About a decade and a half ago there was a book published with the
title "Imagologies", which gushed triumphalistically about the
inevitable replacement of "textual" culture by an ever-mutating
congeries of gifs and jpegs memetically proliferating across the
globe. At the time I was a haughty young Derridean, and huffed it off
with a "what makes you think animated mouse pointers aren't texts?".
Then there was that period where everyone thought hyperlinks were
going to revolutionize narrative - at least a decade after the
publication of the first "choose your own adventure" book (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebook for a brief history of the
genre).
We're probably due another round of self-congratulatory cackling over
the death of print pretty soon. Although our present "social media"
seem pretty intransigently textual, for all the emoticons and
clickable cows.
Anyway: "performance poetry" seems to me to be poetry geared towards a
particular range of types of performativity: those that foreground
vocal timbre, bodily gesture, the sort of stuff you have to be there
in person to do. How the person appears or disappears in the process
is unavoidably of interest (as it is in much other poetry, from Sidney
to Eliot): there's an element of mummery or masquerade. The claim to
be doing something new is hard to evaluate. All poetry does
*something* new: fresh repetition, revoicing or regrafting of the old.
Asking for really novel novelty, for the absolutely unprecedented, may
be asking a bit much.
Give us a black swan!
Dominic
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