Introduction: Elaborative Versionings: Oral/Aural Poetics in Baraka, Brathwaite, and Vicuña

     In an oral culture where works of verbal art are orally composed and transmitted, the status of a poem, song, or story as a performance would seldom be problematic. But how does one describe the oral delivery of a written poem? Under what conditions would it constitute a performance, rather than a reading or a recitation? Do we know how to read contemporary poetries in whichoral/or orality/aurality is reclaimed as a medium for poetry and not just a secondary mode of presentation, the 'poetry reading'? Writing about the oral epic in Yugoslavia, Albert Lord holds that "Once the oral technique is lost, it is never regained." For Walter Ong, the passage from orality into literacy is a kind of irreversible, teleological narrative, such that the identification of oral elements in contemporary literature would probably constitute an "oral residue" (115) or a diminished kind of "secondary orality" (115). In this paper, I want to consider the implications of the insertion of literate postmodern poetry into a performance context. Doing so proposes an implicit critique of the teleological narrative and, at the same time, it challenges the habitual privileging of the written text in literary studies. Using recordings/transcriptions of "poetry readings" by Amiri Baraka, Kamau Brathwaite, and Cecilia Vicuña, I hope to: 1) demonstrate that each event constitutes a performance; 2) explore how their performativity draws upon classically oral dynamics; and 3) show how the emergent qualities of the performances are achieved through elaboration and versioning.

Poetry and Performance [panel]. Modern Language Association Annual Convention. New York, NY. 27-30 December, 2002.