Volume 64, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Poetry and Performance / Issue Editors: Pascal Fischer and Julia Novak

This article provides a close reading of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet “Oh My Black Soule” with regard to its dramatic and performative qualities. The opening line of the poem contains an allusion to the morality play Everyman ; moreover, in this sonnet, the speaker addresses his soul as if he were on a stage; and, in the end, he finds a resolution to the inner conflict that is being described in the course of the poem. Drama is thus significant in three ways: the speaker witnesses a drama of the soul, which is summoned, and reacts to it; he takes part in the drama and its performance as the speaker of a soliloquy; and a drama (in the sense of conflict) goes on within himself. The sonnet is the enactment of a drama of salvation and an expression of the innermost fears and prayers of the speaker who, eventually, finds a resolution and comes to a happy ending. While these three dimensions are all equally linked to the dramatic and performative qualities of this poem, the focus will be on the second aspect and the question how the Holy Sonnet may add to our understanding of the soliloquy, the communicative form which became most popular on the stage at the time John Donne wrote this poem.

Performance theory has a long and complex history. Initiated by J. L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words , it has been critically discussed by Émile Benveniste, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man among others. Most recently, media studies and the concept of cultural techniques have added yet another facet to what originated in speech act theory. Although poetry with its musical dimension seems especially prone to be investigated in the field, this is rarely the case. After an overview of the relevant theoretical developments, I analyze William Butler Yeats’s “Among School Children” – with a special focus on its final verse “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” – as a powerful reflection on the performative nature of poetry in general.

This article explores a recent performance of excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1935/36–1942) entitled Engaging Eliot: Four Quartets in Word, Color, and Sound as an example of live poetry. In this context, Eliot’s poem can be analysed as an auditory artefact that interacts strongly with other oral performances (welcome addresses and artists’ conversations), as well as with the musical performance of Christopher Theofanidis’s quintet “At the Still Point” at the end of the opening of Engaging Eliot . The event served as an introduction to a 13-day art exhibition and engaged in a re-evaluation of Eliot’s poem after 9/11: while its first part emphasises the connection between Eliot’s poem and Christian doctrine, its second part – especially the combination of poetry reading and musical performance – highlights the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of Four Quartets .

The paper uses an interdisciplinary approach to analyse characteristic works by three contemporary British authors who come from different backgrounds but have all, in various ways, brought a performative perspective to bear on their poetry: Patience Agbabi, Jackie Kay, and Ben Mellor. The focus is on the concrete techniques which the poets use to construct different lyrical voices in the written texts as well as in performance. With their emphasis on difference(s), they seem to align themselves closely with broader literary and cultural developments like postmodernism or Stuart Hall’s ‘politics of representation,’ while nevertheless repeatedly suggesting the possibility of a unifying centre behind the text. All in all, the detailed analyses of the poems show the authors to take up different positions in the continuum between orality and writing, unity and diversity, as well as political intervention and playfulness.

This article revisits critical explorations of the question whether popular songs should be regarded as poetry or not and will explore the concepts of poetry that inform these discussions, with a special focus on the importance critics place on the aspect of performance in their attempts to either distinguish between songs and poetry or to (re-)align them. It will be shown that whether critics stress the differences or the similarities between poetry and popular songs does not only rest on their respective ideas of poetry, but also on their disciplinary agenda. The importance of the aspect of performance in popular songs, it is argued, can be illustrated by their ‘coverability,’ which will be briefly illustrated with the help of an analysis of a recent example of a cover version where the lyrics stay the same as in the original, whereas the overall effect is radically changed due to a transformed musical and vocal performance.

The article uses insights into lyrical communication for an analysis of the lyrics of three popular rock songs: Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” (1985), AC/DC’s “Rock ‘N’ Roll Singer” (1975), and Nickelback’s “Rockstar” (2005). It explains how these songs about the figure of the rock star involve the careful listener in speculation about the relationship between the text-internal speaker, the singer (or performer), and the author. The discussion about the identity of the ‘I’ in the songs includes the possibility of a ‘mental appropriation’ by the audience. Showing the relevance of extra-textual factors for the message of these songs, the study also argues for a re-evaluation of the concept of the implied author.