Reading Poetry Slam:

Body as Poetic Text – Andrea Gibson, “I do”

Abstract

Poetry slams have recently received critical attention in relation with troubadour tradition, beat generation and Harlem Renaissance. A few studies have analyzed some poems of poetry slams and most of them have set apart script from performance. However we have to pay attention to the performance which is mainly paralinguistic expressions to understand a slam poem comprehensively. A performed poem is distributed not as a written text but as a movie clip that contains the performer’s paralanguage expressions as well as linguistic contents of the poem. The key questions in this respect are: 1) what kind of factors do we consider here and 2) how are multi-sensory poetic words organizedand how can we analyze these works academically. To amplify on the first question, the theater semiotics of Anne Ubersfeld will be partially applied. For the second question, this paper will discuss Andrea Gibson’s “I do” performances based on an analysis of details selected according to the answers of the first question.