Shefali Banerji (University of Vienna)

Spoken word poetry/poetry performance has been historically overlooked in scholarly discourse on poetry. Things have been changing in the past few decades both in British and American Studies, with seminal works such as Susan B. A. Somers-Willett’s The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry (2009), Tyler Hoffman’s American Poetry in Performance (2011), and Javon Johnson’s Killing Poetry (2017) in American spoken word discourse, as well as Pete Bearder’s Stage Invasion (2019), and Lucy English and Jack McGowan's Spoken Word in the UK (2021) on the other side of the pond, shedding light on the vital need to engage critically with the field, but the change has been painstakingly slow. Not enough has been done. That, when the genre has been a medium of creative expression for communities marginalised across various socio-economic lines and positionalities for decades. That, when the form emerges out of and is influenced by oral traditions dating back centuries from various cultures across the globe. In fact, one may suspect that the grounds for this lack in engagement can be traced to the genre's increased accessibility, its democratic nature, its countercultural roots, its popularity amongst the marginalised, and its status as a medium of mass appreciation. Rebecca Watts’s 2018 article “The Cult of the Noble Amateur” attacking poets Hollie McNish and Rupi Kaur, prominent voices in both digital poetry and the performance genre, evidences this. The paucity of critical engagement with the genre, hence, is not really a sign of the genre’s inadequacy as an art form, but says a lot about literary criticism’s dated ideas of what “art” or "poetry" is. With the monumental rise and success of organisations such as Apples & Snakes in the UK, and Button Poetry in the US, and prestigious literary prizes such as the Forward prize for poetry now including Poetry Performance as a category, how long will Literary Studies treat spoken word poetry as surplus?

This panel invites papers that critically engage with the rise of spoken word poetry in the Anglophone world, with special emphasis on the UK and/or the US, engaging with the form's development, studying its popularity, and investigating the politics of its status as "surplus of" or "less than" print poetry.

Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

> Transnational exchanges: Spoken word poetry and artistic collaborations between the UK and the US

> Intermediality of poetry performance: How are poets reinventing spoken word poetry by incorporating various performance aesthetics into their practice?

> Counterculture, activist roots and the politics of recognition

> Aspirations: What does the future of spoken word look like in the UK and the US

> Digital poetry performance and its scope in a post-pandemic world

This panel invites papers which will critically engage with the art of poetry performance and spoken word in the UK and US, a genre rich in its incorporation of varied performance and poetic traditions, a genre that is often relegated as surplus within literary and poetry studies. The papers can address any issues pertaining to spoken word poetry in the UK and US in their scope.