Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word

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From the publisher:

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.

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