally be considered to constitute performance poetry. Another type based on the Beat method of reading their print poems is poetry with music. The bands with performance poets make spoken vocals an exercise in not singing, but the texts are not catogorized as songs. While Ginsberg actually sang his Blake songs with a harmonium, the original practitioner of this third and most popular type of performance poetry is Hedwig Gorski
, who coined the term performance poetry to describe her work with music. She is sometimes called a neo-beat, but considers herself an American "futurist". Unlike the Beats
, Ginsberg and Kerouac, her poems were written for performance with music that was specifically composed for the poems. Her spoken vocals have come as close to singing as possible without really singing. That is the key to Gorski's performance poetry, the marriage of poetry to music written specifically to fit poems written for vocal performance. The other type of performance poetry Gorski practiced is without music and tied to conceptual art
, but that was at appearances in smaller venues that could not accommodate her band. Unlike Antin and Cormin, Gorski never improvised text but wrote poetry only for performance while eschewing printed poetry.
In the U. S., the rise to prominence of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
poets with their distrust of speech as a basis for poetry has, broadly speaking, meant that performance poetry went out of fashion with the avant-garde
. However, the increasing popularity of open mikes, which allow "unknown" poets to take the stage and share their own work in 3-5 minute increments and of poetry slams has meant that performance poetry is now one of the most widespread forms of popular poetry. Chief among the proponents of these new forms of popular poetry were Bob Holman
in New York, Marc Smith in Chicago
and Alan Kaufman
in San Francisco. In the 1990s, the Favorite Poem project of then U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky
gave new visibility to ordinary Americans reading and performing their favorite poems. Contemporary performance poets are now experimenting with poetry performances adapted to CD, to video, and to Web audiences.
The Beat Poets were the first to popularize crossing over into recorded media to distribute their performed poetry. The best-known Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg
, followed the lead of fellow Beat, Jack Kerouac
, in reciting his work for audio recording. Ginsberg always used music with his readings and often accompanied himself on the harmonium
. Ginsberg put William Blake
's poems to music and performed them with the harmonium. Even though the Beats did not use the term "Performance Poetry" to categorize their work with music and audio recordings, the Beats provided an immediate model for the work of Hedwig Gorski
. She is a Nova Scotia College of Art and Design art school graduate in 1976. The art school was infamous for starting the careers of numerous 1970s performance artists, such as Vito Acconci
, known for photographing his bites. It is worth noting that Gorski, who coined the term "Performance Poetry" to describe her poems written only for performance, recordings, and broadcast usually with her musical band East of Eden Band, is the only woman in this group of late twentieth-century innovators reviving oral poetry
. Similar to the ancient bards, touring became a widespread means for performance poets and slammers to distribute their work since the 1990s. The Poetry Slam is a competitive live performance format founded by poet Marc Smith in Chicago, which has become a hotbed for performance poetry.
Performance poetry has also been boosted considerably by the appearance of Def Jam -- the hip-hop
recording company helmed by Russell Simmons
-- on the scene. def jam has created a television show
that showcases performance poets that runs on HBO, as well as a show of performance poets that ran on Broadway
for almost a year and won a Tony Award
.
Hispanic
performing artists, such as Pedro Pietri
, Miguel Algarín
, Giannina Braschi
, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña
, are known for their humorous and politically charged attacks against American imperialism. Later contemporary Latino
poets such as Willie Perdomo
, Emanuel Xavier
, Edwin Torres (poet)
and Caridad de la Luz
would follow in this tradition.
Closely tied to Chicano
poets is the Native American
poet John Trudell
who recorded and crossed over with his poetry and music cassettes. Trudell arose from the persecution on his reservation by FBI agents, who allegedly killed his wife and children. Protest is significant with the minority
practitioners of performance poetry, such as def poets and slammers. This adds to the vitality of American performance poetry and connects to the social protest of Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg
.
and Aaron Williamson. The work of UK poet Michael Horovitz
in spreading this tradition in Britain during the early 1960s should also be acknowledged. His Live New Departures - a touring version of his poetry and arts journal New Departures (launched 1959) - gave space and opportunities to poets like Pete Brown
and Adrian Mitchell
as these three principals combined performed verse with the backing of jazz musicians like pianist Stan Tracey
and saxophonist Bobby Wellins
. However, the emergence of performed poetry as a popular art form can probably be linked to Allen Ginsberg’s stunning performance at the Albert Hall in 1965 at the International Poetry Incarnation
. Horovitz, Brown and Mitchell would join Ginsberg and Beat colleagues Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso and other European poets at that landmark London occasion. These developments were also connected to the emergence of the Liverpool Poets
, which referred mainly to the poets Roger McGough
, Adrian Henri
and Brian Patten
who fired up audiences across the UK in the 70s and then the likes of John Hegley
emerged in the 80s, influenced as much by stand-up comedy
as a love for wordplay, creating the template for what became recognised as contemporary British performance poetry - a format still exemplified by the work of acts such as Murray Lachlan Young
, Francesca Beard
and Gerard McKeown
. In the 90s, however, in big cities like Manchester and London, a different style emerged that was influenced more by hip hop with much less emphasis on comedy in the manner of Def Poets in the United States. Well-known writers from this evolution include Lemn Sissay
and the late Dike Omeje from the Manchester scene and Roger Robinson and El Crisis from the London circuit.
