Performance Poetry
Performance poetry is a form of poetry that is written to be performed aloud, often with elements of rhythm, music, and theatricality. It emphasizes the oral and aural aspects of poetry, engaging the audience through the use of voice, gesture, and emotion. Performance poets often use their work to address social and political issues, and their performances can be powerful and impactful.
6 Key excerpts on "Performance Poetry"
- Wolfgang Gortschacher, David Malcolm, Wolfgang Gortschacher, David Malcolm(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...It is the kind of poetry which is improvised or composed specifically to be performed before a live audience and in public spaces. In modern Britain, it came to prominence as “oral poetry,” in the 1960s. In contrast to concrete poetry, Performance Poetry has rapidly developed since then, becoming one of the most popular forms of literature of today. More and more poets think of their poems as essentially designed for voice. Giving live performances, reciting, singing, acting, involving the audience—this is how the American Beatniks propagated their work. The City Lights black‐and‐white pocketbooks have become legendary, but more important to the spirit of their verse were public readings, including the most famous one, at the Six Gallery in October 1955, when Ginsberg recited Howl. A few years earlier Dylan Thomas toured America, giving poetic performances to mass audiences. The stress put on the poet's voice was only a starting point for the development which we now call Performance Poetry. Poets soon enriched their readings by multimedia activities, using all kinds of props and costumes, introducing quasi‐theatrical acting, merging their poems with music. In many cases what was at stake was the personality of the poet—the ideal of impersonal poetry, identified (too hastily) with Eliot and propagated by New Criticism and the academy, was contradicted by the poet standing in front of the audience, adding to poetry his or her personal traits: his emotions and temperament, his energy, wit, and charm. Among the pioneers who propagated Performance Poetry in Britain was Michael Horovitz, the leading figure of the Underground, poet and editor of two anthologies, Children of Albion (1969) and Grandchildren of Albion (1992)...
eBook - ePubPage to Stage
Developing Writing, Speaking And Listening Skills in Primary Schools
- James Carter(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- David Fulton Publishers(Publisher)
...But it also seeks to give teachers – and ultimately children – a range of stimulating activities in which they can perform poetry as individuals, as groups or as a whole class – either in the classroom, or in assemblies or in school concerts. When working in this way as an ensemble of performers, children become a ‘poetry choir’ – each performing a variety of roles – perhaps taking a lead role, or as part of a chorus, or even contributing some live music to the performance. Some children are more confident with oral activities and may relish the opportunity to read poems and to bring them to life rather than sit down and write their own pieces. Now that drama is rarely more than the Christmas play or panto, poetry can give teachers the chance to engage in a wealth of speaking and listening activities, to consider text in performance and to bring out performance skills that would otherwise lie dormant or never be used at all. And actually, with some of the pieces in this book the boundaries between verse and dramatic text are blurred – Harold Munro’s ‘Overheard on a Saltmarsh’ and Paul Fleischman’s ‘Fireflies’ are poems that can be performed as short dramatic pieces. On a personal note, perhaps the best compliment I have had as a performance poet was from a Year 6 boy in a school near Coventry. He said, ‘When you perform it’s like we’re inside the poem with you.’ Wow! – what a lovely thing to be told. And what an astute and indeed poetic way of describing the experience of listening to poetry being performed...
eBook - ePub- Timothy Gura, Benjamin Powell(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This does not mean that you get carried away with your emotions. Remember to leave room in your performance for the audience. But in your earliest preparation, go ahead and indulge in complete subjectivity. Get to know how everything feels. Your task in performance will be to share the experience in the poem—not to display your personal sensitivity. This sharing requires intelligent control of technique. The more your listeners focus on the material and are unaware of your presence, the more successful your performance will be. Dramatic Poetry Many contemporary critics take the position that all poetry is dramatic because speaking is itself an action, because it concerns a person or persons, and because it contains a distinct development or revelation. This approach to analysis can prove helpful. Our discussion of dramatic poetry concerns works that center on a character who is in conflict with internal or external forces and whose development is revealed without a third-person narrator. There are four types of dramatic poetry: dramatic narrative, dramatic lyric, dramatic monologue, and soliloquy. Although these terms are often used interchangeably, the four types vary slightly in emphasis on character and situation. Knowing the differences among them helps in deciding on the degree of physical and vocal characterization that is necessary for performance. In each case the persona is an identifiable character who speaks directly to an audience, or thinks aloud, or talks to other characters involved in a dramatic situation. Physical setting and historical period are often important considerations. A dramatic narrative is a poem in which the incidents or series of incidents are related by a participant who is affected by the events described. You often find dramatic narratives collected into longer works that explain complex natural or supernatural events...
