I edited a book that touches on many of these issues. It is forthcoming in
May
from Oxford University Press. Below is the somewhat formal publisher's
listing of the book -- It will be out in the US in early April, in the UK,
they tell me, about six weeks later --
Close Listening
Poetry and the Performed Word
Edited by CHARLES BERNSTEIN
Close Listening and the Performed Word brings together seventeen essays,
especially written for this volume, on the poetry reading, the sounds of
poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of
poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and
postmodern poetry performance has been negligible. This collection opens
many new avenues for the critical discussion of the sound and performance
of poetry, with special attention to innovative work. More important, the
essays collected here offer wide-ranging elucidations of how
twentieth-century poetry has been practiced as a performance art. The
contributors cover topics that range from the performance styles of
individual poets and types of poetry to the relation of sound to meaning,
from historical and social approaches to poetry readings and to new
imaginations of prosody. Such approaches are intended to encourage new
forms of "close listenings"--not only to the printed text of poems, but
also to tapes, performances, and other expressions of the sounded word.
With readings and "spoken word" events gaining an increasing audience for
poetry, Close Listening provides an indispensable critical groundwork for
understanding the importance of language in--and as--performance.
368 pp., 22 linecuts, 6-1/8 x 9-1/4
The US info follows; I don't have details on UK price -- But Oxford tell me
that the book can be gotten in the UK from the US web site.
$19.95w*, paper, 0-19-510992-9
$49.95w, cloth, 0-19-510991-0
Close Listening (paper), ISBN 0195109929
Close Listening (cloth), ISBN 0195109910
order from Oxford University Press
or from your bookstore
or from OUP on-line http://www.oup-usa.org/docs/0195109929.html
Contents:
Charles Bernstein, Introduction
Sound’s Measures
Susan Stewart, Letter on Sound
Nick Piombino, The Aural Ellipsis and the Nature of Listening in
Contemporary Poetry
Bruce Andrews, Praxis: A Political Economy of Noise and Informalism
Marjorie Perloff, After Free-Verse: The New Non-Linear Poetries
Susan Howe, Either/Ether
Performing Words
Johanna Drucker, Visual Performance of the Poetic Text
Steve McCaffery, Voice in Extremis
Dennis Tedlock, Toward a Poetics of Polyphony and Translatability
Bob Perelman, Speech Effects: The Talk as Genre
Peter Quartermain, Sound Reading
Close Hearings / Historical Settings
Jed Rasula, Understanding the Sound of Not Understanding
Peter Middleton, The Contemporary Poetry Reading
Lorenzo Thomas, Neon Griot: The Functional Role of Poetry Readings in the
Black Arts Movement
Maria Damon, Was that "Different," "Dissident" or "Dissonant"? Poetry (n)
the Public Speak: Slams, Open Readings and Dissident Traditions
Susan Schultz, Local Vocals: Hawai’i’s Pidgin Literature, Performance, and
Postcoloniality
Afterword
Ron Silliman, Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading
Bibliography
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