Performance Poetry, Covid-19 and the New ‘Public Sphere’

Abstract

At 5 pm on 20 March 2020, venues were ordered to close and the British public sphere was radically altered by Covid-19. Responding to a sudden and enforced global behavioural shift, this microhistory of Nottingham's ‘Blackdrop' collective raises urgent questions for British performance poetry outside of London. Where does the art form now belong; how does it respond to space; and can it be recreated digitally? Ultimately, finding robust answers to these types of questions will be instrumental in mapping a new public sphere for performance poetry - one which is appropriately funded, egalitarian and progressive. The ‘public sphere’ as a bourgeois concept is here broadened to accommodate performance poetry. Building on theoretical work by Jürgen Habermas, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Kamau Brathwaite, John Frow, and Cornelia Gräbner, this article deploys interviews and field research conducted between 2013 and 2020 to give an account of the lived experience of those working within the performance poetry scene in Nottingham. While the ecosystem in which performance poetry once thrived is cordoned off until further notice, an opportunity arises for the creation of a new infrastructure that is independent of the bourgeois public sphere from which the genre has historically been excluded.