Poetry as Performance: THTR 1008

The cultural phenomenon known as slam poetry was born some twenty years ago in white working-class Chicago barrooms. Since then, the raucous competitions have spread internationally, launching a number of annual tournaments, inspiring a generation of young poets, and spawning a commercial empire in which poetry and hip-hop merge

Listening to poets read their work focuses critical attention on the craft of the poem, while raising questions about the relationship between social history, technology, and the poet's "voice." Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell offers an analysis of a wide range of recordings, from commercial and amateur, to official studio sessions, to ephemeral events captured on reel-to-reel tape. Through the mid-century performances of poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Dylan Thomas and Anne Sexton, Derek Furr draws penetrating new conclusions about how and why poetry was recorded in the U.S. from the 1930s to the 1970s.

The most interesting tensions and ambitions of twentieth-century American poetry intersect in one resonant word: voice. The term "poetic voice" emphasizes poetry's reliance on sound, which is prominent in ethnic American writings, new formalism, and many species of performance and sound-directed poetry, both mainstream and avant-garde. However, voice is also a metaphor for originality, personality, and the illusion of authorial presence within printed poetry-meanings that have been particularly useful (and provocative) in literary criticism and creative writing. In Voicing American Poetry, Lesley Wheeler explores how and why American poetry of the twentieth century and beyond keeps returning to voice as an idea, even though the term frustrates definition. Poetic voice is a crucial term precisely because of its ambiguity: both poets and critics invoke voice to argue for poetry's power. Because voice can also be a medium for poetry, this book offers a uniquely full history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry performance in the United States. Beginning with Edna St. Vincent Millay's captivating performances of presence on the page, the stage, and the radio, Wheeler investigates the rise of the academic poetry reading circuit and its various lively alternatives, from the Beats to the poetry-slam scene. Along the way Wheeler examines how Langston Hughes transformed oral culture into visual poetry, and how collaborative poetry challenges the very idea of self-expression.

Written by a leading critic, this invigorating introduction to modernist American poetry conveys the excitement that can be generated by a careful reading of modernist poems.