Performance Poetry: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Intermedia.

Poetry out loud and on stage presents a particular set of difficulties for the critic. Old approaches, especially formalist criticism that centers on a written text, cannot deal with the processual, transitory, and social nature of contemporary performance poetry. Looking closely at the work of Arm and Schwerner, Jackson Mac Low, David Antin, Allen Ginsberg, Jerome Rothenberg, Charlie Morrow, Linda Montano, Robert Bly, and Steven Benson, I explore several different approaches to this live art. First, I survey the history of performance poetry from 1909 to the present. The history is complicated, and includes histories of poetics, of poetry readings, of the visual arts, music, theater, and dance. Such movements as Futurism and Dadaism encouraged intermedia performance. Definitions of individual art forms were in flux and hybrid forms appeared. For example, Happenings combine theater, music, and painting; text-sound composition combines music and literature. Second, I suggest several critical methods. Information theory, which has been used for analysis of drama and film, is helpful because it allows the critic to follow the details of process without freezing the piece into an artificial structure. Another theory, George Quasha's "Dialogos," stresses the importance of poetics rather than criticism; Quasha suggests that the critic should add to the larger text of performance poetry by making art in response to the art he experiences. Dick Higgins also approaches performance poetry with an emphasis on experience. The critic asks of a piece: What does this piece imply beyond itself? and What does it have to offer me? Next, I discuss the problems of the text-oriented critic faced with indeterminacy in poetry. He will confront this problem both in written poetry (where the process of composition is open) and in oral poetry. I have gathered here a range of definitions of the "open" poem in order to show that the written texts of these poems are only part of a process which emphasizes the discoveries of composition rather than its end-product. I also discuss those poems that take multiple forms: Some texts are chance-generated, some are improvised, and others are the result of collaboration through time. Finally, in the last two chapters, I show that both the poet and his audience are part of the performance poem. The poet on stage must be there with his presence and his voice to authenticate his poem. He gives it out loud to an audience and affects them in different ways. He may wish to change their minds and their lives. Yet, his poem on stage is a framed work of art. He may attempt to break the frame, letting his audience in, or they may intrude, breaking the frame in an effort to take control of the poem. In either case, art, which sometimes leaks out into life, is essentially separated from life. Performance poetry cannot be separated from its historical and social context. Sometimes the simplest gesture will resonate with meaning for those who underst and the world of the performance poem. Description or analysis of a performance poem should be context-dependent, taking into account not only the words as they are presented, but also the poet who speaks them, the audience who hears them, and the tradition in which they are spoken.Ph.D.LiteratureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/157872/1/8017407.pd