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The Poetry Circuit examines the creative impact that public reading had on twentieth-century poetry. Peter Howarth shows how the post-war reading boom made new kinds of poetry, involving their audience and setting in the performance.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: The Modernist Reading
- 2: Projective and Receptive Verse
- 3: Langston Hughes Belongs to Everybody
- 4: The Impersonal Poet Reads in Person
- 5: Marianne Moore's Performances
- 6: Poets' Theatre
- 7: Confession, Protest, and Apocalypse
- Select Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Peter Howarth teaches at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of
British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (2006),
The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (2011), and co-editor of
The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet (2012). A National Teaching Fellow, he is a frequent contributor to the
London Review of Books. He is currently an AHRC RDE Fellow researching the history and practice of festivals.
Summary
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.
