Abstract
What is remembered by the poet in the performance of poetry? Are they recalling the rehearsal, pitching their body into the practiced gestures that activate the poem? Through voicing the poem, do they recall sounds and speech patterns from life experience, now delivered back via the live event? Perhaps the performance recalls the moment of composition, most probably involving a transcribing media of some sort; pen and paper, word processor, audio recorder, and therefore the hunched-over body, locked into its interface, an act itself involving automated recollections of speech and language. Can we then say that the performance of a poem, its live reading, is an act of the body remembering that act of remembering through the keyboard?
Slug sublimity suggests love’s a drag,
touch that lingers and leaves a wet trail of
memory and … What did we do before
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Notes
John M. Picker, ‘Aural Anxieties and the Advent of Modernity’, in The Victorian World, ed. Martin Hewitt (Oxford: Routledge, 2012), 613.
See, David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes (Oxford University Press, 1997).
Peter Quartermain, ‘Sound Reading’, in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (Oxford University Press, 1998), 219.
Friedrich Kittler, ‘Benn’s Poetry: “A Hit in the Charts”: Song Under Conditions of Media Technologies’, SubStance 19(1) (1990), 5.
Catherine Robson, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton University Press, 2012), 7.
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2004), 87.
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© 2016 Holly Pester
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Pester, H. (2016). The Body and the Page in Poetry Readings as Remembrance of Composition. In: Groes, S. (eds) Memory in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_32
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56642-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-52058-6
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