Features
A New Approach to Poetry in Performance
NALD member Julia Novak, and founder and Artistic Director of Vienna Lit, has just published her new book “Live Poetry: An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance”, which aims to promote academic engagement with live poetry.
Given the increasing popularity of literary festivals, open mics, and poetry slams, one could justifiably claim that the English-speaking world is currently experiencing a Live Poetry boom.
The UK, like the USA, has recently seen the development of a dedicated live poetry scene consisting of organisations, festivals and agencies that organise poetry performances all over the country and are fully committed to the spoken word. What is new about these developments—after all, poetry readings and performances have existed for a long time—is the willingness to concede to live poetry an aesthetic value independent of print: the “spoken word” is regularly proclaimed an art form in its own right.
Yet, despite this raised awareness for the aesthetic and social potential of performed poetry, academia has barely responded, failing in the process to update and adapt its concept of poetry to meet these recent developments. Literary studies offer no systematic methodology, no analytical ‘toolkit’, to address live poetry’s distinctive characteristics. The reason for this neglect may be found in the aura of primitivism that is sometimes thought to surround the spoken word, in contrast to the more “sophisticated” medium of writing. More likely, though, it is due to the fact that live poetry bears literary, musical (speech melody, rhythm) and theatrical (mimic, gesture) features, which makes it difficult to allocate it unambiguously to traditional research disciplines and review categories. It thus seems to be situated in an undefined, liminal zone, with the result that no one feels competent or responsible for its critical examination.
Bridging this critical gap, my book provides for the first time a full methodological toolkit for the analysis of live poetry by drawing together approaches from diverse disciplines concerned with speech and forms of cultural performance. Most notably, these include literary studies, paralinguistics, musicology, kinesics, theatre and performance studies, and folklore studies. This innovative methodology is demonstrated through sample analyses based on a mixed corpus of audio and video recordings of poetry performances, as well as on personal interviews with practitioners of live poetry. There is a website to go with the book, which features many recordings of the performances referred to:
Ultimately, the aim of the book is to bring live poetry into the mainstream of literary research and criticism. After all, it should not be forgotten that scholarly engagement with live poetry touches upon an important question concerning poetry in general: that of the future development—and survival—of the genre in contemporary media cultures.
