Prompt - Response 3 - Performance

The work of the writers in this section could be classified in many ways. To think of them in terms of performance is not just to note that all give/gave noted public performances of their worksl.  Cage, Antin, MacLow, (Hannah) Weiner all in some way dance with that quintessentially postmodern idea "indeterminacy"--whether one encounters their work on the page or on stage.   At times, indeterminacy enters in the process of making--through the use of chance generation, dice, computers. Yet it also can enter at the point of performance or reading, where more potentials are unleased (cf. Weiners especially) than most readers can comfortably track and organize.  What can a reader do with such works? How do they encourage us to rethink certain presumptions about what makes a poem a poem? (Note that in your Postmodernism reader, the uncertainty principle, Dada, Abstract Expressionism, Beuys and Duchamp are all quite relevant).

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