Poetry and Performance: Listening to a Multi-vocal Canada

Performances of poetry constitute significant cultural and literary events that challenge the representational limits and possibilities of transposing written words into live and recorded media. However, there has not been a comprehensive study of Canadian poetry that focuses specifically on performance. This dissertation undertakes a theorizing of performance that foregrounds mediation, audience, and presence (both readerly and writerly). The complex methodology combines theoretical approaches to reading (Linda Hutcheon on adaptation, Wolfgang Iser on the reader, and Roland Barthes on the materiality of writing) with poetics as theorized by Canadian poets (namely bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, Jan Zwicky, Robert Bringhurst) in order to argue that performances of poetry are responsive exchanges between performers and audiences. Importantly, the dissertation argues that performances of poetry call for a re-evaluation of reading as listening, thereby altering the interaction between audience and performance from passive to participatory. Arranged in four chapters, the dissertation examines a range of Canadian poets and performances: The Four Horsemen (Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery, and bpNichol), dance adaptations of Michael Ondaatje’s poems, George Elliott Clarke’s poetic libretti, and Robert Bringhurst’s polyphonic poetry. Following the Introduction’s outlining of the term performance, Chapter One examines processes of recording and adapting avant-garde sound poetry, specifically in the sound and written poetry of Nichol and McCaffery. Chapter Two theorizes adaptation as a responsive reading practice in the context of dance adaptations of Ondaatje’s writing (Bruce McDonald’s Elimination Dance and Veronica Tennant’s Shadow Pleasures). In Chapter Three, Clarke’s jazz opera Québécité, with libretto by Clarke and music composed by D.D. Jackson, foregrounds a central argument of this dissertation: that multi-vocal poetics can, in fact, reconfigure multicultural politics. Chapter Four turns to polyphony as a textual representation of multi-vocality in the poetry of Robert Bringhurst. Through a close-listening to a musical poem by Jan Zwicky, the Conclusion points towards new critical directions in listening to Canadian poetry. Only in understanding how cultural and political performances are recorded, enacted and received both on and off the page can we listen, critically and actively, to our multi-voiced Canadian soundscapes.

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