Consuming Language: Embodiment in the Performance Poetry of bpNichol and Steve McCaffery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What separates spoken word as an art form from the interminable spectacle of hearing a poet read a poem (be she amateur or professional) is the extent to which the artist brings a sense of performance to the event — by which I mean not only the theatrical presentation of the poem but also the manner in which the “eventness” of the poem is taken into account in the moment of its production. A public reading of a poem is often offered as a presentation of a finished work, to be appreciated by an audience, much like a painting on a wall. Spoken-word practice, in contrast, is informed by the much longer tradition of oral poetry (which I would like to call “performance poetry”), in which the audience is implicated in the social construction of meaning: rather than gazing at the painting, we are witnesses to and conspirators in its creation. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to even casually sketch out a history of what I call “performance poetry,” I believe that the example set by bpNichol and Steve McCaffery in 1982, with their performance piece The Language of Performance of Language is a touchstone, not only for avant-garde practice, but also for the more mainstream work being carried out by today’s performance poets, and deserves consideration as such.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".