The body and the page in poetry readings as remembrance of composition

Holly Pester

pp. 271-275

in: Sebastian Groes (ed), Memory in the twenty-first century, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

What is remembered by the poet in the performance of poetry? Are they recalling the rehearsal, pitching their body into the practiced gestures that activate the poem? Through voicing the poem, do they recall sounds and speech patterns from life experience, now delivered back via the live event? Perhaps the performance recalls the moment of composition, most probably involving a transcribing media of some sort; pen and paper, word processor, audio recorder, and therefore the hunched-over body, locked into its interface, an act itself involving automated recollections of speech and language. Can we then say that the performance of a poem, its live reading, is an act of the body remembering that act of remembering through the keyboard?