On the experimental front, a number of exciting new initiatives have grown around collaborative stage work using poetry and movement. ShadoWork, for instance, aims to 'disrupt and enrich the conventional regimes of author
, text
and audience
' by combining (simple) theatrical
movement with the full range of voice
and stage
in ways designed to draw deeper attention to the text. Developments such as ShadoWork represent a 'counter-cultural' mode of performance poetry which shuns bald entertainment value, and others such as the Tell Tales initiative and Jonzi D's Lyrikal Fearta (which he calls choreo-poetry) go even further, extending spoken word to short prose productions and fusing performance poetry with dance.
British performance poetry continues to thrive at a grassroots level, with performances in pubs
and theatre
s, as well as at arts festival
s such as Glastonbury
and The Edinburgh
Fringe. Slams and open mikes remain popular and are influenced by the work of radio performance poet Hedwig Gorski
from the United States, there has also been some crossover into TV and Radio. Many contemporary British performance poets have been influenced by punk
poets like John Cooper Clarke
and reggae
poets like Linton Kwesi Johnson
as well as by comedy and hip hop. In 2003 the first UK conference of performance poetry, organised by Lucy English, was held at Bath Spa University
. Speakers included performing poets from the United States Bob Holman
and Charles Bernstein
. Bath Spa
university now runs a performance poetry module as part of its Creative Writing programme.
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
that is specifically composed for or during a performance
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
before an audience. During the 1980s, the term came into popular usage to describe poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution.
History
Hedwig Gorski
Dr. Hedwig Gorski is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as American Futurism...
, whose audio recordings achieved success on spoken word
Spoken word
Spoken word is a form of poetry that often uses alliterated prose or verse and occasionally uses metered verse to express social commentary. Traditionally it is in the first person, is from the poet’s point of view and is themed in current events....
radio programs around the world. Her band, East of Eden Band, was described as the most successful at music and poetry collaborations, allowing cassettes of her live radio broadcast recordings to stay in rotation with popular underground music recordings on some radio stations. Gorski, an art school graduate, tried to come up with a term that would distinguish her text-based vocal performances from performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
, especially the work of performance artists, such as Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American experimental performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s...
, who worked with music at that time. Performance poets relied more on the rhetorical and philosophical expression in their poetics than performance artists, who arose from the visual art genres of painting and sculpture. The Austin Chronicle newspaper, printing Gorski's bi-weekly "Litera" column, first published the term "performance poetry" to describe the work of Gorski with composer D'Jalma Garnier
D'Jalma Garnier
D'Jalma Garnier III is a musician and composer best known for Creole and Cajun fiddle and "outside" musical compositions and collaborations with other artists....
III as early as 1982. She began using the term, however, to describe a 1978 "neo-verse drama" and "conceptual spoken poetry for five voices" titled Booby, Mama! that employs the cut-up method made popular by William Burroughs and conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
methods.
The National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
categorized performance art within the visual arts judging panels; it placed performance poetry within the category of literature. Since many performance poets did not have publications, the latter classification made performance poets categorically ineligible for the NEA fellowship funding or recognition. Their audio cassettes were not acceptable sample material for literature grant consideration; unfortunately, their performance poems translated into text on paper could not compete with poetry written for print publication. The NEA makes no exceptions to this date for the varied presentation of samples in the poetry category of grants. Performance poetry with music peaked during the 1980s just as performance art peaked in the 1970s.
During that time, San Francisco and New York were the centers for this type of activity; however, Austin, Texas
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...
(The Third Coast) also had a thriving scene during the 1980s with a coterie of unique characters. Some of the best original Austin performance poets and performing poets who went on to national and international notoriety include Raul Salinas, Konstantyn K. Kuzminsky
Konstantyn K. Kuzminsky
Konstantin Konstantinovich Kuzminsky is a Russian performance poet who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1978. Currently he lives in upstate New York. He is the publisher of "The Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry". Other publications include a collection of Russian poetry “The...
, Joy Cole, Hedwig Gorski
Hedwig Gorski
Dr. Hedwig Gorski is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as American Futurism...
