Poetry beyond the page, or performance poetry as it is commonly called, refers to poetry that is performed, recorded, spoken, or published in multimedia formats. It involves the creation, activation, enactment, or engineering of a poem in a space outside of a traditionally printed page.

Poetry readings are examples of poetry taking place beyond the page. In the last 100 years, poetry readings have segued through various formats: salon, cabaret, theater, open mic, festival, feature, audio, film, hypertext, hypermedia, machine generation, and an infinite variety of expressions of these within numerous aesthetic demarcations and ideologies. Poetry readings bring poets into contact with the public and with each other.

Poetry beyond the page is an ideal way to converse and experiment with conceptual, linguistic, and technological developments in the 20th and 21st centuries. It has become an alternative place of communal gathering for the sharing of poetry.

The terms performance poetry, sound poetry, and multimedia, or new media poetry, are most commonly used to describe different types of poetry beyond the page. Performance poetry can be divided into several genres—spoken word, oral narrative or ballad, theatrical, slam, hip-hop, embodied, signed, sound or enacted poetry—and may involve a fusion with other media such as music, video, dance, or technology (see French Rap; Arab Rap and Hip Hop Culture; Écriture).

The label performance poetry is often used to indicate that poetry is being acted out in some way: through voice, dramatic styles (e.g., comedy, cabaret), or a familiarized text (i.e., one that may or may not be memorized but with which the poet is familiar enough to engage the audience). Performance poetry is culturally defined and is expressed differently in different cultures. In general, performance is not something bestowed on poetry to create the phenomenon known as a performance poem but instead is intrinsic to the creation of the work, even if the performance comes later.

When writing a poem for publication outside of a book, poets consider medium, space, language, and audience. For example, a poem written for a Flash™ animation would be different from one performed on a stage at a festival. The form of a poem beyond the page has few traditions outside of the various ballad forms of history.

Performance poets are part of an alternative canon to traditional published poetry. This canon includes ancient Greek epics, the opera tradition of the Southern Song dynasty (1179–1276) in China, and the griot (or storytelling) traditions of Africa. The ancient Indian civilization produced the Mahabharata, one of the largest oral narratives ever composed and recorded.

The potential for orality to engage with language, the sonic imperatives contained within the utterance, and the textual features of form, rhythm, image, tone, and rhyme—all combine to make performance poetry an alternative site for experimentation within poetry today. The performance of poetry on the Internet has helped create another expression of poetry beyond the page. Performance poetry is an integrated, unique medium that clearly demonstrates a capacity to reinvigorate contemporary poetry.

One style of performance poetry that is growing increasingly popular is slam poetry. Poetry slams are competitive performance poetry events that follow a particular format started in Chicago in 1986. The idea for slam emerged from the “Poetry Bouts” in Chicago and New York in the early 1980s, in which poets dressed up as boxers and “fought” with poems until a winner was declared. This format still exists today and is sometimes called the Taos poetry bout.

Slam poetry in the United States has largely followed the same set of rules since 1986. A slam poetry evening in the United States, and increasingly other parts of the world, involves poets signing up for a three-round poetry “bout” where poets are given up to three minutes to recite a poem and the most successful poets in each round progress to the final round, when a winner is chosen.

Before the competition starts, the emcee chooses three judges randomly from the audience, and after poets have recited their poems, the judges give them a score (out of a maximum 10 points) for their performance and the quality of the poem. The overall winner is then eligible for a spot on a registered venue’s team to compete in the National Poetry Slam Competition. During the year, various heats are held at a venue, which culminate in a night’s competition where finalists vie for spots on a team. The top four slammers from a venue form the official team. At the national finals, teams compete against each other by accruing individual scores to make up a team score. The same process of judging is used nationally, culminating in the selection of an overall winning team and top individual poet.

Oral poetry competitions can be traced at least as far back as 390 B.C., when Plato was writing about verse contests in Ion, where Socrates discusses Ion’s performance in a contest of the Rhapsodes held during the festival of Asclepius. The idea of competitive performance poetry traverses many cultures and time periods.

Between Plato and slam lie the early troubadours and jongleurs of medieval and early-Renaissance Europe who competed for court favors and reputation. One of the longest-running traditions of oral poetry competitions can be found in Welsh and Celtic culture, where bardic competitions have run for at least 2,000 years.

In medieval and Renaissance Scotland, a form of verse quarreling known as flyting was popular, as poets won competitions by delivering the cleverest, most abusive poem in the most complex verse forms. Latino Décima poets practicing in the mid-16th century (with their medieval Spanish and Moorish roots) were judged on their improvisational skills, the accuracy of their compositions, and their ability to outwit their opponents.

African griots sing ritual songs and summon spirits as part of a tradition that supports wandering storytellers who are expected to know their particular village’s life and history in intimate detail. They seek the favors of kings and businesspeople to fund their craft, though most of them have ordinary jobs when they are not being griots. This tradition continues in Africa today and has been in existence for hundreds of years. In Australia, there has been a competitive performance poetry cup run in Tasmania since 1984.

Poetry beyond the page is not necessarily contingent on orality, however, as it may be expressed through the sign language of deaf poets, dance, music, or new media. At the same time that slam poetry was being developed in the mid-1980s, the increasing accessibility of the Internet and CD-ROM publishing created spaces for authors to begin experimenting with different types of poetry.

The most popular of these early electronic forms was developed using hypertext and hypermedia. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (Additions Series), hypertext is a text “which does not form a single sequence and which may be read in various orders; specially text and graphics . . . which are interconnected in such a way that a reader of the material (as displayed at a computer terminal, etc.) can discontinue reading one document at certain points in order to consult other related matter.” Hypermedia, on the other hand, extend the text through other media, such as graphics, sound, or animation.

Of the hypermedia forms, poetry written in Shockwave® and AdobeFlash® programs are emerging as the most popular forms on the Internet. Although hypertext has been around since 1968, it did not become a significant literary tool until the mid-1980s.

Sound poetry, or text-sound as it is sometimes called, is poetry that uses verbalization of sound as poetic content that may or may not be based on words. This kind of poetry has a heritage that stems back to ancient chants but has become increasingly focused on the nonlingual elements of text in the 20th century.

Repetition, fast-talking, nonsense, nonmelodic choral voice work, partial words, percussive expulsions, imitation, and interpretation of social noise—all feature extensively in the work of sound poets. The tradition of contemporary text sounding is said to stem from Arnold Schoenberg’s Sprechgesang. Sound poetry is sometimes scored in a tradition that blends elements of concrete poetry, musical composition, and visual art, informed particularly by the dadaists, e.g., Tristan Tzara, André Breton, and Louis Aragon.

Audio poetry is distinct from sound poetry and spoken word because it positions itself in relation to music. Poets compose music (or sound) and text to create poetry. Music may be used as subtext, as a way to convey other meanings, or as a soundtrack to provide a musical score to a poem in the same way that music scores a film. Other practitioners of audio poetry believe that meaning is conveyed in both sound and language and that, used together, they can create a different kind of aurally fused poetry.

Poetry beyond the page takes many forms and is a growing area of practice for an increasing number of contemporary poets. The diversity of poetry’s expression demonstrates that it is a flexible and dynamic art that will continue to evolve and expand.

Categories: Literature

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