British Identities in Spoken Word Poetry - Detailseite

In recent years, spoken word poetry has gained increasing recognition as a legitimate literary genre. In 2023, the influential Forward Prizes introduced a category for spoken word poetry, and performance poets like Kae Tempest and Hollie McNish are highly acclaimed. Additionally, in many cities throughout the UK and beyond, including Berlin, communities centred around spoken word performance aim to create spaces outside traditional publishing to combine artistic and activist practices.

Structured as a chronological survey, this class will provide a historical overview of British and Commonwealth spoken word poetry from the late 1960s to the present day. Beginning with US American influences from beat poetry and the Liverpool poets, we will move on to the “punk poet” John Cooper Clarke and dub poetry by Benjamin Zephaniah and Linton Kwesi Johnson from the 1970s and 1980s. We will then discuss work from the 1990s and early 2000s by spoken word performers such as Roger Robinson and Malika Booker, ending with Jay Bernard’s contemporary archival poetry.

We will use these primary texts to introduce and revise concepts from literary studies such as intertextuality, reader-response theory, the archival turn, and autotheory. Incorporating modes of writing like Saidya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” and Antonio Gramsci’s and Stuart Hall’s figure of the “organic intellectual” into our discussion, we will attempt to conceptualise spoken word poetry as a uniquely ephemeral and performative form of knowledge production. In addition to discussing the role of spoken word poetry for marginalised communities and identities, we will attempt to understand how it challenges categories like authorship and genre, as well as distinctions between e.g. fiction and nonfiction or high and popular culture.

All texts will be provided on Moodle.