Contemporary British Poetry Performance in Context

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.