LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Paul Dutton is a sound poet, visual poet, essayist, and novelist from Toronto, Ontario. Paul was a member of the seminal sound poetry group The Four Horsemen from 1970 to 1988, and since 1989 he's performed in the improvisational trio CMCC with John Oswald and Michael Snow. Paul has also worked with the vocal art supergroup Five Men Singing, among numerous other collaborations.
A performative turn?
The nexus of modernist forms of performance/poetics has been around in the West at least since Dada[1], and non-Western and minoritarian poetry communities have cultivated traditions of performance poetry where the body/voice is rarely an afterthought. However, in many of American avant-garde traditions, notions of performativity tend to focus on the poetry reading as the primary site for performative innovation. Of course, given the historical emphasis on the musicality of poetry (sound, meter, aurality, etc.) an emphasis on the poet’s ‘voice’ as the instrument of performance (sounding aloud the music on the page, as it were) is understandable, but occludes other forms of performance and embodiment in relation to poetics.