The Poetry Circuit

Abstract

Live performance changed modern poetry by giving poets new audiences and a new way to make a living. It also generated new kinds of poetry, from Imagism to confessional to contemporary spoken word. 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 public again, and how the feedback loops between voice, venue, and occasion turned the poems into running dramas between poet and listener. Caught on tape, a nervous T. S. Eliot reveals himself to be anything but impersonal, while Marianne Moore’s accident-prone readings keep her poems in constant re-draft. Robert Frost used his performances to spar with rivals and admirers, 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 that involve their audience in the performance, such as John Ashbery’s anti-charismatic Poets’ Theatre, Amiri Baraka’s documentary soundtracks of the streets, and 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 shows that there never were ‘page’ and ‘stage’ poets: the reading simply changed what every modern poet had to do.