Consuming Language: Embodiment in the Performance Poetry of bpNichol and Steve McCaffery

Abstract

What separates spoken word as an art form from the interminable spectacle of hearing a poet read a poem (be she amateur or professional) is the extent to which the artist brings a sense of performance to the event — by which I mean not only the theatrical presentation of the poem but also the manner in which the “eventness” of the poem is taken into account in the moment of its production. A public reading of a poem is often offered as a presentation of a finished work, to be appreciated by an audience, much like a painting on a wall. Spoken-word practice, in contrast, is informed by the much longer tradition of oral poetry (which I would like to call “performance poetry”), in which the audience is implicated in the social construction of meaning: rather than gazing at the painting, we are witnesses to and conspirators in its creation. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to even casually sketch out a history of what I call “performance poetry,” I believe that the example set by bpNichol and Steve McCaffery in 1982, with their performance piece The Language of Performance of Language is a touchstone, not only for avant-garde practice, but also for the more mainstream work being carried out by today’s performance poets, and deserves consideration as such.