The very name ‘poetry reading’ intimates that a poem exists before and after the occasion of its enactment before an audience (indeed, the poems are often read from a hand-held page), but ‘performance’ or ‘spoken word’ poetry is devised explicitly to ‘come to life’ before an audience. In practice, the lines between these two areas are productively blurred, especially as poems that ‘emerge’ in performance are recorded in written text for subsequent circulation. But in bald terms, a performance poet works with their own voice and body as poetic tools, drawing specifically on the fact of an audience and the specifics of performance space to determine expression and critique. Unlike the poetry reading as such – or the poetry slam (see below) – performance poets may also use costume, props and recording technology, allowing their poetry to emerge from vibrant, multi-layered, multi-media convergences. It is virtually impossible to talk about ‘performance poetry’ as a stable genre as it implies such a rich and diverse range of practices; indeed Bernstein talks about performance as fundamentally destabilising for poetry since performance is necessarily temporal and ephemeral (‘to speak of the poem in performance is, then, to overthrow the idea of the poem as a fixed, stable, finite linguistic object’, p. 9). When encountering performance poetry, one may be alert to several dimensions, often all at once. 

There is performance poetry that places emphasis on the poet’s own speaking – the poet’s accent, dialect, idiom is showcased, celebrated, and interrogated through performance – constituting a vital space for the public recognition of linguistic variations in class and nationality, a vital counter to ‘received pronunciation’ and an important widening of society’s soundscape. Such poetry works importantly with accent and speaking as aesthetically generative, aspects that can advance our understanding of the poem’s ‘content’, drawing on features covered in The Poetry Toolkit’s range of sections on ‘rhyme’ and ‘wordplay’. This kind of performance poetry provides dynamic perspectives on the issues of authorship touched on in ‘The Poetry Reading’ think piece and arguably descends – in a dynamic, combative way – from the heritage of political resistance through speech founded in various spoken-word traditions. This aspect of performance or spoken-word poetry also intersects with poetry’s relationship to the body too, not least in terms of visibility. As well as the political significance of making the body present, visible and audible (suggesting diversity and difference), the fact of the performer’s bodily, audible presence suggests exciting possibilities for allowing a poem’s prosody (its rhythm or meter) to become apparent to the ears of the audience: the sounds of these poems can be so vibrant that they almost become more about sonic energy than anything else. But this is a collective effect – it comes from the fact of the performer building that sound and rhythmscape in front of an audience (or an imagined audience in the case of recordings for YouTube or similar). Gräbner writes, with reference to Charles Olson, ‘breathing in, the poet takes in and participates in what the environment gives him; holding his breath, the poet internalizes the exterior and puts it in touch with himself; breathing out, he returns his own inner life to his environment. The rhythm and pace of a poem emerge out of this interactive practice of breathing and listening’ (p. 74). For Bernstein, this both alludes to formal systems of scanning a poem’s prosody (see The Poetry Toolkit print edition) and dismantles them: ‘regularizing systems of prosodic analysis break down before the sonic profusion of a reading’ (p. 13). Some of the most striking and significant aspects of performance poetry lie in precisely these ‘embodying’ gestures – the way that the poet emits and controls sound through their body, both in terms of enacting the poem’s specific soundscape and in terms of how they interact with received ideas about how poetry ‘should’ sound.

This point brings me to a specific type of spoken-word poetry: the poetry slam. Poetry slams emerged particularly in 1980s North America, associated with the poet Marc Smith and his ‘open-mic’ events, but now happen all over the world. Essentially, the poetry slam is a spoken-word poetry competition that takes place in a designated ‘public’ space (public in that it is in front of an audience, but that audience might be determined by membership of a particular club, or ticketed admission and so on). Classically, poets volunteer to perform their poems on stage – usually within a regulated time frame and without the use of props – and be judged by around 3-5 audience members who have been chosen to form a panel. Each performance is scored (using various matrices, such as perceived skill and audience enthusiasm) and a winner is determined by calculating those scores. Slams are very significant in the institutionalisation of spoken-word poetry – in a context where performance poets still face cultural prejudice against their ‘ephemeral’ art in favour of the so-called rigour and durability of written poetry, the ‘slam’ has sounded a note of celebration and defiance, bringing spoken-word poetry to broader audiences and generating interest through organised tournaments that network poets to audiences beyond their immediate locale. The slam’s use of various rules, such as time slots, to create a kind of ‘level playing field’ on which the poets can be judged also bears some comparison with the productive restrictions of ‘fixed form’ poetry, as discussed in The Poetry Toolkit print edition. That said, the ‘poetry slam’ is not without controversy, specifically due to its attachment to the spirit of competition and individualism (pitting one poet against another perhaps encourages division rather than collaboration) – although others would say that competitions indicate that an activity is valued by a society, and that it is a good thing if poetry and the arts can share in some of the kinds of adulation normally afforded to sport, for example. 

