Performance Poetry and Cultural production In the year 1917, Amy Lowell deplored the entrapment o... more Performance Poetry and Cultural production In the year 1917, Amy Lowell deplored the entrapment of poetry on the printed page. "Poetry is as much an art to be heard as is music, if only we could get people to understand the fact. To read it off the printed pages without pronouncing it is to get only a portion of its beauty, and yet it is just this that most people do" (Lowell 1917, 46). Lowell was drawing attention to the acoustic quality of poetry as an essential layer of signification. It is no exaggeration to say that in the past century, performance poetry has come to exceed Lowell's ambition. Performance poetry has chartered a new path for poetry, parallel to the printed page, albeit embedding the aesthetics of performance. The poem's meaning broke free from the confines of the printed page to include the poetperformer's physical presence, his/her interaction with a live audience as well as the paralinguistic and paratextual elements of the performance mode. The genre of performance poetry has come to be regarded as "one of the most significant developments in English-language poetry" (Novak 2011, 30). Julia Novak (2011) places performance poetry as a subgenre under the broader umbrella of live poetry (33) which includes the traditional poetry readings (62). She states that:
Performance Poetry and Cultural production In the year 1917, Amy Lowell deplored the entrapment o... more Performance Poetry and Cultural production In the year 1917, Amy Lowell deplored the entrapment of poetry on the printed page. "Poetry is as much an art to be heard as is music, if only we could get people to understand the fact. To read it off the printed pages without pronouncing it is to get only a portion of its beauty, and yet it is just this that most people do" (Lowell 1917, 46). Lowell was drawing attention to the acoustic quality of poetry as an essential layer of signification. It is no exaggeration to say that in the past century, performance poetry has come to exceed Lowell's ambition. Performance poetry has chartered a new path for poetry, parallel to the printed page, albeit embedding the aesthetics of performance. The poem's meaning broke free from the confines of the printed page to include the poetperformer's physical presence, his/her interaction with a live audience as well as the paralinguistic and paratextual elements of the performance mode. The genre of performance poetry has come to be regarded as "one of the most significant developments in English-language poetry" (Novak 2011, 30). Julia Novak (2011) places performance poetry as a subgenre under the broader umbrella of live poetry (33) which includes the traditional poetry readings (62). She states that:
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