The Performance of Poeticity: Stage Fright and Text Anxiety in Dutch Performance Poetry since the 1960s

The relation between performance poetry and poetry criticism, as the latter is generally practiced in newspapers and journals, appears to be strained. This is the result of a clash between two different performance traditions: on the one hand, a tradition that goes back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conventions of poetry declamation or recitation; and on the other hand, a tradition based on performance experiments carried out by avant-garde movements during the first half of the twentieth-century. This article charts the different sets of expectations associated with these traditions by analyzing how these expectations became manifest during the Dutch poetry event ‘Po zie in Carré’ (Febraury 28th, 1966). As will become clear, individual authorship, textual unity, and poetic significance play important, yet very different roles in these two traditions. Furthermore, I put forward an alternative approach to the issue at hand, by focusing on one particular participant in ‘Po zie in Carré,’ Johnny van Doorn (1944-1991). Thus, this article aims to contribute to a historically aware and more constructive analysis of performance poetry.