, Roxy Gordon
Roxy Gordon
Roxy Gordon was a Choctaw and Assiniboine poet, novelist, musician and activist.-Source:...
, Ricardo Sanchez, Harryette Mullen
Harryette Mullen
Harryette Mullen is an American poet, short story writer, and literary scholar. She was born in Florence, Alabama, grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and attended graduate school at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As of 2008, she lives in Los...
, who was nominated for the National Book Award. The Austin Poets Audio Anthology Project, a public arts project, recorded them for radio broadcasts. There were many others, though, and Hedwig Gorski once wrote in "Litera" that some were "eerie", a word used by one newspaper reviewer to describe Gorski's vocals on the East of Eden Band track "There's Always Something That Can Make You Happy". Other performing writers in the robust literary scene of the Austin area during that time when performance poetry turned into a school of poetry included Pat Littledog, Eleanor Crockett, Jim Ryan, Chuck Taylor, Greg Gauntner, Albert Huffstickler
Albert Huffstickler
Albert Huffstickler was an American poet. He was born in Texas and lived in Austin during his later years, contributing to the poetry scene there and further afield. Huffstickler published hundreds of poems in his lifetime in both chapbooks and academic and underground journals...
, W. Joe Hoppe
W. Joe Hoppe
W. Joe Hoppe is an American poet, short story writer and filmmaker who was at the forefront of the performance poetry scene in Austin, Texas....
, Andy Clausen, Isabella Ides and David Jewell (poet)
David Jewell (poet)
David Jewell is an American Performance poet.-Career:A movie credit in Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise with his poem Delusion Angel. An appearance as an animated cloud in Linklater's Waking Life....
; most recorded on Hedwig Gorski
Hedwig Gorski
Dr. Hedwig Gorski is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as American Futurism...
's audio anthology project.
Jewell deserves special mention as a transitional figure, younger than the aforementioned, and one not especially rooted in the Beats like Gorski, who has strong connections to Ginsberg
Ginsberg
Ginsberg, Ginsburg, Ginsburgh, Ginsparg, Ginzberg, Ginzborg, and Ginzburg are variants of the same surname.-Ginsberg:* Allen Ginsberg, Beat poet* Asher Hirsch Ginsberg , Zionist writer and philosopher...
, Corso, Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...
, and others. By the 1990s the general poetry public just was not that into the Beats. They were looking for something fresher, newer, hipper, more in touch with the times in which they were living than with a style out of the 1950s and 1960s. Performance poets established clubs, cafes, and media as venues that later became stages for the emerging slam poetry scene. Unlike Gorski, who with East of Eden Band, began broadcasting live performance poetry on 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...
and distributing the recordings of these broadcasts in place of publishing in print, Jewell and slam
SLAM
Slam or SLAM may refer to:In computer science:* Simultaneous localization and mapping, a technique used by robots and autonomous vehicles* SLAM project, a Microsoft Research project...
poets were more interested in small live audiences. Venues like Nuyorican Poets Cafe
Nuyorican Poets Café
The Nuyorican Poets Café is a non-profit organization in Alphabet City, Manhattan. It is a bastion of the Nuyorican art movement in New York City, USA, and has become a forum for poetry, music, hip hop, video, visual arts, comedy and theatre.-History:...
in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
City and mass media formats, like Gorski's 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...
's, form the two lines of influence leading to Def Poetry
Def Poetry
Def Poetry, also known as Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry or Def Poetry Jam, which was co-founded by Bruce George, Danny Simmons and Deborah Pointer, is an HBO television series produced by hip-hop music entrepreneur Russell Simmons. The series presents performances by established spoken word...
on HBO.
Performing poets/writers and especially performance poets excelled in the ability to put the event of oral literature into the primary social/communicative function for literature. The plurality of the literary performance is under the control of the poet/writer, and the performer never minimizes the participation of the audience
Audience
An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature , theatre, music or academics in any medium...
members. It is important to remember that performance was the primary distribution method for poetics since tribal times and ancient Greece
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
. As Gorski often states, broadcast and technology surpass books in reaching mass audiences for poetry, and just as writing poetry for print made poetry a completely different artform since the invention of the book
Book
A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...
, "mediums influence the way poets write just as they do painters and sculptors".
Poetry in oral cultures
Performance poetry is not solely a postmodern phenomenon. It begins with the performance of oral poems in pre-literate societies. By definition, these poems were transmitted orally from performer to performer and were constructed using devices such as repetition, alliterationAlliteration
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...
, rhyme
Rhyme
A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.-Etymology:...
and kenning
Kenning
A kenning is a type of literary trope, specifically circumlocution, in the form of a compound that employs figurative language in place of a more concrete single-word noun. Kennings are strongly associated with Old Norse and later Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon poetry...
s to facilitate memorization and recall. The performer "composed" the poem from memory, using the version they had learned as a kind of mental template. This process allowed the performer to add their own flavor to the poem in question, although fidelity to the traditional versions of the poems was generally favored.
