Performance Poetry Research Articles

“The Sound Behind the Mask”: Translanguaging Performance Poetry for Learner Development

s a language instructor, researcher, and poet in Japan, I have experienced challenges in practicing arts-based pedagogy. Constrained by fixed proficiency benchmarks and summative assessments, my arts-based pedagogy in ELT often becomes too focused on product over process. Consequently, I wanted to explore the ways in which arts-based pedagogy could support language learner development in a more flexible context, integrating translanguaging into this pedagogical approach to amplify learners’ existing semiotic resources and their multimodal journeyings in language learning. Here, I share understandings developed through an exploratory process with “Mohan,” an international student participant in a translanguaging arts-based workshop series implemented in collaboration with a university self-access learning center, a follow-up focus group, and two one-to-one discussions. Our dialogue probed the creative process and Mohan’s subsequent linguistic development, anchored by his artworks and his experience as a student facilitator at the center. Throughout, the metaphors and symbols from his artworks became touchstones to which we referred to understand the shifts in his language development. These materials served as a crystallization of Mohan’s mindset at the moment of creation, becoming an anchoring framework through which to identify the benefits of translanguaging arts-based approaches as well as future directions for development. 日本で語学講師、研究者、詩人として活動する中で、アートベースの教授法の実践に関して多くの課題に直面している。英語教育(ELT)におけるアートベースの教授法は、定められた達成基準や総括的評価に制約されるため、プロセスよりも成果に焦点を当てすぎる傾向がある。そこで、アートベースの教授法がより柔軟なコンテクストでどのように言語学習者の発展を支援できるかを探りたいと考える。また、その際、言語学習において学習者の既存の記号資源とマルチモーダルな探求を促進するために、この教育アプローチにトランスランゲージングも取り入れる。本稿では、留学生Mohanととともに、1) 大学のセルフ・アクセス・ラーニング・センターと協力して実施したトランスランゲージング・アートワークショップ、2) ワークショップ参加者とのフォーカス・グループ、3) 2回実施した1対1のディスカッションの3つの探索的プロセスで得た理解を共有する。Mohanと著者との対話では、アート作品とセンターでの学生ファシリテーターとしての経験に基づいて、彼の創造的なプロセスとその後の言語的発達について探る。作品に現れる比喩や象徴は、彼の変化の性質を理解するための重要な手がかりとなる。これらの素材は、Mohanの創作の瞬間の考え方を結晶化したものであり、トランスランゲージング・アートベースのアプローチの利点、および今後に向けた改善点や発展の方向性を結びつけるためのフレームワークとなる。

The importance of performance poetry pedagogy in the Grade 11 English FAL classroom: What is lost in its absence?

This article spotlights the interconnection between poetry as performance arts and adolescents’ identity as performance. It does this through an analysis of four lesson observations conducted in a Grade 11 English First Additional Language (FAL) classroom in a black township school in Gauteng province, South Africa. The analysis aimed to assess what was lost when a teacher failed to apply a performance poetry pedagogy in the English FAL poetry classroom. Using Erikson’s work on adolescent identity development as a theoretical framework and drawing insights from existing literature on poetry as a performance art, the article demonstrates that a non-performance poetry pedagogy kills the dialogic quality of poetry, inhibits the political expressiveness of poetry, nullifies the enjoyment of poetry in the classroom, and provokes learner resistance. These findings point to a need to transform poetry education in South African schools by making the performance arts an integral part of teaching English FAL.

Constructing a Poetics of Connections: From Network to Relation in Pandemic Poetry Performances from South Africa

This essay analyses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on poetic production in South Africa to theorize connection as a dominant motif in contemporary poetry. In South Africa, poets compensate for the lack of state or market support for the arts through community organizations and collaborations. Under lockdowns, in-person events like open mics were replaced by digital programmes hosted on corporate-owned public platforms like Facebook Live, as artists sought to transmute social capital into material support. Performance poetry, in particular, exploded in popularity, offering comfort and connection amidst isolation. With the turn to the digital, spaces for community formation increasingly reflect the neoliberal logic of the network. The South African literary organization Hear My Voice raised a “Poetry Relief Fund” to pay honoraria for weekly poetry performances on Facebook Live. At the same time, poet and playwright Siphokazi Jonas reconceived her politically urgent poem-play #WeAreDyingHere as an international call to arms, reaching new audiences around the world. These events, alongside international festivals like Zukiswa Wanner’s Afrolit Sans Frontières, created new possibilities for understanding connection within the creative economy. But what kind of community is instantiated through those platforms? Who, specifically, is supported, and under which terms? And how does poetry itself mediate those relationships? I analyse both individual poems and the media platforms in which they are embedded to argue that, if relationality and networks represent two different models of sociality, connection offers a paradigm that acknowledges the ascendance of network modes of production without acceding to their logics.

