Archived Bards The Double Life of Performance Poetry on YouTube

Abstract

YouTube is often the first port of call for anyone looking for audio-visual resources, be it a music video, film clip, educational how-to or homemade footage. Yet the novelty of convenience – being able to almost instantaneously draw up a diverse selection of content without the limitations of physical archives – obscures the user’s role in curating the very archive they are using. While YouTube is ostensibly a decentralized archive with no gatekeepers, this is at odds with the role of corporations in policing its content. Moreover, one does not simply watch a video on YouTube; the complex sets of texts that adhere to a video on the webpage - from the title to the comments, and from the view count to the recommended videos scroll – promote a mode of reading the page as a multimodal text. Performance poetry emulates its original, embodied live dynamics on the multimodal webpage. However, while these poets may be able to reach a larger audience on a more egalitarian, intimate and collaborative level, the inevitable cost is the commodification of this very authenticity in viral video advertising.