The advent of printing
Although popular works, including popular poems or collections of poems, were already being distributed for private reading and study in manuscript form, there can be little doubt that the introduction of cheap printing technologies accelerated this trend considerably. The result was a change in the poet's role in society. From having been an entertainer, the poet became primarily a provider of written texts for private readings. The public performance of poetry became generally restricted, at least in a European context, to the staging of playsTheatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
in verse
Verse (poetry)
A verse is formally a single line in a metrical composition, e.g. poetry. However, the word has come to represent any division or grouping of words in such a composition, which traditionally had been referred to as a stanza....
and occasionally, for example in the cases of the Elizabethan
Elizabethan era
The Elizabethan era was the epoch in English history of Queen Elizabeth I's reign . Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history...
madrigalists
Madrigal (music)
A madrigal is a secular vocal music composition, usually a partsong, of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Traditionally, polyphonic madrigals are unaccompanied; the number of voices varies from two to eight, and most frequently from three to six....
or Robert Burns
Robert Burns
Robert Burns was a Scottish poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is celebrated worldwide...
, as texts for singing. Apart from this, the performance of poetry was restricted to reading aloud from printed books within families or groups of friends.
The 20th century
The early years of the 20th century saw a general questioning of artistic forms and conventions. Poets like Basil BuntingBasil Bunting
Basil Cheesman Bunting was a significant British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud...
and Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...
called for a renewed emphasis on poetry as sound. Bunting in particular argued that it the poem on the page was like a musical score; not fully intelligible until sounded. This attitude to poetry helped to encourage an environment in which poetry readings were fostered. This was reinforced by Charles Olson
Charles Olson
Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...
's call for a poetic line based on human breath. Clive Sansom
Clive Sansom
-Life and work:Sansom was born on 21 June 1910 in East Finchley, London and educated at Southgate County School, where he matriculated in 1926. He worked as a clerk until 1934, and then studied speech and drama at the Regent Street Polytechnic and the London Speech Institute under Margaret Gullan...
devoted much of his life to gathering and contributing poetry and drama particularly suited to performance by children.
During the 1950s, the Canadian poet Cid Corman
Cid Corman
Cid Corman was an American poet, translator and editor, most notably of Origin, who was a key figure in the history of American poetry in the second half of the 20th century.-Early life and writing:...
began to experiment with what he called oral poetry. This involved spontaneously composing poems into a tape recorder. 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...
was to take up this practice in the 1960s. David Antin
David Antin
David Antin is a United States poet and critic. In the late 1960s, Antin began performing extemporaneously, improvising "talk poems" at readings and exhibitions...
, who heard some of Corman's tapes, took the process one step further. He composed his talk-poems by improvising in front of an audience. These performances were recorded and the tapes were later transcribed to be published in book form. Around the same time, Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known American poet, translator and anthologist who is noted for his work in ethnopoetics and poetry performance.-Early life and work:...
was drawing on his ethnopoetic researches to create poems for ritual performances as happening
Happening
A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings take place anywhere , are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience...
s. Perhaps most famously, the writers of the Beat generation
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...
were noted for performance events that married poetry and jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
. Also in the late 1960s, other poets outside San Francisco and New York City were experimenting with performance pieces. Notable among these was David Franks, at the time a faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art
Maryland Institute College of Art
Maryland Institute College of Art is an art and design college in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. It was founded in 1826 as the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, making it one of the first and oldest art colleges in the United States. In 2008, MICA was ranked #2 in the nation...
. Franks' work was not poetry recited to a musical counterpoint but literary pieces in which the performance was a necessary and integral part of the work itself.
In Britain
British literature
British Literature refers to literature associated with the United Kingdom, Isle of Man and Channel Islands. By far the largest part of British literature is written in the English language, but there are bodies of written works in Latin, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Cornish, Manx, Jèrriais,...
, sound poets like Bob Cobbing
Bob Cobbing
Bob Cobbing was a British sound, visual, concrete and performance poet who was a central figure in the British Poetry Revival.-Early life:...
and Edwin Morgan were exploring the possibilities of live performance. Cobbing's groups Bird Yak and Konkrete Canticle involved collaborative performance with other poets and musicians and were partly responsible for drawing a number of the poets of the British Poetry Revival
British Poetry Revival
The British Poetry Revival is the general name given to a loose poetry movement in Britain that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The revival was a modernist-inspired reaction to the Movement's more conservative approach to British poetry.-Beginnings:...
into the performance arena.
