Publikacija SEP 2011 - Vilenica

performance of poetry has moved poetry to a poetic field wider than
ever before: the boundaries of poetry have moved. Today, it would
be difficult to name all poetry genres which have taken performance
as their essential element: they mostly involve poetry associated with
the urban environment. This includes dub poetry, sound poetry and of
course, in recent decades, the notorious slam poetry (which globalization
has brought to all corners of the world and which, in the 21 st century,
has outgrown itself, becoming an indefinable performing practice
of poetry with countless rules, since virtually every slam community
has its own set of rules). Poets who do and have done slam, have never
been and are still not truly acknowledged within traditional poetry
circles; an unforgettable example of this point is the statement of the
Pope of Western canon, Harold Bloom, that slam is the death of art.
In any case, slam is undoubtedly the most radical form of poetry performance
in the sense of performing one’s own poetry. Ultimately, the
poet-slammer is rewarded (slam sets its judging arena in the context
of competition, in which the audience and the jury usually choose the
winner), mainly for the quality of the performance, not so much for
the quality of the poem. The other radical pole of performing poetry is
sound poetry, which is a sort of natural appendage of traditional poetry
and the final product of which (a lot of sound poetry is also improvised
2 ) is more important than the performance itself. Sound poetry
is therefore that part of traditional poetry which uses performance to
reach the level of language, which extends its boundaries. This process
of extending takes place at the linguistic level, more precisely, sound
poetry could be defined as verses without words, as Dadaist Hugo Ball
once put it at one of the Cabaret Voltaire events. Sound poetry, like
many theatre plays, requires performance to make its expression and
(artistic) value really come to life 3 . Sound poetry in its widest sense
can thus include Kurt Schwitters and his famous Ursonata on the one
2 I would like to refer to the Slovene Impro project of Primož Čučnik, Tomaž Grom and Ana
Pepelnik, which is, apart from Irena Tomažin's IT project, the only contemporary poetry
project which flirts with the tradition of sound poetry, cultivating, complementing and
developing it in its own particular way.
3 Teaching contemporary poetry should therefore include authors' sound recordings, which
would clearly convey the essence and meaning of such poetry.
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