CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Archivio istituzionale della ricerca - Università di Macerata UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MACERATA DIPARTIMENTO di STUDI UMANISTICI CORSO DI DOTTORATO DI RICERCA IN Studi Linguistici, Filologici, LetterAri CICLO XXXII TITOLO DELLA TESI Performance Poetry A TActile-KinestHetic Poiesis RELATORE DOTTORANDO ChiAr.mo Prof. Valerio MAssimo de Angelis Dott. Irene PolimAnte COORDINATORE ChiAr.mo Prof. Giuseppe Nori ANNO 2020/2021 (quello della discussione finale) 1 Contents Introduction 3 Chapter 1. Performance Poetry and the Contemporary “Humming Sphere” 12 1. Historical and Literary Background. 12 2. Performing Poetry: Cartographies of a Work in Progress. 22 3. Beyond the “Great Divide.” 31 Chapter 2. Performance: A “Dark Horse”? 38 1. Performance: A Semantic Paradox. 38 2. Performance and Theatre: Historical Background. 48 3. Performance and Poetry. 55 4. Performance Poetry: Theoretical Issues 70 4.1. The Transitional Spaces of Performativity and Textuality 72 4.2. “Presentness” and the Experience of the Real 77 4.3. Poet-Performer: Author, Character, and Lyric I 82 Chapter 3. Body, Performativity, and Poetry 91 1. The “Return of the Body” 91 2. Habitus and Gesture 97 3. From “Natural Body” to Tactile-Kinesthetic Interface 107 4. “Brainlingo: Connecting Tissues” 117 4.1. Workshop’s Structure and Analysis 125 2 Chapter 4. A “Remediation” of Poetry 137 1. “To Be Twice as an Outsider” 137 2. Tributes: The Poet as “Object-Protagonist” 141 2.1. Lawrence Ferlinghetti 141 2.2. Bobbie Louise Hawkins 146 3. Book Launches: The Poet as “Subject-Protagonist” 153 3.1. Poetic Trans-Positions 157 4. Vision Festival 162 5. Conclusions: A Performative and Tactile-Kinesthetic Poiesis 165 Bibliography 175 Web Sites 200 3 Introduction Performers assert that the poem exists in multiple forms, that the reading of a poem is the thing itself just as the printed text is. If you’ve learned your poetry from hip hop and slams and television, it’s obvious the book does not “contain” the poem –it transmits it. When you read a poem, just as when you read a play, the words begin their work on you. Unlike the dialogue in a play, the words in a poem are not spoken by characters […] the words are the characters […] Whether read silently to one’s self or aloud to others, a poem is made as it connects the consciousness of poet and reader/listener. A poem isn’t written until it is read and heard. (Bob Holman, Burning Down the House, 2000) As Louis Armand aptly claims in the introduction to the volume Contemporary Poetics, “contemporary” and “poetics” are two terms that “taken separately or together, signify a field of discourse which remains today both problematic and highly contested within the disciplines of philology, applied poetics, and literary studies” (Armand 2007, xiii), as well as in those numerous fields where poetry may be found tangentially related to technology (i.e.: aesthetics, digital humanities, media studies, performance studies, cultural studies, and philosophy). In this relation between poetry, as both poetics and praxis, and the technological present, Armand refers to contemporary poetics as a way to both study and respond to the current technological “emplacement of language and the material basis of this emplacement as an ‘object’ of poetic investigation, practice, and above all technique” (Armand 2007, xiii). In this sense, the relationship between the contemporary and its many poetries and poetics does not imply the delineation of a specific historical and literary period but should rather be conceived in terms of a “condition of writing,” of a “poetic enterprise” (Armand 2007, xiii). Thus, by extending the critical discourse beyond the current literary activity, Armand posits 4 that it is possible to investigate the limits of the poetic writing practice, while re-negotiating the terms of the old dichotomy between poetics and praxis, since the two are now deeply intertwined thanks to, or because of, digital and technological devices. Such an emphasis on the aesthetic and philosophical implications of the writing practice might be useful to problematize assertions of literary historicity, in order to serve as a starting point for an in- depth analysis of the increasing fragmentation of the current poetic scenario, which is one of the consequences of the digital revolution. In this light, talking about poetic form and aesthetic means to address problematic issues of both social and political nature (Oliver 1989; Sheppard 2016), since “poetry is never neutral and purely aesthetic, and it is never free from the society where it is produced and received.”1 Therefore, working with lines, white spaces, and signs of punctuation is not a mere choice of style but a historical and cultural act of (re)action, as Marjorie Perloff widely highlights in her account of the “so-called freedom of free verse” by historicizing the response to lineation: In a contemporary context of one-liners on the television screen and computer monitor as well as lineated ads, greeting cards, and catalog entries, the reader/viewer has become quite accustomed to reading “in lines.” Indeed, surfing the Internet is largely a scanning process in which the line is rapidly replacing the paragraph as the unit to be accessed. (Perloff 1998, 145) Looking at the recent history of this genre, from the advent of concrete poetry, the reemergence of popular poetry, and the many types of digital poems—kinetic poems, multimedia poems, interactive poems, e-poems, etc.