Global Rhythms: Setting the Stage for World Poetry in 1960s London

Abstract

This article locates the origins of contemporary understandings of world poetry in a set of institutions and poetic practices that developed in the 1960s, as evinced by a series of performances in London at that time, including the 1965 International Poetry Incarnation, organized by Allen Ginsberg; Andrei Voznesensky’s near-simultaneous performance at the Theatre Royal Stratford; Kamau Brathwaite’s 1967 performance of Rights of Passage at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre; and a 1969 bilingual performance of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, directed by John La Rose. The concerns of the Caribbean Artists Movement, which sponsored the latter two performances, seem far from the Cold War and counterculture context of the International Poetry Incarnation. Yet both took inspiration from the theatrical performances of Russian poets like Voznesensky. Such surprising interconnections reflect a newly self-conscious poetic internationalism, for which Voznesensky, Ginsberg, Brathwaite, and La Rose all sought a formal embodiment in the global rhythms of the performed and tape-recorded word.