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The idea of performance in poetry is conventionally associated with a live or recorded reading which provides effective dimensions to a poetic work. But a visual performance of a poetic work on a page or canvas, as a projection or sculpture, also has the qualities of an enactment, of a staged and realized event, in which the material means are an integral feature of the work. Visual performance of a poetic work has no necessary temporal, spatial, or social relation to the author or artist. This chapter presents the strategies for visual performance used in the early 20th-century poetics, where every poet put long lines of words on a page. The most obvious and established tradition of visual poetry, however, is that of the shaped or iconic work. Expressive visual means such as typography, calligraphy, painting, or collage were used in pieces whose visual features were neither iconic nor orchestral.

In the work of the London-based poet Bob Cobbing, we can sense the culmination of a global shift in the definition of concrete poetry. For Cobbing, concrete poetry became a means of transcending or evading language in order to access a space of objective communication. His work responded to a whole gamut of twentieth-century and historical forms, from ritual chant-based practices to Dada performance, to the contemporaneous sound poetry of French ‘Ultralettrists’ such as Henri Chopin, William Burroughs’s cut-ups, and auto-destructive art. The example of classical concrete poetry served more as a stylistic counterpoint than a direct influence. Cobbing’s practice was also centrally motivated by a counter-cultural belief that artistic forms which broke down boundaries between media could have more broadly, socially disruptive and revolutionary effects. The development of these sentiments is traced from Cobbing’s early production of duplicator prints during the 1940-50s to his non-semantic, performance-oriented concrete practice of the early 1970s, in which single visual poems become the basis for endless improvisatory reworking. At the close of the chapter, the non-linguistic quality of Cobbing’s work is considered as a manifestation of, and response to, broader tensions within the concrete style.

How did music – both in terms of its sound, its lyrics, and its associated recording technologies – encourage St. Mark’s affiliated poets to get their tracks on vinyl and ensure their poetry and poetics became ever more oriented towards a punk-inflected performance aesthetic? This chapter answers this question in part by turning to John Giorno. Giorno, a performance poet active in the St. Mark’s scene since the mid-1960s, who was in many ways downtown’s court jester. Star of Andy Warhol’s durational film Sleep, lover to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, founder of a pirate radio station broadcast from the bell tower of St. Mark’s Church, organizer of L.S.D fueled poetry performance parties at the Poetry Project, Giorno was perhaps the preeminent figure in the downtown scene determined to refigure poetry as populist outlaw happening. This chapter moves further by exploring how Giorno made the move to vinyl and live performance not just because of earlier examples drawn from the broader history of performance poetry, but because he was determined to mark a break from the urbane literariness associated with the first generation New York School poets.

This chapter analyzes the prose poem, Crayonné au théâtre, where Mallarmé reinvents journalism to show how all literature is a form of theatre. The poem may be understood as Mallarmé's ‘critical performance’ of poetry as the supreme art form, for it brings to the contingency of drama criticism the type of patterning which informs his verse and prose poems.

This chapter considers how education is deployed in Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican performance poetry as a tool in decolonizing activist projects. It cites the work of Los Angeles-based Filipino American and New York-based U.S. Puerto Rican performance-poet activists such as Bonafide Rojas, Rebecca Baroma, and Napoleon Lustre to show how they teach their local communities to disidentify with narratives of U.S. exceptionalism and multiculturalism in order to recognize global power hierarchies that reproduce racial and class inequality. By connecting disparate subjugated knowledge, they construct a history of oppression and resistance that they make available to their local communities. Inside and outside the classroom, they promote disidentification as a repertory strategy to challenge institutionalized histories that privilege narratives of U.S. exceptionalism and marginalize alternative narratives.

Chapter 2 explores scholarly theories that accounted for the role of kinesthetic sensations of pronunciation in the aesthetic experience of the poetic form. The Russian Formalists described the articulatory properties of various poetic styles as an objective, impersonal formal structure. They aimed to establish whether this structure takes shape during the process of verse composition and whether it impacts the subsequent oral renditions of the poem by the author and other readers. In historicizing the Formalists’ conceptions of the performative, embodied aspect of poetry, my analysis centers on the Petrograd Institute of the Living Word (Institut Zhivogo Slova) and the Laboratory for the Study of Artistic Speech under the auspices of the Institute of Art History (Kabinet Izucheniiа Khudizhestvennoi Rechi pri Institute Istorii Iskusstv) between 1919 and 1930. Their endeavor to register poetic rhythms and intonations closely resembled the methods of experimental phonetics used by the European and American phoneticians. My analysis points to numerous common sources shared by the Russian and Western authors—notably, the publications coming out from Jean-Pierre Rousselot’s laboratory of experimental phonetics. The final section of the chapter unravels the concept of “formal emotions,” proposed by the Russian Formalists, as they attempted to distance themselves from the simplistic biographic interpretations of affects encoded in literature and considered the psychomotor properties of verse from the standpoint of genre and style.

This book has investigated how Filipino American culture and U.S. Puerto Rican culture across various genres critique narratives of U.S. exceptionalism that justify U.S. colonial projects. It has shown that hegemonic narratives of U.S. multiculturalism, U.S. exceptionalism, and the good immigrant all function to define and discipline Filipino Americans and U.S. Puerto Ricans. It has described these Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural productions as all selective traditions that have been carefully deployed to affirm hegemonic U.S. narratives that imagine the end of empire as the reproduction of U.S. liberal, democratic, and capitalist values around the world. It has argued that Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural critiques such as novels, documentary films, and performance poetry challenge the eventual outcomes of benevolent assimilation, thus questioning the initial sincerity of the promises of U.S. imperialism as exceptional. They imagine a different end to empire, an end that entails the empowerment of those who have been exploited by imperialism and subsequently by globalization.

This chapter investigates how two Hmong artists musically vocalize those experiences shared by other minorities: as refugees, as persecuted subjects in the diaspora, as targets of racism, and as ethnic groups with similar forms of linguistic and musical oral traditions, from African griots to jazz and poetry slams. Brothers Vong and Tou Saiko Lee capitalize on the resonances between contemporary American art forms—such as rap and performance poetry—and the traditional arts practiced by their elders, not only to entertain audiences through spoken word poetry and rap but to educate people about Hmong history and culture. Their work raises awareness about ongoing crises in the Hmong diaspora and offers a starting point for dialogue between generations. They promote a message of community empowerment through education and respect for the older generations. The chapter concludes by finding similarities between rap and Hmong kwv txhiaj—unrehearsed, sung poetry.

This chapter discusses spoken word, slam poetry, and performance poetry. By any name, this culture and practice is both exhilaratingly new and one of the oldest forms that human beings have. This chapter, written by a practitioner largely for a nonpractitioner audience, explores some of the fundamental elements of the form, addresses common misconceptions, and attempts to illuminate what is important about this resurgence of the oral tradition. The spoken-word stage is not just a spotlight for art. Particularly in the age of digital media, it is the town square, the dance of ideas, and a far-reaching platform for public, personal, and political expression.