Meanwhile, many more mainstream poets in both Britain and the United States
Poetry of the United States
American poetry, the poetry of the United States, arose first as efforts by colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17th century, well before the constitutional unification of the thirteen colonies...
were giving poetry readings, largely to small academic gatherings on university campuses. Poetry readings were given national prominence when Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...
recited "The Gift Outright" from memory at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....
. After that event, spoken word recordings of Frost and other major figures enjoyed increased popularity.
The 1970s and after
By the 1970s, three main forms of poetry performance had emerged. First was the poetry reading, at which poems that had been written for the page were read to an audience, usually by the author. Poetry readings have become widespread and poetry festivals and reading series are now part of the cultural landscape of most Western societies. However, most people would not consider the poetry readings of this type as part of the performance poetry phenomena.This leaves three types of poetry performance, poems written specifically for performance on the Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known American poet, translator and anthologist who is noted for his work in ethnopoetics and poetry performance.-Early life and work:...
model and poems like those of David Antin
David Antin
David Antin is a United States poet and critic. In the late 1960s, Antin began performing extemporaneously, improvising "talk poems" at readings and exhibitions...
that are composed during performance. Both these types would generally be considered to constitute performance poetry. Another type based on the Beat method of reading their print poems is poetry with music. The bands with performance poets make spoken vocals an exercise in not singing, but the texts are not catogorized as songs. While Ginsberg actually sang his Blake songs with a harmonium, the original practitioner of this third and most popular type of performance poetry is 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 coined the term performance poetry to describe her work with music. She is sometimes called a neo-beat, but considers herself an American "futurist". Unlike 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...
, Ginsberg and Kerouac, her poems were written for performance with music that was specifically composed for the poems. Her spoken vocals have come as close to singing as possible without really singing. That is the key to Gorski's performance poetry, the marriage of poetry to music written specifically to fit poems written for vocal performance. The other type of performance poetry Gorski practiced is without music and tied to conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
, but that was at appearances in smaller venues that could not accommodate her band. Unlike Antin and Cormin, Gorski never improvised text but wrote poetry only for performance while eschewing printed poetry.
In the U. S., the rise to prominence of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
Language poets
The Language poets are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s...
poets with their distrust of speech as a basis for poetry has, broadly speaking, meant that performance poetry went out of fashion with the avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
. However, the increasing popularity of open mikes, which allow "unknown" poets to take the stage and share their own work in 3-5 minute increments and of poetry slams has meant that performance poetry is now one of the most widespread forms of popular poetry. Chief among the proponents of these new forms of popular poetry were Bob Holman
Bob Holman
Bob Holman is a poet and poetry activist in the United States.- Career :After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, Bob Holman founded, with Sara Miles and Susie Timmons, the NYC Poetry Calendar, a free monthly publication with all the readings and poets "on the same page"...
in New York, Marc Smith in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
and Alan Kaufman
Alan Kaufman
Alan Kaufman is an American novelist, memoirist and poet who was instrumental in the development of the Spoken Word movement in literature. He is the author of the memoir Jew Boy, the novel Matches, and is listed as editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry.He is also listed as co-editor of The...
in San Francisco. In the 1990s, the Favorite Poem project of then U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry...
gave new visibility to ordinary Americans reading and performing their favorite poems. Contemporary performance poets are now experimenting with poetry performances adapted to CD, to video, and to Web audiences.
The Beat Poets were the first to popularize crossing over into recorded media to distribute their performed poetry. The best-known Beat poet, 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...
, followed the lead of fellow Beat, Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
, in reciting his work for audio recording. Ginsberg always used music with his readings and often accompanied himself on the harmonium
Harmonium
A harmonium is a free-standing keyboard instrument similar to a reed organ. Sound is produced by air being blown through sets of free reeds, resulting in a sound similar to that of an accordion...
. Ginsberg put William Blake
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
's poems to music and performed them with the harmonium. Even though the Beats did not use the term "Performance Poetry" to categorize their work with music and audio recordings, the Beats provided an immediate model for the work of Hedwig Gorski
Hedwig Gorski
Dr. Hedwig Gorski is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as American Futurism...
. She is a Nova Scotia College of Art and Design art school graduate in 1976. The art school was infamous for starting the careers of numerous 1970s performance artists, such as Vito Acconci
Vito Acconci
Vito Hannibal Acconci is a Bronx, New York-born, Brooklyn-based designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist.-Education:...
, known for photographing his bites. It is worth noting that Gorski, who coined the term "Performance Poetry" to describe her poems written only for performance, recordings, and broadcast usually with her musical band East of Eden Band, is the only woman in this group of late twentieth-century innovators reviving oral poetry
Oral poetry
Oral poetry can be defined in various ways. A strict definition would include only poetry that is composed and transmitted without any aid of writing. However, the complex relationships between written and spoken literature in some societies can make this definition hard to maintain, and oral...
