Abstract
The relation between performance poetry and poetry criticism, as the latter is generally practiced in newspapers and journals, appears to be strained. This is the result of a clash between two different performance traditions: on the one hand, a tradition that goes back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conventions of poetry declamation or recitation; and on the other hand, a tradition based on performance experiments carried out by avant-garde movements during the first half of the twentieth-century. This article charts the different sets of expectations associated with these traditions by analyzing how these expectations became manifest during the Dutch poetry event ‘Poëzie in Carré’ (Febraury 28th, 1966). As will become clear, individual authorship, textual unity, and poetic significance play important, yet very different roles in these two traditions. Furthermore, I put forward an alternative approach to the issue at hand, by focusing on one particular participant in ‘Poëzie in Carré,’ Johnny van Doorn (1944-1991). Thus, this article aims to contribute to a historically aware and more constructive analysis of performance poetry.
Highlights
The relation between performance poetry and poetry criticism, as the latter is generally practiced in newspapers and journals, appears to be strained
A Performative Reading of Performance Poetry. This analysis of Van Doorn’s work has several implications for the study of performance poetry in general. It sheds new light on the critical deadlock between Dutch literary criticism and performance poetry, which has been in place since the sixties, because it demonstrates that performers such as Van Doorn reveal and enact a specific cultural politics
Contrary to what Vaessens suggest, they do enter into dialogue with literary traditions. They appropriate canonical traditions and draw the attention to those forms of art which cannot be appreciated by literary critics, due to the limits of their mode of criticism
Summary
Many Dutch poets and literary scholars consider ‘Poëzie in Carré’ the breakthrough of performance poetry in a Dutch context. The first premise is that “the text represents a subject, it allows us to hear an authentic ‘voice’”; a second basic assumption entails that “even when [the poem] initially strikes the reader as chaotic, [it] will show its inner coherence on a higher level”; and the third premise states that “the poem is an ‘organic’ whole and is valued as ‘natural’ and as a source of exceptional knowledge.” (Joosten and Vaessens 21-22) The three premises identified by Joosten and Vaessens correspond to the conventions of the poetic persona, of the expectation of coherence, and of significance, as identified by Culler This suggests that the main New Critical and Structuralist assumptions about poetry continue to dominate critical discourse in the Netherlands. An analysis of the poetry of one of the performers, Johnny van Doorn, will bring out the connection between the strategies of performance and the staging of literary conventions
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