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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Bodies on the Line: Performance and the Sixties Poetry Reading

Bodies on the Line: Performance and the Sixties Poetry Reading

Allison, Raphael

Paperback

Series: Contemp North American Poetry

General ReferencePoetry Criticism

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1609383036
ISBN13: 9781609383039
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: Dec 1 2014
Pages: 236
Weight: 0.90
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
Bodies on the Line offers the first sustained study of the poetry reading in its most formative period: the 1960s. Raphael Allison closely examines a vast archive of audio recordings of several key postwar American poets to explore the social and literary context of the sixties poetry reading, which is characterized by contrasting differing styles of performance: the humanist style and the skeptical strain. The humanist style, made mainstream by the Beats and their imitators, is characterized by faith in the power of presence, emotional communion, and affect. The skeptical strain emphasizes openness of interpretation and multivalent meaning, a lack of stability or consistency, and ironic detachment.

By comparing these two dominant styles of reading, Allison argues that attention to sixties poetry readings reveals poets struggling between the kind of immediacy and presence that readings suggested and a private retreat from such performance-based publicity, one centered on the text itself. Recordings of Robert Frost, Charles Olson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Larry Eigner, and William Carlos Williams--all of whom emphasized voice, breath, and spoken language and who were inveterate professional readers in the sixties--expose this struggle in often surprising ways. In deconstructing assertions about the role and importance of the poetry reading during this period, Allison reveals just how dramatic, political, and contentious poetry readings could be. By discussing how to hear as well as read poetry, Bodies on the Line offers startling new vantage points from which to understand American poetry since the 1960s as both performance and text.

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