2. Towards a Definition of Live Poetry
2.1 Poetry as a Bi-Medial Art Form
In order to provide a more exact delineation of the term “live poetry,” a
closer examination of its two components is necessary:
Defining the qualifier ‘live’ in our context is, for now, relatively simple: it
is best understood as indicating a performance that is “given in front of an
audience, rather than being recorded and then broadcast or shown in a film”
(“live”).1 Thus, the ‘live’ in ‘live poetry’ denotes an author’s recitation of
poetry for an audience that is physically present.
Defining ‘poetry’ is, however, somewhat more challenging. For J. A.
Cuddon, the term “can be taken to cover any kind of metrical composition”
(726). Cuddon further characterises a ‘poem’ as “[a] composition, a work of
verse, which may be in rhyme […] or may be blank verse […] or a combi-
nation of the two. Or it may depend on having a fixed number of syllables,
like the haiku,” before apparently giving up on outlining distinctive features
of ‘poem,’ concluding instead that
[i]n the final analysis what makes a poem different from any other kind of com-
position is a species of magic, the secret to which lies in the way the words lean
upon each other, are linked and interlocked in sense and rhythm, and thus elicit
from each other’s syllables a kind of tune whose beat and melody varies subtly
and which is different from that of prose. (721)
The first definition – “any kind of metrical composition” – is as narrow as
the second is vague, and one could enlist numerous other attempts to pro-
duce sets of supposedly essential features, most of which would rule out a
substantial proportion of the works commonly labelled ‘poetry.’ As one of
the three basic genres of literature, poetry is notoriously difficult to delimit.
In Lyrik und Metalyrik, Eva Müller-Zettelmann overcomes this difficulty
by basing her theory of the genre on the very impossibility of capturing
poetry as a fixed set of essential criteria, and invoking Wittgenstein’s concept
of ‘family resemblance,’ according to which elements of a ‘family’ resemble
each other by a set of overlapping features none of which is necessarily
common to all. Thus, Müller-Zettelmann cites criteria such as relative brev-
1 Philip Auslander, criticising the frequently cited “binary opposition of the live and
the mediatized” as “reductive” (3), points out that “live performance now often in-
corporates mediatization to the degree that the live event itself is a product of media
technologies […]: as soon as electric amplification is used, one might say that an
event is mediatized” (25).
