Listening to Black Women Poets in Mainly White and Mainly Black Rooms
by MARIT MACARTHUR
Author Bio:
MARIT J. MACARTHUR: An American poetry and voice studies scholar, I have researched poetry performance since 2013, supported by an ACLS Digital Innovations Fellowship (2015-16), a NEH DH Grant (2018-19), a SSHRC Grant (2018-2025), and a NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication (2024). My related publications have appeared in PMLA, the Journal of Cultural Analytics, The Paris Review Online, The Los Angeles Review of Books, SoundingOut!, the Stanford ARCADE Colloquy, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Jacket2, and The Cambridge Companion to Literature in the Digital Age.
I am very excited by this presentation and will definitely listen to it again especially because it highlights three of my all time favourite poet-performers! I was so moved by hearing you talk about Nikki Giovan i perhaps because she has just passed but also because of the subtleties in her performances.
It was very instructive to see the technical analysis of particularly pitch in voice performance partly because it precisely brought the point home in concise and concrete ways even though I have been hearing those emphasis even without the analysis. I am a student of performance and my work is on oral poetry performances as well as popular songs from a literary studies angle so perhaps you will understand this enthusiasm.
I have a student who is working on one of the contemporary leading performance poets in Uganda Kagayi Ngobi and I am currently reading his work and was emphasising some of the points you outlined in your presentation. I just want you to know I enjoyed your presentation and it will be a must visit again for me before this June is over. Thank you and I really missed being there in person but this is also very inspiring for me and my student.
Perhaps my question would be aren’t those observations in performance behaviour and changes among different audiences and in specific contexts apply to poet performers elsewhere in perhaps different environments with different histories?
Dear Marit,
Thank you very much for making your presentation available through the conference gallery – as organisers, we are delighted to have the recording 🙂 I have two questions:
1. Would your drift tracker tool be applicable to poetry performances that include musical accompaniment? If not, could you recommend alternative tools or methods for analysing such performances? I would think that music “influences” the movements of the poet’s voice in the performance (perhaps, the influence goes even beyond the actual musical accompaniment, in a form of embodied musical poetics)
2. In your analysis, does the interpretation of high pitch take gender into account? Specifically, do you believe that high pitch is interpreted similarly in male and female performances, or do gendered perceptions influence the analysis?
I am particularly interested in this because part of my research focuses on the interpretation/the role/the place of low frequencies in performances of Afro-diasporic women’s poetry.
Thank you for your insights.