Five articles on slam poetry, sound poetry, teaching poetry through performance, promoting non-violence through slam, and embodiment:
1. Julie Schmid, “Spreading the Word: A History of the Poetry Slam,” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 23-26 (2001-2002): 636-45: Briefly (oh, so briefly) traces the history of the poetry slam, highlighting major players, main movements, and the current state of the art (as of 2001).
2. Conrad DiDiodato, “Sound Poetry: Penn Kemp and the Metamorphosed Ear,” Ascent Aspirations Magazine (2010): Explores how poet-shaman, sonosopher, and medium of transformation Penn Kemp turns the textual/oral binary on its head, favoring and savoring a performative return in her sound poems to a pre-literate, “Neolithic” aurality.
3. Steven Z. Athanases, “Performing the Drama of the Poem: Workshop, Rehearsal, and Reflection,” English Journal 95.1 (2005): 88-96: Reflects on a week-long, performance-centered poetry unit taught in a high school literature class and concludes that a performance approach to poetry study (as to literary study) favors engaging with poetry and not simply dissecting it for meaning.
4. Heather Bruce and Brian Davis, “Slam: Hip-hop Meets Poetry: A Strategy for Violence Prevention,” English Journal 89.5 (2000): 119-27: Central principle: language carefully considered, crafted, and powerfully shared/performed can change others for good and reduce violence. By encouraging students to engage with poetries, to expand their views of what poetry/language/literacy are, teachers can provide them with channels through which to wisely direct their emotions.
5. John T. Warren, “The Body Politic: Performance, Pedagogy, and the Power of Enfleshment,” Text & Performance Quarterly 19.3 (1999): 257-66: Central concern: with the creation of a performative pedagogy that engages performance as pedagogical practice. Warren proposes this in response to a line of scholarship that uses performance as a metaphor for what happens in a classroom in the interactions among teachers, students and their bodies—bodies that are culturally, socially, historically, ideologically embedded in a particular time and space and that depend on these things for the creation, performance, and perpetuation of personal and group identity.
Source:
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