. Similar to the ancient bards, touring became a widespread means for performance poets and slammers to distribute their work since the 1990s. The Poetry Slam is a competitive live performance format founded by poet Marc Smith in Chicago, which has become a hotbed for performance poetry.
Performance poetry has also been boosted considerably by the appearance of Def Jam -- the hip-hop
Hip hop music
Hip hop music, also called hip-hop, rap music or hip-hop music, is a musical genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted...
recording company helmed by Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons
-External links:** * * * * * * from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum* *...
-- on the scene. def jam has created a television show
Def Poetry
Def Poetry, also known as Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry or Def Poetry Jam, which was co-founded by Bruce George, Danny Simmons and Deborah Pointer, is an HBO television series produced by hip-hop music entrepreneur Russell Simmons. The series presents performances by established spoken word...
that showcases performance poets that runs on HBO, as well as a show of performance poets that ran on Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
for almost a year and won a Tony Award
Tony Award
The Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre, more commonly known as a Tony Award, recognizes achievement in live Broadway theatre. The awards are presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League at an annual ceremony in New York City. The awards are given for Broadway...
.
Hispanic
Hispanic
Hispanic is a term that originally denoted a relationship to Hispania, which is to say the Iberian Peninsula: Andorra, Gibraltar, Portugal and Spain. During the Modern Era, Hispanic sometimes takes on a more limited meaning, particularly in the United States, where the term means a person of ...
performing artists, such as Pedro Pietri
Pedro Pietri
Pedro Pietri , was a Nuyorican poet and playwright who co-founded the Nuyorican Poets Café. He was the poet laureate of the Nuyorican Movement.-Early years :...
, Miguel Algarín
Miguel Algarín
Miguel Algarín , is a Puerto Rican poet, writer, co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café, and retired Rutgers University professor of English.-Early years:...
, Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican writer. She is credited with writing the first Spanglish novel YO-YO BOING! and the poetry trilogy Empire of Dreams , which chronicles the Latin American immigrant's experiences in the United States...
, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born in Mexico City and moved to the US in 1978, where he established himself as a performance artist, writer, activist, and educator. He has pioneered multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video, performance photography and installation art...
, are known for their humorous and politically charged attacks against American imperialism. Later contemporary Latino
Latino
The demonyms Latino and Latina , are defined in English language dictionaries as:* "a person of Latin-American descent."* "A Latin American."* "A person of Hispanic, especially Latin-American, descent, often one living in the United States."...
poets such as Willie Perdomo
Willie Perdomo
-Overview:Willie Perdomo is a prize-winning Nuyorican poet and children's book author. He is the author of Where a Nickel Costs a Dime , Postcards of El Barrio , and Smoking Lovely , which received a PEN American Center Beyond Margins Award...
, Emanuel Xavier
Emanuel Xavier
In 2005, Suspect Thoughts Press published Bullets & Butterflies: queer spoken word poetry, a collection Emanuel Xavier edited. The anthology featured the work of thirteen openly queer spoken word artists and new work by the editor himself including: "Legendary", "Outside" and "A Simple Poem." The...
, Edwin Torres (poet)
Edwin Torres (poet)
Edwin Torres is a "Nuyorican" poet.-Early years:Torres's parents moved from Puerto Rico and settled in the borough of The Bronx in New York City. His father died when he was young and he was then raised by his mother and her brother Martin. Martin provided comfort and family support...
and Caridad de la Luz
Caridad de la Luz
Caridad De la Luz , a.k.a. "La Bruja" , is a poet, actress and activist.-Early years:De la Luz, whose parents moved to New York City from Puerto Rico, was born and raised in the South Bronx. There she also received her primary and secondary education...
would follow in this tradition.
Closely tied to Chicano
Chicano
The terms "Chicano" and "Chicana" are used in reference to U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. However, those terms have a wide range of meanings in various parts of the world. The term began to be widely used during the Chicano Movement, mainly among Mexican Americans, especially in the movement's...
poets is the Native American
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
poet John Trudell
John Trudell
John Trudell is a Native American-Mexican author, poet, actor, musician, and former political activist. He was the spokesperson for the United Indians of All Tribes' takeover of Alcatraz beginning in 1969, broadcasting as Radio Free Alcatraz...
who recorded and crossed over with his poetry and music cassettes. Trudell arose from the persecution on his reservation by FBI agents, who allegedly killed his wife and children. Protest is significant with the minority
Minority group
A minority is a sociological group within a demographic. The demographic could be based on many factors from ethnicity, gender, wealth, power, etc. The term extends to numerous situations, and civilizations within history, despite the misnomer of minorities associated with a numerical statistic...
practitioners of performance poetry, such as def poets and slammers. This adds to the vitality of American performance poetry and connects to the social protest of Beat 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...
