Contemporary British Poetry Performance in Context
Description
This open access volume addresses the vital role of the live event in British spoken word poetry of the past fifty years. It starts from the premise that meaning in poetry performance is radically conditioned by the performance's spatio-temporal situatedness and its specific forms of mediation: meaning emerges at the interface of text, voice action, body communication, the poet's projected stage identity, and is shaped by the unique and emergent dynamic between the poet-performer, audience, technology, and performance context. Through performance analyses that are informed by archival work and original interviews with practitioners, the book sheds new light on the dynamic and varied relationships between tradition, innovation, and mediation in British spoken word poetry. It attends to the performance work of canonical, emergent, and re-discovered figures from a range of stylistic, geographical, ethnic and socio-political constituents within the UK, exploring both avant-garde and popular forms of performed poetries.
By carefully relating individual performances to their specific event contexts, the volume sounds out the varied ways in which poets have creatively engaged with both literary and performance traditions as well as with media technologies. In the process, it addresses a number of key developments in UK poetry performance and underscores the transnational dimensions of "British" spoken word. In its entirety, the volume thus makes a pivotal contribution to the history of British poetry performance whilst also developing a critical lens through which to approach the poetry event.
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Persons
Julia Lajta-Novak is Associate Professor for Anglophone Literature and Mediality at the University of Vienna, Austria, and director of a 5-year research project on spoken word poetry in the UK and Ireland, titled "Poetry Off the Page: Literary History and the Spoken Word, 1965-2020", which is supported by the European Research Council and the Austrian Science Fund. She is the author of Gemeinsam Lesen (Lit 2007 - a book on reading groups) and Live Poetry: An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance (2011). She is on the advisory board of the book series Poetry in the Digital Age and an editor of the European Journal of Life Writing. Julia has published extensively on poetry performance and biographical fiction, including a co-edited special issue of ZAA on Poetry & Performance.
Content
Chapter 1: Introduction Tradition, Innovation, Mediation in British Poetry Performance.- Part 1: Poetic Sites and Media Channels Placing Spoken Word Poetry.- Chapter 2: Performing Poetics of Place Word on the Streets at Culture Night (Derry, 2021).- Chapter 3: Popularizing Poetry Punk Poetry, Pop Aesthetics, and Live-Streaming Poetry Slams in the UK.- Chapter 4: Spoken Word Theatre in the UK Examining its DIY potential with The Empathy Experiment and The 900 Club.- Part 2: Diasporic Voices Postcolonial Encounters in Poetry Performance.- Chapter 5: The Sonics of Discomfort Rum and Scotch at the Commonwealth Writers Conference, 1986.- Chapter 6: Postcolonial Politics in British South Asian Spoken Word Performances: Debjani Chatterjee and Nisha Ramayya.- Chapter 7: Decolonising the Archive Black Transatlantic Female Poetry Performance Revolutionaries Marsha Prescod, Jean Binta Breeze and June Jordan.- Part 3: Feminist Aesthetics to Queer Consciousness Gendering Poetry in Performance.- Chapter 8: With what voices do women poets speak Feminist Experimental Poetry Performance in the UK.- Chapter 9: From Roaring Girl to Cnto Gender Performance and Embodied Activism on the Spoken Word Stage.- Part 4: ReSounding Performance Traditions on the Poetry Stage.- Chapter 10: Curating Performance A Close Study of Allen Fisher's Fluxus inspired Poetry Event in January 1989.- Chapter 11: I dont really do poetry that much The Anti Slam as a Satirical Response to Poetry Slams.