These remarks begin to draw attention to context – highlighting the place of performance, and the fact of audience presence. In contrast to the slam’s echo of ancient festivals of cultural celebration such as the Welsh eisteddfod (or the more modern Scottish Gaelic Mòd), here another antecedent might be discernible – twentieth-century avant garde movements that focused on ‘happenings’ (events staged for specific political and/or aesthetic purposes), such as Dadaism, surrealism and the Marxist ‘Situationist International’, a group who sought to bring a spirit of art critique to the conditions of everyday life. In this sense, the communicative-collaborative work carried out by poet and audience on the plane of rhythm opens out to the locale for the performance itself – where a performance is staged becomes important. As Zoë Skoulding writes so evocatively, ‘the poem at the moment of performance enters into relationships with its surroundings, material and social. However, these relationships are all mediated by the poem; they are changed by a text that is both present, because it is embodied, and absent, because it is contingent, momentary, and never heard in the same way twice’ (p. 247). This points towards ‘public’ or ‘site specific’ poetry: poems that are manifested in public space, where the presence of both author and audience is transient and changeable. I consider these in the ‘Public Poetry’ think piece. 

But before leaving the field of performance poetry, there is the issue of permanence. Performance poetry is, of course, importantly ephemeral – the exact conditions of a performance cannot be repeated, and performance poetry derives much of its potency from its intense relationship to temporality: it happens in time, it marks time. For some performance poets, that’s it – you had to be there, any record of it will be disingenuous. Yet this is a fairly rare attitude; more and more, using recording technology, the occasion of a poetry performance (or reading) can be captured and broadcast to many more people than could possibly have been present at the time (allowing a widening of participation). Performance poetry is often transcribed into written text too, which intriguingly allows the shape of the poem to come into view as well as earshot. This compels us to think again about the nature of performance and presence. In some sense, the original performance context persists, perhaps, in the written text, constituting one of the poem’s compositional drives and shaping its rhythm and wordplay (which may be ignited again if a reader then reads it aloud in their turn). In terms of the recorded performance (staged then online, or as a podcast, for example), then things shift again: the performer is ‘present’ again to their audience, albeit in a deferred sense. But the listener/viewer constitutes that poem’s audience in intriguing ways – on the one hand, the audience experience might be fairly straightforwardly restaged, especially if it is shown to a group. But in other cases, the viewer now watches a collective event from a position of individual privacy – watching or listening at home, on your own, on headphones. Drawing on terms from French theorist Michel Foucault, Skoulding sees this new ‘space of performance’ as a kind of ‘heterotropia’, meaning a space in which meaning is changeable, contested and disruptive, not least because the reader/viewer/listener encounters the poem ‘within the frame of other virtual interactions, flicking between it and email or other websites’ (p. 253). However, where Foucault sees these dynamics as unsettling or potentially problematic, Skoulding notes that this ‘heterotropic’ experience of space is becoming more and more normalised and usual, and that it diversifies the ground for meaning: the ‘possibilities of text and sound combinations are triggered by the viewer-reader-listener’s touch; the author and performers are absent, and the text is an unfolding set of digital connections within virtual space […] the viewer becomes co-author and co-performer in choosing a way through the text and the pace at which it is delivered’ (p. 252). 

Indeed, as poets work creatively with a diverse and changing technological landscape, this digitised, multi-media context becomes even more foregrounded. For poets such as Caroline Bergvall or Cia Rinne (who works in different media, including visual poetry), sound poetry digital files are not so much a recording of a performance, but a performance in themselves. Often working with composers of minimalist music, Rinne’s multi-layered recordings, replete with micro repetitions and echoes, open the listener’s ear to a kind of pure sonic expression.