.
The United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom, where the influence of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was more limited, many avant-garde poets are deeply committed to continuing the performance of Cobbing and his peers. Well-known names include cris cheekCris Cheek
Cris Cheek is a British poet, artist, interdisciplinary performer and academic currently resident at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Born in London in 1955, he lived and worked there until the early 1990s. One early influence was working alongside Bob Cobbing at the Poetry Society and the...
and Aaron Williamson. The work of UK poet Michael Horovitz
Michael Horovitz
Michael Horovitz is an English poet, artist and translator.-Life and career:Michael Horovitz was the youngest of ten children who were brought to England from Nazi Germany by their parents, both of whom were part of a network of European-rabbinical families...
in spreading this tradition in Britain during the early 1960s should also be acknowledged. His Live New Departures - a touring version of his poetry and arts journal New Departures (launched 1959) - gave space and opportunities to poets like Pete Brown
Pete Brown
Peter Ronald Brown is an English performance poet and lyricist.Best known for his collaborations with Jack Bruce, Brown also worked with The Battered Ornaments, formed his own group Pete Brown & Piblokto!, and worked with Graham Bond and Phil Ryan. Brown also writes film scores and formed a film...
and 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...
as these three principals combined performed verse with the backing of jazz musicians like pianist Stan Tracey
Stan Tracey
Stanley William Tracey CBE is a British jazz pianist and composer, most influenced by Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk.-Early career:...
and saxophonist Bobby Wellins
Bobby Wellins
Robert Coull "Bobby" Wellins is a Scottish tenor saxophonist best known for his collaboration with Stan Tracey on the seminal 1965 British jazz album Under Milk Wood....
. However, the emergence of performed poetry as a popular art form can probably be linked to Allen Ginsberg’s stunning performance at the Albert Hall in 1965 at the International Poetry Incarnation
International Poetry Incarnation
The International Poetry Incarnation was an event at the Royal Albert Hall in Londonon June 11, 1965.In May, 1965, Allen Ginsberg arrived at Better Books, London, and offered to read anywhere for free....
. Horovitz, Brown and Mitchell would join Ginsberg and Beat colleagues Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso and other European poets at that landmark London occasion. These developments were also connected to the emergence of the Liverpool Poets
Liverpool poets
The Liverpool Poets are a number of influential 1960s poets from Liverpool, England, influenced by 1950s Beat poetry. They were involved in the 1960s Liverpool scene that gave rise to The Beatles, during a time when the city was termed by US beat poet Allen Ginsberg "the centre of the consciousness...
, which referred mainly to the poets Roger McGough
Roger McGough
Roger Joseph McGough CBE is a well-known English performance poet. He presents the BBC Radio 4 programme Poetry Please and records voice-overs for commercials, as well as performing his own poetry regularly...
, Adrian Henri
Adrian Henri
Adrian Henri was a British poet and painter best remembered as the founder of poetry-rock group The Liverpool Scene and as one of three poets in the best-selling anthology The Mersey Sound, along with Brian Patten and Roger McGough. The trio of Liverpool poets came to prominence in that city's...
and Brian Patten
Brian Patten
-Background:Born near Liverpool's docks, he attended Sefton Park School in the Smithdown Road area of Liverpool, where he was noted for his essays and greatly encouraged in his work by Harry Sutcliffe his form teacher. He left school at fifteen and began work for The Bootle Times writing a column...
who fired up audiences across the UK in the 70s and then the likes of John Hegley
John Hegley
John Richard Hegley is an English performance poet, comedian, musician and songwriter.-Early life:He was born in the Newington Green area of Islington, London, England, into a Roman Catholic household. He was brought up in Luton and Bristol...
emerged in the 80s, influenced as much by stand-up comedy
Stand-up comedy
Stand-up comedy is a comedic art form. Usually, a comedian performs in front of a live audience, speaking directly to them. Their performances are sometimes filmed for later release via DVD, the internet, and television...
as a love for wordplay, creating the template for what became recognised as contemporary British performance poetry - a format still exemplified by the work of acts such as Murray Lachlan Young
Murray Lachlan Young
Murray Lachlan Young is a British performance poet whose humorous work enjoyed a spectacular but brief vogue during the mid-1990s. He was the first poet to be given a £1 million record deal, when he signed to EMI amid a blaze of publicity in 1996. He released one album, Vice And Verse.Young was...
, Francesca Beard
Francesca Beard
Francesca Beard is a writer and performance poet.She has been based in London for much of her adult life and cites the city as a major inspiration in her work....
and Gerard McKeown
Gerard McKeown
Gerard McKeown is a writer from Ballymena, Northern Ireland. A graduate of Cumbria Institute of the Arts, he is best known for his performance poetry, which draws as much from disciplines such as stand up comedy and bardic story telling as it does poetry.He has performed as a support act for other...
