Performance poetry

Poetry in oral cultures

Performance poetry is not solely a postmodern phenomenon. It began 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, alliteration, rhyme and kennings to facilitate memorization and recall.^[1]

Advent of printing

The advent of printing changed 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 plays in verse.

Contemporary

Modern performance poetry, made to be performed before an audience dates back to Dada, although the term itself emerged later.

On June 23, 1916, Hugo Ball performed one of the first sound poems, Gadji beri bimba at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, dressed in a cardboard costume so that he had to be carried onto the stage.^[2]

The early years of the 20th century saw a general questioning of artistic forms and conventions. Poets like Basil Bunting and Louis Zukofsky called for a renewed emphasis on poetry as sound. 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 primarily on spoken human breath.^[3]

During the 1950s, the American poet Cid Corman began to experiment with what he called oral poetry. This involved spontaneously composing poems into a tape recorder. Allen Ginsberg took up the 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 happenings.

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.

1940s-1950s

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.

1960s

Poetry readings were given national prominence in the United States when Robert Frost recited "The Gift Outright" from memory at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy^[4]. After that event, spoken word recordings enjoyed increased popularity.

1970s

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 two 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 categorized as songs.

While Ginsberg 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.^[5] 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.^[6] Unlike Antin and Cormin, Gorski never improvised text but wrote poetry only for performance while eschewing printed poetry.

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,^[5] is the only woman, besides Patti Smith, 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.

Marty Watt was a Philadelphia performer who gained prominence at the beginning of the 1970s.^[7] Curator Sid Sachs notes that Watt performed at Middle Earth Books in Philadelphia in 1972, where Patti Smith also performed that year.^[8] Watt recited from memory and used theatrical stagecraft that was rarely seen at a conventional poetry reading.^[9][10] In January 1976, he made his Washington debut in a three-night stand at the Washington Project for the Arts.^[11] Kriegsman described Watt as a “spaced-out poet, actor, mime and super cut-up” who had already achieved a certain renown in the poetry circuit.^[11] He wrote that Watt had “created an unclassifiable format of his own. Part recital, part sideshow, part seance. To call it a poetry reading would be like calling King Kong a nature film.”^[11] The three-night series was also praised in The Washington Star.^[9]

1980s

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 such as raúlrsalinas, Konstantyn K. Kuzminsky, Joy Cole, Hedwig Gorski, Roxy Gordon, Ricardo Sánchez and 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, poet and playwright Isabella Russell-Ides (Getting Dangerously Close To Myself, Slough Press) and David Jewell; 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 was less interested in the Beat Poets of the 1950s and 1960s. They were looking for something fresher, newer, hipper, more in touch with the times in which they were living. 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^[12] 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 Jam 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. 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, audio "mediums influence the way poets write just as they do painters and sculptors".

1990s

However, the increasing popularity of open mics, which allow "unknown" poets to take the stage and share their own work in 3- to 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.

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, 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.^[13]

Today

Today, performance poetry is also being used as a means to promote literacy in public school systems. Global Writes Inc. has been incorporating technology, such as videoconferencing and podcasts, into literacy programs as a means for students to share their poetry. Performance poetry also provides avenues for students to perform their poems onstage.^[14]