- Audrey A. Trainor, Elizabeth Graue, Audrey A. Trainor, Elizabeth Graue(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...14 Poetics and Performance Monica Prendergast and George Belliveau The past decade or so has led to a flourishing of poetic and performance-based qualitative research (for bibliographies on each approach, see Prendergast, 2009a, 2009b; Beck, Belliveau, Lea, & Wager, 2011). Researchers have turned to these arts-based approaches for many reasons and from varied theoretical perspectives. However, the majority of poetic and performance studies could be seen as engaging in the work of art and also in carrying out the work of social science in innovative and interdisciplinary ways. The challenges inherent to the review process of poetic or performance-based inquiries, or creative submissions in other related alternate forms, is one that has been debated in conference settings, between colleagues, and in the literature (Ackroyd & O'Toole, 2010; Faulkner, 2007, 2010; Gallagher, 2007; Piirto, 2002; Saldaña, 2003, 2005; Sullivan, 2009). In all cases, however, we believe that it is imperative for reviewers to attend to both scholarly and aesthetic aspects of the work. Reviewers less familiar with poetic or performance approaches will find this chapter useful in presenting selected key terms and qualitative touchstones that attend to the necessary vigor required of a peer-reviewed publication and the attendant aesthetic qualities present in a successful poetry-or performance-based study. As researchers who have made numerous contributions to each arts-based range of methods under discussion here—and who have also surveyed these approaches through meta-analyses—we are well placed to consider the challenges of reviewing poetic and performance research studies (see relevant citations under Belliveau and Prendergast in References). Select Terms Ethnotheater and ethnodrama are defined most often as modes of dissemination of data gathered and analyzed using traditional qualitative research tools such as action research, narrative, interviews, and field notes...
eBook - ePubCreativity and Writing
Developing Voice and Verve in the Classroom
- Teresa Grainger, Kathy Goouch, Andrew Lambirth(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Poetry is also read with the ear, as the word patterns, inherent rhythms and rhymes are heard on the inner and outer ear and the sounds and savours of words and syntax are experienced aurally. Poetry is tasted on the tongue, and can be ‘a diet of pleasure and a meal of words’ (Grainger, 1998) for the mouth is ‘a theatre in miniature in which we physically enact a poem in terms of sound’ (Dias and Heyhoe, 1988:11). Poetry is also felt: its pulse can make hands clap and toes tap and it may prompt gesture and other movement. Performance Poetry in particular employs movement as central to its meaning making. Mode shifting Readers explore poems from multi-sensory and multi-dimensional perspectives, so opportunities to tap into poetry’s multimodal potential and shift across modes need to be made available in the classroom. Ted Hughes explains how the inner qualities of poetry are borrowed from other forms of expression and are brought into being through the senses. [The poet] can be excited by countless varied feelings. And his inner singing and dancing fit the feelings. But because he is a poet, and full of words, his song-dance doesn’t break into real song, as it would if he were a musician…it breaks into words. And the dance and the song come out somewhere in the words. The dance makes the words move in a pattern, which we call meter and versification. The song makes the sound of the lines rise and fall against each other, which we call the music of poetry or the cadence. (Ted Hughes, 1963:11–12) The written form of poetry, with its own multimodal possibilities, offers a dynamic harbour for the creative act of transduction (Kress, 2003); if a poem is responded to through other modes of communication, its meaning and theme will be reconfigured according to the affordances of the other modes. Examples of a conscious and deliberate shifting of modes may help to illuminate our argument...
eBook - ePub- Paul Heilker, Peter Vandenberg, Paul Heilker, Peter Vandenberg(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Utah State University Press(Publisher)
...Performance KT TORREY In writing studies, performance is ancient and noveau, fundamental and restored, once absent but always present. “In its simplest terms,” performance is “an action, a taking on of some act”; thus, “if writing is always an action,” Ryan Claycomb (2008) argues, then “it is also a performance.” For Candace Spigelman, “every writing is, to a great or lesser extent, a rhetorical performance” (Spigelman 2004, 49). Caroline Bergvall regards writing as “a textual performance” that takes place “on and through the space of the page” (Bergvall 1999, 112). For Stephen Greenblatt, composition is an action and “writing. . . a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig” (Greenblatt 2007, 40). Charles Bazerman, however, suggests that these definitions are too broad; for him, it is only the “meaningful text” that “is always a performance” (Bazerman 2003, 382). For some, the term performance is the contemporary cousin of delivery in ancient rhetoric, that “two way process” between “the speaker or writer delivering the text and the audience delivering its response” (Skinner-Linnenberg 1997, 43). Indeed, Greek society cast “rhetoric as a “bodily art. . . learned, practiced, and performed by and with the body as well as the mind” (Hawhee 2002a, 144, emphasis in original). According to Jenn Fishman et al. (2005), though these connections were integral to rhetorical practice through the eighteenth century, “the growing hegemony of writing through the nineteenth century obscured the body and performance. . . [thus] shifting attention away from oral and embodied delivery to textual production of the printed page” (228). In this way, “writing broke away from oral performance” (Ong 1975, 12). This break transformed the meaning of performance for rhetoric and served to define the term within early composition studies. “For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” Shelley Manis writes, performance “has referred overwhelmingly to skill and assessment. . ...
