The Lyric Put to the Test: Performance Poetry and Transmedia Gestures

Contrary to widespread viewpoints, recent developments in intermedial poetry seem to constitute a resurgence and intensification of particular features of lyric poetry rather than a break with tradition. Digital technology enables a far wider circulation and increases the visibility of those features — presentness, repetition, memorability, and shareability — that Jonathan Culler in his Theory of the Lyric (2015), and others, have outlined. A wider definition of lyric is therefore helpful for understanding the contemporary production and circulation of poems, the characteristics they share with premodern poetic practices, and the multilayered events in which they ‘happen’ and which may extend to their aural, visual, and kinetic dimensions. A lyric poem, for Culler, is iterable language open to being repeated by readers in a variety of contexts; readers are invited to reperform the poem in the ‘now’ of enunciation. Yet, what is it that makes the lyric particularly shareable?

Performance poetry is an ideal case to prompt reflection on this question. Italian poet and performer Lello Voce brought the poetry slam to Italy in 2001, and in 2004 seven thousand people attended a poetry slam in Perugia: unimaginable numbers for traditional poetry readings. In his 2014 conversation with Lello Voce in Monza, Marc Kelly Smith, American poet and founder of the poetry slam movement in Chicago in 1987, remarks that ‘the competition is a game’, ‘a theatrical device’, ‘a type of show’. It was designed to be ‘a mockery of competition’: he says that five random audience members judge the artwork on a scale of one to ten, and points out that for years the prize in Chicago was simply cupcakes. Yet, if these events reclaim the ritualistic and collective dimension that poetry had for centuries, what do performers and audiences actually share during such events? How do they participate in an experience involving spoken words, body movements and often sound, as well as co-presence?

In May 2021, Italian performance artist Giuliano Logos won the XV World Poetry Slam Championship in Paris. One of the seven pieces he performed at the contest is Date loro fuoco. The title refers to the exhortation repeated throughout the poem and the exhortative mode is enhanced by a change in intonation. The recitation gets progressively louder and more agitated, but the utterance ‘date loro fuoco’ preserves a calm assertiveness throughout. Words, breath, voice and body movements all contribute to the performance of the gesture of exhortation. Gestures can move not only across languages, but also across media. The video recording of the performance in front of an audience and the online performance in front of a camera foreground two different ‘events’ of the poem. In the first video, the people addressed by the plural ‘you’ are those in the room, not those watching the recording. The experience of the poem is collective, even though not all spectators in the room may feel equally included in that collectivity, whose boundaries are drawn by the if-clauses that introduce the exhortation. In the second video, ‘we’ are the viewers addressed by ‘you’.

These two videos exemplify two ways of understanding lyric poetry: 1. poetry as heard, the reader feels that the words of the poem are addressed to them; 2. poetry as overheard, the words are addressed to someone else and the reader is overhearing them. This shift is made possible by the affordances of the digital medium, but has always been structural to the lyric and is based on the fundamental gesture of deixis. The lyric makes the most of the deictic power of language and, more generally, of an open referentiality: its language points to something or someone external to the text. The poem does not create a fictional world and referentiality is not fulfilled within it. Based on the text, we do not know for sure who is included in the ‘you’; this is only defined in the event of the poem. Feeling addressed by the poem’s gesture not only entails participation, but can lead to specific responses. When circulated on social media, YouTube or other dedicated platforms, gestures can be reenacted by members of the expanded audience, who in turn may respond to the poem by producing new poems that perform the same gesture.

Still from the YouTube video Poesia ad Alta Voce – Marc Kelly Smith e Lello Voce (2014)

Still from the YouTube video by Giuliano Logos Date Loro Fuoco (2021)