A Global Perspective on Performance Poetry: Through the Web – From American Performance to Romanian Poetic Practices

Abstract American Performance poetry influenced the way in which the practice developed in other countries. Contemporary African, Japanese, and Arab poets started to write more and more for the stage. Eastern Europe seems to have been highly influenced by this practice. In this paper, I will try to investigate how American Performance poetry managed to influence the Romanian Spoken Word scene.

Irradiação de múltiplos e polissêmicos saberes: uma conversa com Leda Maria Martins

Poet, essayist, playwright and professor Leda Maria Martins has been paving unique paths in the arts since the mid-1980s. In the following dialogue, the thinker addresses aspects of her biography – intertwined with poetry and research in popular cultures, theater, performance, literature and visual arts –, places she has visited and the influences that were important for the construction of her work. She comments on the paradox of the late repercussion of her thesis, A cena em sombras, defended in 1991 at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), published in 1995 and only about 30 years later recognized as paradigmatic in the studies of black arts, edited in 2023 in the wake of the emergence of other books and tributes to the intellectual who exudes restlessness in her writings, talks, songs and dances.

Benjamin Zephaniah’s dub poetry and its appeal to children: an ecocritical reading

Dub poetry is a form of performance poetry that originated with Black poets in Jamaica, Britain, and Canada. It is accompanied by rhythmical accentuation and gesticulation while performing in front of the audience. This study analyses the children’s dub poetry of the contemporary Black British poet Benjamin Zephaniah to highlight the unique characteristics that make his poetry more appealing to children. This is accomplished through an ecocritical reading of his early children’s poems, which highlight his biocentric attitude and revolutionary stance against any form of anthropocentrism. The study demonstrates that Zephaniah is an eco-writer who has an effective method of engaging children with his poetry in both its forms, oral and printed, through his performative techniques, rhetorical strategies, humorous style, and serious cosmopolitan topics in the belief that poetry is political and poets should be activists.

Poetry Analysis of Osundare’s Random Blues: Using Speech Act Theory

Osundare's involvement in performative poetry is an attempt to fulfill her social responsibilities and connect with her community as her collective poetry is expressed through performance. The rhetoric of his poems and the structure of their presentation explains why he uses the techniques and resources of the African oral tradition in many of his poems. The purpose of this study is to explore the intertextual relationship between the second generation of Nigerian artists and the new Nigerian artists in terms of colonial influences and relationships. This study shows that poet Niyi Osundare is a second generation iconoclast through which he influenced the poetic landscape of contemporary Nigeria. This study shows that contemporary poets are not significant and methodologically influential to other secular poetic texts, so the aesthetic principle of poetry is emphasized when the dialogue between texts is seen in the form of Osundare poetry. Osundare tells about the paradigm shift of intertextual relations from a vertical point of view, and the artistic practices preserved from the colonial period are the vertical practices of the postcolonial space. The research is qualitative in nature and primarily analyzed primary and secondary data from the literature, original research and literature review. This study also uses poststructuralist intertextuality as a theoretical framework to explore the extent of intertextual relationships. This study suggests that in order to understand recent Nigerian poetry in English, there is an urgent need to explore the history of their intertextuality. Beyond the intertextual dimension, this study demonstrates that the symbiotic relationship between power and traditional formation provides an ontological framework for examining the aesthetic experience of recent English poetry in Nigeria.

Ginsberg's Performance Poetry: The Effect of Transformation of Spoken Words on the Development of the Performance

Ginsberg's Performance Poetry: The Effect of Transformation of Spoken Words on the Development of the Performance

“The Queer Nuyorican”: Reading Downtown Poetry and Performance Through a Queer Lens

“The Queer Nuyorican”: Reading Downtown Poetry and Performance Through a Queer Lens

Linguistic Activism and its Origin

Poetry, as a huge part of the artistic culture in the modern day, has had roles from records of stories and letters of flattery to a form of creative expression. Over the years, poetry gained a larger audience, with social media platforms promoting poets and their messages to society. Activist movements had the help of poems to deliver their voices for social justice, such as performance poetry used by black artists to advocate for their rights artistically. However, linguistic activism is not a newly emerging movement; instead, the idea of raising new ideas to society to cause political or social change existed far before our times. To further explore this connection, this paper will use cases from the past and relate concepts from different eras and will therefore propose a conclusion of the necessity of such a connection between art, innovation, social progression, and politics.

