Hi Dave,

we will just have to agree to differ about the stretching resulting in meaninglessness. Because performance is used in many many different way all around us (from appliances and systems to sex). The point is to begin to distinguish between usages, rather than allow for a general and boggy and potentially reductive assumption to prevail. My list of names was for those who say they want more complexity from hearing poetry as they get from seeing poetry . it's simply a beginners guide to that not a club that offers entry or a ist intended for any other purposes. It's indicative of something else than what is often meant by spoken word . a category that i do push back against as spoken word often does mean a form of light or comedic or identity political verse or monologue in which the emphasis in terms of performance is placed on conventional ideas about virtuosity of delivery. Spoken Word then is a mode of poetic performance, but spoken word does not encompass or subsume or reduce the diverse performances of poetry. I was okay with the discussion of spoken word, but not so when the terms blurred. I, along with many others since the mid twentieth century (artists and philosophers and scholars), have found performance a more interesting term that simply one to do with competence and measurement.

Also, it's not my breathless intellectualizing (although i appreciate the sideswipe in the formalisation). I'm quoting someone else, quoting someone else, not because i cannot think it through for myself but because i was pointing to the fact that a lot of people have been thinking about this stuff. The description of performance taken by Marvin Carlson from Richard Baumann rests on more than the term consciousness. If you read that phrase "consciousness of doubleness" and how he uses it, i think it's immediately clear that he's not seeking to swap out one term for the other. Nor is that phrase the double consciousness as introduced by W.E.B. Du Bois used to get at a distinction between genuine and inauthentic selfhood; even though that could be afascinating discussion to get into. Even more so in fact it could be understood that Baumann's "through which the actual execution of an action is placed in mental comparison with a potential, an ideal, or a remembered original model of that action" opens fully onto all aspects of consciousness, including that which can be positioned as the unconscious? Writing, let alone writing poetry, is often an highly self-reflexive activity? Not always, but often? It strikes me that Baumann's definition is very interesting in terms of the act of writing, particularly the act of writing poetry.

Performance is always performance for someone, 

some audience that recognises and validates it as performance even when, as is 

occasionally the case, that audience is the self.


His final phrase there would seem to apply very distinctively to poetry? Else i don't understand the activity that i enjoy here os posting a poem to a ist and wondering what other people make of it. 

 
To whit - I fully understand the idea of poetry on the page and a literary tradition in which a poem performs on the page and that's why i asked Roger the question that i shall now ask of you: in what ways does poetry not perform on the page??


cris


On Oct 30, 2011, at 2:33 AM, David Bircumshaw wrote:

> Well, cris, I think I would go along with Roger and suggest that you're
> stretching the term 'performance' to the point where it becomes meaningless.
> We already have a term for 'consciousness': it's called, erm,
> 'consciousness'. I think Deborah's initial inquiry on the subject 'Spoken
> Word', even if it begged definition, implied a much clearer notion of poetry
> in performance than that. I'd take issue with the claims of that notion, but
> that's a different matter.
> I suspect there's a kind of rejection of the autonomic unconsciousness at
> work in your rather breathless intellectualizing, and perhaps, ironically,
> an unconscious rejection of the unconscious hinterland. I notice a lot of
> lists of names too: as if party invites were necessary.
> I must insist that my earlier post did not endorse your statement about
> 'non-western' traditions. I shall repeat with an emphasis: classical Chinese
> poetry became text based to an extent that exceeds Western traditions. It
> retained its nursery rhyme and folk roots because it neglected sound when
> compared to the West; all the sophistication became focused on the eye.
> It was a literary poetry, and, because of its intricate entwining in the
> class and bureaucratic structures of pre-revolutionary China, and the
> relationship of Chinese script to heterogeneous languages of China, very
> decidedly not an oral poetry.
> 
> 
> best
> 
> dave
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> David Joseph Bircumshaw
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