. In the 90s, however, in big cities like Manchester and London, a different style emerged that was influenced more by hip hop with much less emphasis on comedy in the manner of Def Poets in the United States. Well-known writers from this evolution include Lemn Sissay
Lemn Sissay
Lemn Sissay MBE is an award-winning British author and broadcaster of Ethiopian and Eritrean parents.He is known for performances of his poetry and also with jazz fusion groups. He is a playwright, and has worked on radio and television...
and the late Dike Omeje from the Manchester scene and Roger Robinson and El Crisis from the London circuit.
On the experimental front, a number of exciting new initiatives have grown around collaborative stage work using poetry and movement. ShadoWork, for instance, aims to 'disrupt and enrich the conventional regimes of author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
, text
Book
A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...
and audience
Audience
An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature , theatre, music or academics in any medium...
' by combining (simple) theatrical
Theatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
movement with the full range of voice
Human voice
The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal folds for talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, etc. Its frequency ranges from about 60 to 7000 Hz. The human voice is specifically that part of human sound production in which the vocal folds are the primary...
and stage
Theatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
in ways designed to draw deeper attention to the text. Developments such as ShadoWork represent a 'counter-cultural' mode of performance poetry which shuns bald entertainment value, and others such as the Tell Tales initiative and Jonzi D's Lyrikal Fearta (which he calls choreo-poetry) go even further, extending spoken word to short prose productions and fusing performance poetry with dance.
British performance poetry continues to thrive at a grassroots level, with performances in pubs
Public house
A public house, informally known as a pub, is a drinking establishment fundamental to the culture of Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. There are approximately 53,500 public houses in the United Kingdom. This number has been declining every year, so that nearly half of the smaller...
and theatre
Theatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
s, as well as at arts festival
Arts festival
An arts festival is a festival that focuses on the visual arts in all its forms, but which may also focus on or include other arts.Arts festivals in the visual arts are exhibitions and are not to be confused with the commercial art fair. Artists participate in the most important of such festival...
s such as Glastonbury
Glastonbury Festival
The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, commonly abbreviated to Glastonbury or even Glasto, is a performing arts festival that takes place near Pilton, Somerset, England, best known for its contemporary music, but also for dance, comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret and other arts.The...
and The Edinburgh
Edinburgh
Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...
Fringe. Slams and open mikes remain popular and are influenced by the work of radio performance 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...
from the United States, there has also been some crossover into TV and Radio. Many contemporary British performance poets have been influenced by punk
Punk subculture
The punk subculture includes a diverse array of ideologies, and forms of expression, including fashion, visual art, dance, literature, and film, which grew out of punk rock.-History:...
poets like John Cooper Clarke
John Cooper Clarke
John Cooper Clarke is an English performance poet who first became famous during the punk rock era of the late 1970s when he became known as a "punk poet"...
and reggae
Reggae
Reggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady.Reggae is based...
poets like Linton Kwesi Johnson
Linton Kwesi Johnson
Linton Kwesi Johnson is a UK-based dub poet. He became the second living poet, and the only black poet, to be published in the Penguin Classics series. His poetry involves the recitation of his own verse in Jamaican Patois over dub-reggae, usually written in collaboration with renowned British...
as well as by comedy and hip hop. In 2003 the first UK conference of performance poetry, organised by Lucy English, was held at Bath Spa University
Bath Spa University
Bath Spa University is a university based in, and around, Bath, England. The institution was previously known as Bath College of Higher Education, and later Bath Spa University College...
. Speakers included performing poets from the United States Bob Holman
Bob Holman
Bob Holman is a poet and poetry activist in the United States.- Career :After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, Bob Holman founded, with Sara Miles and Susie Timmons, the NYC Poetry Calendar, a free monthly publication with all the readings and poets "on the same page"...
and 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...
. Bath Spa
Bath Spa University
Bath Spa University is a university based in, and around, Bath, England. The institution was previously known as Bath College of Higher Education, and later Bath Spa University College...
university now runs a performance poetry module as part of its Creative Writing programme.
See also
- List of performance poets
- Australian performance poetryAustralian performance poetryAustralian 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 from the First Fleet onwards...
- Hedwig GorskiHedwig GorskiDr. Hedwig Gorski is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as American Futurism...
- 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...
- Spoken WordSpoken wordSpoken word is a form of poetry that often uses alliterated prose or verse and occasionally uses metered verse to express social commentary. Traditionally it is in the first person, is from the poet’s point of view and is themed in current events....
- Slam PoetrySlam poetryA poetry slam is a competition at which poets read or recite original work. These performances are then judged on a numeric scale by previously selected members of the audience.-History:...
- Literary movements