— some of the consequences of that “epistemological transformation” (Gioia 2003, 3) brought about by the proliferation of electronic technology in “communication, storage, and retrieval of information” (Gioia 2003, 1) reveal a radical change in contemporary language production and reception, as well as in the narrative frameworks of today’s literary discourse. The digital revolution has seriously challenged our conception of time, by de-structuring and re-framing “concepts of ‘presence’ 1 Excerpt from Dorothy Wang’s inaugural speech at the two-days conference Poetry Studies Now, April 26, 2019, Martin E. Segal Theatre, The Graduate Center (CUNY), NY. 5 and the ‘present’” (Armand 2007, xvi), with the consequent shifting from literary media to communication media.2 Such a “translation” is not only deeply affecting the literary device – due to the tendency to suppress temporal elements in the name of a continuous, uninterrupted, digital present– but it is also demanding new reading practices and a new idea of poetry as well. With reference to the blog-poem –a poem that often does not look like a poem, but it is more similar to an entry3– Tan Lin notes that the idea of a poem as a finished object, that stands on its own, has disappeared. A thought shared by Adalaide Morris when she comments: Unlike traditional print poetry, finally, new media poems are not often lineated or rhymed, do not necessarily maintain stable or consistent configurations, and seem by nature to bend—if not break—the founding constraints of the lyric as violently as hypermedia, computer games, and interactive fiction bend or break the constraints of narrative. (Morris 2006, 7) In this hypertextual, multimodal, inter-connected framework, poems can exist in many different configurations and likewise live in numerous media at the same time. Whether readers become listeners, viewers, participants, or “users,” “operators,” “interactors,” who cross, navigate, and/or reconfigure the electronic poetic text, poems break the constraints of form and genre, generating “new media compositions” (Morris 2006, 7). Indeed, the technological revolution has been intensifying poetry’s qualities of plasticity and porosity, while it has been re-framing the experience of writing. In this complex and heterogeneous context, where both people and texts live inside and outside the digital world, two pillars of the poetic discourse seem to have been shaken: form and genre. If form and genre are not operative terms anymore, if they do not work in terms of model nor structure for poets’ operative actions, then the poem turns into a medium. It becomes both a transmission mode and a research tool to investigate new concepts of writing. Poets explore new forms of 2 From Tan Lin’s speech at the same conference, day one. 3 Ibidem. 6 expression which question language and the very writing practice itself. And poetry becomes a field for artistic experimentation, that problematizes the différance of, in, and among the arts, while blurring and merging the new with the old, language with sculpture, sound with body, movement with image, silence with presence, etc. In this light, a dissertation on performance poetry becomes a field of literary, historical, and cultural inquiry. What does it mean to go back to the body, to the spoken word, in the digital age? Is performance a praxis, a poetics, both of them, or, what? Moreover, previous studies on the influence of communications technologies on our cognitive abilities have shown how the digital devices are profoundly shaping our mental processing system in terms of construction of knowledge, elaboration of our subjectivity/subjectivities, definitions of behavioral patterns, and mechanisms of social interaction.4 In his study of the modern mind, Merlin Donald claims that we are living a third cognitive evolution, in which we have become “symbol-using, networked creatures, unlike any that went before us” (Donald 1991, 382). Our minds function on several phylogenetically new representational planes, none of which are available to animals. We act in cognitive collectivities, in symbiosis with external memory systems. As we develop new external symbolic configurations and modalities, we reconfigure our own mental architecture in nontrivial ways. The third transition has led to one of the greatest reconfigurations of cognitive structure in mammalian history, without major genetic change. In principle, this process could continue, and we may not yet have seen the final modular configuration of the modern human mind.