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"Tyler Hoffman brings a fresh perspective to the subject of performance poetry, and this comes at an excellent time, when there is such a vast interest across the country and around the world in the performance of poetry. He makes important connections, explaining things in a manner that remains provocative, interesting, and accessible." ---Jay Parini, Middlebury College American Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop is the first book to trace a comprehensive history of performance poetry in America, covering 150 years of literary history from Walt Whitman through the rap-meets-poetry scene. It reveals how the performance of poetry is bound up with the performance of identity and nationality in the modern period and carries its own shifting cultural politics. This book stands at the crossroads of the humanities and the social sciences; it is a book of literary and cultural criticism that deals squarely with issues of "performance," a concept that has attained great importance in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology and has generated its own distinct field of performance studies. American Poetry in Performance will be a meaningful contribution both to the field of American poetry studies and to the fields of cultural and performance studies, as it focuses on poetry that refuses the status of fixed aesthetic object and, in its variability, performs versions of race, class, gender, and sexuality both on and off the page. Relating the performance of poetry to shifting political and cultural ideologies in the United States, Hoffman argues that the vocal aspect of public poetry possesses (or has been imagined to possess) the ability to help construct both national and subaltern communities. American Poetry in Performance explores public poets' confrontations with emergent sound recording and communications technologies as those confrontations shape their mythologies of the spoken word and their corresponding notions about America and Americanness.

This article analyses a range of discourses articulated around the figure of the film archive between the late nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries, accounting for the various possibilities that they open up for considering audiovisual heritage as a potential space either for revolutionary change or for political or textual resistance. Focused mainly on archival discourses in Mexico, the article traces their interaction with both national-historical and anti-imperialist narratives, and the implications of digital and online culture for the encounter between the archiving of film and resistance. It accounts for the position of the archive in negotiations between state and private capital and spaces of artistic autonomy, and for the relationships between the archive, modernity, postmodernity and the notion of posterity.

This is a book about the politics of alternative poetries and poetic practices, and the ways that experiments in poetry have provided 'spaces' within which radical or revolutionary perspectives can be developed. It explores social and cultural ideas that more normative mainstream cultural representations might seek to suppress. It demonstrates the ways that poems say things about cultural and social issues, and can say them in new and different ways. My work is conceptual, drawing on a variety of theoretical positions to help read poems that are resistant to giving up an easily digested meaning. It is also empirical, and begins with the material evidence of the poems, worrying away at individual words in detailed analyses of the semantic and syntactical relationships in the work. I try to show that any difficulty is worth the effort, and that poems that try to reflect the complexities of modern and contemporary culture and society are not only sometimes difficult to read, but they often have to be.

The Celebrated poet and author of Can Poetry Matter?offers another bold, insightful collection of essays on literature's changing place in contemporary culturePoetry is an art that preceded writing, and it will survive television and video games . . . The problem won't be finding an audience. The challenge will be writing well enough to deserve one. In Disappearing Ink, Dana Gioia stakes the claim for poetry's place amid American popular culture, where poetry in its latest oral forms -rap, slam, performance-is transforming the traditional literary culture of the printed page. But, as the seminal title essay asks, "What is a conscientious critic supposed to do with an Eminem or Jay-Z?" In a brilliant array of essays that test the pulse of traditional and contemporary poetry, Gioia ponders the future of the written word and how it might find its most relevant incarnation. With the clarity, wit, and feisty intelligence that made Can Poetry Matter? one of the most important and controversial books about literature and contemporary American society, Gioia again demonstrates his unique abilities of observation and uncanny prognostication to examine our complicated everyday relationship to art. Dana Gioia offers insightful essays on literature's changing place in contemporary culture in this new collection." "What happens to poetry in a culture that no longer depends on books? Dana Gioia dismisses the standard cliches about poetry's precarious place in a society transformed by electronic media. Looking at both the literary world and popular entertainment, Gioia's original title essay offers an account of how new technologies and innovative forms of oral poetry - rap, slam, spoken work, performance art - are revitalizing the art in unexpected ways. I. Disappearing Ink Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture The Hand of the Poet: The Magical Value of Manuscripts Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism II. West Coast Elegies Fallen Western Star: The Decline of San Francisco as a Literary Region Rexroth Rediscovered Brother Beat Jack Spicer and San Francisco’s Lost Bohemia John Haines Discovering Kay Ryan The Cult of Weldon Kees On Being a California Poet III. “All I Have is a Voice” “All I Have is a Voice”: September 11th and American Poetry Two Views of Robert Frost —The Life —The Poetry Elizabeth Bishop: From Coterie to Canon Barbara Howes and the Eminent Sorority The Journey of William Jay Smith Short Views —Donald Hall —Philip Levine —Peter Davison —Randall Jarrell —Janet Lewis —Samuel Menashe —Donald Justice James Tate and American Surrealism What is Italian American Poetry? “Connect the Prose and the Passion”

Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word brings together seventeen essays, written especially for this volume, on poetry readings, the sound of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and contemporary poetru performance has been negligible, despite the crucial importance of performance to the practice of the poetry of this century. This collection opens many new avenues for the critical discussion of the sound and performance of poetry. Paying special attention to innovative work. More important, the essays collected here offer original and wide –ranging elucidatiions of how twentieth-century poetry has been practiced as a performance art. Introduction. Charles Berstein I.-Sound´s Measures 1. Letter on Sound. Susan Stewart. 2. The Aural Ellipsis and the Nature of Listening in Contemporary Poetry. Nick Piombino. 3. Praxis: A Political Economy of Noise and Information. Bruce Andrews. 4. After Free Verse: The New Nonlinear Poetries. Marjorie Perloff. 5. Ether Either. Susan Howe. II. Performing Words 6. Visual Performance of the Poetic Text, Johana Drucker. 7. Voice in Extremis. Steve McCaffery. 8. Toward a Poetics of Polyphony and Translatabilityl. Dennis Tedlock. 9. Speech Effects: The Talk as a Genre. Bob Perrelman. 10. Sound Reading. Peter Quartermain. III-Close Hearings/Historical Settings 11. Understanding the Sound of Not Understanding. Jed Rasula 12. The Contemporary Poetry Reading. Peter Middelton 13. Neon Griot: The Functional Role of Poetry Readings in the Black Arts Movement. 14. Was That “Different”, “Dissident” or “Dissonant”? Poetry (n) the Public Spear: Slams, Open Readings, and Dissident Traditions.Maria Damon. 15. Local Vocals: Hawaii´s Pidgin Literature, Performance and Postcoloniality. Susan M. Schltz Afterword: VWho Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading. Ron Silliman Audio Resources Bibliography