This book examines intersections of poetry and performance during the British Poetry Revival. Its investigations are centered on four specific performance events: The First International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965; Denise Riley’s first public reading at the Cambridge Poetry Festival in 1977; Eric Mottram’s Pollock Record; and Allen Fisher’s Blood Bone Brain. Drawing upon a range of archival resources, recordings, and interviews, Juha Virtanen offers engaging and detailed “archaeological” accounts and analyses of these largely unexamined events as well as the potential dialogues between them. The appendices of the book also feature previously unpublished interviews with both Fisher and Riley. This book is essential reading for poetry and performance enthusiasts, particularly those interested in innovative British Poetry.

A comprehensive and scholarly review of contemporary British and Irish Poetry With contributions from noted scholars in the field, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a collection of writings from a diverse group of experts. They explore the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that comprise these two distinct but interrelated national poetries. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companion to Literature and Culture series, this book contains a comprehensive survey of the most important contemporary Irish and British poetry. The contributors provide new perspectives and positions on the topic. This important book: Explores the institutions, histories, and receptions of contemporary Irish and British poetry Contains contributions from leading scholars of British and Irish poetry Includes an analysis of the most prominent Irish and British poets Puts contemporary Irish and British poetry in context Written for students and academics of contemporary poetry, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a comprehensive review of contemporary poetry from a wide range of diverse contributors.

Live performance has changed poetry more than anything else in the last hundred years: it has given poets new audiences and a new economy, and it has generated new styles, from Imagism, to confessional, to contemporary Spoken Word. But the creative impact that public reading had right through the twentieth century has not been well understood. Mixing close listening to archive performances with intimate histories of modernist venues and promotors, The Poetry Circuit tells the story of how poets met their audience again, and how the feedback loops between their voices, the venues, and the occasions turned poems into running dramas between poet and listener. A nervous T. S. Eliot reveals himself to be anything but impersonal, while Marianne Moore's accident-prone readings become subtle ways of keeping her poems in constant re-draft. Robert Frost used his poems to spar with his fans and rivals, while Langston Hughes wrote Ask Your Mama to expose the prejudice circulating in the room as he spoke it. The Poetry Circuit also shows how the post-war reading boom made new kinds of poetry involving their audience and setting in the performance, such as John Ashbery's anti-charismatic Poets' Theatre, Amiri Baraka's documentary soundtracks of the streets, or the confessional readings of Allen Ginsberg, which shame the listeners more than the poet. Covering the first seventy years of the poetry reading, The Poetry Circuit demonstrates that there never were 'page' and 'stage' poets: the reading simply changed what every modern poet could do.

An illuminating new study of modern Polish verse in performance, offering a major reassessment of the roles of poets and poetry in twentieth-century Polish culture. WhatÕs in a voice? Why record oneself reading a poem that also exists on paper? In recent decades, scholars have sought to answer these questions, giving due credit to the art of poetry performance in the anglophone world. Now Aleksandra Kremer trains a sharp ear on modern Polish poetry, assessing the rising importance of authorial sound recordings during the tumultuous twentieth century in Eastern Europe. Kremer traces the adoption by key Polish poets of performance practices intimately tied to new media. In Polish hands, tape recording became something different from what it had been in the West, shaped by its distinctive origins behind the Iron Curtain. The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry reconstructs the historical conditions, audio technologies, and personal motivations that informed poetic performances by such luminaries as Czes_aw Mi_osz, Wis_awa Szymborska, Aleksander Wat, Zbigniew Herbert, Miron Bia_oszewski, Anna Swir, and Tadeusz R—_ewicz. Through performances both public and private, prepared and improvised, professional and amateur, these poets tested the possibilities of the physical voice and introduced new poetic practices, reading styles, and genres to the Polish literary scene. Recording became, for these artists, a means of announcing their ambiguous place between worlds. KremerÕs is a work of criticism as well as recovery, deploying speech-analysis software to shed light on forgotten audio experimentsÑfrom poetic Òsound postcards,Ó to unusual home performances, to the final testaments of writer-performers. Collectively, their voices reveal new aesthetics of poetry reading and novel concepts of the poetic self.

This study discusses the representation of class in poetry in English from Britain and Ireland between the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries, and the effect of class on the production, dissemination, and reception of that poetry. It looks at the factors which enable and obstruct the production of poetry, such as literacy, education, patronage, prejudice, print, and the various alleged revivals of poetry in Britain, and the relationship between class and poetic form. Whilst this is a survey that cannot be comprehensive, it offers a number of case-studies of poets and poems from each period considered.

This is a book about contemporary literary and artistic entanglements: word and image, media and materiality, inscription and illustration. It proposes a vulnerable, fugitive mode of reading poetry, which defies disciplinary categorisations, embracing the open-endedness and provisionality of forms. This manifests itself interactively in the six case studies, which have been chosen for their distinctness and diversity across the long twentieth century: the book begins with the early twentieth-century work of writer and artist Djuna Barnes, exploring her re-animation of sculptural and dramatic sources. It then turns to the late modernist artist and poet David Jones considering his use of the graphic and plastic arts in The Anathemata, and next, to the underappreciated mid-century poet F.T. Prince, whose work uncannily re-activates Michelangelo's poetry and sculpture. The second half of the book explores the collaborations of the canonical poet Ted Hughes with the publisher and artist Leonard Baskin during the 1970s; the innovative late twentieth-century poetry of Denise Riley who uses page space and embodied sound as a form of address; and, finally, the contemporary poet Paul Muldoon who has collaborated with photographers and artists, as well as ventriloquising nonhuman phenomena. The resulting unique study offers contemporary writers and readers a new understanding of literary, artistic, and nonhuman practices and shows the cultural importance of engaging with their messy co-dependencies. The book challenges critical methodologies that make a sharp division between the textual work and the extra-literary, and raises urgent questions about the status and autonomy of art and its social role.

This ground-breaking book explores the phenomenal growth of live literature in the digitalizing 21st century. Wiles asks why literary events appeal and matter to people, and how they can transform the ways in which fiction is received and valued. Readers are immersed in the experience of two contrasting events: a major literary festival and an intimate LGBTQ+ salon. Evocative scenes and observations are interwoven with sharp critical analysis and entertaining conversations with well-known author-performers, reader-audiences, producers, critics, and booksellers. Wiles’s experiential literary ethnography represents an innovative and vital contribution, not just to literary research, but to research into the value of cultural experience across art forms. This book probes intersections between readers and audiences, writers and performers, texts and events, bodies and memories, and curation and reception. It addresses key literary debates from cultural appropriation to diversity in publishing, the effects of social media, and the quest for authenticity. It will engage a broad audience, from academics and producers to writers and audiences.