In the ‘Poetry and/as print’ ‘think piece’ I mention how written versions of poems tend to dominate poetry study, but – as John Miles Foley explains – this places enormous emphasis on what is essentially on a very late development in human culture. In fact, a good deal of human history has been oral (print came very late, and takes time to spread); it’s just that academic study has perhaps tended to follow the rise in print and digital production and overlooked that rich, persistent culture. Some poetic forms and traditions, of course, ‘remember’ this orality especially – see The Poetry Toolkit’s sections on ‘epic’, ‘ballad, blank verse’, and ‘verse drama’ for forms that deliberately evoke oral/aural dynamics. But scholars of oral culture (or verbal art, or folklore as are some of its types) are increasingly recognising the spoken-word histories of a much broader range of world-shaping literatures too, including the Judeo-Christian Bible and European lyric. And, of course, some parts of the world have been better at sustaining oral traditions despite the rise of print culture: verbal art from Africa, Asia, and Native American cultures are now quite widely studied, and the oral cultures of Northern Europe, central and southern America and other parts of the globe are increasingly recognised and recorded. More latterly, developments in twentieth-century cultural and political life proved significantly fertile spaces for performance and orality to come to the fore once more, both aesthetically and politically. Groups such as the ‘Wobblies’ (Industrial Workers of the World), the Beat poets, the ‘Liverpool poets’, and the Civil Rights movement prominently used spoken-word poetry and song, avant garde practices, poetry readings, slams and music/poetry crossover to communicate and create community. 

Of course, print and oral cultures aren’t mutually exclusive: poetry’s relationship with speaking, singing, reciting, and performance persists despite the rise of print, and poets who work in verbal forms most often choose to do so from a position of literacy (the ability to read and write). Indeed, the rise of the internet and the capacity of digital recording has, if anything, increased the orality of our culture. We are now able to access infinite instances of verbal performance quite easily to watch and listen online. Meanwhile, sophisticated scholarship together with creative practice is increasingly allowing us to ‘hear’ ancient verbal art as we learn how to derive oral/aural cues from various records of early song and poetry and thereby enable new recordings to be made. 

This growing ‘verbal culture’ raises interesting questions for how we approach poetry. As Foley and his contributors explore, recognising orality requires us to learn new techniques – or to recognise that the ones we already have are important in new ways. It means opening up our ears and mouths as critical ‘tools’ for study, listening and speaking attentively. It means looking to how we might connect spoken-word poetry with other practices: as John Hall asks, ‘is there a genealogy for this extraordinary mode of often solitary performance, which bears traces of song and movement, of story-telling and of communal remembering and is mistakable sometimes for modes of individual prayer?’ (p. 141) (We might think of religious preachers, African praise poems, or Jewish methods of reading and incanting the Torah.) But recognition of orality as meaningful is also a significant ideological and political shift – it means re-thinking literary value, and opening up the canon not only to a much more global picture of poetic production, but also to non-traditional forms of poetry closer to home. It actually makes traditional practices such as prosody and poetry scanning even more important as we look for ways to ‘attune’ our ears and bodies poetically to oral/aural dynamics (addressed in detail in The Poetry Toolkit print edition and through the ‘poetry readings’ section of this website), and it means thinking seriously about different settings where poetry might be read or performed. Here I don’t offer ‘readings’ of specific poetry readings or performances (I urge you to follow the links to poetry performances in the side bar, and to search beyond these yourself). Instead I offer some critical contexts that you might keep in mind as you listen, watch and even perform in oral culture yourself. In this sense, I am suggesting some critical tools that might help you to develop an analytical perspective of your own, a way of recovering and articulating the power of verbal performance. I address some of these different settings in the think pieces on ‘The Poetry Reading’, ‘Performance / Spoken-Word Poetry’ and ‘Public Poetry’; here is a list of ‘critical issues’ you might consider when engaging with these types of poetry:

• Is the reader reading their own work?

• Authorship and identity 

• The audience response

• The politics of the space

• The use of prosody, the poem’s ‘sounding’

• Does the poem ‘sound different’ from expectation, are changes made? 

• How is the poet controlling sound, rhythm, pitch, tone, tempo?

• How is sound made – with the body, or augmented with types of technology?

• Is a written text available? How does the performance relate to that written text?

• Visibility / invisibility

• Silence / speaking