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?
Thank so much, Susan. I’m so grateful for your attention to my presentation, and I would love to talk further! Please email me!
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.
Thank you so much, Rachel. To your questions: 1. We have actually used Drift for music. In fact I have a forthcoming essay in The Poetry of Bob Dylan, analyzing his song “Highlands” and using visualizations in Drift to illuminate my discussion of rhythm, pacing and pauses. However, the pitch data would not be accurate, because of course Drift would pick up on the pitch of musical instruments, not just the pitch of a voice. The visualization, though, would still be useful for music, in my experience. 2. You might like to look at the discussion of pitch perception and gender in Nina Eidsheim’s The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre and Vocality in African-American Music, particularly the chapter on Jimmy Scott. You can also read my review of that book here: https://yalereview.org/article/music-review-musicologist-nina-eidsheim. Yes, absolutely gender influences our perception of pitch. We discuss gender and perception of voice here as well: https://culturalanalytics.org/article/11039-beyond-poet-voice-sampling-the-non-performance-styles-of-100-american-poets. Let’s talk sometime! I’m so sorry we didn’t get to meet in Vienna.
Thanks so much for this wonderful presentation and for sharing your research. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I have a particular interest in the relationship between poet-performer and the audience, so it was terrific to hear your analysis of how the audience might enable more expressive forms of performance (or not). I wondered to what extent the perception of community was a factor here i.e. whether a poet-performer felt that they were performing to people they felt some kind of connection with? The example of Amanda Gorman’s performance at Biden’s inauguration would have felt largely anonymous in terms of the audience (with the audience being so vast). It would be interesting to follow up your linguistic analysis with an analysis of affect in the performance space and to what extent the two are connected. I thought the Nikki Rosa example was fascinating since intonation and pause in the example you gave seemed to signal different things simultaneously depending on whether the audience is in or outside the community.
Thank you so much, Karen! In terms of affect in performance space and audience, you might be interested in this piece: https://culturalanalytics.org/article/11058-measured-applause-toward-a-cultural-analysis-of-audio-collections. I’d love to talk further!