which often involve linguistic experimentation, and extreme uses of the
voice, to work which has strong connections with hip hop, popular song,
entertainment and ethnic oral traditions.
Performance poetry spans a wide range of Caucasian and non-Caucasian
poetries. It includes the work of numerous European, American and Aus-
tralian poets. But it also includes powerful African-American performance
poets such as Harryette Mullen, Wanda Coleman, Scott Woods and Patricia
Smith; Hawaiian dub poets and musicians and the Japanese-American per-
formance poet Richard Hamasaki, known as ‘Red Flea’, who lives in Hawaii
(Flea 1996); and Caribbean poets such as Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin
Zephaniah or Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze.
Performance poetry has to be experienced through live events, but is
also represented on a growing number of CDs, CD-ROMs and print
anthologies. See Future Poesia Sonora (Lora-Totino 1978) Text-Sound Texts
(Kostelanetz 1980), Homo Sonorus (Bulatov 2001), and Short Fuse (Swift &
Norton 2002). One of the best points of access now is websites such as
The Wordsmith Press (The Wordsmith Press Ongoing) and UbuWeb
(UbuWeb Ongoing). (For discussion of poetry in performance, see also
Sound States (Morris 1997), Close Listening ( Bernstein 1998), and Homo
Sonorus (Bulatov 2001).)
Performance poems range from those which are complete on the page
but are given a heightened dimension through performance, to those
which are incomplete on the page and require performance for their
fruition. Here I will be exploring that continuum, though mainly concen-
trating on types of performance poetry which present an experience
distinct from, and provoking beyond, simply reading a poem on the page.
Performance poetry can be divided into speech-based and sonic perform-
ance poems (see Exercises 1a and 1b), though there are many overlaps
between the two.
SPOKEN WORKS
In this section we will explore different types of speech-based perform-
ance poems: sometimes this kind of work is known as ‘spoken word’. The
language in such poems ranges between the highly colloquial and the
highly poetic, sometimes within the same poem. In all cases performance
is used to give another dimension to the poem, mainly through the pro-
jection of the voice. Dynamics, pitch and accentuation of the voice, as well
as rhythmic delivery, are all ways in which the poem can be transmuted in
performance.
Tongues, talk and technologies 215