Poetry Off the Page: Sounding Literary History

A novel approach to literary history developing interdisciplinary methods for the study of literary movements such as Beat poetry, Jazz poetry, and poetry slam Poetry as spoken word has experienced a noticeable boom for more than half a century. Movements such as Beat poetry, jazz poetry, and poetry slam have led to the development of extensive performance scenes in the English-speaking poetry world and beyond and have received a further boost from the possibilities of multi-media publication, especially on the world - wide web. The interdisciplinary project Poetry Off the Page, headed by Dr. Julia Lajta -Novak at the University of Vienna, investigates, for the first time, the history of British poetry performance between 1965 and 2015. Opening a vital new chapter of British literary history, it simultaneously provides a prototype and toolkit for a new branch of historico-literary research beyond the British context. The project will shed light on poetrys inheritance and innovative transformation of oral traditions, on the functions of poetry performance as a form of public address and a vehicle for identity politics, as well as on its relation to emerging communications technolog ies and their profound impact on how literature is experienced and by whom. Traditional methods of literary scholarship unsuited to studying the spoken word Traditionally, literary studies have focused on the printed text. Although orality plays a vital r ole in poetry, literary scholars have tended to pay little attention to oral performance, and where they did, the traditional methods of literary analysis have proved largely unsuited to studying the spoken word. Poetry Off the Page now sets out to fill this conspicuous gap in the history of poetry by taking into account factors such as the aesthetic and semantic potential of oral performance, publication via multimedia channels, presentational formats, styles, and poetic genres, that have emerged from the performance scene. Interdisciplinary concepts, archival research, and interviews with practitioners To do justice to the complexity of performance, the Poetry Off the Page project is founded on three methodological pillars. These are archival research (including the recently mounted digital Spoken Word Archive, to which the project will also contribute), which will enable close analyses of historical recordings; qualitative interviews with performance practitioners (poet-performers, spoken-word agencies, programmers, producers); and the study of critical and theoretical concepts and methods from disciplines such as literary studies, linguistics, sound studies, literary and cultural sociology, theatre studies, and performance studies. Online platform and podcasts In addition to publications in scholarly journals and books, Poetry Off the Page will mount an extensive, freely accessible online platform to encourage networking in the field. This will include a research blog that features the work of the project team and of other members of the research community, as well as a series of podcasts to reach out to a wider public.

Poetry as spoken word has experienced a noticeable boom for more than half a century. Movements such as Beat poetry, jazz poetry, and poetry slam have led to the development of extensive performance scenes in the English-speaking poetry world and beyond and have been further accelerated by the possibilities of multi-media publication, especially on the internet. The interdisciplinary project "Poetry Off the Page," headed by Assoc. Prof. Julia Lajta-Novak at the University of Vienna, investigated how our view of British literary history since 1965 changes if we shift the focus from the written to the spoken word. Complementing the larger ERC project "Poetry Off the Page", the FWF project specifically investigated: -- The Role of New Media Formats and Digital Technologies: PD Dr. Martina Pfeiler uncovered various ways in which British poet-performers have drawn on new media formats and digital technologies to popularise their poetry - from punk poet John Cooper Clarke's fashioning of his own star-persona on television in the late 1970s and 1980s to recent live-streamed poetry slams. Her research also highlights how popular media formats from other performing arts impacted on poetic practice. In the 1990s, for instance, the poetry quartet Atomic Lip emulated the style of music videoclips in their performances. -- Poetry Slam and Anti-Slam: Pfeiler also investigated the vital role of poetry slam in British poetry. A poetry performance competition format that originated in the USA, poetry slam entered the UK in the early 1990s, fuelling the popularisation of spoken word poetry and profoundly impacting its aesthetics and politics. Furthermore, slam spawned its own meta-poetic format The Anti-Slam, a satirical response to poetry slams. The Anti-Slam entered the UK from Germany in 2013, merging British humour with a transnational poetics. -- Black Women Performers: Digging deep into the poetry organisation Apples & Snakes' Spoken Word Archive, Dr. Helen Thomas uncovered a wealth of performance activity by Black women poets that provides a corrective to standard accounts of Black British spoken word as dominated by a few famous men. Her research has also shed light on poet-performers such as Marsha Prescod who played a vital role in the performance culture of their day but have remained unaccounted for by literary histories. -- Interviews with Spoken Word Poets: Interviews with poets and event organisers in UK were central to our work in Poetry Off the Page, as they helped us find out about performance history and practice and contextualise the performances we studied. Nineteen poets were interviewed for the FWF project. The interview recordings are publicly available via the University of Vienna's Phaidra repository and featured in Apples & Snakes's spoken word archive. They form a vital contribution to a "historiophony" of British poetry performance.