Poetry Off the Page (@poetryoffthepage.bsky.social)

Towards a theory of ‘poet-voice’ Why do people reading poetry aloud stereotypically sound so sad? The term 'poet-voice' has recently gained currency to describe this vocal style, which is often cited - correctly - as a key characteristic of the spread of performance poetry in the 21st century. But this article shows that the roots of this style go back much further, and that to understand the contemporary aesthetics of poet-voice it is necessary to situate them in a genealogy that begins three centuries ago. I combine recent empirical analysis with insights from behavioural psychology on the one hand and critical theory on the other, in order to examine the affective stance that poet-voice projects and the historical structure behind it. That stance, I argue, is fundamentally one of uncontrol, and has to be understood as giving voice to a determinate set of hopes and anxieties concerning the control systems by which our contemporary moment has been shaped. The formation of poet-voice in its current technologically-mediated version is then explored via two case studies: first, the transitional instance of a BBC radio broadcast made by Yeats in 1931, and second, a YouTube video by Kae Tempest from 2011, showing how specific concerns around mediation, affect, and control have given the long-repeated cadences of poet-voice a new lease of life in the contemporary moment. https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.23780