Keep it “real”: the co-construction of authentic performance and audience connection in poetry slam competitions

With the poetry slam competition – a live, competitive spoken word poetry reading – as context for this project, the study explores the concepts of authenticity and audience connection as they relate to message production and meaning-making processes in the field of professional communication. This project uses a symbolic interactionist perspective and Goffman’s (1959) theory of dramaturgy to investigate the poet-audience relationship and discover how a display of authentic performance works to achieve the goal of audience connection. The researcher interviewed six slam poets from the Greater Toronto and Southwestern Ontario area about their experiences in the poetry slam world. Results from the interviews reveal that authenticity is co-constructed between poet and audience, involving a coalescence of private preparation strategies and onstage performance strategies that help craft a sense of credibility and honesty from the poet that, in turn, contribute to achieving successful audience connection by the slam poet as performer.

Keep it “real”: the co-construction of authentic performance and audience connection in poetry slam competitions

With the poetry slam competition – a live, competitive spoken word poetry reading – as context for this project, the study explores the concepts of authenticity and audience connection as they relate to message production and meaning-making processes in the field of professional communication. This project uses a symbolic interactionist perspective and Goffman’s (1959) theory of dramaturgy to investigate the poet-audience relationship and discover how a display of authentic performance works to achieve the goal of audience connection. The researcher interviewed six slam poets from the Greater Toronto and Southwestern Ontario area about their experiences in the poetry slam world. Results from the interviews reveal that authenticity is co-constructed between poet and audience, involving a coalescence of private preparation strategies and onstage performance strategies that help craft a sense of credibility and honesty from the poet that, in turn, contribute to achieving successful audience connection by the slam poet as performer.

Love and homophobia in Malawi's spoken-word poetry movement

By the early 2010s, a number of Malawian poets in their twenties had begun to substitute the elliptical expression of earlier generations with a language that resonated with popular idioms. As poetry directed at ‘the people’, its medium is spoken word rather than print, performed to live audiences and distributed through CDs, radio programmes and the internet. Crafted predominantly in Chichewa, the poems also address topics of popular interest. The selection of poetry presented here comes from a female and a male poet, who, unbeknown to each other, prepared poems sharply critical of homosexuality and what they regarded as its foreign and local advocacy. The same poets have also gained success for their love poems, which have depicted intimate desires in remarkably compatible ways for both women and men. The poets who performed ‘homophobic’ verse went against popular gender stereotypes in their depictions of romantic love and female and male desires. This introductory essay, as a contribution toAfrica's Local Intellectuals series, discusses the aesthetic challenges that the new poets have launched in the context of Malawi's modern poetry. With regard to gender relations in their love poems, the introduction also considers the poets’ possible countercultural contribution despite their avowed commitment to perform for ‘the people’.

Timbral Heuristics and the Sonorous Presence of Steven Jesse Bernstein

In recent years, music analysts have grappled with the sonic strategies from popular expressions that evade traditional notation. Their approaches often rely on harmonic spectrographs or various textual tools to decode the creative mechanics of these art forms. But for many practices with innate musicality—such as spoken-word poetry—these common techniques make limited explanatory headway. This article proposes an alternate path to fill the gaps: Adopt an analytic perspective, grounded in phenomenology, that listens for the musical subject’s negotiation of embodiment through their calculated treatment of timbre in the voice. Here, the analyst traces their perception of the subject’s bodily resonance through diagrams called timbral maps. And through these maps, two key concepts are discovered that structure the creator’s interior logic: timbral surfaces and timbral moments. Surfaces and moments are built into recognizable patterns, which in turn disclose the methods of these artists as lucid on their own terms. This “surface-moment” model is prototyped using a recorded performance of “This Clouded Heart” by the grunge-era Seattle poet and performance artist Steven Jesse Bernstein. The model reveals several stylistic tactics honed by Bernstein through his play with resonant shifts, but more significantly, argues for recasting timbre in analytic contexts: first, as a sustained and winding musical dimension, able to unfurl like other large-scale organizing principles; and second, as a heuristic capable of engaging listeners in an empathetic web between themselves and the subject through the mimetic connection of their bodies.

Performance

‘Performativity’ became a watchword of cultural theory at the turn of the millennium. Yet, while ideas of performative play and the fluidity of identity have gained much traction in conceptual debates about the experience of being human, large chunks of literary theory still skirt past the question of how to account for actual performances by humans in the real world. What happens when literature stops being just a text on a page and unfolds within a communal setting as a live event? In her chapter, Emily Spiers demonstrates how spoken-word poetry makes particularly apparent an underlying and little conceptualized phenomenon that applies for all literature: the ‘perpetually unstable dynamic of literary connectivity’. Through the frame concept of ‘worlding’ as applied to the Badilisha online poetry platform, the chapter shows how the author–performer and audience share the tangible unfolding of ‘a potentiality of the literary act in time’ at the live scene of a spoken-word performance.