Strategies to Identify Constructions in Spoken Word Poetry in Kenya

This article explores how poets construct their identities in spoken word poetry performances in Nairobi, Kenya. The article contends how the poets create their own images, and stage personae play a pivotal role in endearing themselves to the unique Nairobi audience. It does this by tracing the history of the event and comprehensively describing the performances. Preparations for the event are also brought to light. Spoken word poetry is, arguably, the premier regular performance poetry event in Nairobi since 2015 to date. Thus, understanding how the poets construct their own identities is an essential antidote to understanding the longstanding endurance of the spoken word poetry performances in Nairobi.

KWANI? Features of Open-mic Poetry Performances in Kenya

This paper examines the feature of open-mic poetry performance, a sub-genre of spoken word poetry in Kenya. Since 2003, Performance poetry has gained greater recognition in Kenya, illustrating the impact of captivating verbal choices at play in crafted, theatrical, and nonlinear dialogues between open-mic poets and their audiences. This paper uses selected open-mic poems to describe how this sub-genre engages various verbal inflections in (re)presenting our everyday societal issues. Anchored on an interactionist stance, the study proceeds from an understanding that art should be viewed not as a disembodied product but as a collection of dynamic social and interactional processes. While using textual analysis, this paper unravels verbal inflections used in selected open-mic poems in Kenya. It further interrogates how open-mic poets deploy various performance strategies to make their performances lively and captivating and deliver their intended messages. The paper argues that the emergence of open-mic poetry in Kenya has prompted performance poets to construct their own identities as artists. In doing so, these poets strive to define a uniquely Kenyan open-mic poetry sub-genre that enables them to preserve their identities while capitalizing on the benefits that this emerging art brings to them in (re)presenting societal concerns.

Voices in the year 7 classroom: a case study tracing evolving gender identities during a poetry unit of work focused on gender consciousness

ABSTRACT This case study explores how literature, in particular poetry, can be used as an educational platform within the secondary classroom to explore gender identity. A six-week unit of poetry was created as part of a broader project to enable pupils to reflect on their personal and familial experiences of gender, whilst also utilising creative writing and performance as a tool for self-expression. The all-female class were studied before, during and after the learning process to holistically evaluate their development of gender-consciousness. A key area of focus is the strengths and limitations of the use of performance poetry when developing awareness of gender identity within adolescents.

#Patriarchykapackup: mediating sexual discourse and the casteless feminist subject in Indian performance poetry

ABSTRACT Exploring the formations of gender, caste, sexuality, and class in India, this article examines the seemingly casteless discursive and material fields in the poetry of upper-caste female slam poets performed live in Mumbai and hosted on YouTube channels. I approach these texts as a form of mediated erotics occupying media sites contentiously marked as obscene and pornographic by the state while nuancing how these mediums harness language, sound, and speech for confessional sexual articulations. Studying these poets’ discursive strategies towards pleasure and desire and their digital circulation on a transnational scale, I argue that slam poets theatrically channel (out)rage against conservative Brahminical attitudes that treat articulations around women’s bodies as continually verging on the pornographic, whilst obscuring how caste is implicated in sexual discourse. Finally, I argue that casteless Anglophone spoken word can be contrasted with anti-caste vernacular performances by Dalit artists who articulate possibilities for a futurist Ambedkarite castelessness.

EXPLORING WOMEN DUB AS APPARATUS OF PERFORMATIVE RESISTANCE

While “dub” poetry, a sub-genre of performance poetry, is a male-dominated field women dub poets have entered this field with the help of male poets and then gradually carved their place within the genre as independent contributors and established themselves as a resistant force. When women dub poets write about the issues of general politics, they are welcomed but when they focus on women’s problems and gender questions, domestic affairs they are often neglected and sometimes criticised. The question remains how could women, being the representatives of traditional domesticity can/ should adhere to address/ challenge/ use the ‘public’ platforms of performance surrendered and occupied by men. Even if one or two women do so, should they remain under the shadow of their male counterparts and follow the ideals directly or indirectly dictated by them or should they set their own terms? Through various modes of performance women poets often defy the male policy of exclusivity. While male dub poets make their own rules, women poets often disobey the male diktat. This paper wishes to explore how performances of African descended women poets, especially from the Caribbeans, recurringly engage in a dialogue challenging patriarchal poetic and performative elitism and how it often brings tabooed ideas, domesticity, and other areas of “women’s activity” into the forefront of literary arenas and in doing so they forward the genre to a more flexible, more adaptive, and richer form of poetic expression.

Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy: Memory, Performance, and Oral Poetry. Blake Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. xii + 474 pp. $135.

Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy: Memory, Performance, and Oral Poetry. Blake Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. xii + 474 pp. $135.

Embodiment, Autoethnography, Performance Poetry: Living with Severe Traumatic Brain Injury

This presentation offers neurodivergence embodied, autoethnography, and performance poetry. The confluence of acquiring severe traumatic brain injury combined with exposure to concepts and paradigms while pursuing a graduate degree in Disability Studies, catalyzed emergence and triggered development of my disabled identity. The brain damage acquired causes issues of decoding/deciphering/processing, which in turn triggers and/or produces episodes of temporal dissonance. When these shifts in timing occur, they have tremendous impact on rational thought processes and emotional stability. The salient aspects of my new life – emotional sensitivity and volatility – may on the surface seem detrimental and undesirable; however, I celebrate these qualities as they greatly enhance my identification with and empathy for others, which in turn drive my artistic, social, cultural, political expression, quest for community and belonging. While temporal dissonance is unlikely to occur during this planned short presentation, I will relate and provide the audience with windows on largely hidden and little understood forms of impairment.
 
 Note: To hear recitation of some of these poems, check out fellow VIBE presenter Cheryl Green’s podcast: http://whoamitostopit.com/pigeonhole-podcast-17-autoethnographic-poetry/
 
 The original presentation at VIBE was accompanied by music from Miles Davis and Marcus Miller’s 1987 album Music from Siesta. Readers are encouraged to listen to this album via their music platform of choice while reading the following poetry. Youtube link to the album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuvtNL_jyeQ

Code switching in contemporary isiZulu performance poetry

Recent developments in isiZulu poetry have been marked by an emergence of performance poets whose poems have gained popularity with younger audiences. A constant feature in contemporary isiZulu poetry is a conscious deviation from adherence to rigid structural and formal linguistic requirements. Contemporary isiZulu poetry is also characterised by a shift from textual to performance-specific conventions that cater for radio, theatre, social-media platforms and so forth, and is more accommodative of linguistic dynamics that shape the current generation of artists and audiences. While contemporary isiZulu performance is a rather more recent innovation, it still owes its roots to oral poetry traditions and has evolved from literary art forms that were committed to memory and performed during family gatherings and communal events. This article explores code switching in contemporary isiZulu performance poetry and argues for appreciation of this phenomenon for its aesthetic appeal rather than as infringement on long-held attitudes about purity of artistic linguistic expressions. Hyme’s Ethno-poetic Theory will inform analysis of selected poems in this article. Ethno-poetic Theory focuses, amongst others, on how a performance displays literary qualities.

Enacting memory and grief in poetic landscapes

Much geographical work has focused on sites of memory, where memories and grief are inherently tied to particular places, monuments and landscapes. Memories and grief can also, however, be spatially and temporally dispersed and fragmentary, creating landscapes in which things are simultaneously present and absent. In this paper I trace the creation of a memorial poem - a marwnad - for my great aunt, who lived her entire life on the margins of Cors Goch, a lowland bog in rural south-west Wales, as part of a long tradition in Welsh-language poetry. Like many Welsh marwnadau, the poem highlights spatial and temporal complexities of memory, emotion and grief. They are both inherently tied to shifting, ephemeral, fluid landscapes and politicised in changing regional and national cultural landscapes, speaking to challenges faced by rural communities and the changing geographies of the Welsh language. As well as reflecting the temporality and seasonality of site-specific memory and grief, the poem contributes to that temporality as memories resurface and intensify during composition and in subsequent personal readings. I discuss the place of such performative poetry in mapping grief and the implications of poetic grieving and memory-making for absence and presence and relationships with the landscape.

Literary Interventions in Justice: A Symposium

The purpose of this symposium is to explore the ways in which literature, broadly construed to include poetry and narrative in a variety of modes of representation, can change the world by providing interventions in justice. Our approach foregrounds the relationship between the activity demanded by some individual literary works and some categories of literary work on the one hand and the way in which those works can make a tangible difference to social reality on the other. We consider three types of active literary engagement: doing philosophy, ideological critique, and necessary rather than contingent performance. Kate Kirkpatrick opens with Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (2013), reading the narrator as not only a critic of colonial and postcolonial discourse but also a literary exemplar of the search for justice when it is difficult to know to what level of explanation to attribute its absence. Rafe McGregor demonstrates how the final season of Prime Video’s The Man in the High Castle (2015–19) makes a radical break from the previous three, exposing the misanthropy at the core of right-wing populism and calling for a fundamentally democratic response from the left. Finally, Karen Simecek argues that poetry in performance has a potentially reparative function for the ethically lonely – the vulnerable, the oppressed, and the persecuted – in society.