Performed Poetry

This chapter provides a history of performed poetry since the eighteenth century, considering in particular the diverse roles played by poetry readings in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture as poets and their audiences responded to the invention of new technologies and adapted to new economic and political circumstances. The shift from readers reciting poetry at home or among friends to public readings by poets themselves was marked but by no means final. If modernists used authorial readings to reinvest poetry and the figure of the poet with ritual force, the power with which these practices invested the spoken poetic word fueled a revival of traditional modes of poetry recitation during the Soviet era. What was performed when poetry was read aloud was not just the text but a range of social relationships, emotional responses, and shared histories.