This essay offers an early chapter in the conjoined history of poetry and performance art, literary criticism and performance studies. Beginning in the mid-1950s and with increasing fervor through the 1960s, American poetry lived simultaneously in print, on vinyl, and in embodied performance. Amid this environment of multimedia publicity, an oddly private poetry emerged. The essay locates confessional poetry in the performance-rich context of its birth and interrogates not only its textual voice but also its embodied, performed breath. Focusing on early confessional work by Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, this essay conducts side-by-side “readings” of printed poems and recorded performances and suggests that confessional refers to an intermedial, print-performance style—a particular logic for capturing personal performances in print form and for breathing performances back out of the printed page.
In this article, Christopher Grobe explores the history of the telegraph machine on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century stage. Structured around a deep analysis of William Gillette's Secret Service, this article also surveys American, British and French telegraph plays and considers such extra-theatrical “performances” as technical demonstrations and early baseball broadcasts. Grobe ultimately argues that telegraphy transformed the dramaturgical habits and acting styles of nineteenth-century theater, turning them realist and proleptically modern. At the same time, these plays reveal new, emerging understandings of the human, the global, and the live.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.